Passage

7 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 7 there is no escaping the fact that the events industry has had a difficult couple of years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. There were a staggeringly high number of event cancellations, and a high number of events that simply never got to the organization stage. “During the pandemic, we absorbed all the payment processing costs around canceled events so our customers weren’t negatively affected financially,” Linebrink says. “Thankfully, we were in a decent position financially and I was able to convince our investors to let us bet big that this was an opportunity to help our clients generate revenue when they otherwise might be out in the cold.” These bets included virtual events, with Passage building a virtual event platform in just two weeks. This was up and running by April of 2020 and helped the company (as well as its clients) significantly – allowing for revenue generation at a time when in-person events were not possible. “Many of these virtual events have now turned into hybrid events,” Linebrink explains. “For example, if you can only fit 100 people in your venue but you want to share your event with 1,000 more, you can do that through livestream tools. We also bet heavily on socially distance event technology. We created a way to assign seating in stadiums and venues, and leave gaps in between groups. We created a virtual queue system that would text you when it was your group’s turn to go into an event instead of making you wait in line. These features made people feel safer, and we were actually up 80% across 2020, despite everything that happened.” Passage offers these innovative solutions from its Detroit headquarters, where 16 employees provide a full-service solution. Linebrink acknowledges, “We are a very flat organization, mainly remote, with team members that span both coasts, and even internationally as well.”