Everyone loves a good party but is it really worth spashing out a fortune on a corporate jolly? Stuart Anderson investigates.

In a previous incarnation as an insurance journalist I was whisked off to Iceland on a private jet by a software company on the tenuous premise that its product was called “24/7 Broking” and we were visiting the Land of the Midnight Sun.

That was probably the most lavish corporate entertainment I have enjoyed to-date – but what good did it do the hosts? It generated plenty of column inches in the trade press at the time but when the host company was acquired three years later, the announcement made no mention of this new “flagship” product. I’m not sure, either, that I ever spoke to anyone I had met on the trip again.

It just goes to show, it’s not always the amount you spend, or even how great a time your guests have, that counts when it comes to corporate hospitality. Sometimes a half-decent lunch and a couple of bottles of Chateau Laplonque can repay themselves many times over compared to the price of a private box at the Albert Hall.

It’s a very personal thing, entertainment, and one client’s fun day out is another’s legal action for post traumatic stress disorder. It’s not surprising, then, that the region’s entrepreneurs don’t always see eye-to-eye on what makes the best beano.

What they do tend to agree on, though, is that you need to put plenty of thought into how your event will go down with the attendees you have in mind.

John Wakeford, one third of the trio behind Manchester and Leeds-based executive headhunter Hitchenor Wakeford (the other partners being Adrian Hitchenor and David Tunna), is very keen on golf days. “I’ve attended some pretty good ones that have been very successful, and hosted them too,” he says.

“But you have to be careful who you invite. I can’t understand it myself but some people are actually insulted by the inference that they might be golfers.”

He doesn’t believe in hosting events for prospective clients, either. “For networking purposes I’d rather subscribe to an event someone else is organising,” he says. “I wouldn’t host an event and invite people I didn’t know. As well as the golf days, we take people to York races and test matches at Headingley, but that’s to cement relationships with our best customers.”

“We also host our own small, targeted dinners, costing maybe £1,000, where we’ll take a private room at a restaurant and invite ten people,” he continues. “Last year during the World Cup we hired an Indian restaurant and put up big screens – that was very successful.”

He is not, however, a big fan of gala dinners. “Taking tables at some of the bigger events hasn’t worked,” he says.

“They can be less successful in getting attendees along, they are too structured and the speakers aren’t always up to scratch. If you’re sat next to someone you’ve got nothing in common with that can also turn a good event into a crap one.”

This raises two points. The first is that, if you’re going to invite a bunch of clients and contacts to a sit-down event it’s worth putting at least the same kind of thought into who is sat next to whom as you would, say, at your wedding. The other is that if the primary purpose of the event is to speak to your guests, rather than just giving them a jolly, there’s no point taking them to the Royal Ballet.

Wakeford’s complaint about the quality of speakers is taken up by Alan Horridge, the former Americana International managing director who is now chief executive of Altrincham-based sports kit firm Footie Chick. His worst ever experience of corporate “entertainment”, he says, was at the hands of an accountancy firm that invited him to a dinner at Manchester Town Hall.

“The main speaker was some Manchester councillor who proceeded to tell us all in the most dreary monotone voice about how they were applying for some special status under some European initiative, about which he felt we would all be very interested in the minutest detail,” he recalls. “To alleviate the tedium, me and my neighbours on our table proceeded to drink as much as we could – and ended up giggling uncontrollably as the speaker reached point 96 in his 153 point diatribe.”

He does, however, admit that another dinner was the best event he ever attended, so he isn’t against the genre per se.

Dani Maxton, whose Lymm-based business selling investment properties in Cyprus turns over around £4 million, reckons sporting events are the best for impressing the developers with whom her business deals.

“We tend to do football a lot – we take ad-hoc hospitality tickets at Manchester United. We also do things like Chester races and Ascot,” she says.

“We’ll also take people out to Cyprus, but we wouldn’t just do a meal or even a table at an event,” she continues.
Maxton, like Wakeford, arranges her own corporate entertainment, rather than paying a specialist firm to do it for her. She does, though, have a secret weapon: “I used to work in the commercial department at Manchester United, dealing with matchday hospitality.”

For those who think deals are best done in an atmosphere of sweat and testosterone, meanwhile, one Manchester firm is resurrecting a once-popular form of entertainment that died out during the touchy-feely 1990s.
Father-and-son Tom (a lawyer with Shammah Nicholls) and Ben Jones own a boxing gym in Newton Heath and are planning to capitalise on their contacts, and the sport’s increased popularity thanks to Ricky Hatton, to run boxing dinners at Old Trafford.

The standard format will include an after-dinner speaker and four bouts of professional boxing. What EN is really looking forward to witnessing, though, is another idea the Joneses have for the future – a white collar boxing programme, where the region’s advisors and entrepreneurs get to knock seven bells out of each other.

What, though, is the purpose of all this hospitality? Sodexho Prestige, the UK’s largest event caterer, last year conducted research among corporate hospitality bookers, 64 per cent of whom said that corporate entertainment had become part of their sales strategy over the previous two years. Fifty-five per cent of respondents said they measured return on investment for corporate hospitality on a regular, ongoing basis.

But is it really possible to measure concrete outcomes from a single event? As a guest, are you likely to do more business with someone simply because they took you clay pigeon shooting or fed you a particularly tender piece of beef?

“Of course not,” says Horridge. “These things aren’t usually about the direct business you generate – but they are about the contacts you make who may be useful at some point in the future.”

And what about the other side of the coin? How much damage can a really bad event do to you? Possibly not that much, on the surface at least, according to Keith Curran, managing director of Levenshulme-based Yes Telecom. He says he is turned off by junkets with a “false” feel where everything is run according to a detailed script, rather than a more relaxed, flowing and personal atmosphere”.

“You also tend to find the host feels they have to show you the world in one day and the whole thing is spoilt as there are a massive amount of things done in an average way as opposed to a few things done really well,” he continues. “Also with these trips the host makes the presumption that everyone is happy to do exactly what is planned and there are no alternatives if you find it really isn’t your cup of tea.”

But would being invited on a dodgy beano actually harm long-term relations with a supplier or advisor? “To be honest it doesn’t necessarily mean that I do any less business with that company but it may prompt me to question their ability to plan and execute,” he says.

Of course, not all entertainment is about schmoozing clients (although for tax reasons it can be a cunning idea to invite someone from outside the organisation along to staff away days to make it look a bit more like “work” for all involved).
For retail and similar businesses the annual conference can be a major item of corporate expenditure – and some companies choose to use it as a way of rewarding staff.

For instance Inventive Leisure, the company founded by Roy Ellis that operates the Revolution chain of vodka bars, runs separate twice yearly conferences for bar managers, deputies and assistants. In the past managers have been taken to New York, Miami and Marrakech for their conferences. Deputies and assistants are also often taken abroad – the assistants all recently went to Dublin.

Human resources director Ian Cockill admits that, exchange rates being what they are, the Dublin trip probably ended up costing more per head than the more glamorous Moroccan junket. The latter trip had a budget in the region of £100,000 for 200 staff.

For a company like Inventive Leisure it is obviously important to get staff together to share experiences and ideas once in a while, but why not just book a Jury’s Inn in Birmingham? “We like to make it a talking point,” Cockill says. “It’s a legends and myths kind of thing. For instance our Moroccan event included a night camping in Bedouin tents in the desert. It started pouring with rain, the sand was blowing through the tents. People just remember that and will be talking about it for years.”

While he does not believe that such trips necessarily help with staff retention, he does believe that taking the firm’s managers to cities – such as Barcelona – with a buzzing nightlife will both inspire them and give them ideas they can adapt to their own bars.

Inventive Leisure doesn’t employ an events management firm to arrange these trips. “We organise them ourselves,” Cockill says. “We use local people – for instance Roy [Ellis] got a local contact in Morocco to organise the Bedouin trip.

“Usually one of us will go out in advance to ensure everything is in order before the main event.”

If it’s a toss-up between paying through the nose for an events management business to spend a week checking out hotels and bars in New York or going out to do it yourself, the choice doesn’t seem all that difficult, does it?

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