Questions and answers:Working with Zirstar, and event RoI.

Mostly professional services, engineering and manufacturing organisations in defence and automotive, but we're very happy to hear from others. Events on the site range from a roundtable for 10 to a staff and family day for 300.

Secure attendees or delegates. We build the event; filling the room is yours, though our communications service can help maximise attendance.

Yes. We've delivered for clients in the US, Spain, Germany and Poland, and we aren't limited by geography; we work where required.

Yes. We're flexible to onboarding requirements, with the most often requested documentation readily available, and willing to secure any necessary certifications for large enough or ongoing engagements.

A venue's team works for the venue and their own ecosystem of suppliers they most likely receive commission from; we work for you on a pure fee basis – no hidden commissions. We choose the venue and suppliers to suit your objectives rather than the other way round, and if the right answer is a different venue, a private house or no venue at all, that's what we'll say.

You can, and would probably make a decent job of it. But it takes time, and time has an opportunity cost. We bring a tried and tested supplier network, a long list of go-to suppliers and gems of locations that don't show up in a search, a founder on the day, and a response within 24 hours, so your people stay productive in their main jobs while the event gets built.

Our fee is £1,250 or 15 percent of event value, whichever is greater. A 10 percent deposit secures your arrangements, with the balance due 30 days before the first day; inside 30 days, the full cost is due at booking. Payment is by bank transfer or card; corporate credit cards carry a 2.5 percent processing fee. Full terms are in our terms and conditions.

No commission. Supplier invoices are passed on at cost plus a 2.5 percent handling charge, or can be settled directly with the supplier if you prefer.

Nothing. The first charge is a £250 research fee, and it applies only at the go/no-go point, after we've researched and presented options with indicative costs. It's deducted from the final bill if you take an option forward to a detailed proposal.

Enough to be worth calculating. Our RoI calculator puts a figure on an internal event's return in retention, collaboration and wellbeing, and on an external event's return in business won, benchmarked by sector, with every assumption shown and adjustable. One example: a £2,000 client roundtable in January 2025 brought in £78,000 of new business.

Yes, and our Event RoI calculator models it. Event-driven gains decline without reinforcement, to around 55 percent after a year and 30 percent after two, so a single event's value fades. A second event in the year adds about 70 percent of the first's value, a third about 50 percent, a fourth 30 percent; each one compounds on the last while the investment scales linearly, which is why the three-year return on a regular programme comfortably exceeds a one-off.

One of the Zirstar team will get back to you within 24 hours. The first step is an opening discussion with one of the founders to understand your event objectives and requirements; on the phone, your videocall platform of choice, or in person. We'll mainly be listening.

A sense of what you want to achieve. It can be specific or abstract; a well-developed vision that just needs some oomph, a vaguer idea for us to build out, or a broader business need that has been identified but not yet remedied.

Options, with numbers. We'll develop and put indicative costs to a number of options that fit both your hard and soft requirements, talking you through pros, cons, costs, and real-world impressions beyond what's shown on the web. Please allow a full week unless you're really against the clock.

Direction and Reward events benefit from a longer lead time, ideally two to three months. Growth events can be turned round more quickly, as long as you're confident of delegate or attendee availability.

A founder (if requested). In-person, on-site attendance by Zirstar to smooth any last-minute issues and provide an extra pair of hands, leaving you free to focus on making your case to the people who matter.

Yes, where it counts. AV, communications, graphic design, merchandise and gifts, and the event microsite are handled by the same team that plans the event, so one team owns the outcome rather than a chain of subcontractors.

Through a private event microsite: schedule, map, photo and video sharing and ticketing in one place, private to your guests and live before, during and after the event.

Weather is the one uncontrollable variable, but we always have a contingency, often several, and with a wide enough supplier network substitutes are often available at 48 hours' notice or less. Where an alternative carries an additional cost, we'll tell you before committing; the details are in section 4 of our terms and conditions.

If specified, audio, photo and video content that keeps working for you: fully indexed media with searchable transcripts, scene descriptions and tagged individuals, so the moment that mattered can be found a year later and reused in recruitment, internal comms or the next pitch.

Complete the 2026 survey and we'll send you the full anonymised dataset when it closes at year-end, including where your organisation sits relative to peers in your sector and size bracket.

Sparingly, and on our own equipment. Our website and event microsites are hosted on hardware we own and operate in the United Kingdom; the site sets no cookies and uses no third-party trackers. Enquiries and survey responses are emailed to us and kept in a log on our own systems. Client material is processed on our own infrastructure, not sent to cloud AI services (see our AI policy below). Full details are in our privacy policy.

We're an advocate of sovereign AI capabilities. Accordingly, we use open weight models run on our own on-premises infrastructure to process any client data; no cloud, nothing fed back into public frontier models, reduced compliance concerns, and improved efficiency via right-sized model choices.