40under40 Winner - Anne-Maree Ferguson

Perth Convention Bureau managing director Anne-Maree Ferguson lists the role she played in bringing the new Exhibition and Convention Centre to reality as her most significant achievement during her career in the exhibition industry.

Ms Ferguson, who was the youngest bureau chief in Australia when she joined the PCB in 1994, instigated the feasibility study for the $220 million centre.

She has also been responsible for growing the bureau’s annual turnover almost 10-fold, a growth driven by sales, and boosting its staffing by a factor of seven.

The bureau has twice won the world’s most prestigious international convention marketing award from the International Congress and Convention Association.

But it has not all been a steady upward path for Ms Ferguson.

She said one of her greatest business lessons came from trying to replicate a highly successful event.

While working for the Adelaide Convention and Tourism Authority Ms Ferguson organised a glitzy dinner in Melbourne complete with camels, racing cars and James Morrison making a grand entrance on a flying fox while playing his trumpet.

The event attracted significant media attention.

Six months later Ms Ferguson replicated the dinner in Sydney and it was a “disaster”.

She said the lesson from that was to treat each market differently.

Her top business tip is from Benjamin Franklin: “We must all hang together or assuredly we shall all hang separately”.