The growth of Calum McGuigan’s marketing company
Fervent Events is 47th on the Top 500 Fastest Growing Companies in Canada list
Calum McGuigan is making waves in the experiential marketing industry with his company Fervent Events. What started as a grassroots guerilla marketing company has evolved into one of the top experiential marketing companies in Toronto. Over the past five years, Fervent Events’ revenue has grown by 1,622 per cent, hitting $4 million last year, earning the company the 47th spot on the Top 500 Fastest Growing Companies in Canada list.
After graduating from events management at Glasgow Caledonian University, McGuigan came to Toronto in 2006 to play rugby. While he only intended to stay for four months, McGuigan couldn’t stop thinking about Canada when he returned home to Scotland, so he returned to Toronto on a work permit.
“I came here with a suitcase,” he says. “I had nothing to lose.”
McGuigan’s entrepreneurial journey
McGuigan worked as an events officer at the Daily Bread Food Bank for two-and-a-half years. But after running the same group of events each year, McGuigan was eager to experiment with something new. With $4,000 in his pocket, he struck out on his own and created Fervent Events.
“The idea was to do 50 per cent events and 50 per cent guerilla marketing,” says McGuigan. But, after a couple of months, McGuigan saw the focus in experiential marketing, and decided to focus in on that. While McGuigan didn’t have any experience in marketing, he recognized some similarities to events management. “When I started, it was a leap of faith and it wasn’t very well thought through. I had this desire and hunger to do it and I jumped,” he says.
That leap of faith led McGuigan to scouring Craigslist ads, looking for companies that were hiring people to distribute flyers. He then cold called the companies and asked if they would outsource the job to him rather than hiring their own staff. “Whenever I saw street teams, I’d ask them who they were working for and I’d call up the company,” he says.
That daily hustle of making cold calls wasn’t foreign to McGuigan, who worked part time at a call centre. “I worked for six hours a day there then came home and worked on the company,” he says.
McGuigan finally hit a break in 2012 when Fervent Events won a contract with the Toronto Star. The paper wanted to distribute 100,000 campus survival packs to GTA colleges and universities, filled with promotional products from their advertisers. “That gave us some good experience, good exposure and gave us proof of work so when a bigger piece of business came in, we had a credible case study,” says McGuigan.
That bigger piece of business came with Metro News. “We had 72 reps working five days a week in the morning distributing Metro outside the TTC,” says McGuigan.
Today, Fervent Events counts as its clients Universal Music, BMO and SickKids Foundation, and has done everything from pop-up shops to food truck tours and 360 marketing programs. The company now has nine full-time employees and 900 part-time brand ambassadors across Canada, and was recently awarded the Canadian Business Excellence Award.
Looking forward to growth
McGuigan, who was a Top 75 Finalist in the 2018 RBC Top 25 Canadian Immigrant Awards program, credits his company’s growth with his ability to look forward to the next big project and not being afraid to jump at it.
“You always get opportunities that are bigger than you had before,” he says. “Grab that and deliver on it.”