Marcel Wassink has a MSc Computer Science TU Delft. He is a long-term executive who founded, acquired and sold several innovative companies in various market segments such as clean energy, event technology, speech recognition and healthcare.

Marcel built and managed businesses within Fujitsu, Philips and Nuance. He lived and worked in several countries. Marcel likes to get involved, invest or lead innovative businesses, developing their business strategy with a hands-on approach.

Marcel Wassink, CEO and Co-founder Superevent, Austria

GENERAL

Q:  How would you describe your job in under 50 words?

I do not have a job. I have a hobby, which is trying to make our customers happy with our Superevent platform and team of super stars. Fortunately, after a difficult start, we have started to grow fast and the increasing number of happy customers who create word of mouth for Superevent is giving me most pleasure!

Q:  What advice would you offer to all soon to be working in marketing in the meetings industry?

Only start working in this industry if you like it and if you can forget small daily disappointments fast and focus on the (small) daily wins. In this way you keep yourself going in a positive way whatever your responsibility is.

Q:  How to develop talent and how to help people grow to the next level?

I think the most important thing is to be authentic: be clear in setting overall objectives, assign tasks within the team, define processes and compliment people if they cut corners in case these processes fall short. I develop people by giving them honest feedback about good stuff and about the things to improve. I also believe that the basic attitude towards any person is to trust they work hard and are always willing to do a great job.

Q: What are you most excited about at the moment?

That finally our product is where we want it to be, our customers give us great feedback and our business starts to take off through word of mouth. Now we need to start to pay more attention to marketing, which we haven’t really done yet.

Q: Your advice/suggestion for turning a boring event into a memorable one?

I can just speak for myself: memorable events are those events where (1) I really felt I learned something new (2) I felt I could contribute and felt that my input was taken seriously (3) I had fun because of a great party!

BACKGROUND

CROSSOVER

Q: What gets you out of bed in the morning?

Getting up in the morning is easier when I have interesting meetings or calls planned that day. If not, I typically try to keep fit by working out or going for a run if the weather is nice and then try to arrange such meetings/calls for the days to come

Q: Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

I will travel around the world with my wife, discovering new places and visiting friends, children and grandchildren.

Q: What kind of knowledge will participants of Conventa Crossover gain from listening to your lecture?

Get ideas on making events more interactive and how to easily create an interactive and innovative event app for only €750 including all features such as: Program schedule, push notifications, social wall, links to relevant event data, off-line pages, voting, q&a, chat between delegates etc.

Q: What do you expect from Conventa Crossover?

A nice stay in Ljubljana – i love the city! I hope to meet some people from the previous Conventa and make new friends.

Join meeting planners, meeting providers, congress destinations and professionals working in tourism and marketing at Conventa Crossover conference, international conference dedicated to the future of MICE and travel marketing.

When & where: 29 – 30 August 2016 in Hotel Lev, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

“We are absolutely delighted that so many speakers have announced their presence already at this stage, and we know that there are many more to come,” says Conventa Crossover founder Gorazd Čad

Join our newsletter!

Subscribe to our newsletter and stay up-to-date with the latest updates from Kongres Magazine.