An Event Full Life: Recent Episodes
Mike Kershaw & David Watt
This podcast is an informative and interesting look into the world of events through the eyes of Mike Kershaw, one of the founders of the Concerto Group and now Senior Partner of the Number 1 advisors to the UK event industry - Kershaw Partners.
Mike shares his thoughts and insights on the Industry and discusses some of the work that Kershaw Partners do with their clients. After 35 years in events he also shares some wonderful stories about his experiences and hopefully helps others to avoid some of the mistakes he has made.
In the last episode in the current series, David is joined by Richard Groves, founder of Richard Groves Catering and Events, Create Catering, one of the founding partners of the Concerto Group and now a Kershaw Partner. Richard talks about his passion for food and the world of event catering, where this passion was developed and how the event catering industry has changed from the 1980's.
Mike and David discuss how the latest pandemic news is affecting Kershaw Partners' clients and the wider event industry, and how Covid is likley to transform how we look at the Christmas Party market going forward.
A fascinating conversation as David talks to Alex Hewitt, CEO of AOK Events, about his 21 years at the helm of one of the UK's foremost event and hospitality businesses. A true industry professional, Alex looks back on his career thus far and shares his thoughts on what the industry will look like in the years to come. He also gives some insightful advice for those are looking to get into the events world and some of the initiatives that AOK are undertaking to help people.
After a 3 week break Mike Kershaw returns to An Event Full Life this week to talk about leadership, and more particularly how event business leaders need to think more like coaches than ever before in todays world. The mindset needs to shift away from the traditional, "my way or the highway", offering advice that doesn't necessarily solve the problem, to listening to what others have to say. A really fascinating listen.
This week David talks to Gary Exall and Nick Taylor from Noba Event Wi-Fi about how technology has changed since they set up their respective businesses 15 years ago and some of the challenges they have overcome to provide connectivity to the Events Industry.
This week David chats to Gavin Farley, Co-Founder of In2Event and CEO of The Assembl Group. Gavin has been involved with the Events Industry for nearly quarter of a century and shares some fascinating views on the industry, how he thinks we will bounce back from the pandemic and what event businesses and their clients will look like in the future. He also shares a few hilarious incidents that he has been involved with along the way.
This week David chats to Anna Abdelnoor, co-Founder of ISLA about the work she is doing to try and transform the Events Industry to be more efficient and deliver events in a more sustainable way so that we are fit for the future.
This week Mike discusses why it is inevitable that things will go wrong when you organise events, the trick is to learn from them so you don't make the same mistakes twice.
David chats to KP Partner Peter Jackson about how he ended up working in the Event Industry, the evolution of Concerto Live which became Clive and his thoughts on sustainability and culture and why bot matter so much.
This week Mike talks about the backbone of the Kershaw Partners offer and how they help their clients with the help of his "Ten Commandments". He also discusses the issue of employee engagement, how to make sure that once you have built a team, you make sure that you keep it together.
Mike also reveals a few new faces joining the KP Family to help broaden the areas that they are able to advise on.
In the week of the Meetings Show at ExCel Mike discusses the problems that entrepreneurs sometimes have trying to do everything themselves when maybe sometimes delegation would be better. He also talks about the Kershaw Partners work with ISLA.
In this first episode we find out a little bit more about how Mike came to be involved in the events industry and what persuaded him to set up Kershaw Partners.