Northampton students’ management buy-out of well-established events firm

A 19-year-old events firm which grew from hosting policing conferences, is now in the hands of two graduates from the University of Northampton (UON).

Charlotte Disbury from Swindon and Atlanta Benham from Northampton had no idea they would end up being entrusted with an established events company when they first took up work placements for their Events Management BA.

Seven years on, the pair have now completed the management buy-out of Pytchley based CJS Events, founded by ex-Met-Police officer Kevin Shapland in 2004.

Atlanta said it was a daunting prospect taking on the company Kevin started, but one of her life-long career goals was to have a business of her own: “If I sit down and think, ‘I’m a managing director,’ it’s a big concept to process. But I’m also confident Kevin wouldn’t have taken this step if he didn’t believe in us to carry on running the business for another 20 plus years.”

Charlotte added: “Sometimes I can’t believe it actually happened, that this is our life now and how much we’ve achieved. I’m proud of everything we’ve done, going from University and building it up to this stage in six years.

“There is a bit of imposter syndrome, we are still doing events and our day-to-day jobs, so in some ways nothing has changed, but it has, and we have to remind ourselves we own the company now.

“But we’re really happy and proud of ourselves that we’ve got to this stage.”

Kevin, who started his business by bringing police conferences in-house, said he quickly developed a partnership with the Events Management Team at the Faculty of Business and Law taking on full-time work placements, and through a policy of putting his people first, is now able to hand over his business to former students and trusted employees.

He said: “For probably the last 14 years I’ve worked quite closely with the Event Management Team in the Business School, purely because I’m a great believer that as a business we need to invest in the younger generation and as a boss, I found you get some great ideas from students.

“Working with the Uni also allowed me to help develop the curriculum and any gaps in the knowledge of students on placement have been addressed as the course was updated.

“When people first start with me, the first thing I say is that we’re going to sit down in three months and I’ll want you to tell me what we could be doing better, are there any other areas of improvement, because they’ll have a fresh set of eyes.”

CJS now has around 20 clients at any one time, with a variety in the public sector including the police and health service, in addition to a wide array of private sector clients.

Kevin said he’d slowly passed responsibility to Charlotte and Atlanta over two years until they felt confident, they could take on the top jobs.

He added: “I had approaches from a couple of third parties for the business, but I thought, actually, I’d spent 20 years building this up, I didn’t want someone to take it on and tear it apart.

“I would rather place it in the safe hands Charlotte and Atlanta and assist them with continued mentoring so they’re able to take on an established business at the ages of 26 and 27 and can take it to the next level.”

“They are both absolutely dedicated to the job and to the profession. They’ve got complimentary skills, Atlanta is very meticulous, Charlotte’s very creative, they make a great combination. The challenge for them now is that they’ve gone from being friends and colleagues first, to 50/50 business partners.

“Since I’ve had the business, there’s been two big events that put a lot of companies in the events industry out of business, the recession of 2007/8 and Covid. I sat down with Atlanta and Charlotte and the rest of the team at the start of Covid and said our goals were to make sure the business survived and that they still had jobs by the end of it. But that was reliant on them being willing to adapt.

“And because of their ability to adapt, we ended Covid with more clients than we started with. They came to us because we were quick to go online and have stayed with us now that they’re going back to live events.

Atlanta said: “For me CJS is really about team spirit, and we’ve got that running through everything we do. We have a resident director of happiness, that is her official job title, we’re really personable, our public sector clients really trust us, and our private sector clients come back time after time. Our success speaks for itself.”

Charlotte added: “I think as well, one of the things that’s really important at CJS, even though we are MDs and everyone respects that, there’s no hierarchy, we will do what it takes to get the job done and that’s the same as everyone else, we are really a team.”