Susannah Daley takes the businesslike approach to showbiz, despite stormy seas.
Susannah Daley was told at theatre school that she was a businesswoman rather than an artist. Insulted then, this is now something she holds in esteem.
From winning the BBC’s Young Playwright of the Year award when she was 12 years old, through youth theatre and arts college, Daley has evolved her love of theatre into a £4.5m turnover family business.
Partnership Entertainment Events Limited (PEEL) now mainly provides entertainment packages for cruise ships, but is looking to expand after ten years in the business.
Daley first set up with her mother Mollie, also a writer, in 1993. The Daley Partnership was an acting company with about 30 actors which wrote and performed educational productions for venues including Bronte Parsonage, Tetley’s Brewery Wharf and Blackpool Tower, following a successful pilot project with Bradford’s National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, now the National Media Museum.
During the day, the company would put on educational tours for children, such as performing the story of the building of Blackpool Tower, and in the evening entertain corporate guests with, for example, the history of food and drink in Tetley’s Brewery Wharf.
“During that time somebody asked us if we would be interested in pitching for a cruise ship,” Daley says. “I’d never been on a cruise ship so I thought I wouldn’t know what to do.” But they pitched for it anyway. “Although we were enjoying our work in museums and heritage centres, the National Lottery had given a lot of money to start-up projects and there were places opening left, right and centre. But there was no funding to keep them going and things were getting tight. It was a good time to branch out and do something else,” she adds.
And the contract went on to change the whole face of the business. The company got a great response and made a name for itself with cruise providers including Thomson Cruises, First Choice, Island Cruises, Festival Cruise Lines and Fred Olsen.
In 1999 it became limited company PEEL. “It’s all about providing this educational experience that is also fantastic entertainment. It’s truthful and not just some random thing thrown together.” PEEL’s philosophy is to look after its visitors from start to finish, providing day and night entertainment, including cabarets, plays, interactive games, sports, music and comedies, not a stand alone show. “Just a show doesn’t mean anything in itself,” she says.
PEEL continues to win cruise ship contracts, including an exciting new concept for DFDS Seaways’ cruises from Newcastle to Amsterdam. The concept is to provide a means of transport but also a good experience, says Daley, which might be a dance convention where visitors learn to dance and have an evening on the ship or a photography course, with time for visitors to practice what they’ve learnt in Amsterdam.
“I would like to expand,” Daley says. “I would look at managing some venues, because it’s lovely to see a theatre or civic hall not just as a building but with a flavour of culture. Also, we’ve got such a huge database of actors, singers and dancers. In the past we’ve resisted hiring them out to other people because we’ve always needed every one of them. But maybe in the future we will.
“We have so many ideas we talk about all the time and we develop them all the time, it’s not something we do as a separate thing,” Daley says. “Both from the work we do and from running a business I get such a buzz. I love running a business and dealing with accountants, lawyers and corporate structures.”
Daley positions the business as having a ‘businesslike approach to showbiz’ and is passionate about the mechanics of the business as well as the product. A lot of small limited companies don’t really use their boards very well. We meet regularly and report to the board. It’s a fantastic discipline when you have to say out loud, this is our strategy and turnover. It absolutely makes you think.”
And such an approach has paid off. “I was told when I started ‘pay as much as you can afford to pay and a little bit more for your lawyer’. This paid off in our first year when they negotiated increased fees of 10 per cent for being exclusive to Thomson. They can also put you in touch with someone else who can think around a problem in a different way.
“I’m just as interested in what my lawyer and accountant can do with the business as the choreographers and musical director. It sets us apart from other production companies at our level that are run entirely by artists but have commercial limitations.”
These same advisers put Daley in touch with Warner Country Hotels, a hotel group that needed a bit of refreshing to stay afloat.
“All their hotels had fantastic histories so our teams of actors perform short histories about the servants, or the histories of the Earls or the people who built them.
“When the company was younger I just got my head down and got busy. I couldn’t imagine we’d still be around in ten years. It was too hard for a start and I made a lot of sacrifices along the way to do it.
“That’s the deal when you’re an owner of a business. Now we’re ten years old, I still never lose that sense that it could all stop tomorrow. But if we’ve got to ten, we’ve got to be doing something right.”
But it wasn’t all plain sailing for Daley. The terrorist attack on the twin towers on 11 September 2001 sparked a dramatic time for the business.
“We were working with a company based in Italy and Greece and we knew they were going to be slow to pay because they were expanding very fast and cash flow was a problem. But it was a good business. But after 2001, people from the US, which was a big part of the market, stopped crossing the Atlantic. What was slow cash flow became non-existent cash flow, which seriously affected us.
“I remember one weekend coming back from Greece physically shaking with fear and thinking ‘why did I think I could do this?’ I went and saw the other members of my family, and Monday morning talked to the accountants and lawyers and got the board up. As a team we worked out how to manage the crisis.”
Excepting interest PEEL got every penny it was owed back. “We were so close to losing everything. But we got through it by working together and by asking advice. I haven’t got all the answers myself, I don’t even know all the questions, you just have to keep listening to other people.”
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