Nancy Skipper

Nancy started in the music industry in 1997 aged 19, working with promoting legend, Harvey Goldsmith. Her first job at HGE was assisting the Finance team but she quickly progressed to working as Harvey’s PA and then into the Production team which is where she learned the promoting skills in ticketing, marketing and event production working on events like Live8 and Teenage Cancer Trust.

27 years on, some of the shows and events she worked on at HGE then remain in her annual roster of events, Nancy continues to work with Harvey Goldsmith and artists/events such as Jools Holland, Teenage Cancer Trust and David Gilmour to this day.

After going freelance in 2005 and working primarily in the UK festival market, Nancy set up staffing company, Ginger Owl with her business partner and long time friend, Julie Chennells. The pair have successfully run the business for 11 years and have a long list of clients and work in the UK and globally providing event teams for backstage services such as accreditation and artist liaison for live events in sport, fashion, music and at festivals.

The female led company remains 100% independent, without external funding or support GO has built a huge network of freelance professionals, all trained in the GO way of working so that they deliver amazing results for their clients. GO believe in booking and providing the best talent in the business and looking after them, many of their freelancers have been working with the company since it began in 2013.

Nancy’s passion has always been travel, her work has taken her to some amazing destinations in Spain, South Africa, Nigeria and most recently she headed up the company’s Middle Eastern team based in Saudi Arabia where GO operated for 3 years.

Heading up the Saudi team was a big challenge for many reasons. At times GO would be providing up to 300 staff at a time covering the various projects across AlUla, Jeddah and Riyadh. They provided teams for accreditation, artist liaison, artist logistics, crew logistics and crew support and have built an extensive network in the region.

In 2023 GO made a commercial decision to reduce operations in the Middle East to focus on their technology innovation. In 2024 GO have self-funded and built a bespoke online event management platform, drawing together years of knowledge into one piece of software to refine and distill the needs of event promoters for accreditation and artist liaison into one application. GOAllAreas was launched in August 2024 and already has some big events booked in to use it for their 2025 shows.

As female leaders in the industry Nancy and Julie are often called upon to speak on the subject of female issues within the industry.

They take their responsibility very seriously and are committed to continuing to empower the younger generation of event professionals and ensure this is reflected in their teams and workplaces.

As well as being Director for GO, Nancy is the Operations Manager of the National Arenas Association (NAA) in the UK, a role she has held for 17 years. The Association connects the UK arena network for annual meetings and events, as well as sharing best practice. From 2015 - 2022 Nancy was also General Manager of the European Arenas Association (EAA). She stood down from the EAA role while working in Saudi but retains close links to the Association and its members.

Nancy is also a single parent with 3 children. They share her passion for travel, as a family they’re working on seeing the Wonders of the World and have made it to 4 of them so far, the next stop will be Mexico in April 2025!