For Thom Hetherington, the leap into business ownership arrived twice, and both times redundancy did the shoving. The first came at 24, just after he'd bought his first house. The second came years later, with a doer-upper on his hands and a first child on the way. This time, the redundancy led him to acquire Northern Restaurant and Bar (NRB), a struggling young trade show he would go on to build into the definitive hospitality event for the North of England.

Some founders spend years building up to the leap of launching on their own. For Bill Hammond, the moment arrived all at once, in the form of a redundancy letter and a wife who was fairly sure he should stop working for other people's events and start building his own.

Bill spent over two decades in the tech sector, most of it in B2B publishing, before founding Big Data LDN in 2015. He built the event from a first edition that wildly outgrew expectations, through a pandemic that nearly derailed the exit yet ended up accelerating it, to a sale just six years after launch.

In this post, he shares what it took to build his brand from scratch, why he wishes he'd taken social media more seriously in 2016, and what he'd tell anyone thinking about going it alone.

Some founders discover their idea in a flash of inspiration. Others get there the harder way – through a failed consumer show, a room full of frustrated exhibitors, and one voice cutting through the noise with exactly the right words at exactly the wrong moment.

Jason Franks spent twenty years running events in corporate life before launching EMEX and UKME. Both sold. One to Mark Allen Exhibitions, one to Easyfairs. Along the way, he built a family-like founding team, stayed lean past £2m in turnover, and survived a due diligence process he describes – without much affection – as having been invented by sadistic lawyers and accountants.

Serge Dive launched This is Beyond after a safari to Africa in 2005 changed his perspective. A decade of building later, he sold it. Along the way, he learned that in the luxury events world, the rules of conventional business don't always apply – and that the most counter-intuitive decisions are often the right ones.

Building an event business and building a valuable event business are not the same thing. Unfortunately, many founders discover this distinction too late.