A Universe in Tatters

Many industries have been hit hard by coronavirus. Events are amongst the worst hit of all – with no return in sight… not even an indication from the government of planning for a safe reopening.

I ran an events business. I freelanced in events. I have many friends and colleagues whose lives have been turned upside-down by the impact of coronavirus.

In this article, I want to give an insight to the wider world, into our world.

A Community

There are plenty of people working in events, but over time you get to know many of the same faces. People begin to associate you, because different providers are “in” with different niches, just like their products are. And so you’re booked together often.

Sure, there are some people who are hard to get on with. Boy, I could share some stories. I’ve seen catering managers screaming and swearing at event planners. I’ve seen technician’s pull other technician’s plugs out. I myself have had to intervene on multiple occasion when things were getting nasty.

But on the whole, it’s an industry we all chose and it’s a community that we’re proud to be part of. I’ve made some great friends working events and I genuinely smile when I walk into a gig and see them.

What unites us all is what we’re doing. We’re creating an experience to impact people.

Maybe it’s a wedding. The most special day in a couple’s life – not to mention their parents, friends and other guests. Weddings are rollercoasters of emotion and we get to see it all.

Maybe it’s a significant birthday. Completion of a decade – 40th, 50th, 90th. The various ages different cultures celebrate coming of age. 18th or 21st are common in the UK. Jewish people celebrate the Bar Mitzvah for 13 year-old boys and Bat Mitzvah for 12 year-old girls. The Quinceanera, for a 15 year-old Latina – an important milestone and the start of adulthood.

Maybe it’s a product launch. A Christmas party. A new opening. A gala dinner. A fundraiser. Need I go on?

We’re creators.

All the suppliers you hire to create an event create something that they genuinely believe adds to the experience.

For my team at MAGNIV, it was photomagnets. Little gifts for all the guests to take home and put on their fridge and smile at every day.

For the musicians, it’s the incredible atmosphere that music creates.

For the florists, it’s the jaw dropping centrepieces and beautiful bouquets.

For the caterers, it’s mouth-watering food. And cocktails. And canapes. Oh, how I miss canapes.

We complain about it a lot.

It’s not an easy industry. You work “regular” hours, during the week, on sales, planning, marketing, meetings, accounting, business management…

And then the real works starts. The nights come to life. The weekends are a rush.

Forget Saturday nights out with friends. You’re working. You’ve been booked for 18 months already.

I’ve missed Chanukah candle lighting with family so many times I’ve lost count. In the last 6 years, I’ve worked every single Purim – forget Seudah.

We’re at the events clearing up when you leave at 1:30 in the morning. We’re taking abuse from guests who think they’re more important than they are and we’re running around to fix problems and deliver the perfect result in not enough time, because we want your function to be special.

So we complain about it. But we love it.

Sure, the money is OK. Let’s not pretend it’s purely altruistic or just for the fun. But we build our livings and our lives around something that we love – your celebrations.

We’re united by what we’re doing, by what we’re creating and by our love for it.

We’re a community of creatives, of entrepreneurs, of performers, of designers, of artists.

Sometimes we go out together after events. Often we’re just too tired and we have to drive back to put our respective equipment away.

I know videographers who, after being at a wedding since bridal prep began at 9:00 in the morning and on their feet until the last guest stops dancing at 1:30, drive back home or to their offices, to begin backing up all the footage – which takes hours.

Photographers, even crazier, who do the same thing and begin editing a selection of photos because they want the couple to see their first photos as soon as they wake up in the morning.

These aren’t just people I work a lot with. These are friends.

I say that because if anyone of them called me up and said, “Dror, I’m sick, will you go to this event and cover for me tonight?”, I’d get dressed, get in my car and get to the event without hesitation.

When they tell me that they need extra staff as an emergency, I call all my people to help find them someone.

If they need advice, they just have to call.

And they’d do the same for me. Some of them have.

When I was screwed by a member of staff who secretly planned for months to replicate my business, steal my clients and pull away my staff, not only did my team stick with me, but the wider events community was there with advice, support for me and my team and helped me pull things back together.

I wasn’t about to go around telling customers what he had done, when he approached them offering to undercut me, but I didn’t need to – plenty of other suppliers made sure the customers knew who they should choose to go with.

We’re there for each other in the highs and lows.

Together we celebrate our successes. Our new launches. Our growth.

Together we close ranks when threatened.

And we were threatened by coronavirus.

But with no outside support, there was nothing we could do.

We Didn’t See It Coming

At least, I didn’t.

I remember discussing it in early March – but I was fairly sure we would close the borders, the spread would be stopped and we’d still have our summer season.

So we continued as usual.

In February, just like I do every year, I bought materials to last through the summer. Thousands of sheets of magnets; boxes of the coloured film our printers use instead of ink. I buy it in bulk, because that’s the only way I can get it cheap enough to offer good prices and because it takes time to arrive. The magnets are custom made. The printer film is imported from mainland Europe. So the sensible thing to do is to buy in advance of the peak season.

Then, I thought, I’d reassess in September and see if we’d need to order more for the Christmas period.

So I used the deposits which customers had paid to pay for our custom magnets and imports of media. I had no reason to be concerned – looking at our last year, summer 2020 was meant to bring us 25-30 events – at a conservative estimate.

Suddenly coronavirus hit. The first few cancellations came in and we issued the first refunds – mainly Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, which couldn’t just be postponed to next year.

We were still paying our overheads, because we expected to be back up and running in a few months.

Monthly subscription to our CRM. Monthly payments to our website. Monthly payments to the bank. Monthly payments for email. Monthly payments for digital storage for tens of thousands of photos. Monthly payments for physical storage space for equipment and consumables.

More and more money going out of the bank, with none coming back in.

Postponed dates were postponed again.

We cancelled some payments. No more ads or marketing.

We couldn’t cancel others. Taking down our booking management system would have crippled our business infrastructure. We expected to be back, albeit in six months or so. We could absorb the cost, we thought.

And we couldn’t just move out of our storage unit – where would we put everything?

The government will be sensible and help us, we naively believed.

Furlough and loans

At the start, the furlough scheme was there for some of us. Self-employed income support for others. It wasn’t much. Not enough to cover living expenses, business overheads and refunds.

But now the scheme has ended. The new replacement is based on returning to work – you work part of your normal hours, earn money for those hours and get a small top up from the government.

Events haven’t been able to return to work. There was a glimmer of hope, when 30-people weddings were allowed, but all of a sudden even that was stripped away. Just as people began to adjust their businesses.

Not that those 30-people weddings were much help, when your business is based around transforming ballrooms through custom furniture, lighting and audio, for thousands of pounds.

Or sending out a photomagnet team, reliant on the economies of scale, so servicing events that start at 150 guests.

But anyway, they disappeared.

Then there were all sorts of grants, which didn’t help.

Most of the grants were based on “rate relief” and other factors, tied to your property. Great for most businesses. Useless for events people. We don’t have business property, in general. Some have warehouses.

The rest of us? Self-storage units (don’t count), serviced offices/ coworking (don’t count) and spare bedrooms as “offices” (don’t count). Oh, and our cars or vans. We’re mobile – coming to venues. So the grants didn’t apply.

Then there’s the bounce back loan. A loan based on turnover, with no interest for the first twelve months and great rates thereafter.

The loan is designed to help businesses get back up and running. Cover your costs whilst you bring staff back in and customers are still low. Invest in more marketing. A kick start.

Brilliant for some.

I heard about a barber who used the loan and grant money to pay off his mortgage for the rest of the year. All his costs were covered, he had furlough money for the couple of months he couldn’t work and when barbershops were allowed to reopen, there was an influx of customers looking to get their haircut for the first time in months. He was sorted.

It’s not the same in events.

I was offered the loan by our bank. I thought about it. But it would actually be irresponsible to take out such a loan… with no reason to believe we’re going to make the money to pay it back.

We’d spend the loan money, paying overheads, giving out refunds… and then the interest would kick in, whilst we’re still not earning money, because you’re still not allowed to host events.

Suddenly, this great, interest-free loan, would be yet another debt.

So no, the financial support from the government isn’t there. And for passionate suppliers trying to do the right thing for all of their customers, refunding the entire summer peak season and losing the Christmas period… it’s been dreadful.

Here are some of the stories I’ve been reading.

Broken Giants

I read a Facebook post from one events provider who is usually booked out three years in advance. (I’m not going to share names, because I can’t remember which of these posts were on personal accounts and which were on public pages).

They explained how they were driving Amazon deliveries during the day, Uber Eats during the night and doing odd-bits of removals work, such as taking students to university.

A giant in the industry, whose van usually shipped equipment from gig to gig. Double shifting deliveries to make ends meet.

I read an Instagram post from another events provider, who in peak season can have teams shooting up to 8 events on a weekend. Their words receive hundreds of likes and comments – because they’re truly from the heart.

I speak on the phone with friends. Photographers driving for dominos. Make-up artists stacking shelves. Technicians working in construction.

It’s hard to hope

In the beginning, it was easier.

Some people said by the summer, the virus would be gone. We’d be back at it in September.

Bookings from April were postponed to November.

There would be Christmas. Revenue would take a hit, but we’d stay afloat.

Over time, it has become more difficult to see an end in sight for our industry.

We all understand the importance of the lockdown and of the restrictions.

We know how important it is to keep people alive.

Meanwhile, our businesses have no lifeline.

In September, the government published guidance clarifying the laws around refunds, making it clear that in most cases, we couldn’t keep deposits and have to give refunds.

As if we weren’t going to do so anyway.

That’s what keeps us up at night the most.

It’s not the prospect of not working. It’s not the prospect of different jobs.

It’s the fact that many of us do not have the cashflow to return that many deposits all at once.

That’s not how the business works. Just like I paid up front for magnets and media, the make up artist ordered new… make up stuff. OK I really don’t know about make up. New example.

The AV producers? The band? They replaced all their cables, just in case they were wearing out, so they’d have quality new sound for the busy season and not run the risk of something not working.

The photographer bought a new lens. They saved for months.

The caterer rented a new kitchen and fitted it out with brand new equipment.

The videographer replaced his gyroscope.

The event planners rented new offices, hired a new project manager and bought new tablets and radios for their staff to use at events.

No one wants to deny refunds. It wasn’t the customers’ faults they had to cancel.

No one wants to declare bankruptcy and have the debts wiped. That screws everyone. No one wins that way.

Some have had no choice…

Most of us are still clinging to hope.

Even though the basis of the hope is disappearing.

Before it was cautious optimism.

Later it was idealism.

Now it’s just a dream – a dream we all share, to return to the world we love (and complain about a lot).

A way out?

I don’t have the answer.

The first answer is more financial support from the government. Specialist support for the industry, guaranteed for as long as we’re kept shut.

I’m not saying mass events can be restarted straight away. But there has to be a way to reopen events, slowly and carefully.

Some have suggested events that are organised by an accredited event company may be a solution.

Event companies that take responsibility for ensuring social distancing, sanitisation and more.

Venues could work out new, reduced capacities for their different rooms.

Then maybe the bounce back loan would be useful – they could spend it on filtration systems and COVID upgrades to facilities.

The event companies would carry out risk assessments. They’d register the events with the local authorities. The full guest list would be compiled in advance for track-and-trace and more staff could be hired on the night to check people off the lists.

Sure, we wouldn’t be able to all dance together. We wouldn’t have receptions, mingling around and eating food off buffets.

Instead, everything would be seated, plated and served at the tables.

But the photographers could photograph. The chefs could cook.

And the band could play their song once more.

Cover Photo: Jess Schamroth | The Source