Around the time of Covid in 2020, Arek Maciol did probably the craziest company pivot we’ve ever heard of at Bootstrappers: To save his business and employees, he transformed his event booth creation company into a general contractor for home expansions.
Here’s what happened.
In 2016, after years of climbing the ranks at a boutique events agency, Arek broke away from corporate life and created Lvlup Marketing. Starting with one $80,000 retainer client, he built the business to seven figures with just two other employees doing events up and down the East Coast. But, right as they’d landed a top contract, COVID struck and all major events were canceled.
Since Lvlup was an events business, revenue effectively went from seven figures to zero overnight with no clear path forward.
Any other founder probably would have thrown in the towel, but Arek knew how to hustle. Overnight, he re-tooled a wood-cutting machine and got his business on a contract to redesign a relative’s house. All employees who wanted to stay on stayed on.
For two slow years, Lvlup paid the bills doing remodels and home office conversions. Finally, when events started back up, they were one of the few event design and production agencies well-positioned to scoop up coveted contracts.
Want to learn how Arek got into the niche world of event experience building, landing contracts with Discord and Oculus long before they were household names? Buckle up and read on…
Hustling Since the Age of Fourteen
Arek tells everyone that he got his entrepreneurial fire from growing up in Poland in the years shortly following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“There wasn’t a lot of work in the area at the time since we grew up in a mountain village and we were transitioning out of communism,” he says. “Everyone basically hustled, raising and growing what they needed for food and creating small businesses to support their families. I had to grow up fast.”
In 1998, young Arek and his family moved to the United States. The opportunities for work astounded him. At 14, he was already selling newspapers door to door by 15 he was working at a medical laboratory. With his newfound riches, he’d travel back to Poland to enjoy his American salary with his friends due to the favorable exchange rate.
By 18, Arek was a jack of all trades managing delivery drivers and working as a valet bringing in as much as $250 a night in tips. He admits that he never really felt the drive to go to university, he was in a hedonistic period of his life where he worked all day and partied all night drunk on the American dream.
Everything changed when Arek’s girlfriend (now wife) became pregnant with their first child. He realized he needed to find more secure work. He happened to make contact with an events agency building displays and booths at events like Comic Cons and E3.
Arek was soon building experiential event activations for the gaming industry during its hottest era. He was designing stuff for Oculus before Facebook bought it and Blizzard back when it was on its World of Warcraft high.
“It was pure theater doing events in 2011,” he says. “We built two-story structures with their own air conditioning units and I was even commissioned to do a poker table for the Duke Nukem launch. I had to find a custom table builder and shipped it to LA to set it up.”
Arek dedicated huge amounts of time, normally working 6-3 and then starting again at 8 PM to call international clients.Within two years, Arek was doing two million dollars in yearly sales. He had dreams of taking over the business from his mentor—until a promised commission structure fell through.
“After nine months of waiting, I was told I wouldn’t be retroactively paid for the sales I brought in,” he says. “I had a newborn. I needed real income. And then they let me go.”
That was the wake-up call. Arek bounced to another agency, but the pattern was clear: no one was going to pay him what he was worth. So he started his own company.
“I always knew I wanted to run a business,” he says. “This was the moment.”
The Go-To Event Agency For Tech
Though starting alone, Arek had fortunately built a reputation for going above and beyond for many large industry names. He quickly got his first contract as a solo founder from a client he’d worked with during his time at the previous agency—SteelSeries, a well-known brand in the gaming hardware space.
SteelSeries offered a grateful Arek a retainer for a year-long contract to manage all of its events. That one retainer gave Arek the financial runway and confidence to launch his agency. Soon, other agencies started passing on small projects they didn’t want to handle. He picked up work through referrals and made himself indispensable at events.
Lvlup quickly became a business that united his family too. Arek built booths out of his brother’s garage, hired cousins to help, and even recruited his dad to drive the gear cross-country in his 53-foot rig. Arek’s wife handled accounting and design and his brother ran operations. Slowly but surely, they added more clients.
“When it was time to grow outside of the family we made posts on Craigslist in order to keep up with the demand. Sometimes the people worked out, sometimes they didn’t and you moved on,” says Arek.
By February 2020, just before the pandemic hit, Arek had six-figure shows in Boston and one coming up in Seattle, a growing roster of gaming clients, and his family team helping him handle it all. Unfortunately, everything he’d built was about to get ripped out from under him that same year.
What To Do When Your Revenue Goes to Zero
In early 2020, Lvlup had just finished doing a gaming show in Boston and was preparing to do it again in Seattle. This project’s contracts were supposed to be the mythical deal that would skyrocket LvlUp into an international force. But then, right when things couldn’t get better, Covid hit and all events large and small were canceled.
“At first, we thought it was going to be six months max and we were okay with that because we needed a break,” says Arek. “Then we realized it was not going to happen.”
But Arek immediately knew he could take Lvlup’s skills for making complex event experiences and use them for residential contracting. He and his brother started remodeling homes, converting garages to home offices, and remodeling full kitchens. Arek re-tooled an $80,000 CNC machine to cut wood for cabinets and furniture. And his whole family was willing to pitch in.
“We did a full remodel for my wife’s aunt,” he says. “We built everything ourselves in-house. Soup to nuts.”
That pivot kept the lights on until events came back in late 2021—and when they did, LvlUp Group was stronger than ever. They diversified beyond gaming events into robotics, printing, and more. Epson became a major client. Now, they serve several Fortune 500 companies and bring construction knowledge into their booth design and production.
“I build buildings inside buildings,” Arek says. “I know electrical, I know AV, and I can speak the language of the guys on the ground.”
Today Lvlup is growing quickly as events start to come back to the United States. And it’s all thanks to Arek’s determination and a little piece of valuable advice gleaned from his wife…
Never Quit on Your Worst Day
The biggest lesson Arek says he’s learned that he’d tell other founders? Never quit on your worst day.
“I was exhausted doing every aspect of my projects,” he says, “building booths in a small subleased woodshop, working on new projects, and keeping current clients happy all while traveling for each project. I one day called my wife, crying, ready to quit. And she told me—don’t make that decision on your hardest day. If you still want to quit, do it on a good day”
That advice got him through his hardest days and he repeats it over and over again to anyone asking about the secret regrowing an events business from zero twice.
Also, despite the success, Arek says one of his biggest regrets was not hiring for his weaknesses sooner.
“I’m not a sales guy,” he admits. “I wish I’d brought someone in early who loved doing that part. I like building things and solving problems.”
