Rees Leisure
Rees Leisure is an event management company who specialise in sports events. They get to do lots of interesting events such a running, cycling, sailing and swimming events. Within each of events there are a number of other categories of races or activities. Rees Leisure provides an end to end event management service. They operate in the public events space where life is complex, ‘live’ (there are no second chances) and where the need to provide high quality and importantly safe events is ever present. In the past 8 years Rees Leisure’s portfolio of events has grown year on year, as has the numbers of people taking part in their events. They are certainly doing something right.
While they had no concerns over their ability to do the job, they did feel they needed to make sure the events teams were fully conversant with all the relevant event health and safety regulations. The idea being, to ensure all of their events and activities delivered, met best practice safety guidance. The problem they were having was trying to keep up with the requirements of working to the demands of Safety Advisory Groups and the like and, of course dealing with ever greater participant numbers which in turn brought ever great numbers of spectators. Managing crowds of spectators them is also the event organisers’ problem. I got a call. Some event safety consultancy was needed.
So how did I help?
To kick start the process off and provide the basis for all my subsequent work with them I created a bespoke public event health and safety workshop to which Rees Leisure team members were all invited. The course covered all the key subject areas contained in what we call an Event Management Plan: the document that outlines how you intend to protect the health, safety and welfare of those people attending your event as well as employees, contractors and sub-contractors working at your event. The bigger the event – the bigger the plan. Examples of some of the areas I covered included the event build-up and break- down, catering, crowd management, stairs and gangways, lifting operations, venue evaluation, toilets, electrical works and platforms…to name but a few.
Once we had completed the workshop I then worked alongside each event ‘lead’ to help them produce all the required plans and assessments. During this process I fed back comments, made suggestions to ensure that any Safety Advisory Group members, Local Council Officers and or emergency services representatives were going to happy with the plans we were putting in place. For each different event (running, cycling and sailing) I created a bespoke workshop and then worked alongside the respective event manager to complete the paperwork.
Event are a many faceted thing, so as is often the way my event planning skills also came in useful as I also attended planning meetings, reviewed web copy, make suggestions and act as a critical observer on events days and not just on matters of event health and safety!
The outcome
All the key members of Rees Leisure have attended a workshop. All the respective event managers have also received on-going support in all event safety issues. Despite the perceived dryness of the subject (not by me!) all the Rees Leisure team took everything on board and importantly have delivered some great events. The guys and gals at Rees Leisure now feel happy to tackle anything that drops into the inbox – however complicated it could be and with a little help from The Event Expert!? I continue to work with them on the remainder of this years events
I’ll leave the last words to my client Chris Rees, Rees Leisure Founder and Business Development who said “We have worked with Chris on a number of our Events and his wealth of knowledge and experience has been hugely helpful and reassuring to us. We have used Chris for training our Events team, ensuring our paperwork is all up to date as well as actually on events day. I highly recommend speaking to Chris regardless of the size of your event: whether it’s an event safety or an event planning issue as you will definitely find out something useful and helpful that will always improve your event.
Check these guys out here: www.reesleisure.co.uk