Getting support and giving it back

By Jordan Oppy

I am the founder of Oppy Entertainment, an entertainment business located at Coffs Harbour on the NSW Mid-North Coast.

Oppy Entertainment incorporates three businesses:

• Oppy Entertainment provides bands, DJs and all sorts of entertainment to pubs, clubs, weddings, parties and to all sorts of events.

• Coffs Coast Photobooth Hire provides photo booths to events.

• Pub Trivia Australia creates trivia games for pubs and clubs to make them the social hubs of their communities.

With entertainment venues being one of the first places shut down in NSW due to COVID-19 and some of the last to open up, my businesses were hit pretty hard. Myself, my wife (who also works in the business), and three contract employees were eligible for JobKeeper, which has been keeping us going.

Getting support and giving it back

As a way to distract ourselves and our three kids from the cabin fever brought on by isolating and home-schooling, we decided to focus our energy on keeping people entertained during lockdown. While we would normally sell our trivia packs to pubs and clubs, as trivia nights are a great attraction for venues to bring in patrons, we decided in these COVID-19 times to start running our games online for free. It’s been great for our sanity and for the sanity of players who join us from all around Australia, and even overseas! We love our trivia players. I have been hosting trivia in pubs and clubs several times per week for ten-plus years, and our trivia patrons are very loyal.

I guess I just wanted to create a way to help people feel connected during such an isolating time. We keep the games free of charge, so that everyone has a chance to play, and ask for donations from players if they can. We don’t make a profit (we are actually losing money playing the games due to the Zoom membership and Facebook advertising costs), but we’re receiving the support payment from the government, so thought we should be giving something back to the community.

I continue to be busy in the office 6.5 days per week, ten hours a day creating daily puzzles, games, and trivia, and interacting with our Facebook fans during these hard times. I try to make myself personally available to our 15,000-plus fans, answering questions people send our page every hour, and just generally trying to create fun ways to help people pass the time. Giving back to my community in this way, cooking meals with my family every night and going for nature walks – these are the things that will get me through this tough time.

Trying to look forward

As a business that has been 100% affected by COVID-19, we know what people are going through. We have spent over ten years building our business, only to have it come crashing down around us in a matter of weeks, if not days. I am a firm believer of always looking forward, and of not worrying about the things you cannot change. We will get through this, there is no question, and when we do, we will work harder than ever to build back what we have lost and come out stronger on the other side.