27. Buttoned Up Events

Revenue: $1.9 million
Growth: 99.6%
Founders: Julian Haines (38)
Head Office: Melbourne
Employees: 8
Industry: Events
Website: https://www.buttonedupevents.com.au
Year Founded: 2016

How it started

Having started out with a single brand — The Bucks Co — in 2016, Julian Haines went to the marketplace offering a range of activities and experiences under the one banner.

The goal was to make group events easy, and Haines went on to build partnerships with suppliers across the industry.

Buttoned Up Events soon expanded from bucks parties to hens nights and into corporate days out.

Growth

Developing the House of Hens and Team Days brands opened up a much wider range of clientele for Buttoned Up Events, but the pandemic brought almost all of its business to a halt.

Adapting to the market, Haines launched Team Days Virtual, taking corporate team building events online — think virtual casino nights, virtual game shows, virtual murder mysteries and cooking classes.

“This was an area relatively untouched in the Australian market, and became hugely sought after when businesses became working remotely,” Haines tells SmartCompany.

Virtual team building now accounts for 60% to 70% of the business, allowing Buttoned Up Events to reach customers wherever they’re working from around the world.  

Where to next?

The next goal is to achieve 200% year-on-year growth in the first quarter of the 2021-22 financial year.

Having been successful in the corporate team-building space, Haines is aiming to build out a ‘culture hub’ portal to help clients streamline their event planning.

“This portal will help organisations deliver on their people and culture agenda and provide a streamlined and centralised portal for booking, scheduling, sharing, reviewing and tracking the performance of team events within an organisation,” he says.

Then the founder aims to tap into the global market of virtual events, offering “corporate events with colour” worldwide.