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Growing a Community Is the Hardest and Most Rewarding Thing I've Done

  • Lars Gjøls-Andersen
  • May 13
  • 4 min read

I'll be honest with you. There were moments in the early years of SPOT:ON Club where I genuinely wondered if we were kidding ourselves.


Events where the turnout was smaller than we hoped. Planning sessions that ran until midnight for something that felt bigger in our heads than it did on paper. The quiet anxiety of putting something out into the world and not knowing whether people would actually care.


Building a professional community from scratch is nothing like starting a company. There's no product to iterate on, no clear metric that tells you you're winning. You're essentially asking people to invest their time and identity in something that doesn't fully exist yet - and trusting that if you keep showing up, they will too.


We kept showing up.

Where It Started

For years, the annual IEG Sponsorship Conference in Chicago was the event. If you worked seriously with sponsorships and commercial partnerships, you went. You invested in the flights, the hotel, the time away - because it was where the industry gathered, where ideas were exchanged, and where you came back feeling genuinely inspired.


And then it became too expensive. Not just in money, but in the growing sense that we were travelling across the Atlantic to have conversations we could - and should - be having at home.


That realisation was sitting in the background when my co-founder Claus Gersdorff and I sat down for a cup of coffee. One of those conversations that has no fixed agenda and ends up changing everything. We asked ourselves a simple question: why isn't there a room in Denmark for the people who care about this as much as we do?


We couldn't find a good answer. So in 2018, we built it - starting with the conference.


Not with a grand vision or a detailed business plan - but with a genuine belief that if you create the right conditions for smart, passionate people to connect around shared challenges, something valuable will emerge.


What emerged has been more than we imagined.

What the Community Taught Me

The most surprising thing about building SPOT:ON Club hasn't been the events, the conference, or the growth. It's been what happens between all of that.


It's the message I get from a member who just closed a partnership deal and wanted to share it with someone who would truly understand why it matters. It's the conversation that starts at a SPOT:ON evening and continues for months, eventually turning into a collaboration between two organisations that had never crossed paths before. It's the newer members who now bring the same energy I tried to carry in the early days.


At some point - and I can't pinpoint exactly when - the community stopped being something I was building and started being something that was building itself. That shift is hard to describe, but you feel it. The weight of it changes. It becomes less about what you put in and more about what you make possible.


That's when I realised this was genuinely working.

SPOT:ON Activation - Proof at Scale

Every year, SPOT:ON Activation - the Nordic Sponsorship and Brand Activation Conference - reminds me of how far we've come.


What started as a bold ambition is now one of the most important gatherings in our industry across the Nordic region. Brands, rights holders, agencies, and commercial professionals coming together for a full day of real conversation about what's working, what's changing, and where partnerships are headed next.


The 2026 edition at Royal Arena in Copenhagen brought the theme "Partnerships of the Future" to life - and the energy in that room confirmed something I've always believed: this industry is full of people who are hungry to think bigger, to share more openly, and to push the craft of commercial partnerships further than it's been pushed before.


SPOT:ON Activation isn't just a conference. It's the annual proof point that the community is real, that it matters, and that it's growing.

Why I'm More Energised Now Than Ever

People sometimes ask if it gets easier. Running a community, sustaining momentum year after year, keeping the quality high while the world around the industry keeps changing.


The honest answer is: not really easier. But it gets more meaningful.


One of the things I'm most proud of is how naturally people learn from each other across very different worlds. Watching someone from sport genuinely change the way they think about activation because of a conversation with someone from music or culture - that doesn't happen at an industry silo event. It happens because we deliberately built a room where those worlds meet.


And then there are the relationships. Not just professional contacts or LinkedIn connections - actual friendships. People who met at a SPOT:ON evening three years ago and are still talking. That matters to me more than any attendance number or membership count.


What keeps the engine running, honestly, is the feedback. When people tell us that SPOT:ON has made them better at their job, or given them a community they didn't know they needed, it makes every late night of planning worth it. That kind of response doesn't let you stop - it makes you want to do more and do it better.


If you're working in sponsorships, commercial partnerships, or brand activation - in Denmark, in the Nordics, or anywhere else - and you've ever felt like you were doing it a little too much on your own, I'd love to hear from you.


The room is open.

Lars Gjøls-Andersen is the co-founder of SPOT:ON Club and the organiser of SPOT:ON Activation - the Nordic Sponsorship and Brand Activation Conference. He is also the founder of Staircase Consulting, a commercial advisory for the experience industry.

 
 
 

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