Promoted and Hired at Safe Events Global

TLDR (Too Long, Didn’t Read)

Let me tell you about who we have promoted and hired recently here in Safe Events Global.

We recently promoted multiple members of the full-time team here:

Conor O’Cleirigh is now Senior Project Manager
Dessie Brosnan is now Senior Project Manager
Siobhan Rafter is now Senior Designer
Alice Bottini Hall is now Smartsheet Specialist

A new role of Business Development Manager was created, to which Peter Cooney moved having been with us as a Project Manager previously.

We created a Junior Designer position, for which we advertised, and found the lovely Ana Paula Umbelino.

2 new Digital Operations Administrators were added to the team, in Annique Van Niekerk and Freya Watson.

Suleiman Disu came on board as a Health and Safety Advisor.

There is a new role live currently for a Project Manager.

We will likely be advertising for the following within the next 6 months:

Head of Operations
Training Manager
Health & Safety Advisor

Now, if you want to read on, to learn more about each of these developments, please do.

Growth

When C*VID decided to rain on everyone’s parade back in early 2021, there were 4 of us working full-time in Safe Events.

While we had done some work in the Middle East at that stage, we were predominantly operating in Ireland.

We, like all businesses, had some tough decisions to make.

Martin and I decided the 4 of us would stay working, on full wages, for as long as we could. If the ship was going down, we’d all go down on it together.

Not once did we consider letting the 2 lads go and gaining another month of salary for ourselves potentially.

That’s not how we operate.

Fast forward to today:

2021 turned out to be one of our most successful years ever as a company
We’ve fully moved to Safe Events Global as our identity, having recently renamed the company
We now have 24 team members full-time, around the world
We’ve added Safe Events Global Arabia to our group of companies
We are currently advertising for 1 more full-time role, and it looks like another 2 or 3 either this side of Christmas or early in the New Year

We’ve grown very quickly over the past 3.5 years or so.

This has happened off the back of some great people doing great work. That, along with seizing opportunities when they came to us.

It’s been tough keeping up, in many respects, but we’re pretty much there now.

Operations

Conor O’Cleirigh has been with us in various roles for many years. He specialises on the Health and Safety side of things, holding multiple qualifications. He recently moved into a newly-created Senior Project Manager role, where he will continue to liaise directly with clients and run projects for them.

Conor advises from a H&S perspective across multiple clients and projects both in Ireland and internationally. Conor is often our lead on site for projects in the Middle East.

Dessie Brosnan has also been with us quite some time. He regularly fills operational roles including Event Controller and Site Manager on our events. Dessie’s main skillset is around Site Management and general event management.

That said, he also fills Safety roles and, from a project management perspective leads on delivery for some key clients such as Dublin Zoo and Dublin Pride. He recently moved into a newly-created Senior Project Management role where he will continue to focus on client service delivery as well as filling key operational roles as required.

Peter Cooney has been with us as a Project Manager for just over a year or so. Prior to that, he spent a few years freelancing with us. When we decided we needed another Project Manager, we approached Peter as our number one choice to join us. Peter ‘gets’ us and that has only become more clear since he has been with us full-time.

He recently moved into a newly-created Business Development Manager role. Peter will excel in this role. It leverages his previous professional experience prior to moving full-time to events.

Suleiman Disu has worked with us on a variety of projects over the years in the Middle East. When we needed someone on a more full-time basis to be able to jump on document reviews across projects, we all thought of Suleiman. As well as doing that, he will lead for us on various projects in the region also. He’s with us into the new year initially and possibly longer.

Design

There is a running joke in here that our Design Department is the same size as our Project Management Department.

That’s not QUITE true, but it’s pretty close.

Design as a function and a resource is important to us as a company.

We want to produce things that look as professional as we operate. Our client-facing documentation and resources need to be class-leading. We have Safety Consultants who ensure it IS class-leading and our Design Department ensures it LOOKS the part.

We are very active on Digital and Social channels and that means designing things so they look well.

Design is extremely valuable to us in how we do what we do.

So, it’s likely little surprise that our Design Department has grown in the last month or so.

Siobhan Rafter has been promoted from Graphic Designer to a newly-created role of Senior Designer. Siobhan joined us a little over a year ago and found her feet with us very quickly. While she hadn’t worked as a Designer before doing so with us, she had worked in related fields and had studied design. We felt she’d fit in and she did.

We were delighted to be able to create a new, senior role for Siobhan to move into. There, she is involved in training Ana (see below!) in the ‘Safe Events Global Way’ and works on a lot of the resources and assets we need on various consultancy projects for CMPs and DMPs etc.

At the same time as we promoted Siobhan, we advertised for a Junior Designer role. Ana Paula Umbelino topped the charts during that recruitment process. When recruiting for Design roles, we narrow it down through interviews to the ‘final few’. We then present them with a design task, for which we pay each of them, to see what they produce, how they approach it etc.

We loved what Ana did and she’s fitting in nicely already!

Digital Operations

Alice Bottini Hall has been with us for a good while as a Digital Operations Administrator. We advertised for a Smartsheet Specialist role, for which she applied. Alice was the best candidate, particularly given she already has knowledge of our systems and procedures etc.

She knows how Dig Ops works. She knows what we are doing and how we do it and there’s huge value in that. We are delighted Alice has stepped into this role.

On foot of this, new projects coming on line and new clients joining us, we also brought in 2 new Digital Operations Administrators into Dig Ops. Annique Van Niekerk and Freya Watson have joined us on a contract basis, with a view to them hopefully staying with us longer term.

The digital side of what we do is growing very quickly. This is great to see, considering we developed this department initially to build platforms to help US do what WE do. They continue to do that and now also develop similar for partners and clients as a standalone service offering too.

The future

One thing we love is being able to promote from within. We enjoy creating new roles as the company continues to grow and seeing current team members move into those new roles.

We see a few more new roles potentially being advertised in our not-too-distant future too, namely:

Head of Operations (or similar) – basically someone to lead on ensuring all the day-to-day operations and activities in here happen and happen the way we want them to.
Training Manager – this person will lead on both development and delivery of current and new courses. We’ve been looking at this one for a while and it’s been delayed multiple times for various reasons. It needs to happen soon.
Health & Safety Advisor – we see a need to hire a full-time H&S Advisor soon. They won’t be a Project Manager who does safety too. They will be fully focused on safety. They will aid our PM team and our clients in matters specifically relating to safety. We would love for this person to be Irish and based in Ireland. We are very keen to continue to support the Irish event industry, in particular females in the industry here.

Things don’t seem like slowing down in here any time soon.