A man once told he wasn't "clever enough" to study science is taking a multimillion pound health company global.
When it came to picking A-levels, Liam Spence, now 33, was keen to pursue pharmacy after gaining work experience at a chemist. But his school's career advisor told the then-16-year-old he "wasn't clever enough" to study science, changing his subject choice and the course of his career after he left with "non-existent" qualifications aged 17.
Liam told the ECHO: "I was interested in it, but I probably wasn't academically smart enough to do it. They're probably right, but it's just come full circle because I actually wanted to become a pharmacist and now, hopefully, if everything goes to plan, we're launching an online pharmacy."
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He's actually spent most of the last 16 years since he left school amid the "hard slog" and unsociable hours of hospitality. The pinnacle of that career was his nearly four years at Alma de Cuba, a club and restaurant in a Grade II listed former church, which was bought by JSM Group for £2.5m, the ECHO reported this week.
The venue became a celebrity favourite after it opened in the former St Peters Church in 2005, hosting the Liverpool FC players' party after the team's 2006 FA Cup win. The contacts and experience Liam gained there allowed him to launch his own catering company, Golden Circle Events, which organised events for the M&S Bank Arena and worked with luxury brands like Estée Lauder.
His success caught the eye of the Bongo's Bingo team, which invited him to help out with its third birthday shows at Bramley Moore Dock in 2018. Liam said: "I couldn't turn down the opportunity of working for such a brilliant and exciting company, and after the success of the birthday shows at Bramley Moore Dock, they offered me a full-time role, which I was ecstatic about. It's such a great company to work for."
Bootle-born Liam added: "I joined an amazing team, with co-founders Jonny Bongo and Josh Burke, as well as Kyle Pusey and Kealan Gilpin who led the expansion both internationally and within the UK. Together, we became part of an expansion and operations team that took Bongo's Bingo from a few venues in the UK to a global phenomenon, playing in Ibiza, Australia and Dubai. Kealan led the plans to take Bongo's into the American market, and then coronavirus hit."
Events were cancelled as covid spread, and Liam found himself in need of a new job. Fortunately for him, a new company growing in the city would soon reunite him with his workmates. In just two weeks in late 2020, Wirral doctor Frank Joseph launched a Liverpool lab processing covid travel tests with a price tag of £99 and a promise to return the results by midnight.
The company - DAM Health - would soon be part of a global roll-out of Covid-19 testing, running 68 high street clinics and testing around 25,000 people a day at the pandemic's peak. Kyle and Kealan were part of driving this global expansion, and Liam followed in their footsteps to join the company as part of its business development team in January 2021.
Now DAM Health, which is currently based at The Spine at Paddington Village and offers home tests for £15, has opened its first clinic in New Zealand. Liam admits it's "completely different" from the "experiential economy" he was used to, but he said: "In terms of the leap, we did apply some of the same practices. A lot of the expansion work was done by Kealan and Kyle, I can't praise them enough.
"In terms of moving into healthcare, we look at the marketing aspects, the creative aspects and the commercial aspects, but we surround ourselves with the experts in science, medical and healthcare to essentially fill in the blanks and ensure that we are moving in the right direction.
"The major challenge now is pivoting away from such a successful covid testing company into a future healthcare range and a larger portfolio. With that comes more accreditations and more challenges along the way. We've got to build an online pharmacy, we are now looking at offering healthcare solutions, both online and in store, so that's always going to come with its challenges. But thankfully, we've got such a great medical team around us now to help guide us in the correct way."
Looking back on the long road he travelled from school to the healthcare industry, Liam is proud of where he's ended up in life. He said: "Don't always be down if someone advises you to go in a different direction. You never know what can come in the future.
"Working with such great colleagues, like I have with Kyle and Kealan, it's not always about what you know, it's sometimes it's about who you know. Don't let teachers put you down because they think they know what's best. They might put you on a certain path, but there's always hopefully an opportunity around the corner."
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