McKay recently launched his own company, PPM Media. He has a long history in the exhibition business having served as Group Vice President and General Manager for Gartner Vision Events, Senior Vice President of International for Key3Media Group, and Group Managing Director at Penton Media. McKay currently serves on the board of directors of the Society of Independent Show Organizers (SISO). He talks with EXPO about launching his own company and his plans to grow the company’s brands.

EXPO: You’ve been in the industry for a number of years and held high-level positions with a number of major show management companies. Why did you decide to launch your own company? What’s been your biggest challenge so far?
McKay: If you’re an entrepreneur, it’s in your blood. It’s been in my blood for a long time. One of my friends, a former boss, said to me, ‘You know, you were talking about doing this nine years ago when you worked for me. Sooner or later you’ve just got to take a deep breath and do it.’ So, that’s what I did. I’ve worked on more than 100 events during my career, but I’ve always wanted to do things my own way. Even if you’re an executive at a company, you don’t necessarily get to do things your way. I also think we’ve got a concept for creating events for high-level executives that really works. It’s been fun to build a team of people you look forward to working with every day. I’ve been blessed with employees and colleagues of the highest caliber. We work collaboratively, not always agreeing on every point, but we manage to realize the common goal through great team work. Some of the biggest challenges to launching a business from scratch have been my impatience. I want everything done now, but when you’ve got to build everything from the ground up, things take some time. When you work for a big company, there’s a whole administrative infrastructure to rely on and now it isn’t there. Then there are just the day-to-day struggles of cash flow. There’s no Daddy Warbucks to pay the bills as things ebb and flow.

EXPO: How did you fund the company?
McKay: Patrick McGovern, Founder and Chairman of the International Data Group (IDG), also has a network of venture capital funds called IDG Ventures. We were fortunate enough to be initially funded by IDG Ventures Chairman’s Fund, and of course the McKay family fund, which hurts sometimes. IDG doesn’t own our company, but the chairman’s venture fund is an investor.

EXPO: What’s your business plan? Do you plan to focus on specific industries?
McKay: Our plan is to launch high-end executive events in emerging growth sectors. We’re looking for industries in which we expect to see a lot of growth in the next four to five years. We’re also looking for industries in which there’s room to create communities. We don’t just want to host an event for two days. We want to find ways to connect with and serve that market the rest of the year too, whether that’s focus groups, newsletters or publications. We’re currently working on a number of ventures in the technology, manufacturing and architecture space.

EXPO: Your company’s first event, BladeSystems Insight, is launching April 10–12, in Savannah, GA. What can you tell us about it?
McKay: It’s the perfect example of the sort of events we intend to launch. A blade server is a new server that’s smaller more scalable and more economical. We believe it’s an area that will see tremendous growth in the next five years. For this event, as with our future events, we want to bring communities together. So we’ve brought in six analyst groups and have the support of seven different industry associations. We also have several participating publications. This is part of what will differentiate our events – we’re bringing together people from a number of segments that have this interest in common, and we’re doing it without any favoritism to one analyst group or association. We also plan to launch more BladeSystems events. Right now we’re looking at events in Europe and Asia in 2007 and early 2008.

EXPO: How has your company grown so quickly?
McKay: We’ve grown quickly out of necessity. We now have seven full-time employees, a number of part-time employees and a number of people that are working for us as contractors. We want to create events with a very high level of service, so we need to grow to be able to ramp up and serve our clients’ needs.