00:00 Introduction

Ali, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for coming on. I’m excited to talk about your story because I kind of know it, but I’ve not heard it from you. So it’s always so much better when you hear it from the actual person. And I really love your site, and I got a chance to have a play around with it before this lockdown and had a little look at it and I actually passed it on to a few of my clients as well. So this is going to be good. I’m excited to talk about it.

So let’s frame it up a little bit for the viewers. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your business and what it does and where you are in your life cycle here in Australia?

00:48 What HeadBox does and how Ali got involved

Steve, thanks for having me on here. I’m really excited to have this chat with you. So HeadBox launched into the Australian market earlier this year in February 2021. We’re a British-born company, and I actually came to know HeadBox during my six-year stint in the UK which came to an end last year. I was working for global brands and doing their events, and like all good ideas, I was experiencing a number of pain points. And that’s actually where I got introduced to HeadBox. And in truth, it was a game changer.

The whole premise of what it was doing in the event technology space and how it was going to make my life easier was wildly appealing. That took us on a really cool three-year journey where we partnered. They were a startup of five people at the time. We were a multinational company. A fantastic partnership. And then like all expats living abroad, I wanted to relocate back home, which was coincidentally timed with the pandemic.

The CEO and founder of HeadBox, Andrew, actually came to me with the idea of going from a client: “You love what we do. Would you ever want to do this as your own business in Australia?” A pretty unique and exciting opportunity, and so I gripped that with both hands and ran with it.

02:20 Starting out in Brisbane and moving to London

I’ve worked in events my whole career and what I’ve always tried to do is explore every facet of events, get experience in all different elements. So I kicked off my career in Brisbane. I’m originally from Queensland and had a really cool five to six years there working venue-side, and then also jumped over to the client side. That gave me a fantastic experience of working with different clients on different events.

But I think then sort of ingrained in me is that kind of “what’s more, what else is out there?” So naturally going, “Well, you know, don’t just go to Sydney or Melbourne but London.” And really throw myself in the deep end there. I was pretty lucky, I’ve got family over there and a good base of friends, so that was an easy footing to land on.

03:50 Working at Barclaycard and Dentsu on global events

What that then exposed me to in my six years in London is working on a different playing field. When you’re in the centre of London, which is the hot spot of multinational companies, the decisions are made then and there. And they’re putting on events that Australian events just aren’t even in the realms of.

I worked for Barclaycard, working on their 50th birthday campaign and how we brought together 16 different countries to celebrate that. Not only are you throwing in the headache of time zones with an event like that, but also multicultural decisions and considerations. So again, just another level of learning and experience.

The last company that I worked for in the UK was Dentsu, which is a multinational media company, and I was heading up their events team for the UK and Ireland business. Absolutely brilliant role. Dentsu is a company that loves to do things creatively, do things differently. And that gave me a fantastic experience in working with partners such as Google and Spotify. Again, you’re working with the head offices of those companies in London.

05:40 The pain points that led to discovering HeadBox

In any role that anyone works in, you start to really notice the pain points and they start to become bigger than the nice things. What I was finding within this: we did a huge volume of events. To give you an idea, in 2018, my team, which was myself and two other people, did 204 events. So you can probably appreciate that for anyone who has any idea of organising an event, it’s a fair workload.

One of the big pain points was the time it took from really identifying the objective of the event, through to writing the brief, doing the venue sourcing, through to completion. We just didn’t simply have the capacity to do that. So that’s when we started looking at: if we can’t own it, how do we outsource it and bring in someone who’s effectively an extension of our team?

07:20 How HeadBox is modernising the events industry

We put an RFP out to see what partners could come forward. There were your natural players in the industry who were global and we were very aware of. And then I was introduced to HeadBox. Never heard of them, didn’t know what they’re about. I’ve got a big belief: always have a conversation. You just never know where it can lead to.

So we had that initial discussion, and right from the get-go, from their CEO and founder Andrew down throughout the team, it was: “We want to change the game. We want to bring this industry up to the century that we’re operating in, because right now it’s very archaic.” If you think about it, you want to go on a holiday. You can go online, book a hotel room, pay, done. That wasn’t possible in the event space. You had to pick up the phone, you had to get the quotes. It was very manual and very laborious.

So their whole game was to really remove the mundane elements and bring tech into the forefront, but still keeping in mind that people play an integral role in the event booking process: the creative element, the negotiation, all of that. And I was captivated.

08:50 The three-sided marketplace explained

It’s a three-sided marketplace that brings together event bookers, venues and suppliers. The technology that we’ve built helps somebody submit their brief really easily and efficiently. We allow consumers to utilise our platform for free and then we also partner with companies to support them in delivering their events.

HeadBox’s main bread and butter is partnering with large companies to support them in delivering their annual programme of events. We’ve got technology built that enables a company to track their entire annual programme. That’s actually quite rare. When you turn around to a company and say, “Do you know what you spend annually on events?” they might know for the particular marketing and events department, but then there’s a lot of ad hoc spend across various different departments that isn’t captured.

There’s actually then a lot of return on investment that we can deliver for companies when that is all captured and they can actually make really smart decisions with that data.

11:00 Consumer side: the Bumble for events

On the consumer side, we realised that consumer events, especially right now, they’re stronger than ever. Everyone will continue to want to hold the birthday party, the wedding, the anniversary. So we’ve actually built a really cool product that enables consumers to jump online, use it for free, submit their brief, and we then connect them with relevant venues. The best analogy to describe this is the Bumble for events. It’s a matchmaking service effectively for that birthday party, for that venue.

12:00 Launching in February 2021 during COVID

You launched this business in February when none of us believed we were going to get COVID here. How has this impacted you on so many levels? Because you’ve had to hire in COVID, you’d have to build an industry around events where events are very uncertain. You’ve had to onboard people remotely. Every kind of challenge that you could possibly have thrown at you.

I’ll start with relaying a conversation I had with my board member last week. He called for a check-in and said, “I’ve just got a question for you. If you knew what you know now this time last year, would you have still done it?” And wholeheartedly the answer is yes. But we have had to be incredibly resilient. We chose consciously to launch in February when we weren’t out of the pandemic. We were still very much in the midst of it. But what we saw was a great opportunity to bring this technology to Australia.

Coming back to your point that it is easy to use, we know we’ve got a beautiful product. I say beautiful because it is. It’s easy for you to use, for clients and also our partners. When you’ve got a mature, refined product that I have seen the success of across Europe, we know that we’re going to do well here. We just need to endure this pandemic and we’ll come out the other side really strong.

14:00 The hardest part: supporting venue partners through lockdowns

Probably how resilient we would have to be for our partners. When I talk partners, I’m talking venue partners on the whole. They have been through hardship like no one. It’s incredibly challenging for them when they’ve had to shut their doors. There’s uncertainty about what government support there would be, uncertainty around when events can open up again. A lockdown happens very sharply and very swiftly; you don’t come out of it in the same manner.

So actually being that supportive partner that we promised we would be from the outset, and maintaining that resilience through going, “We’re humans as well. We feel the toll.” But actually reminding our team that we will come out of this stronger. And the more supportive we can be for our partners in the meantime will put us in good stead.

16:00 How the pandemic changed habits and beliefs

I’ve always been a big believer in tech. Even having grown up as a country girl, I’ve always had this fascination of what can tech do to make life simpler. And that’s truly what we’re doing, we’re trying to make people’s lives simpler and easier.

Three years ago, it wouldn’t have been as common or as acceptable to have a Zoom meeting with a client. You would have had to go and meet them face to face, do that travel time and be there in person. What the pandemic has enabled us to do is operate in a more virtual sense. And that for me has actually enabled us to set up a team that is geographically spread across Australia. Because before the pandemic, I would have had to be in three different locations at once and really spread myself too thin.

18:00 Will events come back with a bang?

Do you see this huge boom coming? Because obviously one of the best things about what you do is that you save time, you make it much more efficient. Do you see this wave of madness coming in terms of events?

I’ll split it into two ways. With consumers, consumers are so much quicker to bounce back. They want to be holding that birthday party that got cancelled or the wedding that they’ve had to postpone. So we’re already seeing in Brisbane, for example, a lot of consumer confidence in the event inquiries there.

Companies however are a little bit more risk aware. They’re looking at something and going, “We probably can’t actually do that 300-person event,” for two reasons. Is it the right thing to do from a brand reputation perspective, especially if they’re a listed company? So they’re actually re-looking at their events and breaking them down and saying, “Why don’t we just do departmental events? They’re smaller, they’re safer.”

20:00 How corporates are rethinking event formats

They’re also doing it from an employee consideration point. People have changed. They perhaps don’t want to come to an all-singing, all-dancing Christmas party that holds a thousand people. They might find that overwhelming. So they’re really having to play to how people actually want to interact with one another.

We’re designing quite a cool event at the moment that is actually allowing people to go to different zones at the event. There’s a nice quiet lounge which they can just enjoy and chill out, or they can step into a more intense music scene. But really enabling people to show up how they want.

22:00 Podcast and book recommendations

There’s two that I’ll share. A podcast is actually a British podcaster, Elizabeth Day, and she created a series called How to Fail. It’s an interesting name, you think it’s quite negative. Actually, she focuses on how our biggest learnings come from our moments of failure, not our moments of success. Which I fundamentally believe in as well.

She interviewed the former CEO of Google X, and I would implore anyone to go and listen to it. It’s a beautiful story on how he suffered immense loss by losing a son and how he created the algorithm for happiness. Sounds a bit kooky, I fully appreciate that. But when you listen to it, he unpacks it beautifully. It gives us very simple tools and tips and tricks that we can implement in our own lives.

And the other one, which I’ve actually got here with me: Life Is Tough But So Are You. A friend of mine has just come through remission with cancer and she wrote this book. I would implore anyone to read that because whilst we thankfully may not have gone through cancer, it is such a beautiful book that we can all look at and go, “It is tough, lockdown is tough, it doesn’t feel great, but we’ll get through it and we can dig deep.”

24:40 Why you should join HeadBox right now

We have such exciting growth plans. To give you an idea, when we first mapped out for the launch into Australia last year, we were only going to launch in one city this year, that being Sydney. By March we launched in two. And by May I’d had sign-off from the board to launch in three. Hopefully by year end we would have launched in four.

That gives you a bit of an idea about probably my relentlessness, and how I’m constantly just going, “We can do this, we can do better, we can do more.” But also a true reflection of how brilliant the team are. And I’m the first to say to anyone, I have the most incredible team who are supportive of not just my goals, but our goals.

We did a reflection six months in on the first six months to find out what the team loved, what they’ve learned. And time and time again it came up just how much they love the team. And if we can achieve what we’re going to achieve together, it’s going to be a pretty exciting journey.

26:40 Wrap-up

Ali, thank you so much for coming on the show. I’ve really enjoyed hearing it in your own words. And it’s good to see that you’re so upbeat and positive about everything. And I love that. And maybe that book was certainly something I think a lot of people would appreciate reading now as well.

I’m sure we will catch up again when we can one day. But in the meantime, I look forward to watching the restrictions ease and you guys exploding. So good luck with it.