PROFILE
TEAM SC PRODUCTIONS
Hard work pays off Working on shows for Kilimanjaro Live, Orchard Live, LarMac Live and AMust4Music, 2022 is going to be busy year for Jake Warriner, SC Productions’ newly promoted company director and production manager. Here, Warriner talks of his passion for events
H
ow long have you been working in the events industry? I’ve been working in the events industry for about 12 years now. I started working in a local hotel at 16, as a waiter for weddings, conferences, and parties and then two years later, I went full time and was running all the events in the hotel from an operational aspect. Did you always want to work in events? No. I originally applied for university to study social work but ended up taking a year out. I started work in the hotel and it made me realise I was really enjoying what I was doing. This led to me applying to study events management in Cardiff. What led you to working in events and why do you love it so much? In between my second and third year at university, I undertook an internship, as Sarah’s assistant [Sarah Hemsley-Cole, founder of SC Productions] on an outdoor event in Cardiff called Ar Waith Ar Daith. It was my first taste of outdoor event work, and I absolutely loved the scale of the work, the broad spectrum of what we were responsible for and the craziness of what was happening around me. Who and what within the events world inspires you? I’m very lucky to have been surrounded by many people who have inspired me over the six years I’ve been working at the company. An obvious one for me here is Sarah and the other being
Zac Fox from Kilimanjaro Live [group chief operating officer]. Both have vast amounts of knowledge and experience, have unbelievable workload capacity and are also great mentors that I have been lucky to have from almost my first day at the company and to now. Tell us more about your promotion. How does it feel to now be a company director? Ahh, it still hasn’t quite sunk in, but it is a great feeling that the hard work over the past years has paid off.
What are you looking forward to most this year? I’m really looking forward to hopefully being back to normal with less uncertainty with what may or may not be going ahead over the summer. I’m also looking forward to completing shows that we started working on pre-pandemic. After years of talking about them, they might actually happen. We hope.
What do you bring to SC Productions? I’ve now been with the company for six years, so I know the company inside and out. I’m very calm, take everything in my stride and have a good relationship with contractors, clients, and suppliers across all the work that we do. We took the decision to recruit more full-time event assistants in our office at the end of 2021, ready for the upcoming season, so my energy and focus is going into training them, ready to hit the ground running in May. What do you think the biggest challenges will be this year? Good question. I’d say there’s going to be many challenges this year. I think security is still a huge issue across the country and I also think people in general are going to be a big problem. There are too many events this year for the number of freelancers and crew available. Kit wise seems to a bit steadier than last year but the obvious areas of toilets and marquees will still be an issue.
JAKE WARRINER www.standoutmagazine.co.uk n 53
