Launch. Scale. Exit: "When you sell, you want a clean, happy, financially rewarding exit – and that's exactly what we got " with Thom Hetherington, Founder, Northern Restaurant and Bar

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.

Nineteen years, one financial crash, and a 66% rise in show turnover later, Thom sold NRB in a deal that gave him and his family financial security while he was still young enough to enjoy it. In this post, he talks about letting sales drive the early years before realising the audience mattered more, why rebook rate became his most important number, and why he thinks every ambitious events founder should have older, wiser heads in the room from day one.

What inspired you to launch Northern Restaurant and Bar?

I acquired the event in 2004, just a couple of years old and failing badly at the time. But the underlying idea was sound: a large and growing community of hospitality operators across the North of England who didn't travel down to London trade events, and who could easily support a strong regional show of their own. Being based in the North ourselves, we felt we could bring genuine passion and presence to what were already solid fundamentals. From day one, our ambition was simple – build world-class Northern events.

How did you know it was the right moment to go out on your own?

I'd already run my own business once before, at 24, after being unexpectedly made redundant just after buying my first house with my partner, Sophie. Setting up Moorfield Media, the company that went on to acquire NRB, came about the exact same way – another surprise redundancy, another big renovation project, and our first son on the way. A pattern was clearly forming. I've never worked for anyone else since. I'm evidently unemployable, but necessity really is the mother of invention. Sometimes fate just needs to give you a shove.

What two or three decisions in the early years made the biggest difference?

The first was letting sales drive the business. My business partner Andy and I both came from an old-school telesales background – fighting over leads, flogging glossy ad space – and we brought that same competitive tenacity to NRB: keep costs tight, push revenue hard. It worked brilliantly, right up until the 2008 financial collapse, when it stopped working at all.

That forced a rethink. We realised we needed to get closer to our audience first and let the sales follow – which, as it turned out, was a far more enjoyable way to build a business anyway. Drawing on my time at Restaurant Magazine, I made sure I was visible and present throughout Northern hospitality, not just at our own event. We also made sure NRB was seen as a genuine force for good: platforming the people doing great work in the sector, and backing every worthwhile initiative we came across, whether it touched on skills, government lobbying, or sector charities. We were everywhere, helping everyone. Soft diplomacy is a powerful thing, and selfish altruism is the only sustainable way to do good.

What metrics ended up mattering more than you expected?

The ratio of visitors to exhibitors, which sounds obvious in hindsight, but we'd both come from magazines, where that relationship between readers and advertisers is invisible – you can get away with a lot on vibes and appearances alone. Not so with an exhibition. There's nowhere to hide when the aisles are empty and nobody's talking to anybody.

The second was rebook. The changes described above took our onsite rebook rate from around 44% up to 76%, and once the event was that strong, the rest of it filled and grew almost on its own, with minimal sales effort required. Over that period, we grew show turnover by 66% while cutting our sales overhead by the same amount.

What was the hardest part of launching and selling?

We acquired rather than launched from scratch, and honestly, those first few years felt fairly straightforward. We were fortunate that the event's ops director, Lindsey, had gone freelance and carried on handling the parts of physically building the show that we didn't fully understand ourselves. Sales, marketing and content were all transferable skills from publishing. The genuinely hard part was running a company – accounts, credit control, invoicing – none of which I ever enjoyed.

Relatively speaking, selling NRB was easy. Nineteen years in, we knew our strengths and weaknesses well enough to bring in Mayfield Media to run the entire process for us. It wasn't always smooth – few sale processes are – but they handled the negotiations and supported us through due diligence, which freed us up to keep the event trading well throughout. It took longer than expected, but the outcome exceeded anything we'd hoped for.

What was the most rewarding part of launching and selling NRB?

The whole reason I chose to do it in the first place: I was doing something I already knew how to do – media and events – in a sector and region I was genuinely passionate about, answerable to no one but myself. It was everything I hoped it would be, start to finish.

Cashing out on a high and watching the event keep growing under its new owners. When you sell, you want a clean, happy, financially rewarding exit – and that's exactly what we got. If you've spent most of your working life loving your job and shaping your own path, and you and your family end up financially secure by fifty, with the freedom to chase new entrepreneurial projects while your brain and your knees still work – you genuinely can't ask for more out of life than that.

What might have sped up the journey from launch to exit?

Bringing in older, wiser heads earlier on. That alone would have helped us go further, faster, and probably would have spared us the worst of the 2008 collapse. I had good, supportive relationships with people like Tim Etchells and Mark Wilderspin, and at one point ran a small joint venture with them – but some formal involvement, as NEDs or a Chair, would have paid real dividends. It's exactly the kind of gap I think an outfit like Manta Media Capital exists to fill: the rigour, experience and access to funding that a young events business often can't build for itself. Any ambitious young events entrepreneur should be snapping that up. Young me certainly would have – and old me would be having words if I hadn't.

What's next for you?

It's already arrived, in the shape of a semi-retirement that's backfired spectacularly – I'm busier than ever. I run a hospitality consultancy that keeps me deeply immersed in the sector and region I love. I'm still Exec Chair of Manchester Art Fair, now the fourth largest and fourth longest-established art fair in the UK, which lets me indulge another passion entirely. I also sit on two charitable boards: The Tim Bacon Foundation and Factory International, and I try to find time for eating, drinking, travel, and enough running to offset all of it. I always joke that a Venn diagram of my life would be three circles: food and drink, arts and culture, and militant Northernism. Life after NRB keeps me firmly, and very happily, in that overlap.