Black Tomato Events has more than doubled its staff numbers in the last 18 months to cope with growing demand for its innovative incentives.
The team has grown from 25 people in 2009, to 64 today – and the recruitment continues, with Sadari Cunningham and David Heron joining the sales promotions team, as senior account manager and business development manager, respectively.
Black Tomato Events' business development manager, Elliott Grant, said: “I don’t think we’ve hired one person that we haven’t needed; we’ve had so much work. We’re struggling to see if we can get to the end of the year without hiring another event manager.”
Earlier in the year, the agency moved to new larger offices in Shoreditch, housing both its corporate and leisure travel departments.
Grant said overseas incentive travel now accounted for 75 per cent of Black Tomato Events' business and that large companies were increasingly approaching them for unusual travel programmes.
“We’re getting a lot of big global clients coming to us as opposed to us having to chase them. They’re getting more adventurous and I think clients come to us because we keep things interesting. Recent incentives through our Epic Tomato brand have included a base camp explorer trip to Iceland to watch the Northern Lights with a gala dinner in a lava tube and an expedition to Guyana for an American entrepreneur club. They got helicoptered into the middle of the jungle and had to find their way out.”
Events next month include incentives in Thailand and Vietnam for an automotive company and kitchen manufacturer and a seven-day trip to Namibia to see the Southern Cross star constellation for an astronomy organisation.
“Every month we all get together and try to come up with new ideas,” said Grant. “We see where the leisure staff have been recently, like to the Hidden Kingdom in Nepal, which has only just opened to tourists. We always have something new to offer the clients who have been everywhere and seen everything.”
Pictured: an expedition around Mount Everest is just one of the adventurous incentives offered by Black Tomato
