Assured Events shortlisted in Greater Manchester Business Awards

Stockport based Assured Events has been shortlisted in the 2017 Greater Manchester Business awards for organisations with up to 10 employees.

Assured Events is one of 4 companies shortlisted from 75 entries! According to the organisers, the competition was fierce as the awards attracted more applications than expected making the Panel’s job much harder.

Assured Events was established by managing director Karl Perry in Cheadle in 2006 who explains how far the business has come in the past 11 years:

“Since 2012 to the end of 2016, turnover has grown by 185% from £716k to £2.04M.  Net profit has grown over 412% from £42k to £215k.

“These are fantastic numbers but they are just a by-product of the real story

“Having started the events-specific business pretty much from scratch in 2006, we actually grew steadily throughout the recessionary years, which in itself, was no easy achievement, given that our project types are often considered to be a discretionary spend.

“Then in 2012 we were hit hard by a client’s customer going into liquidation resulting in the client having to pull multiple projects, followed by another client going into liquidation themselves, leaving us with one less client and with debts to write off.”

Assured Events shortlisted Greater Manchester Business awards

Up until that point, most of Assured clients – Coca-Cola, Molson Coors Brewing, Kellogg’s – were in the FMCG sector focusing on incentive trips and team-bonding days.

Expansion into Higher Education conferences led to a growth for Assured in the HE sector as Karl explains:

“We grew their commercial return through sponsorship sourcing, exhibition and cost management by over 40%.  They in turn referred us to another association since when we have won 4 more, 4-day association conferences (one contract takes us through to 2020) and currently have tenders out with 2 other associations. We are already lining up venue visits for 2019 conferences.”

Assured Events continue to expand attract growing brands such as Five Guys Burgers and Fries, the Michael Page incentive business and Quarterly High Flyer incentive programme and have added team development days for Lloyd’s of London.

Karl added:

“We are now a team of 9 and envisage taking on another member during the first half of 2017.

“We have a number of objectives over the next few years. Our aim is to take the commercial, operational and venue experience gained from our UK events and become the go-to provider for overseas HE associations wanting to run a conference in the UK.  This will be achieved by investing heavily in SEO targeting HE association searches requiring UK support from abroad.

“Last year, we began purchasing furniture and have begun to hire it out to clients for the events that we organise. It paid for itself and the annual storage, within months. We aim to create a standalone rental division servicing the wider events sector by mid 2017.

“We currently outsource creative and digital resource but are looking to take this in-house enabling us to be more proactive when generating creative, deliver a quicker turnaround and with the digital expertise in-house, we will be able to offer enhanced marketing support and app development for our clients’ events.”

Assured are keen to support young workers; they aim to provide 3 placements per year, with a view to 2 coming back permanently.  Within 3 years they expect to have 50-60% of the team recruited this way.

Happy staff leads to low turnover

In line with modern-day work practices, Assured encourage flexible start and finish times and remote working to avoid traffic delays.

Staff are encouraged to take 2 days a year (paid) to volunteer for a charity of their choice.

If staff birthdays fall Monday – Friday, they have their birthday off work.

Every Christmas the team are taken abroad for a day and night as a thank you for all of their hard work over the year.

Consequently, Assured Events have a very low staff turnover; only one person has left in 3 years and sick days run at an average of less than 0.75 days per person, per year.

We would like to wish Assured Events good luck in the Greater Manchester Business Awards taking place on the 19th May 2017 at the Radisson Blu Edwardian Manchester Hotel. The judging panel will meet a few weeks prior to the evening to vote on the Winners from each Shortlisted category.