Analysis of Factors Affecting Financial Performance in the Event Management Sector-Nairobi County, Kenya

Event management business is a complex and multidimensional in scope. It includes the convergence of ambition owner/manager, competence, internal factors organization, the resources and infrastructure, external relations and networking. Analysis of factors influencing the success of event management firms is imperative to know since any mistake made can lead to big losses given the nature and scope of the business. The study analyzed the selected factors affecting financial performance in the event management sector in Nairobi County, Kenya. Specifically, the study focused on the following; the entrepreneur's characteristics, the company's competitive advantage, social networks and service innovation seems to be a major drawback in the performance of the event management sector. The study adopted descriptive research design and targets business owners in the event management sector of Nairobi County. The unit of analysis was the business enterprises in the event management sector where an approximate number of respondents to 178; which was 10% the total population of the selected were approximately 1782 respondents. The data generated by the study after fieldwork was edited, coded then entered into a computer for processing using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS v.21.0). Descriptive and inferential statistics was used to analyze information generated from respondents. The data collected was presented by use of percentages, tables and the researcher categorized variables. The study results revealed that, holding all the other factors constant, the financial performance in the event management sector in Nairobi County-Kenya was tested against key factors measured by the significance of these key factors and established that indeed the said factors (Service Innovation (SI), Competitive Advantage (CA), Social Networking (SN), Entrepreneur Characteristics (EC))contributed to 78.6% of the variation of financial performance in the event management sector in Nairobi County-Kenya as explained by adjusted R2 of 0.786. The study finally recommended that, the management should put additional emphasis and more attention to innovations differentiation, the management should also pay more attention to customer orientation and that training of the venture proprietors’/owners and employees on an individual entrepreneurial competencies level is important to ensure that the competencies are managed correctly to achieve optimal benefits in terms of the contribution to operating efficiency which improves financial performance.