The Covid pandemic has had a devastating effect on many industries. One of the worst hit has been the events sector, for which work has pretty much dried up, leaving many businesses struggling to survive.
An innovative St Helens Events Company has adapted its services in order to buck the trend.
Chamber Members, T5 Event Media Ltd, is an events organising company, which has been trading for 11 years. It offers the full spectrum of services from event planning through to multimedia production. Its clients range from small businesses right through to large blue chip companies, across the UK and Europe.
The first lockdown, brought to an end what had been the best start to a year that the company had ever had.
Company director Gary Maziere recalls the day in early March “It was devastating, the events that we had lined up for the rest of the year, were being cancelled one after the other. Within days we had no work whatsoever.”
Gary and fellow Director, Phil Maziere, started the process of looking for alternatives. T5 had previously used the Chambers Business Growth Programme, to improve its marketing activities.
“The marketing consultancy opened our eyes to a lot of things we weren’t doing very well” says Gary, “It helped immensely when COVID forced us research alternative work.”
Ironically, the thing that had caused the problem, Covid, also provided the solution. T5’s customers, unable to continue with attended events, went online. Quality problems with their presentations, led to calls to T5 to provide a solution.
“Once they realised that they needed to make their presentations more professional, they turned to us. We started to manage the content for them, and then pushed it out through a vision mixer. Using Green Screens we produced really high quality results, and work started to build up.” Says Gary.
He explains, “Anyone can set up a Green Screen, but to get the full effect, you have to have a precise set up of cameras and lighting. We set a system up in our office so that we could demonstrate the amazing results we could achieve. Our customers loved it, and more work followed.”
An opportunity to install green screen set ups all around the UK, for a French company took the Green Screen service to a new level.
Gary explains, “Out of the blue we were made aware of the opportunity. We made contact, and negotiated a contract. It was a perfect fit really. They need an experienced reliable company in the UK to set up their systems, and we have the expertise to do it.”
T5 have been busy installing the kit all over the UK since then. They’ve even installed one for the NHS which uses it for training videos.
“It’s saved the business.” says Gary, “It’s been hard work, and we’ve had to adapt our skills, but we’ve added another string to our bow, and when the Pandemic is over, we’ll come out stronger.”
