Bill Mott started and ran the streaming departments at event production giants Freeman and PSAV for more than 15 years. While there, he and a colleague, Joshua Butler, were inspired to create a company focused solely on live-event streaming, without the need for bulky, show-site equipment.
“We jumped off the cliff in 2019 and started our own business,” Mott says.
Their venture, Falcon Events, had roughly 20 events booked at the start of 2020. When COVID-19 reached the United States, all of those events were canceled. But by mid-April, many of Mott’s contacts had reached out in search of all-virtual event production services.
“Streaming in the last few years was always like an add-on, but I knew it was going to be a first-and-foremost thing because I saw that trend,” says Mott, Falcon’s CEO. “And then when COVID hit, it was the only thing.”
“The company outgrew its office space four times in two years.”
Bill Mott
Freeman was an early supporter of Falcon, hiring it as a vendor. Now, Mott partners with dozens of B2B event platforms, including industry giant Zoom, to procure clients. And business is booming. By the close of 2020, Falcon had produced about 175 virtual events, hired 83 employees, and outgrown its office space three times. This year, the team has already surpassed 250 events, added another 40 team members, and expanded its office space a fourth time.
“The value-add of the old guys was logistics—bringing in big equipment, trucks, and mobilizing large teams of labor in cities, and things like that,” Mott says. After the pandemic hit, “none of that was of value anymore.”
Falcon’s model can create uniformity across nearly 75 virtual stages. Medical conferences, in particular, have found it to be a good fit. Many of the company’s clients are located in the Washington, D.C., area, with roughly 5 percent based in Dallas. As vaccination availability increases, Mott hopes his team will continue to dominate the virtual event space as competitors return to in-person gatherings.
“I don’t think there’s anyone that really matches our scale at this point,” he says, “and I’m hoping that a lot of the event companies that are our current competitors in the virtual space will rush back to get on show sites.”
