This story appears in the February issue of Utah Business. Subscribe.
Once a month, Utah Business hosts Founder Friday, a free event that showcases the wisdom of Utah-based founders. As a part of Utah Tech Week in January, Younique hosted a conversation between Utah Business Editor-in-Chief Melanie Jones and Mobly co-founder and CEO Zach Barney. This event was sponsored by Younique, Comma Copywriters and Kajae. Here are a few takeaways from the conversation.
1. Money is made at night.
Barney isn’t referencing the Warren Buffett quote about making money in your sleep. He’s talking about how networking at the nighttime events surrounding business conferences — like dinners and happy hours — often results in the most beneficial deals.
“You should always be ‘on,’” he says. “If you’re traveling for a conference, you are working the conference from the moment you step on that plane until the moment you step off on the return flight.”
These candid interactions can potentially exceed the impact of traditional sales channels. For example, at Barney’s previous company, attending a post-trade show party once led to closing significant business transactions that offset the cost of having a booth at the conference within one week.
2. Prioritize engagement over giveaways.
Businesses ought to invest in conversations that uncover client needs and lay the groundwork for lasting connections rather than relying on the temporary allure of a giveaway to draw attention. The raffling of an Apple Watch, for example, may end up attracting people to your booth who aren’t even in your target audience and will never be interested in your offering.
If you are going to hand out swag at events, Barney recommends spending more money per item for a more selective group of people, “whether that be mailing them something small and compact, or handing out something impactful so it doesn’t just get thrown away in the hotel or handed to their dog or child when they get home.”
3. Follow up on leads quickly.
“When you meet people, take notes and follow up quickly,” Barney says. “Don’t wait to follow up, or else you’ll lose their mindshare. If you want to build a relationship, whether it be for a job, sale or partnership, be friends with that person. You’ve got to stay top of mind. We get busy, and we don’t have long attention spans.”
4. Host smaller, more frequent events.
Barney advocates for participating in smaller, more frequent events to nurture deeper connections with potential clients. Larger gatherings can be impersonal, while smaller events allow for more genuine interactions.
5. Track your ROI.
Barney founded Mobly in response to a tangible problem he repeatedly faced as a sales leader: verifying the return on investment (ROI) from expensive events. Events often involved spending substantial sums — sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars — without a clear mechanism to track their effectiveness. With Mobly, he hopes to close this gap with real-time data enrichment to ensure precise and actionable insights for event marketers.
As Barney puts it, “The best companies are founded by people who are trying to solve their own problem.”
