The Smaller the Room, the Bigger the Business?

You have probably heard at least a few of these expressions recently: executive roundtables, private dinners, invite-only gatherings, micro-events, curated gatherings, executive communities, petit comités.

Different names, slightly different formats, but essentially the same movement: business conversations are becoming smaller, more curated and increasingly intentional. Which is interesting, because for a very long time, we were moving in exactly the opposite direction.

We spent years making the room bigger

For decades, the logic behind business events was relatively straightforward: more people meant more opportunities. Bigger conferences. Bigger trade shows. Bigger audiences. More speakers. More badges scanned. More business cards collected — for those of us who remember business cards — and eventually more LinkedIn connections. Digital accelerated this logic even further: a physical conference could accommodate thousands, a webinar could accommodate tens of thousands, LinkedIn gave us access to people we would probably never meet otherwise, and today technology and AI allow companies to communicate with an extraordinary number of potential customers with increasingly sophisticated levels of personalisation.

None of this is necessarily bad. Large conferences still have enormous value: they expose us to ideas outside our immediate circles, help industries build shared knowledge, introduce us to people we would never have thought of meeting, and create visibility, discovery and serendipity at a scale that a dinner for twelve people simply cannot reproduce. And they are not going anywhere.

But something else is growing alongside them. If large events are still extremely efficient for reach, smaller gatherings are becoming particularly powerful for relationship density — and those are two very different things.

You can leave a conference having listened to fifteen interesting speakers, exchanged contacts with thirty people and discovered five companies you did not know before. You can leave a dinner having spoken to six people. But perhaps one of those conversations lasts forty minutes. Perhaps someone shares something they would never say on a stage. Perhaps two people discover that they are working on surprisingly similar problems. Perhaps a commercial conversation begins without anyone having to start it as a commercial conversation.

The objective is not necessarily to meet more people. It is to create better conditions for the right people to meet each other. And suddenly, the question is no longer “How many people were there?” It becomes: “Who was in the room?”

The rise of the smaller room

There are already signals that this is becoming an increasingly relevant part of B2B strategies. The terminology changes depending on the market: in Brazil, petit comité has become relatively common, while in international B2B environments you are more likely to hear about executive roundtables, leadership dinners, private gatherings, peer communities or micro-events. But focusing too much on which country has embraced which terminology misses the more interesting point — I don’t think this is really a country trend. It is an ecosystem trend.

The environments where these formats appear particularly naturally tend to share certain characteristics: a concentration of senior decision-makers, sophisticated B2B markets, high-value products or services, long sales cycles, strong professional communities and, perhaps most importantly, people whose attention has become increasingly difficult to access. That helps explain why we see these formats frequently around technology, consulting, finance, private equity, venture capital, innovation, professional services and luxury, and in business hubs such as London, New York, Paris, Singapore, São Paulo and the Nordic capitals.

The product matters too. If you are selling something relatively transactional, bringing twelve executives around a table may be an unnecessarily complicated acquisition strategy. But imagine you are selling a transformation project that can take eighteen months and involve several million euros. Or advising companies on cybersecurity. Or helping CEOs rethink their supply chains. Or selling sophisticated technology to financial institutions. Or trying to build relationships with twenty strategic accounts rather than generate twenty thousand leads. Now the economics of the room start looking very different.

The common denominator is not geography. It is the value of the relationship.

Why now?

There is another dot worth connecting. We have never had more access to other professionals, and professionals have probably never been more difficult to genuinely access. Our inboxes are full. LinkedIn is full. Calendars are full. Every company wants fifteen minutes of our time, and personalised outreach is becoming easier to produce precisely when recognising genuine personalisation is becoming harder. AI will only accelerate that contradiction: when communication becomes infinitely scalable, human attention becomes more scarce.

And this is where the small room becomes interesting. Because its value is not simply exclusivity — it is context. Someone has decided why these particular people should meet, has thought about what they might have to say to each other, and has created the conditions for a conversation that would probably not happen in exactly the same way somewhere else. That is curation. And good curation has always been valuable.

The dinner is not the strategy

This is also where companies can get the trend completely wrong. Booking a beautiful private room, choosing an expensive restaurant and inviting twenty CEOs does not automatically create an executive community — and if everyone starts doing exactly that, the format quickly becomes another piece of corporate noise. The real strategic asset is not knowing how to organise a dinner. It is knowing how to build the room.

Who should be there? Why would they accept the invitation? What connects them without making everyone identical? What topic is interesting enough that they would genuinely want to discuss it? Who should not be there? How much of your company should be present? How do you avoid turning an interesting conversation into a disguised sales presentation? And perhaps the most underestimated question of all: who do you know that you can actually call? That last question changes the nature of this capability completely.

Your network can be a business asset

Companies traditionally think about assets in fairly predictable categories: brand, technology, intellectual property, customer data, distribution, talent. But there is another asset that is much harder to put on a balance sheet: the ability to convene people. Not simply having thousands of contacts in a CRM — having relationships. Knowing an executive who will answer your message. Knowing the journalist who understands the topic. Knowing the founder with the opposing point of view. Knowing the academic who can bring evidence into the discussion. Knowing the client who has already lived through the problem everyone else is trying to solve. And, more importantly, understanding which of those people would have something interesting to say to each other.

That combination of network + reputation + curation is extraordinarily difficult to replicate. You cannot buy it overnight. You cannot build it through one LinkedIn campaign. And you certainly cannot ask AI to generate twelve meaningful professional relationships for next Thursday.

This is why I believe the ability to create these environments can become a genuine strategic capability for companies — and an interesting service for consultancies, agencies and professionals who already sit at the intersection of different industries and communities.

So how can a company actually use this?

The first mistake would be starting with the event. Start with the business question. Perhaps you want to enter a new market. Perhaps you want to get closer to a particular group of decision-makers. Perhaps your company wants to become associated with a topic where it currently has little authority. Perhaps five strategic clients are facing the same transformation. Perhaps you want to reactivate relationships with former clients without sending another “we should catch up” email. Each of those situations could generate a completely different room.

A useful starting framework is relatively simple.

1. Define the conversation before the guest list. “Dinner with CFOs” is not a proposition. “What will AI change about the CFO’s role over the next three years?” might be. The topic has to provide value even if nobody buys anything afterwards.

2. Curate for contribution, not seniority alone. Twelve CEOs do not automatically create twelve interesting conversations. Sometimes the most valuable room contains a CEO, a researcher, a customer, an entrepreneur, an investor and someone coming from a completely different industry. Curating a room means thinking about chemistry, not just job titles.

3. Keep the commercial agenda visible enough to be honest and invisible enough not to dominate. People know companies have business objectives, and pretending otherwise is unnecessary. But if every conversation eventually leads back to your product, you have organised a sales event with better food.

4. Think in communities, not isolated events. One dinner is an event. Four carefully connected conversations throughout the year can start becoming a community. The accumulated value is considerable: relationships deepen, participants begin knowing each other, conversations evolve and the company hosting them can become a trusted connector within that ecosystem.

5. Design what happens after the room. This may be the most important part. What did you learn? Which introductions should happen afterwards? What themes emerged? Could the discussion generate an article, research project, podcast, report or another gathering? Which relationships deserve another conversation? The dinner ends. The strategy should not.

From hosting events to owning conversations

There is a subtle but important distinction here. Companies do not necessarily need to become event organisers — they can become conveners. A company that repeatedly brings interesting people together around relevant questions starts occupying a different position in its market. It is no longer only selling expertise; it is creating the environment where expertise circulates. And that can influence reputation, business development, customer relationships, thought leadership, partnerships and even product development.

There is also something wonderfully old-fashioned about all of this. After CRM systems, marketing automation, virtual events, social networks, sophisticated targeting and now generative AI, one of the interesting developments in business might simply be twelve people sitting around a table having a genuinely good conversation. The technology around the table will continue changing. The value of the table itself probably will not.

Perhaps that is why, after spending so many years trying to build bigger networks, we are rediscovering the importance of smaller rooms. Because sometimes connecting the dots does not mean connecting more dots. It means knowing exactly which ones should be in the room.