Interviews
My Story:
Will reveals all
Will Russ, part of Brew Events has been running music events in Sheffield for over a year and a half on his own through his company Hookline Events. We've caught him for an interview on how working on the Race Night has developed him as an event manager.
What experience did you have before organising the race night?
I had already developed many of the skills needed for the race night event in my placement year running small gigs and club nights as part of my business Hookline Events. Although developing skills in operations, volunteer management, budgeting, accounting, décor, theming and resource management, primarily I was doing social media, sponsorship, promotion, stage management and graphic design. So because these were my strengths and the rest of my team had little experience with
them, I took the lead in these roles (Belbin, 2010). We still helped each other with all the roles, but it made it easier for responsibilities to be assigned to make sure all of us were not worrying about everything at once.
What were the key learning areas for you?
Organising an event as part of a group, working closely with a medium sized charity and planning a non-music event were the areas in which I learnt the most as they were new to me. Being able to learn new skills, more effective forms of fundraising and working with a medium sized charity are very important to the actualization of my dreams as I wish to work in the third sector and raise money for my own charity, Friends of the Himalayan Children's Care Home (Maslow, 1943).
Ideally I would like to do this through music events but doing a race night made me realise that other types of events may be much more profitable as I would only make between £60 and £150 from each of my gigs and club nights. And with music saturating the event market, unique and interesting events like a race night or something else a bit different can capture people’s attention over small music events and stimulate them to get involved.