WHAT IF YOU WAKE UP tomorrow and your boss tells you: “Thank you, but your services are no longer required?” As John Quiñones often asks: “What would you do?”
Would you see it as an opportunity to become the best version of yourself, or mope around feeling defeated and ashamed?
When Ashley Hope was forced into that situation, he chose the former.
Being laid off may not have been on his to-do list, but what resulted from it was exactly what Ashley needed to boost him to levels of success he probably would not have otherwise reached.
Today he owns a live sound company called AccuSounds. Business is doing well, he has three full-time and two part-time employees and he couldn’t be any happier.
Ashley’s situation began a few years back when at about 24 years old, he landed what he then thought was his dream job. It was the type he always wanted. Having essentially grown up around the entertainment industry, to work within the sector was a very attractive prospect.
A past student of The St Michael School, Ashley remembered when he was younger attending all kinds of events with his mother, Pat Hope, and loving it.
“I would say that is where I found myself in the entertainment industry. My mother was a stage manager so when I got to a certain age, I think 12 or 13, she would always take me with her to events,” he said.
“Seeing everything happening, the inner workings of a show and actually helping her work sometimes was very alluring to me.”
This was why, while at secondary school, he began helping to set up the sound system whenever there were activities. The now 29-year-old said it was then that he actually fell in love with this kind of work. So much so that he continued in the field well into his time at the Barbados Community College (BCC) as he pursued a degree in music.
Whatever event the course programme held, whatever gig they performed, wherever it was held, this trained trombonist was always there to lend support setting up the sound systems.
“I wasn’t a pro but I knew the basis of it and so it was a little easier for me to set up rather than if one of the other students had to set up,” he said, laughing.
“I continued to do it during the two years I was at BCC – school events, graduations, pageants, concerts; it didn’t matter. That was when I would say I realised this is something I could do.”
However, upon graduation and with the need to earn money, Ashley, of Grazettes, St Michael, found a job at a bank. That lasted for almost 18 months but during that time, he also began pushing his enterprise.
Ashley invested his bank salary into purchasing a small system, which he used for weddings and any other small gigs he had on the side. This continued for a few years until he found his “dream” job in 2011 doing the same kind of work but on a full-time basis. However, two years after came the news that he would be without work.
He wasn’t home for too long before he made up his mind to become self-employed permanently. According to him, in his last position, he was the person on the ground giving of his best, making the company look good and he queried: “So why can’t I go and do that for myself, build up my company and make it work for me?”
However, still somewhat unsure if this was the right move, Ashley turned to his mum and step-father, Erskine Rose, for some much needed guidance and reassurance.
“It was difficult in the sense of life; I still had to live and still had to eat, bills to pay. I was living on my own so I had to look out for myself. So I did question myself but my stepfather did help and he pushed me. We sat down and came up with a plan of action in terms of what I needed to do in order to sustain myself, and what I needed to do to sustain the company and ensure that I continually got work. So basically, how to grow the company. He gave me his blessings and so did my mother and that was all I needed.”
Two months later on September 10, 2013, Ashley registered AccuSounds. The business offers services such as sound system rentals, audio equipment rentals and sales, AV rentals, live audio recordings, sound system installations as well as conference and meeting support.
Ashley recounted coming up with the business’ name after playing around with the word acute, trying to find different meanings for the word “on top”. Ironically, in the first year of business, AccuSounds was on the opposite spectrum of the top.
“That first year there was some months in there when I questioned: Is this really working out? One month in particular, May 2014, I got one job and that came on the last day of the month. That made me doubt myself, but from June the next month things picked up and I felt good. As an entrepreneur you have those days but you have to stick to it if you want to be successful. If you stick to it, you know you will have those rough patches and they will pass.”
Indeed, the rough patches passed when he landed a major contract with a top hotel. After that, he said the pieces to the puzzle just began to fall in place.
The next move was acquiring more equipment. In doing so, it allowed him to get more gigs. As the profits began rolling in, they were put back into growing the business.
Today, he has carved out his niche in Barbados and as the business continues to grow, he hopes to take it to neighbouring countries.
“I am fairly young, the company is fairly young, but I think there is a bright future ahead. My competition isn’t necessarily the big companies; they already have their target market. My market is the smaller events which has allowed me to work every day,” he said.
“I honestly didn’t think all this would have happened this quickly, in under four years, especially having those months when nothing was happening. But one thing I think has helped me tremendously is that I have always strived to give persons that quality service that they deserve and that I would want for myself.
“So they are assured that we are going to be on time, set up and waiting and my equipment will look outstanding. Those and other little things that people don’t pay attention to, I make them my focus because I know these things have given this field a bad name,” he said. (SDB Media)