In case you haven’t checked LinkedIn recently: Conferences are back in full swing. After two years of congregating over zoom, it seems conference organizers and attendees alike are more bullish on in-person meetings than they’ve ever been. 

But Mark Loehr, CEO of OpenExchange, argues that, while conferences and in-person meetings are crucial, the next wave of meetings will still be virtual. With the right partners, companies can leverage synchronous and asynchronous meeting technologies to convert viewers into investors and champions. Curated virtual meetings can help formalize what’s always been true: Storytelling plays a keystone role in whether businesses boom or bust.

In an interview with The Financial Revolutionist, Loehr explains his path to OpenExchange, offers tips for organizing virtual meetings, and outlines his vision for the future of virtual contact. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Financial Revolutionist: What is OpenExchange, and how did you arrive at this idea?

Mark Loehr: OpenExchange powers global business through virtual meetings and events. We create interoperability between Teams and Zoom and WebEx with managed service on top for financial services and the professional investment industry.

I've always been deep into Wall Street and technology. I started off as a block trader in 1978; by 1987 I ran the Credit Suisse trading desk, and then I moved into banking, I did IPOs for Credit Suisse, and later I was a CEO of a public company during the dot com phase.

I saw this idea and it just connected everything I did before: financial services, technology, cumulative relationships through engagement. And as a trainer, I was always impressed that, with my turret with 120 keys, I could talk to so many people within 42 minutes.

I always thought that this would be most important for capital markets when you're on the road, that you really shouldn't have to go on the road for two weeks when you're in the middle of the busiest period of your corporate life. But it turned out that corporate access, which is really management teams meeting with investors that already own their shares, was the first use case. And we exploded from 2019 when we did 4,000 meetings to 100,000 meetings in 2020, to 200,000 meetings last year. We handle the meetings that are most critical for all the top 10 banks as well as the London Stock Exchange.

What in particular is so complex about these meetings that requires specialization and a meeting being handed over to you? Is it a compliance question? 

We might have 20 conferences going on in a single day, we might have 6,000 meetings in a given day, 600 in a single hour. A bank can't handle all of that. With 1,000 video operators, and a dashboard, the client can see every single meeting, who's late, who's a walk-in, and so forth. That combination of complexity is where the world is going.

Was Covid the reason for the large spike in your business?

People recognized that virtual can be trusted, and that there are so many different use cases for it—so we got that massive bump up above the line. And now we reverted down to the line and maybe a little bit below it, but we’re still much higher above the line than we were before. Conferences where companies go to meet everybody are very much back to in-person right now. But non-deal roadshows where a company would have gone to Europe to see clients are now virtual because it’s better for the company.

Our personal belief is that now, if I'm a CEO, I'm not going to 10 conferences anymore. I’m going to my flagship conferences, maybe three of them, and I’ll do seven virtually. 

What does a successful meeting look like? Or, what makes a successful meeting strategy?

You should try to figure out how big your audience is and engage with them accordingly. Up to 20 or 30 people, you're going to want it to be quite interactive, everybody being up on the screen, and having a moderator to get the flow under control. Once you get up to 100 and more, you're going to want to figure out which people should be in the Q&A, and which people are going to be view-only. 

It really depends on what you're trying to accomplish and who your meeting is for. Is it live? Is it interactive? 

The thing that nobody has quite figured out yet is networking. After the meeting is over, how do participants get to meet more people? There are a few ideas we're working on, such as backstage passes, where we open it up for some people to be able to stay on after a call for 1000 people. In general, networking is quite cumbersome, so if somebody figures it out, I think it’d be valuable. 

You’re currently at NIRI. What encourages you to continue attending in-person events?

It's neither black or white. It’s what I call the critical mass theory: If I go to a conference, and there are a lot of people there, and I had really important and impactful discussions, then I'm going to come back the next time. But if the CEOs don't show up and the biggest portfolio managers don't show up, then I'm not going to go back the next time. 

This same theory makes me believe that 30% of the conferences are going to go incredibly well in-person and 70% are going to move towards some kind of a virtual format. It's just more cost effective, especially since the cost of conferences have gone up at least 50% since 2018.

Where do you see OpenExchange five years from now?

I do think that companies will use virtual much more to tell their story beyond earnings. It's not just about company results: It really is about the company's story.

And banks don't realize that the content that they’ve created—especially through research on these companies—is way more valuable than the earnings report. And they're about to unlock that and monetize that. And the only way you can really do that is through virtual and video. The companies can’t do that themselves. Banks are going to play different roles: You're going to see them not just raising capital for companies through IPOs and follow ons, but rather raising awareness for companies through content creation. 

That would make explicit the storytelling component that always has been true for how a company is valued or not.

That’s correct. But if you think about what goes on with earnings and IPOs, the CEO is the dominant spokesperson for the company. For the shareholders, that voice now is going to get triangulated down from that CEO to different people. The product, the culture, and other things are going to have to fit. 

Any final advice for The Financial Revolutionist’s readers?

I never sell. I always think about the meeting and the person on the other side of the table as if I were on their shoulder, thinking about what they would want to know. I try to be a counselor and consider what’s right for them at that moment in time, not for my company. If someone agrees to a meeting, I wonder why they did that, what they’re hoping to get out of it, and what I can give them that will help them. I try to sit on their shoulder and imagine what they're thinking and why they walked into the room.