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I want to take you back to Monday 23rd March 2020. This was a very different day in our company as all our clients were closed down, retail sector, visitor attractions, venues and events. We heard a new word – LOCKDOWN!
What to do? Roshi came to the rescue with the furlough scheme and allowed us to send employees home and he would pay them 80% of their wages. What about the business? Effectively that was put into mothballs as we were prohibited from performing any activities that constituted company promotion or revenue generation.
What could we do then? After discussions with various sources, HMRC gave some guidance that it was OK to carry out product development, staff training and marketing strategy in order thatwhen we came back we would be in a stronger position to move forward again. We took full advantage of that and added new features into the software, many of which had been put on the back burner due to the daily pressures of supporting existing systems. Some staff went and upskilled themselves in a variety of areas and others of us started to look forward as to what opportunities there might be once the lockdown was eased.

One thing that was happening was the late spring weather was really good and fruit was ripening in the fields. However, the Eastern European people who usually pick all this fruit were not allowed back into the country so what was going to happen to it now? Boris Johnson appealed to the country and came up with the slogan “Pick the fruit, save the farmers and feed the nation”. This in itself gave us the germ of an idea in that yes, people could go and pick the fruit but there were restrictions on numbers, social distancing was required and the farm staff had to be kept safe. How then could all that be controlled? Our solution was an on-line bookings system where a picking voucher was bought for the type of fruit to be picked. Initially this was strawberries but as the season progressed there were gooseberries, raspberries, blackberries, etc.

The system we created was very simple, you pay for the voucher on-line, obtain a date/time when you could go and pick the fruit and then turn up at the appointed time. You present your voucher, which is exchanged for the appropriate punnet size for the fruit you are picking and off you go into the fields. Social distancing in the fields was controlled by markers and a one-way system. Once the punnet was full, put it in your car and go home.

We were the only company offering such a system so a significant number of the country’s Pick Your Own Farms took it on board as their method of operation. Needless to say our revenue streams just grew and grew as more farms adopted the system and more fruit became available. Some farms even added vegetables to their offering.

As the season progressed the lockdown was eased and visitor attractions were once again allowed to open, admittedly with limited numbers. The issue here was that they also had to maintain social distancing, which meant that visits had to be pre-booked. What better way than with an on-line bookings system? Enter Merlin ® again, as we had the system all ready to go with a website where customers could just sign in and create their own branded bookings and ticketing platform in under an hour. Once again they signed up in significant numbers and our revenue streams continued to grow.

June was the significant turning point as we could see that on-line sales were booming for all our clients, which obviously meant that so were ours and the outcome was a better June than in any previous year.

Moving into July with even more venues coming on board, covering everything from Hog Roasts to Maize Maze all needing on-line booking systems, our revenue streams hit an all-time high, with sales up by 500% on the same period last year.

This is continuing throughout August and we know we will be breaking even more records, with the need for booking being increased as cafes, restaurants, etc also have to control numbers and therefore need a bookings system. We’re now well into seven figures each month and still growing at a fast rate. How did we get to where we are now, was it by chance, pure luck or more than that? I put it down to some business advice I was given many years ago when I was told that you don’t sell products, you find problems and sell solutions. He summed it up like this “problem seeking, problem solving, friend for life. Yes, we were in a sticky situation back in March but so were many others, so could we do anything to help them that would also help us? The answer, as you can see, was a resounding “yes” so we went off and did it.

The net result of all this is that our company is much stronger now than before the lockdown and we are now recruiting three additional staff to cope with the phenomenal growth.

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What Happens Next?

In the days after an event it’s easy to rest on your laurels and bask in the afterglow somewhat. Why shouldn’t you? An awful lot of work went into it and it’s nice to no longer be ‘on the clock’ for a while. If you can muster up the energy, there are a few things that you can do to get even more from your efforts.

Social Media Promotions

Thanks to all the great photographs you took, the members of your social media team (which is quite possibly longhand for “you”) have a load of material to work with. If you didn’t get chance to do it during the event, retweet the messages people sent out with your hashtag – it never hurts to show how well it went after the fact and helps build a buzz of interest for the follow up event (oh, you didn’t think you were going to do another one?). Don’t forget to tag people in the images you distribute via your social media channels. If you had a guest speaker or a star turn, thanking them through your social medial channels is a great way to get reciprocal promotion as they’re always going to retweet messages from happy customers.

Email Followups

If you have another event to promote, of course you’re likely to want to contact attendees of your previous event. Who wouldn’t? However, it’s always worth sending out an email saying thank you with no sales material attached. It’s good to talk, right? Creating a space where the photographs you took are uploaded to makes a lot of sense too. It works as a thank you (people love seeing if they or their friends/colleagues appear in your photographs) and, once again, it provides another reason for people to keep on talking about the event.

The Next Event

Is the thought of doing all that work again filling you with dread? Let’s hope not, because having done one event, the next one is always much easier as, even if you don’t realise it, lessons will have been learned. Whether the event went swimmingly or didn’t quite meet your expectations, things will have happened, or opportunities will have presented themselves, that allow you to make any subsequent events that bit better or run that little bit smoother. A debrief is a fantastic opportunity to make sense of everything that happened. There will be some things that you thought were a good idea that proved ultimately unnecessary – they can be cut from future events, making them even more profitable; other things will have occurred to you during the event that you wish you had done at the time. Getting all these things noted down somewhere will help towards making the next event even better. Even if you’re convinced that you’re never doing it again, jot it down anyway – the days after your event are the perfect time to reflect upon the positives and negatives and you might be surprised how many transferable learning opportunities the experience will have provided.