What I Learnt about Engaging Suppliers When Setting up a New Event

I’ve been working in hospitality since I took a job at my local tea rooms when I was 14, and fell in love with it instantly. Since then I’ve worked for some of the country’s best chefs, including Gordon Ramsey and Clare Smyth. I met my husband working for a top restaurant and we spent two years living and working in Paris, soaking up the atmosphere in the world’s gastronomic capital. 

But throughout our careers, we realised that hospitality in the UK didn’t have a space where professionals could meet, discuss and learn from each other to examine the industry and how best to move it forward. We began to see there was a gap in the market. More than that, there was a real need for a safe, positive environment for hospitality professionals to come together to celebrate, collaborate and change their industry from within.

We started talking to friends about the possibility of creating an event. When the guys at Duchess Farms in Hertfordshire offered their farm as the PX+’s home, it became clear that this could be a viable event. 

To make it a reality though, we needed to engage with suppliers. This is how we went about it:

Planning

When we started planning PX+ there were 14 professionals on the original committee, each with their own idea of what the festival would look like, coming together from different angles, with different needs, so that was a challenge in itself to make sure everyone was heard and everyone’s requirements and needs were planned for.

The plan was incredibly important, but it was also very flexible, because as we were going along we all found we’d like to add bits, or take bits away, so we knew we needed flexibility and we knew we needed suppliers, or partners as we called them, who understood that the festival had a life of its own.

As we spoke to new headliners and contributors, the festival continued to change, so this sense of a shifting plan was an integral part of our festival, especially in the first year.

The Vision

We wanted to wow the industry. 

It all came down to guest experience for us. We were inviting the best and brightest of hospitality talent in the UK.  We knew that these amazing people worked everyday in the country’s best restaurants, hotels and events. They were being invited to a farm in the heart of the Hertfordshire countryside, for an event that was dedicated to them and their industry. If they weren’t bowled over, we’d have failed. 

It was really important that every single element of the festival was of a consistently high standard, and therefore every supplier and partner had to lift that experience up, to make it the best of the best.

Reaching Out

We then started to draw up a list of possible supplier/partners: who is going to want to go with us on this journey, to understand what we want to achieve and is able to help us do that?

We created a long list of brands we thought would want to be involved. We were careful about how we started the conversations with these suppliers – we made sure they could understand our vision and our dream of what the festival could be.

As it had never been done before, it was really trying to sell an idea to the suppliers, but one which was built on our team’s experience in hospitality. We wanted to connect with the suppliers we reached out to, so that we could draw on their expertise and knowledge to make it a reality.

We worked with this larger group, asking for proposals and for their input into what the festival could be, and then went back to those who we felt showed they understood our values and needs to invite them to be part of the event.

This approach worked for us, because it allowed us to get to know the suppliers, build a relationship with them and, most importantly, build a sense of trust and mutual respect. This trust made a huge difference when we moved onto the next stage: detailed planning and final preparations.

Detailed Planning

Once we had our list of suppliers, the real work began.

The key for us was maintaining a dialogue with all of our suppliers so that we could learn from them and improve every element of the event.

So we looked at kitchen infrastructure, walking the site with our supplier, PKL, and examining what groundworks we needed to put in place for our water supply and to ensure a safe kitchen space. We spent time looking at our power needs, the flow of people, the temporary structures, the refrigeration needs of our food suppliers, what AV setup our speaking guests expected and what was plausible in the spaces we had allocated for talks.

We leaned on our suppliers for their knowledge and their hints and tips, learning what was possible, what was economically prudent, what decisions would have unwanted knockon effects and where best to invest to improve the overall festival experience.

Working with our suppliers was always a dialogue, information and requests flowing in both directions, negotiating, informing and sometimes clashing, but always moving towards our shared goal: a great event that achieved our objectives.

The Event

The event was an absolute whirlwind, and for the first few hours we couldn’t really believe this idea we’d had was now happening. But then, as the weekend went on, we realised that it was achieving what we wanted and our guests were reacting incredibly positively to the experiences we had created.

Our vision had become a reality.

This was only possible because we built relationships with our suppliers in a way which promoted trust, encouraged sharing and focussed everyone on the outcomes we wanted at the event. That gave us access to the expertise of our suppliers and allowed them to give us honest, constructive advice based on real-world experience.

Our supplier relationships made our event experience possible.

The Next Steps

We are now in the middle of final planning for this year’s event, and we haven’t stopped learning, and we haven’t stopped the dialogue with our suppliers.

We will be bringing in new elements, changing the focus of some areas, and tweaking our ways of working from last year, but many of our relationships with suppliers remain in place and they are working to create something even better from last year because they have invested in us and we have invested in our joint relationship, all focussed on making PX+ the best it can be.

Conclusion

We followed a very straightforward process when engaging with our suppliers:

1) Formulate a plan that focuses on outcomes
2) Reach out to suppliers and invite them to engage with a dialogue on the possibilities of the event, allowing you to build relationships
3) Choose your suppliers and then begin detailed planning, listening and adapting your plans based on their knowledge
4) Maintain the relationships with suppliers and build on them to make the next event even better

By Katie Bone, Director of PX+ Festival