David Savage: Welcome to today's episode of In Conversation With... I'm lucky to be joined by Samantha and Daisy from, let me make sure I get this right, Corporate Entertainment Professionals.
- Yes. Thanks for having us.
- No, thanks for coming in. Although you live around the corner effectively down in rural Kent and we're all here in London.
- I know. I've known you for four or five years and I didn't know that you were basically my neighbour, so.
- More or less.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, absolutely. But look, thanks for making the effort to come up.
- No, of course.
- Look, first of all, before we dive into anything else there are two of you sat here. Normally, when we're doing these interviews it's one person.
- Two for the price of one.
- Well, yes.
- Lucky you.
- What are your roles?
- So I am the CEO and Daisy is the COO. So my role is the creative sales side and Daisy's,
- So I'll take Sam's ideas and I'll put them into action. So I do the HR marketing and then also I'll daily operations and making sure they're streamlined.
- As you alluded to the fact we've known each other a little while. We first got to know each other when you were running Startups Magazine.
- Yes.
- Which obviously would've had a lot of strategy.
- Yes.
- And Samantha, you've been running Corporate--
- Entertainment Professionals, yeah.
- For what, 15--
- 15, yeah. 15 years now.
- So how did you two come together?
- We met and we have to thank her, as well.
- We met through, we both had a business coach called Lucy and I was going there early mornings doing various different courses--
- Like six forty-five in the morning.
- Very early. And Daisy--
- Always late.
- Daisy turned up late all the time. And I'm really friendly and as soon as Daisy walked through the door, I'd be like, "Sit here!" like at school. And then we got to know each other.
- Yeah.
- And then, yeah, out of the kindness of Daisy's lovely big heart, I would always give her like an issue and she kind of was like, "I can solve this."
- I'm a problem solver at heart, so.
- Yeah. You are, aren't you? And then it ended up, on Saturdays, I'd invite Daisy for coffee and brought my little ones along, my little boys.
- And, yeah, we just clicked, really. And then we started, the door kind of opened, like it naturally progressed. And then what was that was over probably, what, two years maybe?
- Yeah, we like dated for a year before we became exclusive.
- "Coffee dates." Yeah.
- She's my husband.
- And then, like, I came on board with Sammy a couple of years ago now. Two weeks before lockdown of an events company.
- Yes.
- Yeah. So let's dive in there 'cause it is an events company and people, events are now digital events, online events, offline events. You are not, you are specifically offline events. So do you just want to explain what the business does? And then, I suppose, we can dive back into that.
- Yeah. So we provide entertainment for events. So a lot of it is bespoke entertainment. So a lot of it is designed and branded for the client. The way that I would describe it is we put the cherry on top of an event and we sell the story.
- So that could be anything from stilt walkers, promo models, aerial artists, fire artists. We've got the World's Largest Birdcage aerial prop. We've got giant dinosaurs. Yeah. Everything like that.
- Robots. Topless butlers. We do everything.
- We've got a whole warehouse of costumes and props.
- Yeah.
- Which doesn't really work on Zoom.
- No, it doesn't translate, and when lockdown happened, we did have to sit down and think, are we gonna pivot at this point? Are we gonna go online? We did see some other agencies starting to do it but A, there was the whole financial setup of that. B,
- I think I was very much, "No, this isn't happening." Trying to forget what was going on, "This is going to be over in a couple of weeks."
- Yeah.
- And I very much, I think, dug my heels in to say, "We don't do this."
- But your instinct was right, because we don't have the same effect for our artists over Zoom, so.
- No, we do a lot of acts, so, we have like a Grinch impersonator. So we had people reaching out and asking if he could like host calls and like a Ricky Gervais impersonator and do like Christmas videos. But, financially it wasn't our normal turnover.
- Yeah.
- Yeah. I mean, how did you survive? 'Cause it was a long period where you couldn't have done what you do.
- We streamlined.
- We streamlined, yes. We had to get rid of our offices. We had to get rid of staff.
- Sell the van.
- We had to sell the van. We sold a couple of the larger props that we weren't using.
- It was really tough.
- It was tough, yeah.
- Every day that we would talk, obviously, there was a time when we couldn't even be together, so we'd talk online and we would just say, like, "What's the news today?" And just take it one day at a time. We did apply for grants with the Arts Council, but unfortunately we didn't get that. So we just had to rely on a few grants that we got from our local council. And the rest of it was just our reserves.
- Yeah. And we did have a couple of outdoor events. So as soon as they sort of were releasing the laws, like, a little bit, we do some bits for Warwick Castle and they had really big Halloween event. So for us we were like, We've got something!
- Those larger contracts were great for us.
- Yeah. We had a couple of socially distanced festivals which, I mean, that just sounds weird, doesn't it? "Socially distanced festival." People had to book pods outside and they were roped off in groups of six and they had security like manning each pod.
- I went to Ibiza during the pandemic.
- Oh, really?
- And it was a bit like that. It was very strange. Yeah, you can have fun at your table, but not in groups. Yeah, I can imagine it sucked the joy out of doing stuff. Even when you could do stuff, it's not quite the same.
- Yeah, and a lot of our entertainment is what we call mix and mingle. So they'll dance with the crowd--
- Photos.
- And you could have a magician who goes table to table as well. So all of that was scaled back. So we just had to use lockdown to strategize. We rebuilt the website, we rebranded, we did all of the--
- We? Daisy did this, not me.
- We did all the behind the scenes work and made the most of the downtime.
- I want to kinda make sure I word this sensitively but, Samantha, it's your business, right? You've been running it for 15 years. So obviously the pandemic happens, you want to make sure it works.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- And yeah, sure, you're friends, you're going for coffee, you've been "casually dating" and all of a sudden you're exclusive. But, with the greatest respect, Daisy, two weeks before the pandemic, sure, you must have gone, "Hang on, hang on. Is this sensible?"
- More for me--
- You didn't know the pandemic was happening, like.
- Two weeks before we got the news that the outbreak had happened and I just remember there wasn't a part of me that was thinking, "This is a mistake." Because I knew going into business with Sammy would be the best decision of my life. It was more, "I need to make sure that Sammy's made the right decision bringing me on board to the business because things are about to get really tough. So I have to make sure that I contribute in the best way possible to make sure that we survive."
- Look, you're obviously two different personalities but heavily invested in each other. What are the makings of a leadership team? You know, we talk to technology leaders. You're not a technology business, but you are still leaders and I think there's a lot to learn from other sectors. So why has it worked?
- I think because we are Yin and Yang and obviously we've both got the same long term goals but we also find pleasure in the different things that we do for the business. So Daisy, like you are very tech operations and mine is, I like to be out there and loud and be creative.
- People person.
- And be with people, and it kind of works because we both stay in our lanes. I mean, I try and stay in my lanes, I think I put my foot in every so often that you have to smack back it in. Yeah. So I think, yeah, just knowing exactly, having the same goal is one of the main things.
- Yeah.
- And enjoying what you do. And we don't trot on each other's toes because it's two different things. If we were both doing operations or both doing the creatives,
- We'd butt heads.
- We would butt heads. But it works because we are Yin and Yang.
- You say "stay in your lane," there must be times where you've learned from each other.
- Yeah. I have learned so much from Daisy. Daisy's organisational skills are militant. They're out of this world. I've never, I always say to people the way I describe Daisy is, I would say, "I've never met a girl with a brain like this." And she's quite young. You are young, younger, and I will always say, "I've never known a girl a brain like this." And the things that I've learned, like I'm I've never been organised. I've been like a pen and paper. Now, I never used a diary, like a digital diary.
- Oh, my god. It was so stressful.
- So now I get invites and now I'll send calendar invites to clients and I'm like, "Yes." And I then I send her one and she's like, across the room.
- So we've found, like, I think a lot of the stuff that I've learned from Sammy has probably been to be ballsy and to take risks. And, to just go for it and like, so especially when it comes to like purchasing costumes or investing in a new act or a new marketing campaign, I am quite reserved in that sense. I like to know what the ROI is going to be, you know, what the likelihood of it succeeding is. Whereas sometimes you do just have to take a chance and I've learned to be more confident as a result, from Sammy.
- Given that you founded Startups Magazine, which was in itself quite ballsy. I mean, Samantha must be really out there if you're thinking, "I'm quite conservative."
- She really, really is. She is. I've never met anyone who's as ballsy as Sammy.
- I like that. Thanks very much.
- Two women leading a business often gets focused because all female leadership teams sometimes find it harder to get buy in, to get traction to, to get funding. You mentioned there that you tried to get funding from the council and didn't. Has that been something that you've been up against, challenge wise? Or is that something that you don't really think comes into it?
- I don't think it comes into it. Like, at the moment are our turnover for what we need, it's absolutely fine. We're doing well. The only reason we obviously applied for the grant was because of lockdown.
- Yeah.
- And the reason we didn't get it was because the way that we worded our proposals. So I yeah, I don't--
- It was a very specific grant for bringing cultural activities into town centres and things like that. So we are obviously a supplier to that but we're not the main designer of it, so.
- But you will know from your previous job that females leading businesses are often told wrongly that they should take, kind of, a male onto their founding team.
- Oh, 100%.
- Because "they will be taken more seriously."
- That's ridiculous.
- Yeah, which is awful.
- I've not heard that, but I think that's stupid.
- Yeah.
- I mean, what would your advice be to an all female leadership team trying to grow business, trying to be successful? What do you think are the lessons that you've both had that work?
- I just think keep pushing forward and, yeah. The way that I see it, I don't see any difference between a male's brain and a woman's brain. Like, who's to say a man's going to run a company better than a woman and two women.
- You said you're not a technology business, or we said that you're not a technology business, you're very much focused on in person events. However, is there anything that you have taken from the last couple of years, with augmented reality and so on, into what you can offer customers?
- So when it comes to the evolution of events going online we have been offered the opportunity before to provide dancers and artists so that companies with the available tech can film them and translate that into sort of those VR environments. So that's something that we might look to down the line but if we did that it would be providing that service for that one client. It wouldn't be a service that we would offer in house. It would be, we would work in partnership with those companies by providing our dancers, our artists, things like that for them to film and map so that they can translate into VR. But other than that, I think it's so important to keep that in person connection. Everyone got sick of Zoom calls over lockdown and they miss that in person connection. So I think that's really what we offer and that's what can make an event. Sometimes having that, like Sam said, "The cherry on top."
- What are people looking for in events?
- Bespoke stuff, we always offer the clients' things that are really different because if you go outside now and you saw something different, you might take a photo. Like, I just noticed outside there's like giant giraffes hanging over somewhere. And the first thing I did was take a photo. And when we do events and everything is so bespoke, everyone takes a photo. The first thing they do is they upload, they tag, they hashtag, and it's just great for everyone all around. So yeah, for us, the weirder, the better is the way we put it.
- So we've got giant clock heads in yellow suits with LED screens, like giant helmet clocks. We've got lampshade ladies, which is exactly what it sounds like.
- Yeah.
- We've got disco ball heads. That's our most popular act.
- Yeah. Mirror men, mirror women, like mirror to the floor. So when the light hits them they, like, sparkle.
- So we spend a lot of time designing costumes, like researching, based on what our most popular acts are and what the trends are. Like people really like mirrored acts, like, mirror man, mirror woman. We look at investing in more of that. And you've always got the staples of fire artists and promo models. But what we do is, it's our costumes that take it to the next level. So we have everything you can imagine.
- In our lock-up.
- In our lock-up, which is massive.
- Yeah, it's big.
- It's almost like people have been locked away for a few years and even now they're only just beginning to get back out into events and they're looking for something that's different to what we've been experiencing over the last two, three years.
- We found that last year, our projections and targets were based off of our best year ever but we knew that it wouldn't be the same after lockdown. So we kind of used it as a measurement and people would like, normally our year goes up like this up towards Halloween and Christmas, it gets busier and busier. But it was just so sporadic where people were scared to book. They didn't know if there was going to be another lockdown, they didn't know if the event was going to go ahead, but then they had more budget available, in some cases, to spend because they hadn't done anything on events for so long. So it was a bit strange. We managed to, we got by last year, this year, however now that it's secure and people are pretty, 99.9% sure there's not going to be another lockdown. It's been our best ever year.
- So look, finally, what would you offer as advice to other entrepreneurs, to people who are trying to lead their own business? Especially given that you've been in a difficult market. Yes, it's coming back now, but you've obviously had a challenging couple of years. You've got to have some insight that you can share that people might take away.
- Sammy has a list of quotes from books.
- No, it was books. The best book that I've ever read for businesses is called Profit First.
- Yeah?
- You heard of that? And it's basically, it's so simple, it's just how when the money comes in you split it into the different pots that you need and it's pay yourself first, because obviously you're the one that's doing the work. Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, Pumpkin Plan, we like that one.
- Rocket Fuel.
- Rocket Fuel. Rich Dad Poor Dad, love a business book.
- Sammy reads them and then I get the synopsis. It's great.
- It's like a tiny book club.
- Yeah, and I also think if someone said to me, like, "What is the best advice you could give?" I would say, "Speculate to accumulate." Because a lot of people are worried about getting themselves in debt or raising money, then for it not to work. But I think, you're putting in the effort and you've got the passion. Why would it not work?
- So I think you've asked me this in the past and my answer always changes for this based on the people that I meet and what I learn. And I think before it would've been, just go for it. If you've got an idea, just believe and keep pushing. But now more in terms of if you're running the business, my best advice for anyone currently running a business would be to really take a close look at where you spend your time. Because if you are spending all of your time on clunky systems, on admin, then you are wasting time that could be spent with clients, building relationships, working on your marketing, anything that's actually potentially revenue generating. So I think really analyse where you spend your time.
- Well look, it's been a pleasure to speak to you both. Thank you for making the effort to come up to London today.
- Thanks for having us.
- And I hope it continues to go well, obviously as people get back out into the world increasingly.
- Yes, me too.
- Hope you've enjoyed today's episode. Hang around on the website, have a look. There's plenty more content for you to dive into.
