A MAN who made £100,000 in 30 days from a genius idea was absolutely devastated to suddenly lose it all.
Ryan Powell, 25, from Bridgend in Wales, was on a Tinder date at a drive-thru cinema when he was struck with a brilliant realisation in November 2020.
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He assessed what it would take to create his own version of the cinema, and decided he could probably throw one together himself.
He told Wales Online: “I was like ‘I can do that’…surely it is just an inflatable screen and projector, it can’t be that hard.”
Ryan was running a children’s event business which was already struggling.
He was in “desperate need” for an alternative type of work and decided to ignore any reasons why he shouldn’t go ahead.
With “no experience” behind him, the young entrepreneur and business partner Jake Weller launched Firefly Cinemas by asking 100 people to post about the open air movie complex in exchange for half price tickets.
Ryan explained: “Our tactic was Chinese whispers, we stirred up hype for something that didn’t yet exist.”
He managed to sell tickets before he’d actually purchased a screen and within 30 days had sold £100,000 worth of tickets for events at Porthcawl, Cardiff and Merthyr Tydfil.
But when a lockdown was imposed in December 2020, Ryan was forced to cancel or postpone some of his screenings.
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His new business began to show cracks when the new dates were over four months away.
Other problems cropped up like weather issues, relocating as well as not having a licence to run the cinema.
He said: “You learn a lot about yourself…because it cost us so much time and energy and it was really hard, I don’t think I wanted to admit that the pandemic was a problem.
“So I kept going, kept putting on more events.”
He said it all “came crashing down” after putting in countless hours and was forced to move back in with his parents.
Despite the downfall, Ryan says there has been plenty of lessons and believes that as long as you learn something each time you fall down, it’s worth it.
He said: “To reach the really really high highs there has to be the lows.”
