The most revealing thing about an events company is what it does when there is nowhere to hold an event. In early 2020, CTL Communications had a healthy pipeline, an events-heavy business and a founder who still liked to stand on the show floor while rehearsals thundered around her. Then the rooms closed. For three to four months, revenue was minimal. The product appeared to have vanished along with the audience.
The obvious response was to move the agenda onto a video platform: same executive, same slides, smaller rectangle. CTL decided that was the wrong answer. Remote employees did not need a chief entertainment officer cheering at them through a screen. They needed leaders who understood what working alone felt like. They needed useful choices, candor and a reason to participate. A meeting, CTL realized, was never chiefly a room. It was a carefully arranged change in attention.
The event was only the visible object. The real product was what people believed, remembered and did after it.The idea underneath CTL's pivot
The day the room disappeared
Catherine Turner had encountered an involuntary beginning before. In 2009, the agency where she worked ceased trading. Turner, who had entered the industry as a freelancer on a Madrid project, opened CTL from her spare bedroom. It was a leap taken against a recession. The pandemic supplied the sequel.
This time, the company reset around virtual employee experience, internal communication and healthcare work. It mixed live interaction with digital content, training, film and carefully prepared leadership messages. The result was counterintuitive: CTL ended 2020 more than 15 percent larger, after beating its post-COVID forecast fivefold. It reported another 25 percent-plus rise in 2021. By 2025, Turner said the team had grown from five to nearly 100 people in five years.
There is no public price tag for the pivot or for CTL's client projects. The measurable cost was time without revenue; the measurable return was growth and a business no longer confined to physical events.
The anti-webinar
CTL's most useful evidence comes from the small decisions inside a virtual gathering. At one event, 600 attendees from 36 countries heard 52 speakers. The conference used a cinema metaphor and a Netflix-style portal, giving people control over what to watch and when. Seventy-two percent said they made a new connection. Another recent virtual summit, built around sessions adjusted to delegates' schedules and time zones, recorded 85 percent satisfaction.
Neither result came from the platform alone. CTL treats the invitations, calendar holds, teasers, studio setup, live chat, polling, breakouts, replay library and follow-up as one continuous experience. This is event production as choreography. The important unit is not the session. It is the sequence of nudges that takes someone from “Why am I invited?” to “What should I do next?”
The CTL shift / relative emphasis
Conceptual diagram based on CTL's published approach, not a financial or performance chart.
One company, three jobs
Today CTL occupies an awkward and valuable piece of the agency market. It is part management adviser, helping leaders agree on the story. It is part creative studio, producing films, design, presentations, toolkits and campaigns. And it is part experience maker, staging conferences, launches, exhibitions, broadcasts and activations. The business earns project and retainer fees for carrying a complicated message across those seams.
That combination is the differentiator. A strategy consultancy can make a precise deck that dies in a folder. A production company can make a dazzling show that changes nothing on Monday. An internal-communications shop can send a perfect sequence of messages without creating a moment anyone remembers. CTL's bet is that one team should connect executive intent to creative expression, the live moment and the behavior afterward.
Healthcare is where the method gets serious
CTL works across enterprise communication, but healthcare and pharmaceuticals form the clearest public thread. The firm has produced leadership summits, product launches and educational campaigns for Boehringer Ingelheim and collaborators including the World Stroke Organization. Its Trailblazers launch supported the first treatment for generalized pustular psoriasis, an ultra-rare disease, and won industry honors. FAST Heroes uses children's enthusiasm for stories and sharing to carry stroke symptoms home to parents and grandparents.
CTL says its educational programs have reached 90 million children in more than 24 languages and set Guinness World Records. The interesting part is not simply scale. It is the route. Instead of trying to make a reluctant adult audience care about stroke, the campaign turns children into memorable messengers. That is behavioral science in costume - a serious health instruction smuggled through a character, a classroom and a family conversation.
The copyable part is a question
Most companies cannot copy CTL's production bench or its healthcare experience overnight. They can copy its order of operations. Begin with the behavior that must change. Ask what the audience is carrying already: fatigue, skepticism, loneliness, regulatory anxiety, too many initiatives. Only then choose the medium. Let people control timing where control helps. Give leaders room to listen rather than merely announce. Treat the week before and the month after as part of the event.
The method needs conditions that are easy to name and hard to secure: access to decision-makers, leaders willing to be candid, dependable production, audience research and permission to revise the plan. It will do little for a client that wants a one-night spectacle, refuses measurement and disappears after the confetti. Behavior change requires somewhere for the changed behavior to go.
“We met people where they were - online.”Catherine Turner, Founder and CEO
A remote company that still wants the room
CTL itself is fully remote. That could sound odd for a company devoted to gathering people, but Turner describes it as a hiring advantage: talent is not limited by postcode. The firm counters distance with defined career paths, role-specific training and regular online and in-person contact. More than 70 percent of its leadership team was female in 2025, and its relationship with WEConnect ties the company to a wider network of women-owned businesses.
The next expansion is into responsible AI and behavioral analysis. CTL's public rules are notably plain: human-led, privacy-aware, transparent, optional and checked by people. AI may accelerate research or remove manual work; it does not get to replace judgment. The company also now has an EcoVadis Gold Medal, which it says places it in the top five percent of assessed companies over the previous year.
All of this broadens the original insight without replacing it. CTL still loves the instant when the lights go down. It still makes stages, exhibitions and launches. But its market is no longer “events.” It sits in the gap between information and commitment - the crowded, human interval where a message either becomes a decision or evaporates. The room matters. CTL's useful discovery was why.