Kids today, what are they like? Well, if they are anything like Ryan Bailey they are running a successful company - because he's quite possibly the UK's youngest business boss.
Ryan is just 16 and his sound and lighting enterprise is working with leading musical, theatre and comedy acts, while he attends college three days a week.
The teenager actually started Unity Production, in his home city of Plymouth, when he was 15, before he even sat his GCSEs.
He’s worked with top comics Rich Hall, Mark Steel, Hardeep Singh Kohli and Angus Deayton at Millbay’s Red House Theatre, and with bands at festivals around the South West.
He’s also supplied the audio and lighting at fun days and other community events, and for theatre productions including at the Theatre Royal Plymouth’s Lab performance space.
And all this while studying live events production at City College Plymouth.
“I have two days off college a week,” he said. “So I use that to work.”
Ryan, who passed seven GCSEs including maths and science, is an electronics wizard, designing sound and light displays, helming mixing desks and lighting booths and mostly using his own bank of equipment, from microphones to PA systems.
In fact, he splashed £2,000 on new kit including a digital snake (ask your nearest electronics brainbox) and mixing desk just before his exams.
“I paid for all that with my own money,” Ryan said proudly. “That’s cash I’d earned from doing events.
“At a show I have to set out all the gear, do the sound check, there’s a deadline I have to hit, and then operate it all during the performance and pack it down afterwards, then leave.”
And the only time Ryan has to call for help is when he needs dad Neil Bailey to give him a lift to the shows.
The former Ivybridge Community College student is, naturally, too young to drive and his father only pitches in to help at the shows because he’ll be hanging around anyway, as the designated driver.
“I stay and give him a hand, but technically he can do it all himself,” he said. “I also have to pay for the fuel – and the KFC on the way home.
“But Ryan is running his own company and finding his own work.”
Ryan began as a sound and lighting expert when he was just 12 years old, and set up Unity Production in 2019 because he was getting so much work he needed to have a company structure for all the dull business stuff, such as invoicing – which he also takes care of.
“I started the company because it shows it’s professional,” he said. “I do most of the accounts myself, the quotes, invoices and pay for things.”
Ryan, who was a member of Ivybridge CC’s special group for technically minded students, has already masterminded the sound and vision for the Plymouth Performing Arts Academy’s productions of the Wizard of Oz, Annie and Children of Eden, and worked with Plymouth’s Laughable Entertainment on its top class comedy shows.
And now he’s already thinking about his future career, planning to follow his studies at City College Plymouth by heading to the capital’s bright lights to work as a sound engineer on top West End shows.
“I want to go to London when I’m 18 to work in theatres,” he said.
Ryan got into electronics and sound through music. He’s a drummer with the well-known Plymouth band The Meltones, which features his piano playing father, whose day job is running the IT firm Total ICT, alongside Steve Whiteway, on keyboards, and ace guitarist Jimmy Appudurai-Chua.
“Through the band Ryan has had fantastic exposure to working with lots of different performers,” said Steve. “And now he has the youngest sound and light production company in the whole of the South West.”
