The School Gates Open at 6pm - and Vivify Venues Starts Its Second Shift

At half past five, the school belongs to algebra, assemblies and the peculiar smell of poster paint. An hour later, it can belong to a five-a-side team, a choir, a martial arts instructor or a group learning to bake. Vivify Venues makes money from that changeover. The Manchester company lists and manages school facilities after teaching hours, turning buildings designed for one public purpose into places that can perform another.

The premise has the satisfying neatness of finding cash in a winter coat. Britain already has pitches, courts, pools, halls and classrooms in the middle of its communities. Schools already pay to maintain them. Local organisers already need affordable places to meet. Yet the two sides are separated by a thicket of keys, calendars, invoices, insurance, safeguarding checks and staff rotas. Vivify does not pour the concrete. It makes the existing concrete easier to use.

For hirers, the visible product is a searchable marketplace. A postcode and an activity reveal nearby rooms, with live availability and online payment. The taxonomy is wonderfully specific: badminton and ballet sit alongside kabaddi, hydrotherapy, board gaming, funeral wakes and life drawing. For schools, the product is a choice about how much nuisance to surrender.

The gatekeeper is part of the product

Plenty of companies can put a calendar on the internet. Vivify's distinction is that it can also supply the people who unlock the building, check that the right group has arrived, mind the boundaries of a working school and close up afterwards. Its community hosts work evenings, weekends and holidays. They pass through a training academy covering operating standards, security, safeguarding and customer service.

That human layer explains why this is both a software business and a facilities operation. The booking platform manages live calendars, complex repeat bookings, invoices, payments, reporting and uploaded insurance documents. Stripe integration automates payments, retries and refunds. Trust administrators can view several schools in one dashboard. None of it helps the Tuesday-night netball club, however, if the car park is chained shut.

Vivify sells three levels of intervention. Fully Managed covers marketing, bookings, finance, compliance and on-site staff. Bookings Managed takes the inbox, contracts, vetting and debt chasing while the school keeps control of its own building. Connect is the self-serve route: software, marketplace visibility, automated payments and dashboards for a school prepared to run the operation itself.

The ladder matters. A school business manager can begin without committing to a wholesale handover, or outsource more when the admin becomes tiresome. The school's own diary remains sovereign: sports day, parents' evening and the Christmas performance can all be blocked before public slots appear.

A company born when every venue was closed

Russell Teale spent nearly two decades in leisure, rising from an HR administrator at Total Fitness to operations director. A previous startup, the fitness app FiTR, struggled for traction. The pressure landed physically: Teale later described a thud in his chest that he feared was a heart attack. A health monitor identified a panic attack. His next role, running operations at School Letting Solutions, exposed him to community lettings. Seeing people from different walks of life using school space, he has said, "blew my mind."

That was the change of mind behind Vivify: the interesting asset was not another gym membership but the public building already down the road. Teale founded the company in 2020 with Alaine Swis and Andy Mellor. The timing was comic in the bleakest way. They had a venue business when the country was closing venues.

“We did not qualify for furlough so I did the first 12 months salary free.”Russell Teale, on Vivify's lockdown launch

This is the cleanest answer to what the experiment cost before investors arrived: a year of the founder's pay, plus the strain of starting while schools and leisure sites were restricted. Public accounts of the early period do not offer a tidy catalogue of product failures. The first thing that plainly failed was the environment around the product. Demand could not behave normally during lockdown. What kept the idea alive was Teale's conviction that closed leisure centres made distributed school facilities more necessary, not less.

Revenue share, not rent collection

Vivify describes school listing through Connect as free, without setup costs or a subscription. Its managed services use an agreed percentage split of hirer income, adjusted for what the school needs - particularly whether Vivify staff must run the venue. This aligns the sales pitch neatly: the provider earns when the school's empty hours earn.

The company says it now works with more than 200 schools, exposes more than 2,000 school facilities and reaches a network of over 15,000 hirers. It advertises bookings in as little as 90 seconds and potential annual income of up to £300,000 per school. That last number is an upper bound, not a promise. Vivify itself notes that results vary with location, facility quality and local demand.

Company-reported network and impact figures. Income potential depends on the building, timetable, local market and service level.

By May 2026, BusinessCloud reported about 500 employees, including the distributed workforce, turnover of roughly £8 million and a target of £12 million for the year. That is a considerably heavier organisation than the phrase "booking platform" suggests. It also describes the moat. A rival needs software, but also local demand, school relationships, insurance processes, host recruitment and the patience to reconcile a cancelled badminton slot.

The play worth borrowing

The reusable lesson is not "build a marketplace." It is to identify the operational reason an idle asset stays idle, then package progressively more help around it. Vivify has done this in three steps: make demand visible, make the transaction painless, and take over the awkward physical work when the supplier cannot. The service tiers turn operational appetite into a product choice.

Another useful move is to sell the same transaction to each side in different language. Hirers hear convenience: a nearby pitch, transparent availability, one-off or repeat booking. Schools hear control: their calendar, vetted users, safeguarding, dashboards and a new budget line. The marketplace works only if both descriptions remain true.

Competitors make similar arguments. SchoolHire Solutions offers fully managed lettings, while Kajima Community combines BookingsPlus software with the BookingsGuru managed service. Schools can also keep the work in-house. Vivify's position is the breadth of its stack and the scale of its consumer-facing demand: marketplace, software, contact centre, payments, compliance and optional people on the premises.

Its social-purpose language is unusually close to the cash register. A booked hall can pay for energy, teaching support, equipment or trips. In 2023, Vivify said it had facilitated 10 million visits and generated £10 million for schools, equivalent by its calculation to £50 million in social value. The same year it won ukactive's Healthy Communities award. The company has also worked with Total Swimming Academies on a £1 million Movement Project for school pools and facilities, and partnered with ukactive to promote access to physical activity.

The culture borrows the verbs of an operations manual: Growth, Passion & Pride, Find a Way and Partnership. Staff helped write those values, according to its people director. "Find a Way" is especially apt in a business where the glamorous strategy ends at a padlocked side entrance. Vivify's work happens in that last stubborn metre between a confirmed booking and an open door.

After the final bell

Vivify is now a much larger bet than its lockdown beginning. It acquired Community Hire in 2022, extending its reach into Luton, London and Bristol. Its product expanded from full-service management into self-serve SaaS and the middle lane of booking administration. In March 2026 it ranked third in BusinessCloud's EdTech 50. The company has become education technology by paying attention to what education buildings do when education pauses.

There is something pleasingly literal about the name. To vivify is to bring life to something. At six o'clock, the formulas have been rubbed from the whiteboard, the football team is arriving, and a community host is walking across the tarmac with a ring of keys. The asset was there all along. The business is the second shift.