How we scaled a B2B events business across 40+ countries

When my Co-Founder, Samuel Adcock, and I started The Ortus Club in Singapore in 2015, we were in our mid-twenties, pitching a fairly unsexy idea to enterprise clients who had never heard of us: that a dinner for 15 people would generate more pipeline than a conference booth in front of 5,000.

Nobody was particularly interested in hearing that from a small agency in Southeast Asia. The established event houses were in London and New York. The enterprise brands we wanted to work with — the Googles, the Visas, the Metas — were already being courted by firms with decades of track record and offices in every major market. We had a WeWork desk and a thesis.

A decade later, The Ortus Club has produced more than 2,500 invitation-only executive events across 40+ countries. Our client list includes Google, Visa, Meta, Adobe, IBM, Zendesk, and Airwallex. We operate across APAC, EMEA, and North America. And we have never run a single open-registration conference.

This is not a success story disguised as a LinkedIn post. This is what we actually learned — including the parts that were painful — about building a global B2B services company from Southeast Asia.

Specialisation was the only thing that made us credible early on

The most important decision we made was also the most uncomfortable one commercially: we said no to everything except invitation-only executive roundtables. No conferences. No exhibition stands. No sponsored speaking slots. One format, done obsessively well.

For the first couple of years, this meant turning away revenue. Prospective clients would ask us to run a panel at their conference or manage a large-format event, and we would say no. That felt reckless when we were trying to build a business. But it gave us something that turned out to be far more valuable than early revenue: a clear identity in a crowded market.

When a VP of Marketing at a Fortune 500 company asks, “Who does invitation-only executive roundtables?” — we wanted the answer to be us, immediately, without qualification. That only works if you are not also doing twelve other things.

We eventually documented our entire methodology in a free guide called The Art of Networking. It remains the most practical thing we have published, and it is the backbone of our company trainings.

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Southeast Asia was not a disadvantage — it was a training ground

There is a specific advantage to building a global B2B business from this region that does not get discussed enough in founder narratives. Southeast Asia is the most culturally diverse business environment on the planet. Running events across Singapore, Manila, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and Sydney in the same quarter forces a localisation discipline that companies built in more homogenous markets simply do not develop.

Our team is largely based in Manila and Singapore. The operational muscle we built, adapting tone, format, guest curation approach, and follow-up cadence across six or seven dramatically different cultures in APAC, gave us something we did not fully appreciate until we expanded into Europe and North America: we were already better at localisation than most of our competitors because we had been doing it since day one.

The cultural nuances are not trivial. The formality expected in a Tokyo executive dinner is fundamentally different from what works in Sydney. The way you position an invitation to a CTO in Singapore is not the way you position the same invitation in Jakarta. Getting this wrong does not just reduce attendance — it damages the client’s brand with exactly the people they are trying to reach. We learned this the hard way more than once in our early APAC expansion, and those lessons became the foundation for everything we built afterwards.

Scaling into EMEA and the US meant rebuilding, not copy-pasting

The move into London was our first real test of whether the model could travel outside APAC. The answer was yes — but not without significant adaptation.

London’s senior executive community operates differently from Singapore’s. There is more scepticism toward event invitations generally, longer relationship-building timelines, and a much higher premium on credibility signals in the invitation itself. Who else is attending, who is hosting, what is the venue — these details carry more weight in EMEA than in APAC, where the topic and format tend to do more of the heavy lifting.

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The US market presented a different challenge entirely. American executives reward directness and clear commercial framing in ways that would feel abrupt in most of Asia. The post-event follow-up expectations are faster and more transactional. And the sheer volume of competing events in markets like New York, San Francisco, and Chicago means your invitation is fighting for calendar space against a much larger field.

The constant across every market — the one thing that has not changed in a decade — is the core thesis: get the right people in a room, design a conversation that creates genuine value for every person present, and the commercial outcomes follow. That has been as true in Zurich and San Francisco as it has been in Singapore and Sydney.

Delegate acquisition is the real challenge

If I had to identify the single most underrated capability in B2B event marketing, it is delegate acquisition — the process of actually getting senior executives to say yes to your invitation and show up.

Anyone can book a nice venue. Anyone can write a compelling agenda. The part that separates event companies that deliver genuine commercial value from those that do not is whether the right people are actually in the room. A beautifully produced roundtable with the wrong 15 people is worthless. An average venue with the right 15 people is transformational.

Our entire operational model is built around this. We do not sell sponsorship packages and hope people register. We identify the specific executives our client needs in the room, and then we do the work — the research, the outreach, the personalisation, the follow-up — to get them there. That process is manual, labour-intensive, and does not scale elegantly. It is also the reason our clients keep coming back.

The 2026 Event Marketer’s Playbook — our annual research publication based on data from 295 senior B2B marketers across 29 roundtables in 30 cities — confirmed what we have seen operationally for years: the cost-per-qualified-conversation for curated invitation-only events is significantly lower than for open-attendance formats when you weight for pipeline quality. The per-event production cost is higher, but the outcome is not comparable.

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What I would tell a founder building a services business in Southeast Asia

First, specialise earlier and more aggressively than feels comfortable. The temptation to be a generalist is strongest when revenue is scarce, which is exactly when saying no matters most.

Second, treat the cultural complexity of this region as a competitive advantage, not a logistical headache. If you can operate effectively across APAC, you are better prepared for global expansion than you realise.

Third, document your methodology and publish it for free. The Art of Networking has been our single most effective resource — not because it generates leads directly, but because it establishes the core mission of what the company stands for. And that’s contagious.

And fourth, invest disproportionately in the part of your service that is hardest to replicate. For us, that is the guesting process. What goes on behind the scenes? For your business, it will be something else. But the principle is the same: the thing your competitors find most difficult to copy is the thing your clients will value most.

We are a decade in now. The thesis has not changed. The rooms have just gotten bigger — and more global.

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