'I created and sold UKREiiF - now I'm helping fellow entrepreneurs with new Leeds event'

After creating the huge UKREiiF real estate conference in Leeds, Keith Griffiths is now seeking to help the nation’s entrepreneurs with a new event in the city. Chris Burn reports.

One of the key tenets of businessman Keith Griffiths’s new Entrepreneur Festival coming to Leeds next summer is featuring speakers “who have been there and done it”.

He is modest about his own achievements but visiting him at his stunning property Arthington Hall, a well-known Grade II Georgian country house with incredible views over the West Yorkshire countryside, leaves no doubt that he falls into that category himself.

Keith and wife Amanda’s company Built Environment Networking created the now-famous UKREiiF event, whose title stands for The UK's Real Estate Investment & Infrastructure Forum.

The annual three-day event launched at the Royal Armouries in Leeds in 2022 as the UK’s answer to MIPIM in Cannes and soon became a must-attend conference for senior politicians, industry professionals and investors.

The forum has been credited with unlocking more than £2 billion in projects and investment around the country and bringing tens of millions into the local economy as delegates book out hotel rooms and restaurants.

Keith and Amanda sold their business to Infopro Digital following the third UKREiiF in 2024 and moved into Arthington Hall shortly afterwards.

The 60-year-old father-of-four says leaving the company and the successful event behind was not an easy choice but undoubtedly the right one.

"The decision was extremely hard but it secured my family's financial future for generations to be honest. The amount's not disclosed but we did quite well.”

While Amanda has now retired, Keith is returning with a new event called The Entrepreneur Festival – inspired in part by the challenges he faced when selling Built Environment Networking.

"I didn't know how to sell a business,” he explains. "I spoke to agents, lawyers, accountants, and obviously I got a lot of good advice. But I couldn't find some people that had been there and done it before that I could sit and talk to. Because I couldn’t find that peer group support is one of the reasons I’m setting up what I am now.”

The Entrepreneur Festival will take place at Royal Armouries between June 15 and 17 featuring more than 300 speakers who “have been there and done that in business” with the intention of providing practical support to businesses through every stage of their lifecycle. It is designed to be the centrepiece of a year-round online membership club to provide tailored support to entrepreneurs.

Griffiths’ own journey to becoming a successful businessman was not a straightforward one. Having grown up near Wolverhampton, he joined Tarmac Construction from school and became a quantity surveyor.

He moved to Yorkshire in the late 1990s to become a partner in a construction consultancy called Gleeds with responsibility for marketing. But after being made redundant following the global financial crisis, Griffiths took the leap to set up his own company called Built Environment Marketing.

He put on events to build the new firm’s profile but says he quickly worked out “the actual events were far more fun and far more profitable” than the main business.

That led to the establishment of Built Environment Networking, which put on around 80 events per year for the real estate and construction industry.

"They were always about putting people together in the same room at the same time so they could create business. It was always about putting people on the stage that had work, that needed the consultant, the lawyer, the accountant, the agent, who was in the audience.”

He worked closely with Amanda, who ran the operational side of events. After Covid hit, they turned to online events for 18 months “to keep our head above water” – then took the ambitious step to set up UKREiiF, building on their existing experience and contacts to create something vastly bigger.

"The things that made UKREiiF were; first of all, it was cheaper than MIPIM. Second, from a green perspective, it stopped everybody flying dozens and dozens of people out to Cannes. Third, we made a massive effort to increase diversity with speakers and the audience. The event would not have worked in London because the thing that makes it work is people staying for a few days. In London, everyone would have gone home, the fringe events wouldn’t have happened and it wouldn’t have gained the momentum that is has by being in Leeds.”

Around 4,000 delegates attended in the first year, with then Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves among them.

"It was by far the biggest thing we'd done. The feedback from everybody in Year One was brilliant, and then the ticket purchasing just went through the roof in November when we had our first early bird sale. We went, ‘Crikey, we've got something here’.”

Griffiths says he is delighted the event is going from strength-to-strength, with much of its original team still in place. He now hopes that The Entrepreneur Festival can follow a similar path and he already has one eye on potentially selling the concept in a few years.

Like any good entrepreneur, Griffiths already has other ideas in the offing.

But before then, his focus on helping the next generation of entrepreneurs through both the new festival and associated online membership system. "We don't want to make it just a three-day event. This is creating an entrepreneurial club online where we can help people through the journey of being an entrepreneur.”

So from someone who knows, how do you become a successful entrepreneur?

“It has to be a mindset thing because you have to take managed risk. The big thing at the moment seems to be ‘How fast can I grow this business with other people’s money?’

“One of the things we had at UKREiiF was we grew but we never had to take money and by the time we sold it, we still had 100 per cent of it. Doing the necessary groundwork is one of the things we can help with.”

Every week we put one of our premium business stories in front of our paywall to demonstrate the benefits of becoming a Yorkshire Post subscriber. This story is this week’s selection. Please do consider supporting our mission to produce journalism like this - right now you can sign up for just £2 a month.