“If we were going to go down, it was going to be like Jack and Rose on the Titanic.”

Holly Moore is the founder and CEO of Make Events, a corporate events agency based in Wilmslow, Cheshire.

Before Covid I was struggling with my purpose within the business. In February 2020 I went to LA and had the best time, but still didn’t find my purpose. I flew back and was like, “Why are people wearing masks?” I don’t think the enormity of it had sunk in.

In my head it was going to be three months. I had enough profit to keep the business going, so I decided we’d do all the jobs we never got round to. And in those two weeks I felt like I did find my purpose, because I had to lead the team in a way I never had done before.

We were on target to deliver £4 million and it dropped down to £35k. Everyone wanted to cancel, we spent the whole time sorting it out. All we had was deposits, and we were trying to be really good with clients. This wasn’t their fault as much as it wasn’t our fault.

We wanted to be the agency to be seen to have done good. We wanted to be the last agency standing. If we were going to go down, we were going to go down like Jack and Rose on the Titanic.

I found the first two or three months really hard. I had no family, I was single, my friend got severe Covid which turned into long Covid, she was calling the ambulance quite frequently. I was terrified of getting Covid and being on my own.

I really struggled. We did the first round of furlough and I found that really hard. The weather was beautiful and I didn’t go outside. I just sat at my computer and I felt like I was stuck in mud.

After three months, everyone was on virtual, and I was like, “How is that Make Events?”. We’re creative, we’re about people, we’re about the experience. How can we make virtual work for us? I’m not going to do something that isn’t me.

I didn’t want to do it just to tide us over. There’s a motivational speaker called Rachel Hollis, I was due to go to her four day conference and it flipped to virtual. I said to the team, “If I can be engaged in her conference virtually, then I think we’ve got an opportunity.” We signed up, we were sent pre-event comms, workbooks, gifts... it was so creative and energetic. I was engaged for the whole time and it gave me so many ideas.

That was the beginning of coming out of it. We started working on a charity event, Gethin Jones is a friend and he offered to host it free of charge. I decided for my own mental health I had to go into the office. I hadn’t worked my arse off all that time to just let it go.

I needed a strategy, and it needed to be bright and bold. We needed to be more Make Events. I sat down with a Word document, and I worked on the strategy for six weeks. We’ve always done what it says on the tin, we are Make Events because we make events. So we called the strategy Pivot.

From that moment on, for every strategy we coined a phrase. We did the Rule of Six parties, Social Christmassing, Back to Business. Whatever they talked about in the news we gave it an identity. That kept me going, because each marketing strategy was a creative project, and that’s what I love.

I made some redundancies, but we also employed and created jobs. We created a head of content, head of design, marketing director, we’ve promoted, given pay rises. To keep standing the way I wanted to do we had to invest in our marketing, and that was the only way I could possibly do it.

Because of costs we were committed to, we made a loss every month. We broke even in December and in April, that was it. We got a loan, but we’ve never touched the loan. The business has never had any investment, any borrowing. We are still in that position.

We’re pitching for a lot more new business than we used to. We are having a lot of enquiries from mega brands, they can ask five agencies to pitch because we all want the work. There’s been a lot of investment in pitching, something we might not have done in the past.

We haven’t won them all and that’s been really disheartening. I don’t mind the agency competitors, but what I do mind is when someone makes out that the event is happening and then they say “Oh we’re not doing that any more, my director didn’t pass it off.” That’s been tough.

Corporates don’t care that agencies are running on fumes at the moment. I’ve had one in this week where they wanted ideation and they wanted venue finding and I just said “We’re 10 years old, you can see our work, you either want to work with us or you don’t but we cannot be working on a pitch in this short space of time.”

Mentally there’s been a couple of times where I’ve known that my head is going. I can’t focus, I waste the day, I feel tearful and I know that I’m no good to anyone in the office. And I know I’ve gone past the point where I should. But I am quite good at saying I just need to get away. And I’ll take myself off to London for the weekend, or take a few days off to do life admin.

In events our teams are our friends, they’re our families. It’s the nature of the job. Every decision that you make you feel you’re wounding somebody, if it’s furlough or whatever. I’m hypersensitive, if anyone’s down in the office or mentions money, I take responsibility for that. And you can’t!

You can’t give up now. But then you do think, “Is there a product or service I could do that isn’t affected by corona?” You do have those thoughts.

At any point this year I could have gone “This stress is too much.” I could have said, “Let’s organise a few weddings this year, or parties, and make what I’m making now for myself, with no stress, all I need to think about is me.” But you can’t do that. You can’t start a business and be there for the Guccis and not be there for the bad times. You have to commit to that and you have to do it for your team.