Belinda King established her own entertainment company after training as a dancer in England a little over 20 years ago. In its early days, Belinda supplied entertainment for Japanese hotels and casinos in Portugal. Initially, she danced too, but after the first year and plenty of bookings coming in, she stopped dancing professionally and concentrated on growing the company. In its early days, she also choreographed the shows, but times have changed and, as CEO of this thriving enterprise, Belinda is looking to the future from the company’s HQ in Northampton.

Casino International: Whent he company started up, were you based in Northampton?

Belinda King: Not really, I used to travel around the world with the shows for the first two or three years. It was a whole big new project when we started in Portugal; where they used to use a different type of entertainment, part of the actual gambling license was that they had to recruit international entertainers. So I was in the right place at the right time and we made a really big impact at that time. We really started changing the whole entertainment scene in Portugal and it then went to Spain and France and everywhere else. 25 years ago they used to have very big, glamorous visual shows, but then it came to standstill; then we re-introduced more theatre into the casinos, so they were like little mini theaters within the casino. We produced lots of very different things including folk lore and classical ballet – and that’s how we started really.

CI: How has the company grown and changed over the years?

BK: Well, I got married and had two children, came back to the UK in 1995, and set up a company here in Northampton and it has slowly grown over the last ten years. Certainly over the last couple of years it has grown very quickly, and I hope it will continue doing so.

CI: In terms of personnel how did you retain staff or has it always been on a contract-by-contract basis? It’s surely hard to retain staff when you’re putting shows on, with work not being as concrete as in other fields.

BK: Most of the time I have retained staff, that’s how I found it works best for me - so that I was able to create and maintain the quality and the standards that I always expected. Although it has had its difficulties retaining staff as you can imagine. Most companies, particularly these days, work on a freelance basis but I have always had the opinion that for me to maintain the high quality and the standard we produce that we have to keep the ‘special people’ in the team that help to produce it in the first place.

CI: When you get a commission how do you work with a client to deliver the right product?

BK: I address each client’s venue on its own merit and its own needs, so we will go out and do a ‘recce’ and speak to the artistic directors and we will speak to as many people as we possibly can – Marketing, Public Relations and first of all get some insight into what they need, what the client needs and what their company is looking for. Then we show what we can bring to the table, what we can introduce. So we very much work on a personal level, we don’t just produce a product and put it out on the market for sale. We do look carefully and quite often we will – in terms of the creative content of a production – look at doing something for the locals, making it interesting both for the locals and for the tourists. Sometimes these venues are 90% tourism so the audience is changing on a daily basis or other venues there can be 50-60% locals which would present a different project all together – so I work to spec, I work to the client’s requirements.

CI: Who are your core customers now?

BK: We are still in the casinos in Portugal, we also work with Cunard and we have an exclusive contract with the Queen Mary. We provide all of their production shows for their theatre. We also provide for the Queen Elizabeth II, we revamped their theatre, and again we put a lot of research into what was needed to make the changes and we have been doing that until she retires in a couple of months time.

We are in the process of doing the Queen Victoria which will be launched this December. It’s been built in Venice. Beyond that with the shipping industry we have some potential new business coming in next year.

In the casinos we are seriously looking at expanding and widening our horizons on that. We’re looking at strategies and ways of presenting and providing a more complete package hopefully for other casinos. So that’s our interest as it works very well along with the shipping industry.

Everything that we do is at top level, the very top. We have created that whole team of people, we have an infrastructure, we have a full-time team. We have a good reputation, so this is the time now, we are well established and we are at the top of our game really with the future now to expand, particularly in the casino world.

CI: What marks out the company as different? What do you do that stands out from your rivals, apart from the quality of your shows?

BK: One of the ideas we got was something that works very well on the cruise ships – if you have one cast and they work on four or five productions. Rather than take one show out for three months, it works well to have one cast that can perform three or four shows, which would work very well in casinos as you could have a different show on each night, so if they have a local audience then that offers real flexibility which they’re are not doing at the moment, which is quite prohibitive in the casino world. We think that is something we can offer as we have all this experience of doing it on the ships – we have a cruise style model, if you like so we can say right, let’s use that model. That’s something we are very keen to try out on a client!

CI: Where do you find your performers then? People that have the discipline and talents to perform three or four different shows a week?

BK: Most of our recruiting for dancers is done in Eastern Europe – you just don’t have the same type of hard training here in the UK, sadly. We did have but now it has changed and we have to go to Russia and Ukraine, and Argentina as they have that incredibly disciplined ballet training – and from there on they can learn contemporary dance or swing dance and different styles. But first and foremost they have the mentality and discipline to work, it is professionalism.

We are invited to all the stage schools that are graduating, just recently we’ve been to the Northern Ballet school and there were 70 graduates and I only chose one, a Japanese boy who was extraordinary. He’d got a government grant to come over here and be trained, so I offered him a job and he said. "Oh, no, I’m going back to Japan". That’s what happens sometimes.

Three shows with one cast does require a very multi-talented cast. So, singers have normally done a certain amount of time in the West End, or at least a number one British theatre as they have to have had that back-to-back vocal training and ability.

CI: So how are you going to pitch your skills to casino operators around the world?

BK: It’s no good us going into a meeting and saying we’re different, we are going to propose something completely new – what we want to say is, ‘this is what we do and we do it better than anybody else. It is successful, we don’t have the repetition and complacency. We will make sure it is run and maintained.’ And hopefully if we get that far we will invite the necessary people to come onto the ship and they can see it themselves. So that’s it, but it is a very difficult one to explain as it is very difficult to quantify quality, isn’t it? You can show people photos and DVD’s and show designs and input, the award winning certificate or trophy, or the scores that they got last week, but quite frankly if you don’t see for yourself, you don’t get the full experience.

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