You’d be a terrible CEO of a small company on the verge of potential marketing approval.
It’s not about the capital cost when deciding to forgo a conference, it’s about appropriate delegation of management resources. If you can’t have any management there because they are needed in the UK (for the list of probable duties I mentioned in my last post), you don’t go to a large scientific conference or have kids hand out flyers and say I don’t know to every question.