The best conversations at industry events rarely happen on the stage.
They happen after the session. Over dinner. Or in that moment when everyone stops performing and starts speaking honestly.
About growing a firm. Leading a team. Using technology without chasing every shiny new app. And dealing with the problems that never make it into the polished LinkedIn post.
The part that's hard to say
Those conversations have shaped some of my best ideas. They've also reminded me that firm ownership can feel surprisingly lonely, even when your calendar is packed with people.
Clients need answers. Staff need decisions. Neither group can help you with the actual problem, because the actual problem is usually something you can't say in front of either of them.
The stage can wait. I'm more interested in the conversations that happen when firm owners start telling the truth.
So we built the other thing
Small group. Toronto Island, which needs a ferry, which means the phone stops mattering for an evening.
Five to a table. Four courses. A new table every course, so you don't sit with the same people twice. One question each time, and the first one is just you, uninterrupted, for three minutes.
No name tags. We'll already know who you are.
One exception, and it's a good one
We've since added a keynote, which I realise reads oddly given everything above.
Jim Harris is the exception. He's spoken at more than sixty events a year for years, TEC Canada named him Speaker of the Year, and Blindsided! has sold in eighty countries. If you're going to put one person in front of a room of owners, it should be someone who has earned the room.
Then the stage goes away and doesn't come back. One talk is the entire programme. Nobody works the tables selling anything, because the tables are the point.
Why it's by application
Not for exclusivity. Because a room is only worth being in if somebody curated it, and capacity is genuinely limited by the number of seats at five tables.
It's also the front door to something larger — a community of owners who share what they're running and what they got wrong, instead of collecting ideas at a conference and implementing none of them.
The evening is the easy part. The people are the point.