Who’s Missing From the Room? Running an Empty Chair Audit Before Christmas

There’s a particular sound to a town-centre business forum in November. It’s the scrape of the same fourteen chairs being pulled out from the same fourteen tables, followed by the same fourteen people saying how nice it is to see everyone again.

That isn’t a criticism of the fourteen. They turn up, they pay their subs, they volunteer for the clean-up. But if your forum keeps wondering why it doesn’t feel representative of the local business base, the answer is usually sitting in the empty chairs. Not the people who said no — the people who were never really asked, or were asked in a way that never stood a chance.

The same room, the same blind spots

Most forums don’t set out to be exclusive. They start as a handful of owners who know each other, and the invitation list grows through people they know. That works for the first year. By the third, it has quietly become a closed loop. The accountant invites the client. The client invites the supplier. The supplier invites someone from the same networking group. Before long the room is full of people who already know each other’s business names, and the useful friction of meeting someone new has gone.

The missing sectors tend to be predictable. Trades and installers who start at 7am and can’t justify a 6pm meeting. Sole traders who assume forums are for firms with staff. Newer businesses that have never heard of the forum because it only advertises through a mailing list they aren’t on. Quieter operators — the ones who don’t naturally put their hand up — who would come if the format didn’t feel like an audition.

An empty chair audit is simply a way of naming that gap before you try to fix it.

Map the room you’ve actually got

Start with a list of your current attendees, not your membership database. If the two are different, that’s useful information in itself. Group them by sector, business size, years trading, and location. Don’t overcomplicate it — a spreadsheet with five columns will do.

Then ask a blunt question: which local business types are under-represented compared with the high street, the industrial estate, and the home-office postcodes around town? If you have no one from childcare, no one from logistics, no one from the beauty trade, and no one under thirty, write those down. That’s your empty chair list.

Next, ring three people who aren’t in the room and ask why. Not a survey. A five-minute chat. You’ll hear the same things: timing, cost, parking, the fear of being sold to, or simply not knowing anyone. Those are design problems, not attitude problems.

Run one low-commitment open table

Before the 2026 year-end, book a single session that asks almost nothing of people. No annual membership. No speaker. No round-robin pitch. A room above a pub or a quiet corner of a café, 6pm to 7.30pm, drop in when you can. Put the word “open” on the invitation and mean it.

Two questions are enough to run the whole thing. First: what’s one thing that’s harder than it should be about running a business in this town right now? Second: who else should be in this room next time? Let the conversation go where it goes, but keep bringing it back to those two questions. You’re not there to recruit. You’re there to listen and to spot the people who might come back.

Invite through routes that don’t rely on your existing mailing list. Ask a wholesaler to put a note in trade counter bags. Ask the accountant to mention it to sole-trader clients. Put it in the local Facebook group that actually gets used, not the one the council runs. Tell people they can bring a mate. Make it free or nearly free, and say clearly that there’s no pitch and no membership form on the night.

Judge it by returns, not footfall

A busy first night can be misleading. Thirty people through the door feels like a win until you realise twenty-eight of them were already on your list and none came back in February.

The better measure is return attendance. Keep a simple sign-in sheet with permission to stay in touch. Then watch who comes to the next session, and the one after. Five new faces who return twice are worth more than thirty one-off visitors who came for the free mince pies.

Ask one question on the way out: “Would you come to another one of these?” Don’t ask for a rating out of ten. Just yes, no, or maybe, plus a sentence if they’ve got one. If the maybes cluster around a particular reason — too late, too early, too formal, too vague — you’ve got your next fix.

Change the room, not just the guest list

An empty chair audit isn’t about tokenism. Adding a plumber to a room that still runs like a chamber luncheon won’t work. If the format only suits people who are comfortable speaking to a room, the quieter operators will stay away no matter how many invitations you send.

Try a table layout that doesn’t have a head. Try a session with no name badges. Try starting at 8am for the trades and 6pm for the retailers. Try a fifteen-minute window at the start where nobody has to introduce themselves. Small changes to the shape of the evening often do more than another round of emails.

Your town’s business forum doesn’t need to be everything to everyone. But it should at least know who it’s missing. Do the audit this month, book one open table before the Christmas lights go up, and count the people who come back in the new year. The empty chairs will tell you what the forum is actually for — and who it’s currently leaving out.