While at a festival in Oxfordshire in 2008, Nat Stedman and Joe Pritchard were inspired to start their own event planning business. After saving for two years and receiving £12,000 from the European Union Social Fund, they rented a house in Cardiff to start up under the name Rojo&Co.

Since their first sale in spring 2011, flexible staffing arrangements with students from local universities allowed them to secure customers all over the world, ranging from Accenture to Mars Inc.

Despite internal changes (Joe left the company to devote more time to his family), the startup was accepted into the Welsh High Potential Startup Programme.

This year, Rojo&Co launched a new brand, Imagiha, to achieve their goal of automating event planning through web-based software allowing anyone to plan professional events.

Q&A with Nat Stedman, co-founder of Imagiha

We asked him about his experience and reflections on starting up.

What was your experience of starting up in Wales?

Wales is possibly one of the best places to start a business in the world for its business support. There was a lot of professional support in the way of advice and funding available in Wales as well as good links with other cities. Given the number of universities we have in such a small space in South Wales, there’s a huge amount of talent. That talent is not as expensive and there’s not as much competition for the talent as there is in London. So it was quite a strategic decision in terms of the support to move to Cardiff as well.

What role does technology play for your startup?

The business wouldn’t really be profitable without the efficiencies created by the technology side. So, the technology side of the company will act autonomously with a close partnership to the events side, and the two will act as a test bed to improve one another in terms of efficiency and market needs.

What was your experience of receiving government and EU funding?

When we originally received the graduate bursary, given the amount of time and effort we spent applying, we perhaps could’ve earned that money in just going and doing a job, or perhaps trying to win clients. It’s a little bit of a false economy in the sense that it’s not easy to jump through the hoops, shall we say, but it is terrific support.