strictly business
ENTREPRENEURS
Lights, sound,
action …
Kevin McQuillan reports on the rise of event management company Blue7Team.
A
nyone regularly attending business functions in Papua New Guinea will encounter Elwyn Agonia and Naari Banam, the co-founders of event management company Blue7Team. When the couple started in the business in 2004, there was only a handful of events such as concerts and charity fundraisers, organised by volunteer women’s groups and radio stations. Agonia’s media background started in video production at EMTV, fresh out of boarding school that he attended in Melbourne. Arriving
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back in PNG, he went into video production at a marketing agency and then Radio Kalang FM. This last stint landed him a role as part of Nau FMs pioneering team. “While I was at Nau-FM, I started the Total Event Company. It was uncharted waters and we were mostly doing client promotions with plans for special events.” In 2008, they took up an offer to start a new radio station being put together by some of the original shareholders of PNGFM. It took two years before FM-Central hit the airwaves but within 12 months, they were running a second station, FM-Morobe. But the bug to start their own business remained. “What pushed us over the edge was the premature birth of our daughter at 26 weeks,” Agonia says. “Two months in the special care nursery gives you a lot of time to think and for a fledging radio station this is not such a great thing. I did go back to the station for a little while but within a year had resigned to start our own thing.’ Agonia had also been moonlighting as a DJ with the only sound and lighting production company in Port Moresby, Flashes. “We looked at our strengths and our passions – Elwyn’s being the knack for knowing how to pull a crowd, marketing foresight and logistics logic. Mine being leadership and sales and marketing,” says Banam. “We thought: we don’t have the money to buy the hundreds of thousands of kina needed to do sound and lighting production, so we will use what we have – ourselves.” Flashes had been a weekend hobby and the owners did not have the time to meet the demand. So, the couple took over, developing a full-service event production company. “We operate with a full-time team of 15 and long-term. We can easily have in our employ between four and 50 casuals at any one time,” Banam says. Blue7Team’s annual turnover is just under PGK2 million. Acquiring the best equipment is a test of the relationship. “Elwyn is very good at what he does and technicians like that want the best. So it is a constant battle between the both of us