The Yellow Fish Story: Brighton Born and Bred

When Maria Valentine decided to start her own business, she knew exactly what she wanted to do and where she wanted to do it – she just didn’t have a business plan. Sixteen years later, she reflects on a Brighton success story and shares some tips on how to stay relevant in an ever-changing business landscape.

Yellow Fish is a Brighton success story. Founded by Brightonian Maria Valentine, the full service marketing and events agency has evolved and thrived with an ethos that centres on Passion, Pride and Personality.

Since its inception in 2003, the business has weathered economic storms and diversified – without ever losing sight of its goal to provide bespoke, relationship-driven services.

It may describe itself as quirky, but Yellow Fish is bang on the money when it comes to meeting clients’ expectations and deadlines. As well as organising events and ensuring those who attend take away key messages, this is a brand that knows how to help businesses really incentivise and motivate their people. After all, the experience is everything…

A highly talented team looks after the needs of a wide range of clients, including blue chip companies and household names. They benefit from personalised UK and international event organisation, as well as fully tailored content creation, communications and much more.

Sub-divisions of the company are an integral part of its strategic approach to everything and include Y Brighton? It promotes the city as a destination for fully-tailored corporate events, including conferences, team-building opportunities and staff incentives. This innovative expansion of Yellow Fish’s core services is designed to showcase what Brighton has to offer big businesses and boost the local economy at the same time.

Y Creative is also a sub-division of Yellow Fish. It delivers the expertise of an internationally-respected design studio to businesses of all sizes. In particular, it enables Brighton-based companies to benefit from world-class print, multimedia, digital, and display services to bring ideas and concepts to life.

In this interview, we meet Yellow Fish’s founder and managing director, Maria, and invite her to share the brand’s story so far.

How it all started

Sixteen years ago, Maria was working in the Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions (MICE) sector. At the time, she worked for a company that had carved out a niche in the pharma market.

“We started getting involved in non-pharma business, including incentive travel programmes and bespoke travel,” she says. “Services were geared towards sales people and customer trips – anything from taking a group to Cape Town to privatising small islands.”

This new strand of the business interested Maria. She saw opportunities that she thought others in the business were missing.

“For me, I thought ‘I could do this differently’,” she says.

“I wanted to have the autonomy to drive that side of the business forward. My idea was for a more client-focussed service that was relationship-driven.”

Her then employers preferred to stay focussed on their traditional pharma business. The only way she could deliver the business and services that really resonated with her was to start her own business.

Almost immediately, she attracted big brands. They included T-Mobile, Visa and Philips. That left her with little choice when it came to setting up a base. She definitely could not work from home.

“I had to have an office and staff from the get go,” she says. “I was dealing with big corporates. Because I needed some cash-flow, I went to the bank.”

That is when the reality of owning her own business really hit home. Maria was asked for a business plan – and didn’t have one.

“It was a big learning curve,” she recalls. “I knew my business, but not how to start up one! It started small and, over the years, the business has organically grown. For me, it has never been about growth or expansion, I didn’t want Yellow Fish to become a faceless agency. It is all about personality and being proud of what we do.”

Yellow Fish has excelled across multiple sectors. Its ability to help corporates understand the difference between staff recognition and incentives has been a game changer.

Riding out the economic storm

In 2009 Britain’s economy was dealt a massive blow. Recession set in and many businesses went to the wall.

“It was challenging,” Maria admits. “It made me want to further develop the business. We were very fortunate because, at that time, a key market for us was telecoms. This was a sector that was still developing technology and therefore spending money on rewarding its staff and holding events.”

She witnessed agencies with clients in the automobile and financial sectors collapse.

“They just weren’t viable anymore,” she says. “And that made me focus on the markets I wanted Yellow Fish to be in. The more work we did with new clients, the more opportunities I saw. And, as we developed relationships, the trust grew.

“We started offering live production services for conferences, including set designs. Then we moved into messaging.”

This new element to the business meant Yellow Fish could go beyond event organisation and hospitality to help clients get their messages across.

“We asked clients what they wanted to get out of an event and, as a result, started offering content management that focussed on the messages companies wanted people to take away with them.”

In-house design studio

Yellow Fish started life outsourcing its client design needs. As the business grew, an opportunity to develop an in-house design studio came along.

Maria says: “Our clients wanted bespoke brand identity and event concepts. We appointed Matt Sweet as our in house graphic designer and in the beginning, I was worried I wouldn’t have enough work for him. Matt is now Creative Director and his team delivers concepting, content management and digital content services, including video – not just to our own clients but to any business.

“Developing the in-house studio was a game changer and transformed Yellow Fish into a full service agency. We no longer just organised and delivered events – we could offer a full service solution and focus on the content and communication as well.”

A lesson learned

Like many businesses, Yellow Fish initially fell into the trap of accepting a large proportion of its work from one client. It attracted a lot of business from one major telco brand and a significant amount from two or three other corporates. Maria estimates that well over 80 per cent of her agency’s business was coming from three main clients during 2014/15.

“Business was great,” she said. “It did concern me that so much of our work was coming from one or two clients, but I think, like a lot of businesses, you are so caught up in servicing that you lose sight of the need, or don’t have the capacity, to look for more business.”

In 2016 Yellow Fish suffered a blow when one of their largest clients was bought out and the new company already had its incumbent agency suppliers. The company ‘saw a big drop off’ in business at a time when two other clients got in to financial difficulty and pulled all expenditure on events and hospitality.

“Had we not been tight with cash-flow and finances as well as actively looking for new business opportunities, we could have hit the wall,” Maria admits. “We had to lose staff and that was really tough. What I learned was that you have to keep constantly re-assessing. You need to look at current trends and stay relevant and never get complacent”.

Maria attributes the company’s success and stamina to pull through the lean times to her team – “If you haven’t got a strong team behind you, you are really in trouble. Never under-value your team and their importance to your future.”

The aptly named ‘Clever Fish’ serving today’s clients have ensured Yellow Fish offers stand-out solutions for brands internationally.

Yellow Fish 2019

Sixteen years after starting her journey, Maria has gone almost full circle. Yellow Fish has recently won lucrative contracts in the pharma sector.

She says the ‘focus on content’ is what her clients are looking for – as well as the personal service that sets Yellow Fish apart.

“We now have a really good % mix of clients across various sectors and are currently recruiting to service our new wins but with freelance and contract staff to support our core team,” she points out. “This way we don’t incur large overheads when the business need isn’t there”.

One of the things Maria is currently looking to do for the future is recruit an MD to assist the already talented senior management team in further growth.

Apart from bringing in new ideas, she says, it will put Yellow Fish in a good position to move forward from its current, highly successful standpoint.

“I don’t profess to know it all and business is constantly evolving,” she says. “This isn’t about massive growth; it never has been. It is about staying true to ourselves while developing our services and ensuring we are current in our delivery.”

Bringing a fresh pair of eyes to the table could see the agency further diversify or add more to its current services.

Company culture

Delivering client-focussed services with passion, pride and personality is ‘the joy of being in Brighton’.

Maria cannot mask her love and enthusiasm for the place she has always called ‘home’.

She says: “It’s not so stressy in Brighton; I was never a London girl. Every Tuesday in the summer we have a private yoga class on the beach and there is always a lot of getting out in our local town – whether it is a picnic on Hove Lawns or a pub night. Being relaxed is key to who we are”.

“Yellow Fish people are absolutely professional with incredibly high standards, but we are also a pretty chilled lot. When we are recruiting, we always ask ourselves ‘is this person a Fish?’.

“Having said that, we serve key corporates and what we do has to be bang on. “Our people always go the extra mile.”

“We work to strict deadlines and expectations, but you have to have the ability to switch off. That is why we try to find time to step away from the desk and office.

When Maria started Yellow Fish, her children were aged just eight and ten and her husband was commuting weekly to Dublin for work, “it was most definitely not the easiest time of my life” she says.

“I know, as a female, how hard it is to juggle work and family life,” she says. “It is a massive thing but even more so in this industry with constant deadlines, overseas travel and 18hr days when delivering an event; I couldn’t have done it without a very supportive husband and family around me, I have been very fortunate”.

Having ‘been there and done it’ Maria understands the demands of the industry on her staff. Many of the original Yellow Fish team now have families of their own which is why providing a flexible environment and regular ‘time out’ sessions is crucial in allowing everyone to re-charge and be the best they can be.

“Family is key and, at the end of the day, it is about getting the balance right.”

The future

Yellow Fish aims to continue to develop its core services as well as support local businesses through Y Brighton? and Y Create.

Find out more about Yellow Fish.

Website: https://yfish.co.uk

Telephone: 01273 223500

Twitter: @YFishChat

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/YellowFishBrighton

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/yellow-fish

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yellow_fish_brighton/