I have spent about fifteen years working out why some rooms feel electric and others feel like a waiting area.

I started in the Royal Navy, which is not the usual route into live events, but it taught me the two things this job actually runs on: logistics and people. From there I went into London media, first at Absolute Radio, then Global, then TheLADbible Group, and later as Events and Content Director at Funzing. Somewhere in the middle of all that I co-founded Lemonfest, an independent music festival that ran for ten years and taught me more about margins, weather and last minute problem solving than any agency job could.

These days I run conference brands for a living. As Managing Director at Prohibition Partners I look after Cannabis Europa in London, Business of Cannabis in New York, the PSYCH Symposium and the European Cannabis Insights Summit in Berlin. The headline number I am proudest of is Cannabis Europa going from 300 delegates to over 1,000, and from zero exhibition stands to 50, across four years at the Barbican and Old Billingsgate. Sixty four percent of that audience is C-suite, which is the bit that actually matters to sponsors.

DSMNTL is where I do that work for other people. It started because too many good events were being held back by the same three things: an agenda built by committee, a sponsorship deck that sold logos instead of outcomes, and nobody in the building who owned the commercial number. I take those apart and put them back together properly. Hence the name.

I am based in Barcelona, where I also run Growth Lab, a live talks series in Barcelona, London and New York. I run most mornings with PB Running Club, I am unreasonably invested in getting espresso right, and I still believe the best moment of any event is the twenty minutes after it ends, when nobody wants to leave.

If you have an event that should be doing more than it currently is, I would like to hear about it.