There’s a lot of businesses out there in the world of live events that have been around for 10 years or more, so that wasn’t the reason behind Ginger Owl founders Nancy Skipper and Julie Chennells receiving the Outstanding Contribution award at last year’s UK Festival Awards. Executing the often herculean task of getting the right people in the right place at the right time with the right passes (and meal tickets) gets you a little closer to the reasoning. The clincher is the manner in which its been achieved; the long hours and hard yards, all delivered with a friendly smile has built a loyal following, both of clients and staff and, crucially, has delivered opportunities and skills to people who are genuine assets to the word of festivals. We were lucky enough to find them both sitting still for an hour, it was a joy.
How are you both?
JC We’re good, coming towards the end of a very busy summer. You know how it is, it’s been great, we’ve had some new events this year. I know it’s been a difficult year for festivals, but I it hasn’t reached us quite yet. I don’t know how that’s going to be in the coming years, but it’s been as busy as ever this year.
September is when it sort of calms down, isn’t it, Nancy?
NS It’s starting to ease off a little bit now. I think, if the events could be, you know, just a few weeks apart…we had seven events two weekends in a row, all on the same weekend. So that was a very hectic, pressurised couple of weeks. And now it’s gone back down to a sort of normal number. Yeah. What have we got this weekend, three?
JC Yeah, I mean it is interesting how many events we do are all on the same weekend. You can have a whole month and all the events we do are on one weekend. If only it’d spread out a bit more.
The follow up question to how are you is where are you? T
JC We’re both working from our home offices at the moment, which is really nice. Not on site yet.
NS I’m in Suffolk at the moment. By the end of the week, I will be in Devon for Beautiful Days. But right now, working from home, which is nice.
JC Me too. Working from home in Croydon.
Where’s the next stop?
JC My next stop is Camp Bestival in Shropshire next week, so I’m going up, Nancy’s going down.
NS I’m really looking forward to going down to Devon [for Beautiful Days] because I used to live down there, so it’s really nice, one of my favourite weeks of the summer.
What I should have said right at the top is congratulations on your 10th anniversary and winning a well deserved, UK Festival Awards outstanding contribution gong.
NS Thank you. Thank you very much. It was really lovely, I think we’re still getting over the surprise.
JC And it doesn’t feel like ten years. It’s gone so quickly, you know? We can hardly believe it. It’s something we really did want to celebrate ourselves and for our staff. But it’s amazing that ten years have actually passed. Well, 11 now.
NS And that was in April, wasn’t it? So yeah, it’s really gone fast, so much has happened.
Can you remember back to how this all started?
JC Yeah, definitely, I think I remember it. Nancy might remember it differently. We worked at Harvey Goldsmiths together for a long time; I left in 2004, Nancy left in 2005 and we were freelance for probably ten years. We were just getting each other in, as you do, like freelancers; you know, I can’t do this job, do you want to do it instead of me? Or ,I need someone to come and work with me on this job, can you come and do it? We remained really close friends when we left Harvey’s and we were just doing so much together, it was getting busier and busier. I think it was the Teenage Cancer Trust when we sort of just said, should we just start a company? We didn’t really put a lot of thought into it to be honest.
We definitely didn’t envisage it turning into what it’s turned into. We just thought it would be a way to pool our resource between the two of us, but actually it was only a matter of weeks before we were pulling together whole teams for festivals. And I think we did 11 weeks of festivals that year, didn’t we? In a row?
NS Yeah, we did all the shows at the Olympic Park for Live Nation that year. And you were doing magic Summer live, weren’t you? We had quite a few events that year.
JC Yeah, we we had a lot that first year, which was kind of one of the reasons we started the company. I think we’d both been approached by quite a lot about quite a lot of work. So we just thought, you know, let’s let’s make this a legitimate, you know.
Let’s incorporate!
Incorporate, yeah, absolutely. But I have to say, there wasn’t a big business plan or a big chat about it. It was just like, oh, should we do this? And it was like, yeah, so let’s do it.
Over the decade, how has Ginger Owl changed?
JC: I think the original idea really was like Nancy said to pool our resources between the two of us. I don’t think we originally really thought too much about the staffing side, you know, as in employing loads of other staff and needing to do bigger and bigger projects. You know, it wasn’t that there weren’t lots of companies like there are around now; our sort of style of production company. And I feel like our business was very much based on our friendship, it was the fact that we worked together for a long time. We continued to work together when we left that job because we enjoyed each other’s company and we liked working together, it was built on a friendship, and I think that’s what’s kept us going as a business. It has been based on friendship and trust and loyalty to each other, you know, which is a really, really, really big deal in the world that it is these days, you know.
Are there any early lessons you still look back on?
JC: It’s a difficult one, there’s all sorts of lessons that you learn as you go along. I think taking on too much is something; not wanting to say no to anything is probably something that I think lots of people are guilty of in this climate because you feel like, you know, if you say no, you won’t be asked again. I know freelancers feel that pressure as well too, and that leads on to the mental health stuff and having a work life balance. You know, it’s something we’re working really hard on, isn’t it, Nancy?
NS It is. Yeah.
JC You know, that we are having a work life balance, that if something is becoming all-encompassing and that we never have any time, or our staff never have any time because they’re working. We have to know when to say no and to step back. I think that’s a pressure I felt as a freelancer and it’s a pressure we’ve felt as a company. I think you just have to resist the urge to say yes to everything because ultimately, you can’t do your best work when you’re stretched to breaking point. I think it applies to lots of companies and lots of freelancers as well. And it’s a hard thing with the competition out there, to stand back and go, no, I’ve got enough this summer.
How would you describe the services the Ginger Owl provides?
Our background is rock and roll promoting rather than a more of a corporate agency style production company, I would say. Would you, Nancy?
NS We’re not quite an agency, although we do staff the events. We can do production, but we tend to not do that as well. We kind of have the backstage services section and the softer services, although we can do site and production as well. But it’s a kind of in the middle section I suppose. Not marketing agency or corporate. Definitely not corporate.
What size of team would you take to an event now? And where do you find those people?
NS It depends; we used to have really huge teams when we were working out in Saudi. We’d have 300 plus working across all the events in the winter. In the summer the numbers probably aren’t as high. But we have, like I said, seven events in a weekend then across all those events we’ve got maybe 150.
JC In the UK our biggest teams are between 40 and 50, but with multiple events at different places it can push those numbers right up. The challenge for us and I think I’ve heard other companies say, is finding the managers to run the teams, not the staff themselves.
We find them in a variety of places, recommendations, people that we’ve worked with alongside on an event, but they’ve been in a different role. We might meet them and go, ‘do you know what? You’ve got the right approach, you’re an Owl if you like. And we bring them in.
Sometimes when we’ve got vast amounts of roles to fill, we do the traditional job on LinkedIn, get the CVS, read the CVS, do the interviews, and we have to put the hard work in like any recruitment agency. But the big thing for us is, is finding the right manager to lead the team, that is always a challenge. That’s certainly the thing I do first is when I look at the events we’ve got, I work out which manager is in that place, as the first piece of the puzzle.
Have you got people that have grown with you?
JC Yeah, a lot of our team have been with us since the beginning of Ginger Owl. Kate, for example, who’s our head of accreditation now, we worked with her as a freelancer. I think I met her in 2004 when I first worked at Download. Same with Mandy, who works with us, I think that’s when I first met her. They’re still our managers, still friends of the company and of us personally. We’ve also had people we met when we first started Ginger Owl who are still with us, lots of industry people that we work alongside. Kelly, our operations manager, we met her when we were at Harvey’s. Would you say Nancy?
NS Yeah, so a long, a long time. And then we’ve we have got newer team members who’ve come in. It does take them a while to grow, I suppose, because each event generally is only annual, to learn and develop does take time. Even some of our freelancers have been with us for over ten years, haven’t they?
JC Oh, yeah. I mean, the likes of Dean, who I met on a tour that I repped back in 2012, and he’s just been with us as a freelance manager ever since. Lots of people that are our managers have been with us a long time. I think that’s, again, the trust; they work in a certain style that suits us.
Of all the names you’ve listed there, it took quite a while to get to Dean, the first male name. Are you on a mission to address the gender balance in live production?
JC Absolutely not on purpose…but maybe.
NS Yeah, not consciously.
It is true that our entire management team is female, which is now six of us; but not because we’re weeding out the male ones, it’s just because they happen to be the ones who’ve got the skills that we need.
JC Cain, we’ve got Cain, who’s worked with us since the beginning of Ginger Owl as well. He’s one of our full timers, he’s one of our main managers. So, you know, we we do have a few.
When you think of the Harvey Goldsmith alumni at the top of the business nowadays, there are a lot of women.
NS Well, exactly, there’s a lot of talented people out there. I guess we were very fortunate in that Harvey obviously didn’t have the same potential issues at the time that we were working for him, that maybe other people of our generation might have experienced. So, we were lucky and we could work in any department and go off and do anything.
JC I mean, Harvey’s a bit like us in that we just want staff who work in our style and are great at what they do, it doesn’t matter more than that, really. You know, I think it’s just a pure coincidence, really, that a lot of our management team are women, it’s not something we actively chase, it just happens to be. It’s based on friendships as well
You’ve done a lot of work on the massive Soundstorm event in Saudi Arabia. How did your involvement begin?
NS I received a screenshot of a running order for a festival by WhatsApp from someone that we knew. Not a regular client, no context, no other information. I think from memory it arrived on Boxing Day morning or New Year’s Day morning, something like that while we were in Covid. We kind of explored what that was, asked a few questions and we were asked to quote on it.
It wasn’t the first time we’d worked in Saudi, we’d done two shows in Saudi before Covid, so it wasn’t brand new to us, but obviously the event turned out to be Soundstorm. We went out to do that one event and then continued event after event to do the three years that we, we did out there.
It was it was really interesting to see the emergence of the music market over there. And, as I’m sure you know, it is expanding infinitely. Every week there seems to be another person announcing, building an arena, building a stadium, building this in Riyadh and that in Jeddah, and the football and other sports. The thirst for content and events just seems to keep growing and growing over there. So, I think it was a really nice to be out there to see it kind of explode you know? For freelancers, obviously it’s great for them because now they’re busy in the winter; their season kind of mirrors the, the UK season quite nicely. If you’re a person who doesn’t want any time off.
Did that bring different challenges, getting people out there, for example?
NS Absolutely. The first event that we did, I think lots of them claim this, so you probably can’t quote me on it, but it’s said that it was the first event that men and women could attend together. At that time, even for myself traveling out there, I was very concerned. We had to give all sorts of bits of really scary information for anyone traveling, you know, don’t travel with medicine in your bag, don’t travel with two passports. All those things that have now kind of calmed down, people travel out to Saudi as a normal thing.
Obviously, there’s other considerations. At the time, as a female, we weren’t allowed to travel in a taxi unchaperoned and we still had to wear the abaya, we had to cover our hair, all those things. By the time we went back after Covid, that was all gone. Now it’s so much easier to travel there. I mean, I didn’t even really think that hard about what was in my suitcase when I was traveling backwards and forwards towards the end. I obviously made sure there wasn’t a bottle of wine in there!
It must be a challenge for some.
NS Well, exactly. It’s so easy to just forget or maybe not be told. It’s become so much more frequent for travellers to go there, it’s so much easier to get a visa. When we first went, getting the staff, if they were female, if they were in the LGBTQ groups, then they had reservations. But people have seen that other people have been and there’s no issues.
There’s less concern around those issues now?
NS People still have concerns about human rights or they have personal objections to traveling or working in that region. Of course, that’s someone’s personal choice, that’s up to them, but it’s less and less frequent.
Is Soundstorm and ongoing thing for Ginger Owl?
NS For our company, we’ve retracted ourselves from that for the time being.
I think I did three years out there and I probably had no days off. We needed to adjust the work life balance for our company and kind of redirect things for ourselves. There was so much demand out there that we weren’t able to do as much for Ginger Owl as my time was completely dedicated over there. We finished our contracts in March there, and we made the decision to come back to the UK, focus the platform and UK based business. We will work in the region again; We’ve got other things, other customers and some events in Saudi.
JC We’ll have a winter off basically. You know, we may be back there next winter. Like Nancy said, work life balance and look at where we’re going as a company, because you’re not able to do anything else when you’re working across the UK market and the Middle East market. We had three years of never being able to plan or have any time off or do things differently. It was just a constant sort of hamster wheel of working.
NS And we were under quite a lot of pressure to do our commercial registration, to set up over there. That would have meant me being over there and Julie being over here. I’ve got three children who all live in the UK, so that would have been difficult. We just decided that it was a tipping point, and we could have gone that way and had Ginger Owl Saudi or whatever we wanted to call it, and Ginger Owl UK, but really we just wanted to of focus on the UK and bring it back to that.
Like you said, you can say no.
JC Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s been a big lesson for us. When you’re getting to the point where, literally, and it sounds like a joke, but I don’t think Nancy and I had a day off. You’re talking Monday to Sunday, seven in the morning, ’til 11, 12 at night with people contacting you all the time for three years. Nancy and I are strong, strong women but you can’t work forever, and be in demand forever.
You mentioned the platform. What’s the platform?
JC Well, we’ve been working on event technology for a few years now, and we’ve had a few goes at building various things. But this year we took the decision to make the investment with a wonderful development agency who we’ve been working with to build a platform that works across our key functions.
Accreditation, obviously, we’re known for and we lots of work in that field. Not only pulling in names for events, it’s also issuing health and safety inductions, gathering vehicle information, catering, scanning, access control, the whole thing. Also, artist liaison and advancing with artists, all of the key stuff that they need; guest list, advance information, offering itineraries out.
We’ve got ideas for the future and more development things that we want it to do for us as a company, the functions we offer our clients. It’s really exciting times; we love where it’s at at the moment and we’ve got really exciting ideas for the future. All our team’s involved, we want them to go and do events and say, how can we automate? How can we make this better? How can we make this really smooth for our clients, for our artists and that we’re looking after and for ourselves and our staff?
We’ve already got four events using it and many more to come. It’s just really exciting.
What’s the name of the platform?
GO All Areas.
NS We didn’t realise when we set up the company that we made it super easy for ourselves by making our initials GO, because it goes before everything else.
So GO is just Ginger Owl, in short.
Yeah, I don’t think we actually properly started using it or even realized it until we got to 10. We did GO:10
We’d used it for GO Crew before that hadn’t we?
Is this a platform that other people can license rent, buy, subscribe to?
JC We don’t offer a dry hire at the moment, so you have to have our staff to run it if you want to use it.
We’re not just purely a technology company. Like a lot of the offerings out there that just license a product and off you go. Our model is that we offer a 360 solution. So if you want accreditation, for example, we run your accreditation, we use our platform to run it. Same with our liaison; we will bring our staff along and then we will use this platform to make it great for our staff, you as a client and the artists who are the recipient. I think that is highly likely how it’s going to stay. There’s lots of tech companies out there that just offer tech, but that’s slightly different to what we want to offer.
Do you both have a stand out ‘earth, please swallow me up’ moment from your careers?
NS I can think of mine immediately, when I lost my entire David Gilmour ticketing spreadsheet for the run of the entire shows at the Albert Hall, The whole thing just disappeared, and I never got it back. I had to rebuild the whole thing. Yeah, I could have exploded happily that day.
JC Oh, God. I’m trying to think. Um.
Julie, ‘my life has been perfect so far’ Chennells?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just think I’ve got a really bad memory.
Maybe it’s just blocking out the bad memories. What about the opposite end of the spectrum, the ‘pinch me am I dreaming’ moment?
NS Oh, God.
I think we’ve probably had quite a few of those, haven’t we?
Yeah. This is the wrong industry to ask for just one of those, isn’t it?
NS Yeah, we never expected any of what’s happened in our career. I think we just don’t really operate like that.
JC This was before Ginger Owl, but we both worked on it because obviously we have worked together since 1998, but it was working on Live 8. I think that was pretty huge for me, just because growing up, Live Aid had been such a big deal. Live 8 for me was actually when I’d left Harvey’s. But you were still at Harvey’s, weren’t you, Nancy?
NS Yeah, I did one more year after that.
JC I don’t think you get much bigger than that. That show had pretty much every icon, half of which who are dead now. If I look back at it, you know, that was a moment.
NS I was working in Harvey’s office listening to Bob Geldof screaming all day long, just over there, making it work in six weeks or however long it was that we did it.
JC Yeah, just craziness.
I think, and this isn’t a contrived answer, but I think winning the award that you gave us last year, it was wonderful but I think it made us realise, because we aren’t the sort of people who are very good at celebrating our successes; I think it made us focus on the fact that we have done ten years and we have done really well. You know, neither of us have any links to the music business, we didn’t have any ins, we didn’t have any help getting where we are. So the fact that we’ve got where we’ve got is something we should be proud of. And I think we don’t often offer ourselves that moment, you know. So I think to have someone else to say no, you know, stop and think about where you’ve got is a pinch me moment.
It’s just a shame that you had to fly over from Riyadh for 24 hours to just have that moment.
NS Well, of course, I was happy to.
JC It’s very hard to enjoy these moments when you’re always working. And I think that’s the problem is when you’re always working, you don’t get to enjoy it so much anymore, you know? Which is why I want to get we want to get back to that moment of being able to be bask in what you’ve achieved. We should be able to at this point.
It’s good to know that that printed chunk of bamboo can just make you stop and realize for a minute that what you’ve done is quite a significant thing.
NS Oh, it definitely does. Mine is just here to the left side of my desk. We quite frequently receive emails from people who are looking for work or who say because of your female management team or your female led company, we find you really inspiring; it’s really nice to receive those. But twice last week I actually got emails from people who were writing to us about other things, but just say thanks for everything that you do. And we never really think of ourselves as doing anything or championing things, but I think people obviously perceive that we do. So, it’s quite nice to kind of be recognized in that way, because I never would have thought of myself in that way.
Do you enjoy introducing people to such an exciting industry?
JC Yeah, absolutely.
NS I think so. I do think so. I think, you know, even if you have a little impact on someone’s career or development, and if the thing that we bring to their development is to be nice and work cooperatively and have the Ginger Owl way about them, then that’s definitely a success for the industry for sure.
Are you thinking that in ten years time, there’ll be people running businesses that describe themselves as Ginger Owl alumni, just like you describe yourself as Harvey alumni.
NC 100% there will.
One final question that puts you on the spot again. Give me three words to describe the Ginger Owl journey so far.
NS Oh, God. Challenging, exciting…I’ll let Julie choose the last one.
JC What ours was based on, although it’s been less so the last couple of years, is fun. You know, me and Nancy, when we were younger and where we started, we just used to laugh all day long in whatever role we were doing. And that’s something that I want to desperately keep hold of, that what we do is enjoyable and fun. We work to the highest possible standard, but we’re enjoying it.
That’s challenging, exciting, fun; three words to put on the top of your recruitment adverts.
Yeah. Keeping the the enjoyment element has always been very critical to Julie and me. We’ve probably taken it a bit further than we should have sometimes, gone a bit too far with the fun element, but it is important. I know business is business, but business doesn’t have to be dry.
A great philosophy to end on, thank you so much for taking the time to talk.
Oh, no. Thank you.
