From the Diary of Michelle Andrew

If your company spends tens of thousands a year on conferences and can’t say what came back, her method starts with one multiplication, done before anyone books a flight.

Before MIPIM, Michelle Andrew wrote down what the week was going to cost her. Flights, £450. Hotel, £2,500. Conference ticket, £2,800. Five days out of the office. The last item on the list was liver damage, which she marked “hard to quantify.” The total came to roughly £5,750, and that was for a business of one.

Then she multiplied it by five. Her target was £28,750 or more in pipeline, and it came from the formula she uses for every conference she attends: total cost, times five, equals the minimum pipeline the trip has to generate. From there, she wrote, she works backwards: how many meaningful conversations she needs to have, how many follow-ups need to convert, what her average deal value looks like.

By her account, almost nobody does that sum. The research agrees that the measuring is the hard part. When Forrester surveyed B2B event teams in 2024, demonstrating ROI was their number one priority for the year ahead, and the firm puts a failure to agree clear, measurable goals first on its list of reasons why that is difficult.

Michelle is the founder and managing director of Meeesh Consulting, the London-based consultancy through which she advises companies on partnerships and commercial growth, and of The Strategic Attendee™, the framework and workshop she built to help businesses and individuals get a meaningful return from conference spend. The readers she most wants are the people who sign off on event budgets: CEOs, CROs and heads of partnerships at built environment and PropTech companies. “They’re spending tens of thousands a year on conferences and mostly can’t say what came back,” she says.

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Usually the Conference Was Fine

Michelle meets them at every event: people with, as she puts it, “good intentions and no real plan for why they’re in the room.” Afterwards she hears the same people say the conference “wasn’t very good this year.” Her verdict is short. “Usually the conference was fine.”

She names three things that went wrong, all of them in the attendee’s control. The first is no preparation. People turn up hoping the right conversations will happen and, she says, “spend the first day getting their bearings while the people they should have met are already booked up.” The second is slow follow-up. Plenty of people have a great conversation and mean to follow up, and then it takes them months. “By then the moment has passed.” The third is that nobody set out what success looked like, so nobody can say whether the trip paid off.

“That’s why I say the ROI is won or lost before you get on the plane. The event is just where it shows.”

Michelle Andrew, Founder and Managing Director, Meeesh Consulting and The Strategic Attendee™

She made the same point in a post before UKREiiF, the real estate week in Leeds. “The mistake most people make is treating the prep window as logistics,” she wrote. Hotel, train, dinner bookings, done. Her own preparation begins somewhere else.

It Starts With a Number

The multiplication is rough on purpose. Take the total cost of the trip (tickets, travel, hotels, and the time of the people going) and multiply it by five. “It isn’t meant to be precise,” Michelle says. “It’s meant to change the question from ‘should we go?’ to ‘what would have to happen for this to pay off?’”

It’s a starting point for understanding the investment and working backwards to what would make attendance worthwhile, rather than a fixed requirement for every conference. Sometimes she’s there supporting clients or conducting research, so the objectives and the measures of success will differ. Where generating new business is the goal, pipeline is a useful target, although it isn’t the same as realised revenue.

She runs it on herself first. For UKREiiF she costed the train at about £180, the hotel at about £650 and the ticket at about £1,995, with three days out of the office, put the total at roughly £3,000 and set a target of £15,000 or more in pipeline. Then she works back to who specifically she wants to meet, what the ask is, and what her follow-up week looks like before she has got on the train.

The other calculation she teaches in Strategic Attendee workshops is the cost of not going. Before UKREiiF she asked it of herself: could she do the same amount of business development by staying in London? She games out both scenarios, she wrote. The reason the question matters is who is in the room. Conferences bring together a concentrated audience who have deliberately made time to meet people and explore ideas. “Even with contacts I could theoretically see in London, getting into their diary during a normal working week can be much harder,” she says. “At a conference, they’re already there and in the mindset to connect.” That access and momentum are part of the value too.

With clients, the first step faces the other way. “When a client comes to me with growth that has plateaued, the first thing I do is look backwards before we look forwards,” she says. Which relationships turned into revenue, and where did they start? “Usually there’s a pattern, and then we design for that on purpose.” In practice that means fewer events chosen more carefully, a clear list of who matters and why, and a plan for what happens afterwards.

For larger organisations she runs this as a self-contained Strategic Attendee workshop, so their teams can apply it themselves. With some clients she does it alongside them: choosing the events, building the target list, and sometimes being in the room on the day. One of those days is the example she gives when asked for evidence.

The Wingwoman

A client came to her with a big conference on the calendar and, she says, no real plan beyond “we should be there.” So the work went in first. They chose which sessions were worth attending, then mapped each one against who the CEO needed to meet and what they wanted to learn. Meetings were set up early.

“On the day, I went along as his wingwoman,” Michelle says. “He’d met his key people by mid-morning, and then he could relax and enjoy the rest of the event, which is when the best conversations tend to happen anyway.” Several deals came off the back of that trip, she says, and it more than paid for itself.

“What I love about that example is that he didn’t work harder at the conference. He worked less. All the effort went in beforehand.”

Michelle, Founder and Managing Director, Meeesh Consulting and The Strategic Attendee™

She keeps the same room for the unplanned in her own diary. Before one event this autumn she wrote that she would leave some space for serendipity, “because some of the best conference conversations are the ones you didn’t plan.” Conferences are one part of what she does.

The Same Reasons Everywhere

Michelle’s work runs across the built environment, climate, fintech, PropTech and AI. She is typically brought in, as she puts it on her profile, “when growth has plateaued, partnerships feel ad-hoc, or complexity is creeping in.”

What moving between sectors has taught her is that partnerships fail for the same reasons everywhere, “and the differences are mostly vocabulary.” Whether it’s telecoms, fintech or property, she says, the deals that work have “clear value on both sides, a named owner, and someone who keeps showing up after the launch announcement.”

It also shows her where one industry has already solved a problem another is still stuck on. “Real estate is learning things about data and platforms that banking worked out years ago, and the reverse is true for long-term relationships and trust,” she says. “A specialist sees the detail. I see the pattern, and the shortcut.”

A good deal of that pattern-spotting happens in rooms she is running. At PropTech Connect in September she facilitated eight roundtables, on subjects from AI and occupancy data to retrofit and the future of the office, and the first theme she drew from them was “Start with the decision, not the technology.” She has given two talks to founders and CEOs on building strategic partnerships for the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Centre. Alongside client work she convenes small, curated women’s leadership dinners, which she describes as informal, agenda-free rooms. She grew up a long way from London.

Going Independent

Originally from Vancouver, Michelle moved to London while helping scale an incubator programme focused on digital skills and technology start-ups, and quickly fell in love with the city. After several years working across finance, infrastructure and real estate, she struck out on her own.

Her appetite for learning has continued alongside her career. She completed the Executive Strategy Programme at Oxford’s Saïd Business School in 2022 and studied sustainability in the built environment at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership in 2024, bringing fresh perspectives into her commercial work.

Of setting up on her own she offers one line. “Going independent, I learned that the first year is mostly about trusting that the work you’re doing now pays off later.” It is the same order as her arithmetic, where the effort goes in well before the return shows, and she applies it to people too.

Kindness and Curiosity First

The line Michelle would put her name to has no number in it. “Kindness and curiosity first,” she says. “The best relationships I have were not built by pitching to someone. I always ask questions and give value first.”

The habit that goes with it is handwritten thank-you notes and personalised touches. “I’ve always sent them, and people remember them far longer than any email.”

She has been lucky to have many mentors, she says, but the person she has always looked up to is her dad. “His work ethic, how he leads, and his generosity through his philanthropy have shaped how I show up in my own work.”

In September she was home in Vancouver for her grandmother’s funeral, and wrote afterwards about the people who stood up to speak. “None of the stories were about what she achieved. All of them were about how she made people feel.” Then she turned it on her own work. “My work is all about relationships, and this week reminded me what the real measure of it is,” she wrote. “Do people feel looked after when they were around me? Did I lift others?”

Where Michelle Is Now

Her diary for this October held a first: EXPO REAL in Munich, a trade fair that drew 42,000 participants from 70 countries in 2025. “With 42,000 people in the room,” Michelle wrote beforehand, “‘see what happens’ probably isn’t much of a strategy.” So she set her goals before she travelled: five meaningful conversations with businesses she hadn’t come across before, targeted market research for her current clients, and less time trying to meet everyone. “Because apparently I have to practise what I preach.”

This year she is also serving as a judge for the UK PropTech Association, sits on the NextGen Executive Committee of the Urban Land Institute in Europe, and has been nominated as Woman of the Year in Professional Services.

The people she wants to hear from are the ones holding the event budget. If they read this and think “that’s us,” she says, that leads to workshops, and often to deeper commercial and partnerships work with Meeesh Consulting. Event organisers are a close second. “The best ones already know their attendees want more than a lanyard and a panel,” she says, “and I’d love to work with more of them on helping their audiences get real value out of the room.”

Outside work, there is her dog. “She’s my sidekick and my biggest motivator, so the hardest part of conference season is leaving her at home.”

And what comes next is the formula at a larger scale. “Taking the Strategic Attendee™ from workshop to platform,” she says, “so every company that spends money on events knows what it should get back.”

The Michelle Andrew Playbook: Before You Get on the Plane

Multiply the cost by five. Add up tickets, travel, hotels and the time of the people going. Five times that figure is the starting point: work backwards from it to what would make the trip worthwhile.
Look backwards before you look forwards. Find which relationships turned into revenue and where they started, then design for that pattern on purpose.
Go to fewer events, chosen more carefully. Then cost the ones you’d skip. The people you want to meet are already in the room and in the mindset to connect, which is much harder to get in a normal working week.
Know who you want to meet before you land. Keep a clear list of who matters and why, and set the meetings up early.
Plan the follow-up week before you leave. If it takes months, the moment has passed.