Studying at Harvard - our journey to join the Ivy League!

In 2025, I completed a certificate in Creating Brand Value at Harvard Business School. I’ve received such a warm and celebratory response to this achievement – thank you to everyone for your kind words.

I’ve had multiple questions surrounding why I did the study, how I did it, what I learnt, and how it’s changed my approach – below is my take!

Disclaimer: This article reflects my personal interpretations and takeaways from my studies at Harvard Business School. All views expressed are my own. No direct quotations or copyrighted course materials are included; the content is based solely on my independent reflections and is provided for informational and entertainment purposes only.

Event Flair grew significantly after the COVID 19 lockdowns. The events we were part of were larger and more esteemed, our team grew, and we were attracting many more ‘name’ clients. I got to learn first-hand the importance of, the delicacies and calculations behind the creation of many of our clients’ beautifully curated brands – and I loved it. The level of care was something I’d always applied to my own work, so seeing this same approach and detail when customers were considering entertainment for their events fascinated me, I had to learn more.

I’d been playing with the idea of doing further study in marketing, and had been looking at local courses to do so. My brother (also in the performing and screen arts industry) and I were chatting one day about it, and he casually said “Why don’t you study at Harvard?”. The year prior I had actually visited the Harvard campus in Boston alongside my cousin who was interested in studying law there. I reminisced walking around the gorgeous, historical campus having a fleeting imagination of living “how the other half lives”, but it never, ever occurred to me that I could become alumni. Sure enough, Harvard has recently opened an online facet of their business school, meaning becoming what I thought could only occur in my imagination was actually, a cold hard reality.

The rest was, well, pretty straight forward. I applied, I did the course, and I passed!

The course itself absolutely blew my mind – I was learning from giants in the marketing and brand industry, via a course delivered with world class tone. It was the most incredible experience and I encourage anyone and everyone to look into study at Harvard!

What it made me realise and how I pivoted Event Flair’s strategy

There were several key learnings from the course which I directly correlated to how I run Event Flair as a business, our marketing strategy and our conversations with clients.

Point of view

How I see Event Flair, is actually not how everyone else sees Event Flair - for better and for worse. I needed to translate my view of Event Flair to our audiences, to clarify our business and how we elevate events. I put together a few pieces of content to allow our audiences to test their knowledge on us, while taking the opportunity to further clarify our offerings:

It was a great opportunity to see how my marketing efforts had actually translated to our audience, helped to inform content going forward, and gave opportunity to fill in gaps that I realised I hadn’t explicitly communicated, but assumed everyone “just knew”.

I also took the opportunity to jump on a recent Instagram trend, that spoke about what may look like months of experience, was actually years in the making – with the goal to establish us as an experienced, trusted provider with creative ideas that were only getting better year on year.

How working with Event Flair is a reflection of the hirer

In the course, I learnt more and more about how hiring Event Flair (or any other service) wasn’t purely transactional. Working with us was a reflection of the hirer as a person, their status, their interests, reliability and social status. I always knew what we did was important – but I became acutely aware of how I could position Event Flair as something positive, elite and esteemed to be associated with. Our absolute goal is to elevate events, to make them spectacular, but most importantly – we provide entertainment that is relevant and harmonious to the event itself. This was a key reason why I started the company – I could see a role that entertainment could take in raising the calibre of an event, rather than a nice to have, or an add on that didn’t really change the event’s function at all.

Considering this, I chose to publicise more of our reviews, including making a highlight on our Instagram page so this was readily available for customers to view, as well as using these reviews more often in our social media captions. I took the time to build better relationships with our customers, making sure they were aware of the expertise that we brought to the table, so they could trust us – put bluntly – to not embarrass them. I positioned us as “the hirer’s best kept secret, but the thing that no one can stop talking about”

The value as the founder

My brother (a different brother!) once stated it was amazing how I’d created such an extension of myself through Event Flair – and it’s always stuck with me. I can call it a business, I can separate my emotions from it, but at the end of the day – Event Flair has me written all over it. My business has always succeeded best when I look at it objectively/outside of myself, but I realised this was a facet that I could no longer hide, and I probably shouldn’t.

Consumers want to know who stands behind the brand, who created it – their loves, their fears and all the in between. I never realised my power here, and also the real reason why the company did better when I took the time to grow myself - because Event Flair is an extension of me. While to most this realisation would mean taking on more, for me it meant slowing down and becoming more strategic. I sat back and thought of the things that would terrify me the most, and did them. I set goals for myself. I looked for personal opportunities that served only me, rather than the business. These have been the times where I’ve seen the most rapid business growth and extraordinary opportunities for Event Flair, and I truly believe it was the energy shift in myself as the founder – to go for the things I never thought I could.

In summary – I highly, highly recommend Harvard Business School’s courses. It was the most incredible course, completely changed my views of business and my personal life, and I’m so excited to continue to use the knowledge to extend the boundaries of Event Flair.

- Theresa, Creative Director at Event Flair