How CitySocial expanded it's event company profitability with two TrustHiring remote software developers

CitySocial was an event company based in the Raleigh/Durham North Carolina region of the Southeast, running social events through several proprietary event titles and bar crawls. One specific event became a national success, Pints & Puppies.

The company operated and scaled its events business to 25 cities around the United States, where they partnered with the event spaces, acquired sponsorships and local charity partners, provided the full event management operations and staff, and handled all the event promotions and marketing ticket sales process for quarterly events in every market for thousands of attendees.

With all of these efforts being handled remotely by the CitySocial team, there were several challenges in the scalability process going from RDU to 25 cities that they were faced with:

• Dispersed event teams to track and manage nationwide. CitySocial went from having one event staff and operations team locally, to finding 25 cities worth of staff, managing travel, and ensuring run of show success in all markets events and delivering the highest quality attendee experience for every market and guest who bought a CitySocial ticket.
• Venue, charity & sponsorship relationships for every event. With each event having a charity partner, local sponsors, and a venue host, the three variables of those partner relations, multiplied by the 25 cities, with each variable changing quarterly, created huge volumes of disarray on communications, data management, contracts and organization.
• Event marketing promotions of ticket sales to tens of thousands. Going from marketing events to the same local audience, to then creating an event marketing system to integrate with a ticketing system for all events, to manage advertising spend for every market and manage the ticket sales and check in process for all 25+ cities became a logistics challenge our existing system had never handled before.
• Limited budgets to allocate capital to other initiatives. Like many new startup companies expanding quickly for the first time, budgets are naturally tight, but they are especially limited for special projects or initiatives that don’t seemingly keep the business operations running or are needed to survive and thrive. At the time, this was how any software development was viewed to the team at CitySocial in their expansion.

At the start of the expansion to the first 5 new markets, CitySocial was seeing three critical declines in their financial metrics they knew had to be fixed:

• 22% decline in overall ticket sales revenue per new event market launched.
• 14% reduction in sponsorship revenue per new event market.
• 27% drop in event attendee positive reviews and recommendations.

With their financial returns and forward outlook in decline at the onset of their national expansion, Nicholas and Andrew knew CitySocial had to find a solution to correct course and build momentum towards the growth they knew was possible.

Through a long internal deliberation, they made the key distinction that their challenges were starting to take a hit at the core financials and customer experience of CitySocial, and therefore the solution also needed to be treated as a core company budget expense to fix.

Instead of using 10-20 separate technology software services and tools all disconnected from one another, they determined that a software solution internally was needed to be built for managing all of their new expanded volumes nationally in 25 cities of:

• Event management staff and operations teams.
• Corporate sponsorship communications and relations.
• Local charities to provide a donation to, selection process, relations.
• Venue partnerships host locations, food/drink costs, selections, staff.
• Ticketing for all attendees, payment, registration, emails and event updates.
• Advertising and customer acquisition efforts, marketing costs, tracking.
• Event registration pages natively hosted on our website, payment, details.
• Attendee follow up, communications, reviews, repeat attendance, customer experience tracking.

After exploring the software development process with several local US-based development firms, there was an apparent mismatch in the proposals of a one-time build-out of the software for over budget project offers.

Given the nature of all the event solutions that CitySocial needed, they were looking to actually hire full-time developers to add as team members to develop, manage, and support the entire new CitySocial software suite every day.

CitySocial reached out to TrustHiring to try and find two of the best software developers to hire for their project, one with a focus on the front-end development and the other on back-end to manage their full suite of solutions to be built for website and mobile events.

CitySocial was most interested in finding the two software developers by signing a contract with TrustHiring, because they knew TrustHiring exclusively hires talented candidates for only software development and engineering roles.

Given our focused concentration on remote IT professionals, we were able to place two individuals into hired full-time roles at CitySocial within a month. Both full-time hires annual salaries and TrustHiring’s one-time placement fee all came well within their project budget.

In comparison, TrustHiring was able to hire two full-time overseas software professionals at annual salaries for CitySocial, for a lower cost than a US development firm building a one-time project scope over 4-months and handing over the product.

Here were some of the success metrics they shared as a resulting impact of their implementation of the software solutions the TrustHiring developers made possible in helping CitySocial solve:

With the right software developer team additions provided by TrustHiring Candidates, CitySocial was able to become a new, nationally expanded company serving markets nationwide, and reach heights never expected in their business.

Embracing TrustHiring talent and solutions changed their business for the best in the years to come, and it led CitySocial to exiting their event titles and management company to a local hospitality company to run through all their 10+ restaurant and event space locations to even greater success.

Start TrustHiring at your company today, we can change your future growth too!