As you might have read in many of my recent articles, I’ve been running businesses for more than 20 years now.

Working with my clients allows me to use the experiences, and importantly the learnings, to help them grow their businesses, but it also helps me to remember those experiences and share them with the world.

And even though I’ve run businesses in seven different industries, I’m finding that the lessons can be applied across the board. I do seem to have attracted more tradespeople towards me recently though.

One of the industries I’ve had businesses in, is the events industry. I’ve run so many events at clubs and other venues that I can’t remember them all, but there are some stand-out experiences that have provided key learnings for the rest of my entrepreneurial career.

In the run up to one of the first events I ran with a business partner, the venue we’d booked, lost its licence. In this article I’ll highlight how I reacted, one takeaway from that experience, and how that can help your business too.

A business that almost failed to get off the ground

With two weeks to go until the event, everything seemed to be going according to plan. Me and my business partner had sold about 70 tickets for a venue that had a capacity of 300 people, and we knew we’d be able to sell a load more in the final two weeks.

For me, this event was about giving back as much as it was about the business, because we were giving a percentage of any profits to a charity that was close to our hearts.

You can imagine our reactions then, when about 14 days before the event the managers at the venue told us they’d lost their licence.

To make things worse though, no other local venues with a similar capacity were available.

We had two options. The first was to refund the tickets we’d sold and cancel the event. The second was to book the only available venue for that night- which had a maximum capacity of 1,000 people.

Without telling me, my business partner decided to book that venue, and we suddenly had to sell more than three times the number of tickets we’d planned.

While I immediately focused on how empty it would look with just 70 people inside, looking back now I’d say that had we gone with option one, our events business would probably not have got off the ground as quickly as it did.

Stress became the fuel

You might have read about my breakdown in previous articles, and about how I don’t remember really feeling stress until that point. This event was a great example of that.

Any stress I would have felt when the venue lost its licence just became my fuel to focus on the priority we had- to sell the huge number of tickets we had to sell.

It must have worked though- on the night itself we had 983 people through the door, and it began a crazy period of my life where I ended up working with some of the biggest artists in the world.

Remember your vision and values:

If I think about my events business as a whole – the highs and the lows- one of the main takeaways would be the importance of vision and values. 

Keeping your vision and values at the core of your business will help you get through most, if not all, of the tough times. And believe me, every business faces challenges.

I believe that the reason I was able to focus and sell 983 tickets for that event, was because my ‘why’ for the event provided a strong enough motivation.

As the events business grew, and we organised bigger and bigger events, my motivation came from my love of music and my vision of improving the experience for our guests.

In a previous article I wrote about a headline act that cancelled 8 weeks before one of our events, and I think it’s that love and vision that helped me get through that challenge and deliver the event that we did.

I’ve learned a lot during my 20 years in business. A lot of the learnings hit me in my pocket financially, but more importantly, all the stress definitely combined together to cause my breakdown.

I often look back now and think “if only I’d had my own coach. Someone to support me. Someone to learn from.”

That’s why I now work with entrepreneurs who are, in many ways, similar to me in the early days. 

And that’s why I’m on a mission to help early-stage entrepreneurs avoid the mistakes I’ve made, and grow their business.

If you’d like to find out how I could help you, please click here to book a discovery call.