In this Top Floor interview, we hear from Alex Hewitt founder of AOK Events. Alex shares insightful stories on how he navigated challenges to create a key player in the events space over the last 24 years that was awarded the best place to work.. For more information on their services goto https://www.aokevents.com/
Connect with Alex Hewitt on Linkedin: / aokalex
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Hi everyone welcome to this episode of the Top Floor CO podcast. I'm delighted to welcome Alex Hewitt of AO Care Events. He's got an amazing story he's going to share with us. 24 years ago I founded this business. He's navigated several challenges. Covid. He's got some of the top brands like Innocent, Red Bull and LinkedIn come to him for the events for the employee engagement for the client engagement. He's also benefiting his employees by sitting up at the ownership trust also to the level that he's actually won awards to be a great place to work. So how did he start it? How did he navigate the challenges? How has he now got successful been in over 24 years? You're going to hit all of it on his podcast. So I'm delighted to welcome Alex Hewitt. Hi Jamie thanks for having me. So my pleasure, I pleasure Alex. So just start at the beginning. So maybe firstly what got you into an event? Well I had a strange route into events in that I was very lucky that my parents sent me to a posh private school where I became the first people for some years to fail all of his A-levels. I was convinced I was going to become a professional cricketer. So I spent all of my time playing cricket. And so after I did that my father got me a job in the city. I absolutely hated that as well. And then a friend of mine got me a job working as a barman in our local pub posted a little pretty village near Gatwick airport. And the first day I stood behind a bar I absolutely fell in love with being a barman. Just loved different people coming in every day making them welcome. It didn't matter if it's local farmer or that Ed New Zealand aircrew coming in. You had to make sure that everybody left having had a better time or in a better mood than they were when they first arrived. And with extraordinary set of circumstances within five months of working there I'd become the youngest pub landlord in England. I can still remember the look on the magistrates face that Crawley Magistrates caught when she gave me the license. And that was my university. I had to, I lived upstairs. I was giving the keys to a very grown up sweet shop but lived upstairs and very quickly had to get my head around sales, marketing, accounting, HR. It was 80 hours a week and I loved absolutely every minute. And I did that for three years and then the lease that the the owners had expired. And one of my other regulars who worked at Marriott at the time at a large events company no longer trading onto that name. I thought you know my love of sport and the knowledge I've gained from running a pub I mean I'd learned to cook learned about beer or wine. He thought I might be quite good at selling corporate hospitality. And he gave me a job and to my astonishment one of my other regulars at a leaving party said make sure I'm the first person you call when you get your feet under the desk and she was the global head of events for IBM UK. Wow. And they were my first client. Fantastic. So yeah so sorry so I went and worked for him and then kind of swapped around for a few different jobs, learned a little bit about conference production and a production agency for four or five years. And then in the year 2000 actually fair played my then fiance knowing that we were going to get married and hopefully having children at some stage in the future kind of said to me one evening you've always wanted to have your own agency. You know if you're going to do it I think now would be you know a really really good time. So why was that point a good time? Well because she had quite a good job in advertising and so we had enough money to survive with me taking a pick up leaving former sales director job at this production agency and you know going down to a bare bones salary and you know pre-marriage pre-children was able to you know give it absolutely everything without any distractions you know to kind of get the business off the ground and I was fortunate and lucky and clever for two colleagues of mine from the previous agency asked if they could come with me one of whom Joe Greenstock still sits next to me 24 years on well actually we've been working together for 28 years. Wow. And so when I started AOK events there were three of us two of us in sales and an event manager. And when we started the company really we were a corporate hospitality broker but so many of our clients pleased with their day at Wimbledon or Chelsea Flasho or whatever it was you know started saying well will you help us with our Christmas party or an overseas golf trip or a team building event or whatever over a period of years. And I suggested that to you rather than you suggesting that to them. Yeah we were the least curious company ever. We were a lifestyle business and really we were for the first 10 years of our existence and you know again my youngest if I started again I would be more curious. I think when you start a business you're always so grateful that a company gives you some business that you forget to ask if they've got any more. And actually most consumers you know once they've built up a relationship with an agency or a brand they're really happy for that for that relationship you know to continue evolving but we we we forgot about that for about the first 10 years of our of our life. But we had to survive you know 9/11 in 2001 so we're still I think there were four of us by then but you know when we saw the twin towers under attack obviously the financial kind of markets crashed but everybody forgets a side effect of 9/11 was the sort of mega growth of mobile phones. Right. It was the global event that saw parents buying mobile phones for all of their children. Oh no we're going now don't they? Yeah yes they absolutely yeah they absolutely do good points. So whilst we lost quite a lot of our banking clients and stuff like that we did masses with them with mobile phone companies and we've always targeted largely. Was that you being proactive or you receiving some inbound leads? A little bit of the two that that's a very good point a little bit of the two and we were fortunate in that a number of people you know called us up T-Mobile, Orange, Virgin Mobile. We'd had relations we had relationships with them all but they had marketing budgets the likes of which we never really seen before at AOK events you know banks and law firms were relatively cautious you know 20 years ago and mobile phone brands came along and just started spending you know really quite a lot of money on incentives corporate hospitality parties and they were joined by you know early tech companies. Our biggest customers or potential clients or clients they were looking for. They were sort of the one to do which is now Microsoft advertising you know effectively you know we met a we took a standout at a at a trade show and I still remember at that trade show I think I had 15 it was like a speed dating event it's run by forum event so I think it was still very much in existence we had 15 I had 15 30-minute meetings you know over the course of the day but we came back with Wannadoo, WH Smith and Labbrookes as clients who weren't just clients of corporate hospitality they just decided they'd gone to find an agency to outsource all of their client events through and we you know we would just clever around our marketing and once you've got one good client in a particular sector we've always found it relatively easy to open other doors in that sector by saying that we're well we're already working with you know one so we understand the pressures that you're under and the sort of customers that you're looking to attract you know and we you know and we take it from there. So the transition from corporate hospitality to client events was there a lot of learning you have to do about how to deliver those those things? Well yeah because we were clueless I mean you know I'm an idiot you know I haven't had any training I didn't pass any qualifications you know of any sort so I would say the best thing that we did in terms of delivering you know we were delivering there was a company part of Barclays called Barclays Global Investors so so by 2005-2006 you know we were delivering all of their live events all of their conferences so we're talking you know conferences that old Billingsgate for 700-800 you know people large large amounts of tech and you know my technical knowledge was you know pretty limited you're kind of learning on the job therefore you know working with really reputable suppliers that you can forge a really really good relationship with was really important so from an AV point of view we worked with a company called Broadsword I was still still now one of the largest production companies in the UK and their owner Bruce Teggert you know he actually started his business after hearing that I was starting my business and saying you know will you will you use me full of your AVs so we kind of you know we grew and learned together. Fantastic is there anything on and obviously you're doing something new you're relying on a lot of people is anything any like observation or skill that you learned you want to pass on about like building relationships and gaining trust? From of when I set AOK events I can't remember who it was but somebody recommended that I read a book called building a happiness-based business okay and it's by an Australian dentist called Patty Lunt really good work it's only about 100 pages long and I'll tell the sort of outline of the story without spoiling it in case anybody wants to go out and buy it but I think that the profession of dentistry in Australia attracts the highest suicide rates of any profession throughout the whole of Australia and one evening due to litigation people being late complaining staff abuse all sorts of reasons having to spend your day looking in people's mouths you know for anything else one day he wasn't really considering jumping off the bridge at Sydney Harbour but he found himself just kind of you know looking out over the over the over the harbour and he decided that he wanted to do everything differently from how the rest of the industry did so he wrote to 90% of his customers the ones that he didn't really like working with so I'm really sorry I've started to do things differently here's the name of three other dentists in Sydney in a good lot and here are your dental records and to the 10% that he did enjoy working with he kind of wrote to them to say look I love having you as a customer but things are going to change it's going to get a little bit more expensive but we're going to create a customized experience that makes you enjoy coming to the dentist rather than rather than dreading it and within five years he had the largest dental practice across the whole of Australia who'd gone from just one in Sydney to every city throughout you know the whole of Australia and it really left a mark on me and I think the way that I've always interacted with my employees and the way that we have always interacted with our customers has been based on giving outstanding customer service being as kind and thoughtful and empathetic as we possibly can and treating every single event regardless of its size as if it's the most important event in the world Brilliant so how do you ensure that you how do you attract a team that's got that for solid philosophy and also how do you then keep them because you know you've kept some people for like 24 years yeah firstly we recruit solely on culture and not on what their CV says I know within three minutes two minutes of somebody walking through the door if they're an AOK event sort of a person what do you look for to know that attitude attitude attitude attitude attitude can do attitude is somebody prepared to go the extra mile to ensure that a client's event is is is is perfect and you can't teach that right you can encourage it but people either you know turn up at nine and leave at five thirty or turn up at eight thirty make everybody a cup of tea in the office put the radio on create the right you know vibe in the office and make sure that if there is somebody staying late that they're not there on their own what can we do to help you so that you can get home a bit earlier those things are they're really hard to coach people either want to be that sort of person or not so I think from a from the an early day I recruited people that I thought were just going to be really good at selling events or really good at organizing events that were going to be a great brand ambassadors for AOK events and were always prepared to go the extra mile in terms of delighting a client how did you find those people uh you just interview like crazy um and now a day go boards or no I think we've only paid a recruiter once in 24 years and we're lucky in that we now have you know a pretty great reputation particularly now that we've won awards for being a great place to work so that so that really helps but we've got a big social media you know profile as well so if i put an ad on sorry can i pause the interview very quickly Jamie I've only paid for a recruiter once in 24 years we've got a large social media following we've obviously won awards for our work and when we put an ad out I think we're really prescriptive about the type of person that we're looking to recruit so we're looking for um personalities to apply for a job rather than skill sets um as I said we're a pretty simple business nearly all of our roles are either selling events or organizing events and um the organizing events I've got the most fantastic operations director Charlie Tanner she can she can do the finishing touches to making sure that people that work for her organize events in the way that AOK events like to organize but we know relatively quickly whether somebody's um dot those uh assets of um you know being thorough attention to detail personable having the ability to talk to the CEO one minute the cleaner the next all of those skills that event managers need to balance uh you know or event event manager on the job and sales is sales I mean if somebody's got some sales experience most people much prefer selling corporate hospitality or parties or conferences or incentives than they do pensions or greenhouses or vegetables so um you know what we sell is a relative unit at the moment I've got a team of people selling Oasis hospitality and Wimbledon now you know it's much easier calling the client up and saying are you interested in going to the Oasis then is cold calling someone and trying to sell them it's like to be the Britannica or or a pension because most people are pretty receptive to the biggest event of the year um but but I don't regret for one minute recruiting based on culture rather than on skill sets because we can teach skill sets um and but but but a culture cultures culture it's an old hack need phrase but if you're only as good as the weakest member of your team don't have any weak members sure and and weak members culturally is as important as weak members from a skill point so in terms of the skill set you said that obviously culture but you're not on skill set obviously you'd want someone to have the skills enough to deliver value with a certain time frame um and what time frame would that be would you would it be months weeks or years are you willing to wait for someone to be in a position to deliver value for a sales person will give them 18 months really okay um we're not interested in so that there's another really important um part to the equation is that we try as often as possible to recruit from the bottom right so that somebody who's been there before gets pushed up okay so as part of attracting and retaining talent there's nothing more demoralizing than working for a company for four years I believe and then recruiting a load of people above you so that you're route to a more senior position a higher salary suddenly has a number of more roadblocks in it than it did than it did before so we try and recruit um relatively junior people either from university or or first jobbers uh or something like that and they start relatively near the bottom and we have quite a flat hierarchy anyway so it's not like there are layers and layers and layers of promotions that you have to go through but we try and recruit people so if we take on a new event manager we get somebody relatively um junior somebody else might have to step up a little bit from a seniority or move on to slightly bigger jobs and and that's the way that we've always recruited so what's your tips for the listeners on management the leadership um yeah okay that's a great question uh throwing that out very quickly uh I think um from a management well a management leadership they're similar but but but slightly different I think from the very start you can only ask your employees to do something if you're prepared to do it yourself um and I think that good leaders are you know in in early leave late can do attitude always somebody asked to some help always volunteer to some help don't be afraid to make all of your team a cup of tea you know in the morning actually delivering cups of tea and saying what you're up to today you end up getting great feedback from from from people you can pick up as somebody's you know it doesn't look quite right um somebody might say actually can we have a cup of tea in private it's something I'd like to talk to you about so so I think golden rule you can't ask anybody to do anything if they work for you if you're not prepared and to do it yourself I think we've been really really open um from a communication point of view about company performance so much so that people are invested in you know we set monthly targets for the business we set annual targets everybody's aware of you know what those are they understand how we're tracking if we're behind or ahead everybody understands you know what that means to everybody so I think having really good open communication around your strategy how you're performing against that strategy um you know is uh it is is really good and just trying to be that's showing the bad stuff as well as the good stuff oh for sure I mean let's take covid you know as an example from March to June 2020 my shareholders and I lost one and a half million quid every penny that we'd earned or saved over 20 years of running the business and we had 45 staff on our payroll we had to make 31 of them redundant um two girls were on maternity leave we um kept them on the payroll because we felt that we had a duty of care as humans rather than employers not to make them redundant whilst they were both sure you know having children for the first time in their lives um you know you got to look at you look yourself in the mirror when you go to bed at night you know as much as uh as anything else um but we kept the 11 people who we thought were the most creative dynamic uh and nimble who had the ability to find ways to send clients in voices after my kind of creative director and I worked out the way that we were going to navigate covid through through selling you know selling virtual events okay so how do you get into that then how did you kind of come out as an idea test it and then get it get a return from virtual events during covid um this this guy Dan Wheeler and I chatted uh by mid-April early May which we brainstormed for an hour each day of maybe longer uh of just trying to come up with ways that we thought we could send invoices stay alive but also help our clients find a way to keep communication going with their customers as well as their as well as their staff I think at the start we were not overly creative but we did do an awful lot of virtual wine tastings that friend of mine ran a really good wine business and um well you know I think we sent out um I think around uh 25 000 quarter bottles of wine over 2020 um so we were sending out six quarter bottles of wine to people with cheese and biscuits with branded hampers um and people could kind of catch up with clients and staff members whilst having a glass of you know california versus france or white v red or rose you know or whatever it was but actually uh linked in have you been a really great client of ours for 10 or 15 years we always used to organize a big halloween party for them in real life every october but they we put we talked with them and they did a virtual halloween party in october with the same budget as if they would have had a okay in real life one and and that was a pretty major deal and but we were booking just so many acts and artists um as part of that virtual event eventually we started going out to all of our other clients with all of these virtual acts or artists so one of them ended up being joe wicks who did a series of online exercise classes yeah yeah very safe and then we started booking footballers and golfers to do watch alongs of football and golf events that were taking place behind closed doors um you're probably a similar age to me um in the in our summer holidays back in the um eighties there used to be a program called why don't you yeah yeah so we had a client a building firm that in in early 21 for instance they had a lot of quite young staff with young children that were really struggling to work during nine and five because they all everybody was home schooling their kids because the the schools were all shut and they wondered if there's anything that we could do to help them so in the february half-term in uh in 2021 we create what i remember that why don't you you know get off your bum and do something less lazy instead i think was the full title and we came up with this um virtual kids club and from nine till five each day for two weeks over that um monday to friday of that half-term employees were able to book their children from the age of three to sixteen into virtual classes ranging from nine till ten o'clock was always the little ones and they were storytelling but we hired you know two fantastic actors and dungeons and dragons and kids were running all over the house and getting their best fancy dress on and then they were drawing competitions and all that sort of thing through to the end of the afternoon we were doing hip hop dance classes with um like really well known hip hop artists um and i think over and and this building company um allowed all of their staff from across the world to register their their their their kids forever but we had thousands of people thousands of people drawing it's fantastic there in a very so how what percentage are events now of virtual zero i will see everyone's gone totally back to in person our clients have gone back to i mean there are you know there are some conferences which are streamed right and people can join those um for sure is that both in person and virtual it's another hundred percent virtual it's we don't we don't do any right well less than one percent uh you know the odd one um there's a there's a betting company that we work with that have team they've got not got a global workforce is that yeah we've got a global workforce we do some virtual team building events with them but less less than less than less than one percent and the benefit that event companies have had um from you know if you've survived covid you know another really important thing to say you know for your listeners is that because we ended up being the most creative agency in London in 2020 and 2021 in terms of coming up with really creative virtual events to allow brands to keep in touch with their employees and their staff we want so much new business so not only did we do this for our existing customers but people will say oh my god i heard about this virtual halloween event we want to do a halloween christmas party heard about that kib's club um we were doing massive of activation around christmas so there's the new clients there that that then stayed with you after covid so you know we're we're we're absolutely the beneficiaries of that and then suddenly when live events came back there was this tsunami of interest in having a summer party and doing a going to a corporate hospitality you know it will miss seeing our friends and family and clients so much that there's just been since 2021 um events have been um you know a considerably more popular component of a brand's marketing budget than than they were before and and where the absolute beneficiaries of that in that all of our old clients are doing lots of live events again but all of the new ones as well fantastic that's great so congratulations on winning the um great place to work all that's fantastic can you just show the listeners you know what you've done to get to that place where you've become such a great place to work and also being be recognized for it yeah um so uh i think you know having the best workplace culture possible you know it is the absolute foundation stone of winning an award like that i mentioned earlier we kept the 11 employees that had the best cultural assets right to do whatever it took to help keep aok events um alive and they're the ones that live and breathe our values day in um you know day in day out and we're quite articulate to new employees about what behaviors we expect and and and and what um what are not allowed we actually have an incentive that we've run for the last um three years which is target led um but if the company hits a stretch target and importantly if our employees individually have all you know um shown the characteristics that we expect of them then then we'll then we'll take people away uh for for a weekend somewhere nice so i think we went to Slovenia this year marrakesh that you know the the year before one of the most powerful things that we did was to tell a girl um 18 months or so ago that she wasn't on the trip because she didn't show the necessary characteristics that we expected of an employee but we gave her a second chance and that really was the um the a turning um you know that that was where she actually changed her attitude and um you know um we're very you know very much the beneficiaries of that yeah so quite a lot of it is intangible it's not a there's not a piece of paper that says you've got to do this you've got to do that yeah it's just a people either get it or they don't get it Jamie sure sure so when you did that to let employee did you think there might have been a risk of losing them or were you confident they would then change attitude and then cut come on on board uh no we were we were we were we were prepared to lose her but we were confident that um that uh she was young and you know i think we were her first job and she just didn't necessarily maybe we weren't quite as prescriptive you know during her um induction uh as we as we should have been but we found it relatively easy um that's a great way of you know developing someone is there any other like many stories that you've got on how you've turned someone that wasn't doing wasn't doing what you wanted them to do in terms of attitude etc and kind of you transition them many other stories you've got on how how you did that yeah i think uh not i mean i've got lots of stories about outstanding employee um you know behavior and certain situations arriving that you could never coach or teach we were doing a a big product launch for an American shoe brand uh that has i think the shoe brand is hush puppy um so they have hush puppy have a uh a dog as it's uh as it's kind of you know logo and we had to get a couple of dogs to come along to a to a conference as part of a catwalk show or something like that and the client insisted that that the handler brought these dogs into a coffee break you know because everybody loves dogs and thought it'd be quite nice to you know for everybody to you know pat the dogs and everything like that anyway did that but you know there's some really senior senior people there um to my astonishment um this basset to hand did an enormous crap in the middle of the uh in the middle of 150 people and this relatively new event manager um that we had that was on the job without being asked just got a load of napkins walked into the middle of the room picked up this dog turd and and got rid of it um and and that night i was talking to you know really big companies uh i come if they're sales director or they're CEO but he said to me you don't know how lucky you are that one of your members of staff is prepared to pick up a dog crack you know to ensure that your you know that your event's going to work better and we've kind of always used that story slightly jokingly as the benchmark for outstanding kind of employee behavior but there are little moments like that that happen day in and day out at our agency not not as extreme as that people looking after their colleagues or looking at going out of their way to look after clients to you know just just to make sure that um you know we're being we're being the best best company that we can possibly be fantastic that's really really really good um so it sounds like you've taken the you know employee welfare and and a stage further with the employee ownership trust where people actually own the business you want to just take people just explains people effectively what led you to do that and kind of how it's benefited you and and the employees yeah absolutely uh i think by the summer of 2022 we knew that financially we'd made back quite a lot of the money that we'd lost in covid uh i haven't i've got genuinely the best senior leadership team i could ever wish for at a ok event and we had an off site in the summer and i i was you know i'm a soppy old so and so really and i was um so grateful that we hadn't just survived but we've thrived and we were really ambitious about the future that i said that i really wanted that that some of these um uh members of the senior leadership team who weren't shareholders of the company i really wanted them to have some skin in the game at airk events and would they be interested and they they kind of all said yep that that that that would that would be great love it airk events we'd be really happy to stay there etc etc so it took me three to six months to go through all the different ways that i thought i could incentivize um these these people to stay in and have some skin in the game what i particularly liked about employee ownership trust um was that it it it it applies to everybody so i think once you've been an employee for a year you automatically enroll as part of the trust uh but the people who are the most senior and who have worked at the company the longest will ultimately be the biggest beneficiaries from any future profit or if the company sales sales in the future so that worked really well for my kind of senior leadership team they were the ones that have worked at the longest graph of the hardest brought in the most revenue or had the most responsibility from a kind of event delivery point of view um but then we've got a really family actually we have i have a senior leadership team and i have a junior leadership team as well actually who are the kind of the next lot of senior leaders within the company and they were all so i talked to them really excited about the possibility of having some equity in the company that that they'd worked for for maybe four or five years um and slightly selfishly the way that a neo t works is if you don't know is that there was a there's a valuation given on what the company might be worth in five years time hmrc signed that off then the company has five years to pay the shareholders um that the the valuation from net profit that the company makes over the next five years and when the eo t went live on october the first last year i guess i was 53 so slightly selfishly it gives me five years so i'll be you know i'll be 58 you know when the eo t um you know pays out you know everything to maybe to slow down you know the number of days that i do over a five-year period of a aok transfer my knowledge to the senior leadership team he'll be able to take the business on and make it even better hopefully um in the in the future and and to kind of tell that eo t story to as many people both internally and externally as another reason why aok events is a is a fantastic place to work and a great you know i i believe the the best privately end-event management company in the uk fantastic so would you be stepping down totally then other than the five years i've got i've definitely i've gone down to four days a week from uh from from five days a week i definitely think by next year i'll go down to um three days a week my senior leadership team uh you know really keen to learn the you know the day-to-day runnings of of the business and to take that responsibility away from me and actually it gives me some time to to learn some new skills myself you know we're we're looking at growing whether that's through acquisition creating new products or starting up new services over the last couple of years we set up a fantastically successful entertainment business based on you know we were booking so many virtual acts in 2020 and 21 we felt like we wanted to keep that momentum going um and we have this brand aok entertains based on an extra you know that it's going absolutely great guns doing conference speakers bands DJs etc etc we've set up a destination management company um last year but we're also looking at growing through acquisition as well so my role is changing slightly um but it is all around securing the long-term fiscal growth for the business so is that going to continue ongoing or is there a point where you step away totally uh well i've just bought a little house in Devon and i love it by the seaside so at some stage i'd like to spend more time there uh and get my goal for a bit better um but having run aok events so happily for 24 years it is just a part of me and who i am and i genuinely consider a number of my colleagues and employees at aok events as some of my very closest friends and you know and confidence and and it's really hard to distance yourself from them all together fantastic it's only other just just finally Alex there's any other stories or tips you'd like to share with listeners that people are generally interested in business improving business creating a successful business um i think you know it's that i think being authentic is the is it i've never let a client down in 24 years so if we if we take corporate hospitality for instance which is about 40 percent 35 40 percent you know of our business it gets a reasonably bad right there are always stories in the paper about i'm at the moment selling oasis tickets for seven eight ten thousand pounds or everything like that i in 24 years i think we've sent over a quarter of a million people to various sporting events concerts etc around the world i've never had a complaint from anybody about where their ticket is because i've always been able to tell them before they've gone there about exactly where they're sat occasionally the red wine's cold and the white wine's warm there's not an awful lot i can do about that but if you we've built a business on having a small number of companies that uses a lot rather than thousands of people that might use this once a year because i think that's unsustainable so i i think having some customers that you like that like you that you trust and that you think you might be able to grow with and you can have some fun along the way um is is a great is a is a great starting place and and there are lots of one man bands out there with one client and that's that's absolutely fine but you know back in 2010 2012 i i wanted ark events to be the biggest and best it could possibly be um and yeah we've done a we've done a reasonably good job on getting it there excellent thank you very much Alex it's been a great share to learn from someone that's been you know in business for 24 years had loads of awards attracted someone to top brand names and thank you for being open with the stories both the goods and the bad thank you very much
