Industry Leaders Join Forces to Create Etherio Group and Expand Meeting/Event Planning, Incentive Services

The meeting and event industry’s most creative minds and trusted partners have come together under the new brand,  Etherio Group.

Eric J. Altschul, CEO of ABC Global Services, has joined forces with other well-known leaders in the industry: Steve Goodman, managing director of MeetingAdvice; Eli Sananes, president of Global Meetings & Incentives (GMI); Katie Harvill, founder of Matchstick Creative; and Michael Shannon, CMP HMCC, a veteran of meeting sales management. Altschul now serves as the president and CEO of the newly formed Etherio Group.

By uniting their businesses as Etherio Group, these industry players have created a leading meeting and event company focused on corporate clients, life sciences, associations, incentives and site selection. Together they offer a wider range of technology and virtual solutions, creative services, strategic meeting management, regulatory compliance, reporting and financial management while retaining their unique gifts for building and nurturing meaningful relationships with their clients.

“Steve, Eli, Katie and Michael are consummate professionals who excel at developing creative concepts that spark meetings, events and incentives to life. We have joined our can-do cultures, coming together as a single brand that delivers full-service meeting and event, incentive and sourcing expertise focused on building connections and relationships,” says Altschul. “Etherio Group can meet the needs of any client regardless of size or complexity. From strategy and logistics to execution, we differentiate ourselves through attention to detail and building long-term relationships. These are the values that brought us together and that will remain central to everything we do.”

“By coming together, we have created an ideal situation for each of our subsidiary companies where we can focus even more on our clients and build our capabilities,” says Steve Goodman. “I am excited to be a part of Etherio Group, and our greater financial strength allows us to invest in new resources and technology and offer industry-leading services to our clients.”

“Etherio Group gives us a strong platform for growth, and we look forward to growing the Meetings & Events and Life Sciences divisions,” says Eli Sananes. “Going forward, our joint efforts are particularly important as we highlight our expertise in virtual platforms and production as well as expand our sales organization.”

The seven divisions under the Etherio Group umbrella are:

MeetingAdvice (Etherio Meetings & Events). Steve Goodman and his team of professionals have been providing full-service meetings and event management across the hospitality, association, retail, technology and telecommunications industries for over 25 years. They are known as meeting perfectionists, intuiting what the client needs before they can even articulate it, then delivering with passion and seamless style.

Global Meetings & Incentives (Etherio Life Sciences). Lead by Eli Sananes, GMI’s primary business emphasis is on managing and executing pharmaceutical and health care-related projects on a local, regional and global level. With a keen understanding of industry compliance, meeting complexity, attendee culture and operating white-glove, high-touch projects, Sananes and his team are the leading provider of end-to-end meeting solutions and logistic services for a wide variety of pharmaceutical meetings worldwide.

Etherio Incentives. Matchstick Creative founder Katie Harvill has been navigating journeys around the world for the past 18 years, crafting uncommon and out-of-the-box incentives focused on building and strengthening client cultures across their senior leadership teams and top performers.

 

Etherio Associates. Michael Shannon, vice president, sales & strategy, is an industry veteran who oversees an independent sales force working with corporate clients, associations and others to offer a range of services from site selection to strategy development and full-service logistics.

Etherio Virtual Events. During 2020, the team pivoted to develop expertise as producers of virtual events while remaining platform agnostic. Time and again, the team demonstrated that partnering with the right producer made all the difference in virtual meeting outcomes. Led by Elizabeth Crawford, the Virtual Events team focuses on supporting each client’s virtual and hybrid needs.

Together with subsidiaries ABC Global Services and CCRA International, Etherio Group delivers over 24 million room nights to hotel partners, ensuring it can deliver the best rates and amenities. Leaders in their segments for more than 40 years, both ABC Global Services and CCRA International are focused on providing the industry’s premier hotel content and a range of services to travel management companies and agencies around the globe, including after-hours call center services, an international air program and agency/agent accreditation.

“Etherio Group will continue to invest in people and technology so that we are always on the leading edge of the industry and exceeding customer expectations,” adds Altschul. “Most importantly, we will never lose the human touch and the investments we make in building personal, long-term relationships with our clients. That is the essential ingredient of what we do that made our individual businesses successful and makes us even better together.”