Success Interview with Abbi Leibert

Success Interview with Abbi Leibert

Welcome to success interviews. These are where I chat to fellow female business owners and freelancers to find out more about why they started their businesses and how they measure success. In this post, I’m joined by Abbi, who’s a freelance events content producer and event producer.

Interview Transcript

I’m an event producer. I’ve been working in events since I was at school. I helped do the school plays and I worked in a hotel where we did weddings and parties. When I left school, I moved away to study but not at university and carried on, I did club night promotion and started dj’ing and then eventually I moved to London thinking it’d be really easy to get an event job but apparently everyone wanted to work in events.

Why did you start your business?

I was applying to every tiny little horrendously paid job that there was and not getting anywhere. I finally phoned someone and said – I’ve applied for the job with you and I just wanted some feedback because I haven’t heard anything and they just said to me, have you got a degree? When I said no they said that they were getting so many CVs they had to filter somehow and I realised that without a degree I wasn’t going to get a job. Even a crappy one, there was too much competition.

So, I went and did an event degree. This was in 2003, it was the very first year that event degrees existed in the UK and I did it as a combined honours with music and business because I had a music background. No one in the event industry at the time gave a monkeys about this degree. I would go around trade shows, give them my CV saying I was a student and they would just laugh. Now there are graduate programmes everywhere, it’s a really good degree.

At the time. I don’t think it included what it should have done and it was a lot of leisure and tourism stuff based on hypothetical Olympics, which we didn’t know was actually going to happen for us. It didn’t really prepare me for event life but I knew this and I slugged through it, it’s what I wanted to do but I still couldn’t get an event events job in an event agency even with my degree.

Afterwards, I got a job as an entertainment agent and spent 5 years working for a company that started with just me and my boss in a very small office in Finchley. By the time I left a few years later, there were 7 of us in the office and we were doing hundreds of events all over the world. It was pretty cool. Then I went from there into production because I was doing more and more of going out with the performers to events because we were doing bigger and bigger shows and I was having to programme them and decide who was going to be on and then stage manage and I just loved being on-site and loved actually seeing the event happen and not just sitting in the office, booking people in. So, I got into production and I’ve carried on ever since.

The reason that I freelanced is an interesting one because the reason’s changed over the years. I’ve been freelancing since 2016 and I started my first production job in 2012. Around that time, I worked full time in a big agency and we did loads of events for the government, loads of Olympics-related events with Red Bull and Puma and big brands that I was just so excited to be there and be involved in but I soon came to realise that I was being overworked, underpaid and I was struggling with burnout. I was struggling with working in a big office where there were too many of us for the building. They should have been in a bigger building it was too noisy. We were crammed in elbow to elbow, it was fun and I learned an awful lot by being thrown in at the deep end and swimming really well.

After 2 years I felt I deserved a promotion, so I started looking for a job elsewhere. I had a lot of interviews and would get through to the last two people and then wasn’t the one that was chosen. So, I stayed at the same agency for another two years because I couldn’t do the emotional turmoil of constant job hunting and after four years I’d had enough. I went through it again and again, three jobs in a row where I got to the last one. I was walking to one event agency to sign my contract and they called me to tell me that they’d changed their mind and I was devastated. I’d really had enough. Then I did get another job, started working at that agency and they made all of us redundant after three months of me being there.

I just thought, what are the other options? Freelancing? That was it, it was terrifying at the time because it wasn’t something I’d thought of doing. I wasn’t prepared for it but I did it anyway. It was necessity and emotional turmoil.

A couple of years in, I had worked with quite a few different agencies and realised that the problems were not just with the agencies. There is a culture in events of overwork, underpay if you can get away with it. Nobody talks about rates. Nobody talks about what they were getting paid. There is no standard job title or pay bracket from agency to agency.

So, I decided to start my own agency because I wanted to put my money where my mouth was and create an agency that worked how I wished agencies worked and I did really well with word-of-mouth work for the first two years and then when those contracts had to go back out to tender and I didn’t get them, I realised I don’t like schmoozing, I don’t like marketing. I know how to do it all but I just hate it so much that I didn’t bother and slowly but surely I was taking on freelance work.

I read a book that a friend suggested to me because I’m a bit of a workaholic and it’s called the Underachievers Manifesto. I read this book and it sits in my downstairs toilet for anyone else who wants to read it and the general gist was who are you trying to impress? What are you doing all of this for? What’s your motivation? Who cares if you are a bin man or a dentist, or a doctor or a teacher? Who matters? I’m the only one that really matters. It’s nice of your parents to be proud of you but I’m a full grown 35 year old adult. I realised that I have always been looking for the next thing and actually the next thing isn’t even what I want you just keep going to be the best that you can and the best that I can be is an event producer. I don’t want to be chasing up the ladder. I just want to pick the jobs, the clients and the agencies that I like working with.

How do you measure success?

I used to measure success in terms of money and status and it’s really nice to earn more money but I also now weigh them up with my mental health and happiness. When I was younger, the important things were to get up the career ladder, to be the best that you could, to earn as much money as you possibly could, to have the respect of your peers and be recognised for what you do.

I do still value those things but they are not the most important. Now it’s happiness, my mental health and that I feel fulfilled in my work, I don’t all the time because I’m still a bit of a workaholic and I’m nose to the grindstone, churning work out but every now and again I’ll get a project that I actually really am emotionally connected to and really proud of. Those jobs are great, more of those would be great.

What one tip would you give to your younger self?

There’s lots of things that I would love my younger self to have avoided happening but at the same time, I wouldn’t be where I am without them happening. So, I don’t know that I have a whole lot of advice. I’d probably just let it all happen but I think no is a word that’s OK to use in life. I think a lot of people are scared, you don’t have to people please and that your work is not your worth.

All things, bad and good, they all shape you and make you more resilient. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. It’s all life experience and it helps you be very empathetic and sympathetic to other people and understand where other people are coming from as well. So just throw yourself into it.

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