'I think you get one chance in a country like Ireland. It's a small place'

Magician Hamish Urquhart talks about what he has learned about setting up a company in Ireland.

By Hamish Urquhart Founder, PartyWizz

THERE ARE THREE main threads to my life: magic, marketing and travel – and they often overlap.

I’ve been interested in magic since the age of six, and I did magic shows all through my teens.

The first real job I had was a holiday job in a restaurant in Yorkshire, where I’m from originally. The owner of the restaurant came up to me and said, “You’re a terrible waiter, but I just saw you doing tricks in the kitchen.”

He told me I was better at that, so why don’t I go around the tables and entertain the guests rather than serve them. That’s when I started to realise that magic would play an important part in my life.

I went on to university, and my holiday jobs were working as a magician in Harrods and Hamleys in London.

I even got my first job in marketing through magic. I went to an interview and the person looked at my CV and said, “Hamish, I see you’re a magician, do me a trick then.”

I did him a trick and he told me the only way I would get a second interview would be if I told him how I did it. I didn’t tell him how it was done, but I still got the job.

HAMISH 4 Hamish Urquhart
Source: PartyWizz

Career

In all aspects of my life I’ve used magic. I’ve visited 88 countries so far and in most of those I’ve done magic along the way. In developing countries, I often do shows at orphanages and children’s hospitals.

Magic is totally universal and great for communicating, even to people who don’t speak the same language.

If I’m in a pitch for advertising, there would never be a presentation where I didn’t include a trick so the client would remember us.

I started my career in advertising in London, working for part of a large network agency called D’Arcy before moving to help create an advertising agency in Dubai.

I joined a business partner over there who I had worked with previously in London and we developed the agency as a partnership.

I jointly ran that for about six years and we built up a nice network of blue-chip clients, but I left because I got tired of Dubai itself.

On the way home, I did an amazing train ride back to Yorkshire over four months, stopping off in many fascinating places along the way, including Iran, Northern Iraq and Syria.

But I ended up in Singapore working for a brand consultancy over there, which led me to the strangest thing I’ve ever done.

When I was working in Singapore, I quickly started to miss being my own boss from my days in Dubai. Now I can’t imagine working for somebody else again.

I met the owner of a chain of restaurants and bars at a party, and I said I was looking to do something different. He told me to go and have a look at one of his hotels in Kuala Lumpur.

To cut a long story short, I gave him a report on how he could make it better and he said, “Go and do it then.”

So I ended up managing a hotel in the middle of Kuala Lumpur for nine months with no hospitality experience at all. It was ultimately with a view to looking after their brand across the chain, but running it was also the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

Solving a problem

I don’t know if I’ve ever been really qualified to do anything – I’ve always blagged my way into things, I suppose. And running the hotel was probably the greatest example of that.

I finished that because myself and my partner decided to come back and live closer to home. He had a job offer here in Dublin, and so after 10 years away it was time to move back.

When I moved to Ireland, I knew four people who were friends from different parts of my life and, while deciding what to do, I got back into magic and started doing parties.

From talking to parents, I started to see the problems they were having trying to find entertainers quickly and easily.

That’s when I started looking into the idea for PartyWizz – an Airbnb- or Uber-type platform for booking entertainers and key elements of a party all in one place.

Some research I read showed that parents in Ireland were reluctant to run parties for their kids because the return wasn’t worth the effort. That to me showed there was an opportunity.

But I didn’t take this as gospel and I commissioned some professional research from an Irish research agency, including focus groups and a survey.

From a personal perspective, I wanted to know that if I did this idea, I would be actually solving a real problem.

The research supported my hunch that there was a market out there for something like PartyWizz that could make party organising easier.

partywizz
Source: PartyWizz

Hurdles

Validating my idea was probably the first real hurdle I came up against, but another real problem is that I have far too many ideas.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen the launch of something and said, “I came up with that years ago”. It’s not the idea, it’s making it happen that counts.

But I also don’t have enough time or money to make all the ideas happen. So I really wanted to make sure PartyWizz was the right one to go with.

To be honest, it has taken much longer than I expected to build the network of entertainers and the tech itself. Everyone always says the lean startup approach is to build the minimum viable product and get things out there as quickly as possible.

Like a lot of entrepreneurs, I’m a bit of a perfectionist. Although I talk about what lessons I’ve learned, I’m still on the fence about whether I should have started trading much earlier – even if it was with a less-sophisticated product.

But I’m of the mind in business that you get one chance. Ireland’s a small place, and I don’t think you will learn much from launching a product that doesn’t follow through on the unique selling point it promises.

So I waited until we had a really good piece of tech, which is what we have now.

Funding has also been a challenge. Dublin is an expensive place to live, and when you’re out on your own you need to be very clever about how you pull something like this off with the minimum amount of expenditure.

I had a small grant from the Local Enterprise Office, which has been very supportive, but it has been mainly self-funded until now. I also didn’t really want to take other people’s money until I’d validated the idea properly, which I feel I’ve now done.

I think what I’ve achieved so far shows there is a market, which means I’ll be looking for further investment.

I’ve already talked to private individuals and Enterprise Ireland about getting involved, with a view to launching in the UK and expanding to other types of entertainment.

hamish 6
Source: PartyWizz

Lessons learned

I’ve had an enormous amount of support from people here and really find everyone so positive. There are so many people who are willing to share their ideas, how they do things and give feedback.

I love the networking part of startups, so I’m a big fan of the early stage meet-up groups as well – I’ve met some wonderful friends and business connections from those networks.

But even though the Irish startup community is so energised and positive, I think I’ve learned you can’t always take someone at their word.

They might meet me for a coffee and say they’ll get back to me, but you probably find that only a third of those people who promise to follow up actually do.

That’s not because they’re not good people, it’s because they don’t want to appear negative. So I’ve learned “yes” doesn’t always mean “yes” in business.

Hamish Urquhart is the founder of PartyWizz. This article was written in conversation with Killian Woods as part of a series on unlikely entrepreneurs.

Sign up to our newsletter to receive a regular digest of Fora’s top articles delivered to your inbox.