During a crisis, incentives and motivations change, potentially leading to new cooperative behaviors and even to the creation of new systems or structures. Crises can get the collective adrenaline flowing, focusing minds to solve the problem at hand.

Here is our story.....

Pre Pandemic

Dynamic Events was founded 25 years ago and has specialised in providing team building and event management services to the corporate market. We are a small, relatively successful company that was delivering 400 events in a typical year. In the first 4 months of 2021 we have already exceeded this figure.

The events in 2019 are the same to the events in 2021 in that they all provide an outlet that promotes human connection and employee engagement but the method of delivery has changed which has allowed us to scale and reach new markets.

Reasons for success

• Smart, dynamic, professional team of people
• Continuous investment in business systems and event technology pre and during the pandemic
• Global network of likeminded business

Crisis Mode

The company went into a shock shut down in March 2020 but we turned things around in a relatively short space of time and repositioned ourselves to not only survive the pandemic but reinventing our delivery methods which has allowed us scale and export our services to a global market. We’ve are on track for a 4 fold increase in output, during a pandemic, while similar companies and our competitors are in shutdown or survival mode.

2020 started off no different to any other year. We had a successful January and the outlook was looking good for the summer with many events solidly booked in the calendar. We were aware of the corona virus outbreak in China, it was insignificant, but it really started to hit home when it first appeared in Europe in February. This is when we noticed lower turnouts on international business events taking place in Dublin. The events where people from around Europe would travel to Dublin for their sales kick off for example. Large organisations started to impose their own travel bans on their employees. The likes of Microsoft and Google were asking their employees not to travel to other countries. This then lead to same organisations instructing employees to work from home.

Once this happened, fear began to spread among our customers who had events booked in. The phone and email queries were flying in asking about refund options on their deposits and then this very quickly turned into the cancellations. €160,000 of secure bookings was either cancelled or postponed in less than a week and then the final nail was hammered home when Leo Varadkar gave his famous speech a few days before St. Patrick’s Day. All of our bookings are now wiped and sales reduce to zero. We have no prospects and there is no business.

Focusing Minds to solve the Problem at Hand.

We didn’t have many options available to us, but we were determined to do something. Cost cutting was the first thing to prevent the company becoming insolvent. We forensically examined all of our outgoings, temporarily lay off half of our employees, seek temporary moratoriums on our loans, lease etc.

Imagine & Plan

We are part of a global network of like-minded team building companies, so this is where we started. We attended weekly zoom meetings to brainstorm ideas on how we could move our services online. We identified that we had customers in dire need of employee engagement, but we had no way to deliver it. After much thought and collaboration we figured it out.

Within days we had launched our Remote Series of Team Building Events. We were able to bring these options to the clients to prevent them from canceling their in-person event. We strategically priced the online versions at less than 50% of the in-person events to make them attractive.

Our first paid booking came in April and we started to build a reputation over the summer as a professional deliverer of online social events for the corporate Market. Our key message was “Connecting colleagues online while they are working apart”. Employee engagement had become more important than ever, and we had the answers.

We would deliver between 1 to 5 online events a week between April and August and bearing in mind Summer is when we are usually at max capacity with Company Away Days, Corporate BBQ’s, Family Days etc so to be delivering three or four online events per week was only barely keeping the lights on.

September is when we started to notice a noticeable uplift in demand. The fact we positioned ourselves so early in the pandemic put us in pole position to benefit from the impending online event boom. We were up to 10 events per week in September, this grew to 20 events per week in October. At this point all of our employees are back to work. 40 event per week in November culminating in 111 events in one week running into Christmas. We even had to hire in extra staff to facilitate the demand.

We were experiencing this hockey stick growth from having nothing in March to handling 200 enquiries per week in December and this continued into 2021 and beyond.

Sometimes a business needs a crisis.