Year End Results
A punchy titled blog for a Friday afternoon designed for even the sleepiest weekday commuter to click on. Or maybe not. Either way, we’re excited at esk as we are delighted to announce our year end results for our first ever year of trading. And it is good news! Headlines as follows:
We produced over 100 shows in 12 countries
Revenue was £234k (GBP)/$300k (USD)
EBIT was 4%
It has been an exciting year and we’re thankful to all our stakeholders for getting us off to a great start. Developing a start-up in any landscape is challenging, however, even more so during a pandemic. We are a live entertainment and screen producer and the live entertainment and screen industries were particularly hard hit as explored in previous blogs. Therefore, to focus on sales and growth we went back to 101 business basics. This blog explores that a little.
Firstly, we focussed on our strengths. Our co-founders between them have a strong array of skills and were already in demand throughout the live entertainment industry as producers, technicians and consultants. We therefore recognised our strength was in our people and advertised their skills and services to key partners. This led to a large increase in sales over a short period.
Secondly, we looked at our weaknesses. We knew we had very little capital and couldn’t compete with large industry players. We therefore developed shows and content we knew weren’t in the wider marketplace. For this we settled on Film with Orchestra shows and used our skills as salespeople, producers and technicians to produce events for orchestras, venues and promoters across Europe. This led to deals with major studios and promoters to produce their films for live shows such as ‘Jurassic Park Live’, ‘Home Alone' Live’ and ‘Star Wars Live’.
Thirdly, our opportunities. The live entertainment industry was just opening up after the pandemic and our larger rivals were focussing on debt obligations and high employee turnover. We were a young start-up that could be flexible and react to bookings and rescheduled events at the last minute. This meant we became trusted as an organisation and could leverage that trust to capitalise on further sales opportunities.
And yes, finally, you guessed it, our threats. Our main threat was cashflow. New businesses need cash and we focussed on the essentials: collecting money as fast as possible and making sure our cashflow forecasts were as accurate as possible. This meant we could plan our spending carefully and ensure we didn’t let down key stakeholders by paying any bills late.
It isn’t overly complex and has been the strategy for many a startup. The next challenge is to develop our strong start to further capitalise on opportunities that mean we can rapidly scale up as a business. Hopefully we’ll have further good news to report 12 months from now!
