It’s been an incredible couple of years for Ayre Events.
By Annette McIntyre
The Leeds-based AV supplier has seen impressive growth, with a staggering 96 per cent revenue increase from 2023 to 2024, building on the momentum of an even more staggering 279 per cent increase from 2022 to 2023.
The company, which was set up in 2018, has weathered the impacts of Covid to grow even stronger, increasing it’s staff from four to 14 over the last two years. It plans to continue growing its team and expects to have around 20 employees by the end of the year. It is also increasing its venue portfolio outside of Yorkshire.
And no-nonsense managing director Chris Driver-Ayre has no doubt about the reasons behind their success: “It’s because we don’t do bull*** – that’s the reason why.
“We say what we can do, we do what we do, and we do it well.”
“We’re winning business left, right and centre because of our reputation and doing a really good job – and that’s very much the thing that we’re riding high on,” he added.
“The figures that we are doing are incredible. We are probably one of the fastest growing AV companies in Leeds.
The speed of their success has been much faster than they had anticipated.
“We’ve had to pretty much rip up our five year plan because we delivered our five year plan in year two,” Chris said. “It’s a good problem to have.”
The business covers all areas of event production, including, sound, lighting, staging, scenic, and rigging for a wide range of projects and events. It prides itself on the high level of service delivered to its clients, who keep coming back year on year.
Chris said his company had been “massively” impacted by the effects of Covid.
“We saw a lot of it coming in 2019 because we worked with quite a big financial company which is worldwide based and they saw offices starting to close pretty much when it was kicking off.
“So we lost a lot of money at the back of 2019. And obviously when Mr Johnson sat down at his table and decided to close the world for us we just lost an entire revenue stream there.”
Fortunately they had already been involved in broadcasting for events for a couple of years and they were able to move to doing more of that.
“We pretty much just made that more and more mainstream,” he said. “We went out to clients and said we can do this for you. Obviously it’s not going to be as expensive as it would be for an event and we can still get your message out there.
“Thankfully we had quite a lot of clients buying into that and that really supported us. Plus we got funding from the arts council as well. So we did a lot of different things during that time to keep going.”
Chris said the company has gone from strength to strength but added: “We’re still paying the debt off from that time though – bounce back loans and all the rest of it. But you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to keep your business going.”
But all their efforts to get through that difficult time have paid off. With increasing numbers of successful projects to its name the company has been gaining new clients and has also been growing its venue portfolio outside of Yorkshire as existing clients ask it to do more work in other areas.
It has been involved in a number of notable projects including Cryptfactor, Bradford City of Culture, Bradford City Player of The Year, Rotherham NHS Proud Awards 2024, Gastropub Awards, Bradford Broadway, and Leeds United Player of The Year Awards 2024. The production company has also supported various organisations with live streams and hybrid events.
A recent project included providing PA systems for several local authorities for the local elections ballot counts, held in sports halls and leisure centres across the Yorkshire region. In addition to PA, AYRE deployed two-way radios, which provided essential internal comms during the count.
After the latest growth figures were announced recently Chris said: “We’re incredibly proud of AYRE’s growth over the past 12 months. While the pandemic may feel like a distant memory, its impact lingered, especially in the events industry. However, after four years, we’ve regained our footing and established strong relationships with clients in Yorkshire and beyond.
“As we further diversify our portfolio, our aim is to sustain this upward momentum. Our recent team additions have played a crucial role in facilitating this growth, fueling our ambitious plans for the future.”
Ayre Events has strong links with Bradford, having been booked for the Broadway festive lights switch on for the past two years. The company also does a lot of work at Cedar Court Bradford and it was involved in the Bradford City of Culture launch event.
“It was quite a cool event,” Chris said. “It was pretty easy to work with because they brought in a producer from down south and he had a quite clear vision on what he wanted to achieve and how he wanted it to feel and look.
“We provided full stage, stage backdrop, projection, lighting and sound. We also provided some free-standing portrait screens.”
While some customers know exactly what they want others will need a lot more advice.
“Some will come with a very clear design proposal that needs achieving,” Chris said. “There will be other clients coming to us literally without a clue what they want to do.”
He said there were often misconceptions among the public about what an AV company does.
“When we say we do events everybody thinks that we do Glastonbury and outdoor festivals and that kind of thing. But we’re very much on the corporate market. So our main stream of work is dry hire event production and dry hire equipment.
“We service 26 venues in the yorkshire region with dry hire services so that’s projector hire, pa system hire, microphone hire. We go and install it at the venue, the client will turn up and use it and then we come and remove it.”
Among its most recent projects the company helped with a charity fundraiser for Out Together – a charity which supports older LGBTQ people.
“I attended it personally last year and spoke to the event organisers and said: “Look, I’ve got an event production company. We could support you at the next event. So they came to us and we support them on a sponsorship basis,” Chris said.
As well as undertaking a number of “ace” projects with clients the company is also working towards its ISO9001 accreditation.
“This is a quality standard and I think when we achieve that we might be the only business in Yorkshire that’s got that standard as an event production company,” Chris said. “So that’s a pretty epic project we’re working on at the moment as well.”
