In March 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic slowly started to unfold, businesses like On Event Production Co. were operating as usual at events all over the UK. Bookings came in, calls were made, events were planned. For Chris Vernon-Smith, Creative Director, and Adam Dewhurst, Managing Director, this meant the entire company was in full swing with stands to build, organising exhibition deliveries and tight communications with their clients.
The challenge
We were driving down to London when we got a call to turn home, come back, the show’s gone. I think we lost about £2,000,000 worth of business that day.”
Chris
In the weeks that followed, as event after event was cancelled, postponed or thrown totally up in the air, On Event buckled down to redesign their bread and butter. How could they retain customers? Could they provide virtual events? What would that look like?
Customer need
The adrenaline of such a sharp change in trajectory was met equally by clients with events in the first half of the year. One customer in New York quickly came back with the task of continuing to provide the event but in a virtual space, which led the team to their fundamental new requirement: a rock-solid, reliable internet connection.
The client set me the challenge, saying, ‘We still want to run this, we still want to do it. Let’s do it virtually’, and at that point, we just said ‘Challenge accepted, let’s do this.”
Adam
The solution
With speakers all over the world and viewers all over the world in their homes, the On Event team managed to deploy a totally online event. It was a huge success, and the start of something totally new.
Now, the team has a fully airtight business model for virtual events, run with the steady support of ultrafast fibre from Glide. Our provision of a leased line means On Event have a totally uncontended connection of 200Mbit/s to channel all their work through. We saw a company that needed help to move into a new operating space, so we did everything we could to make it easy.
Running all these services on our own network adds peace of mind for people like Chris and Adam. We help them get the most out of their employees if they connect remotely as well as providing their clients with top speed, faultless streaming for every event.
In a year when connectivity became more important than ever, Glide’s teams have gone above and beyond to ensure our customers can continue to grow their business through internet they can rely on.”
Dan Alvarez
Sales Director @ Glide
Moving into the future
Success for businesses like On Event looks like many different things, from a happy audience to a full calendar; the last thing they’re worried about is the internet connection. And that’s precisely how it should be
The impact that super-fast broadband has had on On Event is tremendous to see and encouraging for businesses in a similar position. Ultimately, for On Events, the benefits of fibre broadband allowed them to redesign their business model to outdo the limitations of the pandemic.