INTERVIEW
10 years of Event Lab As the company celebrates a decade in business, TPiMEA sits down with co-founder Nadim Jamal, who looks back on some of the highlights over the years, shares details of a recent brand refresh, and speculates on future expansion plans.
Starting in 2013 as a humble basement operation, Event Lab has grown into one of the region’s best known staffing agencies, providing its services to some of the largest and most prestigious events all over the Middle East, from the Special Olympics in 2017 to Expo 2020 Dubai, the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, and countless major Saudi Arabian projects including MDLBEAST Soundstorm, Formula 1 and Riyadh and Jeddah Season, to name a few. With a team of 45-plus full-time employees operating from a plush office in Dubai’s Barsha Heights, the company is unrecognisable from the fledgling outfit that started out a decade ago. “When we started, there was nobody in the market properly representing event professionals looking for freelance or full-time work and helping clients find freelancers,” Jamal said. Here, the co-founder shares his take on the industry and where Event Lab sits within it 10 years on from the company’s formation. How has the market changed since the early days of Event Lab? We started this business because there was a huge gap in the market – in fact, there were very few freelancers back then compared to today, and clients still weren’t as accustomed to using large numbers of freelancers as they do today. We found that there was often even a distrust in freelancers, but as clients gained confidence that somebody was vouching for the individuals being placed and providing a system to recruit and onboard freelancers, they gained more trust in using freelancers. It really changed over time. There was also a lack of consistency in the rates that freelancers would charge, which could range massively. This is still an issue, but over our 10 years of operation we’ve helped both freelancers and clients to find a happy medium, creating a fair middle ground and getting closer to standardisation of rates. In the early years of Event Lab, the UAE was the main territory where freelancers operated, but now it’s going well beyond that. There are countless opportunities in Saudi Arabia, the FIFA World Cup brought a lot of work to Doha, and we expect Qatar to get very busy again once summer is over. Dubai has embraced the importance of the events industry to the economy and to its development, introducing proper legal frameworks and freelance visas. Middle East
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