Summit Media

At present 20 former criminals work at the business – including the head of the technical HQ in Prague, who was deported having being released early after serving 11 years of a 26 year sentence – many of whom, since their release, still return to the prison every day to manage the teams, while others have moved on to set up their own ventures or even joined Summit’s clients’ businesses.

Founder Hedley Aylott launched the “project” with the dual aim of delivering online marketing for paying clients while developing a pioneering training and rehabilitation scheme for prisoners that would lead to employment on release.

Prisoners

As such, “polo-playing reformer” Aylott has trained almost 300 prisoners. Moreover, he points to statistics that show only one has re-offended since coming through the scheme.

Aylott first started working with inmates while studying at Nottingham University. He gave ten inmates two weeks to write a three-track EP before putting on a gig for the rest of the jail. As chance would have it, Mark Goodyear turned up to the performance and subsequently played the tracks on Radio 1.

That proved a turning point for Aylott. When he left Nottingham, he headed to Manchester to study a course in music composition.

He then set up a recording studio in Strangeways prison to run his “project” – this was in 1994, shortly after the infamous riots.

He worked with a group of gang members to produce a track called Summit that was about the coming together of all the different gangs. It was a call for peace, a comment on Manchester and its gun culture.

With his mum – who still works with him to this day – doing the books, Summit Records was formed, releasing the prison hit around the world and making the Top 20 in the UK charts.

Following the success of the record, Aylott was invited to meet the guv’nor of a Yorkshire prison who “didn’t like the record, but liked what he was doing”. Within four weeks he was running his project at HMP Wolds, a category C prison in East Yorkshire.

From the prison, Aylott and the inmates produced a series of arts projects, culminating in the commissioning of Liberty Street, a rock opera written and composed by Aylott and performed in HMP Wolds. It was an opera about life on the street in the late 90s, integrating a full orchestral score with big dance beats and rap.

The opera was performed in front of an audience of 3000 over a period of six nights. Aylott suggested webcasting the performance, which involved building a website through which to host the show. This was 1997. Without yet realising it, though, this was the birth of Summit Media.

Over the space of three years a number of other performances were subsequently written and produced. Along with them came websites to sell and promote tickets and CDs.

However, while the theatre and music was a great platform, a lot of the inmates would never become actors or singers and, at the end of the day, they needed skills that they could transfer to the real world on their release, tangible skills to help them find employment.

So, having produced these arts projects with little or no funding, Aylott decided to change this, proposing the set-up of a digital media studio in the prison – uniquely, a profit-making company.

“Summit Media started in a little yellow portacabin. There were three of us – myself, a plumber from Newcastle and a joiner from Grimsby,” recalls Aylott.

The prison-based studio offered online marketing and website development – according to Aylott, quite revolutionary. “Back in those days people just built fancy websites.”

As such, business grew rapidly. Summit Media worked with an agency in Leeds, Sticky Eyes, who outsourced their online marketing to Summit. Quickly the little team of three grew to six.

Gnome workshop

By 2001 the digital media studio was proving so successful that it moved out of the portacabin and took over the prison’s concrete gnome workshop.

It was renovated into a smart media centre, complete with uniforms, and morphed into a fully-fledged digital marketing consultancy which was staffed by a collective of inmates who had applied to come to Summit from prisons across the country.

To this day, all inmates hoping to work at Summit need to complete a rigorous application pack and make a 40 minute presentation to an imaginary MD, coming up with a new brand, a marketing and web strategy, and storyboarding an advertising campaign.

“It’s a pretty tall order,” admits Aylott. “Applicants would cut out pictures from magazines to storyboard it and record presentations on their ghettoblasters.

“We want someone that has a brain. Someone that wants the opportunity. Most of our guys in the early days hadn’t even seen the internet. We develop raw talent, straight-forward and logical thinkers.

“The reason that Summit is so unique is that it is a client-facing, commercial business run inside the prison,” continues the Summit boss. “It is not a training opportunity first and foremost. From the day they arrive, the inmates have to earn their right. There is no room for charity or for failure. It is one strike and you are out. If you misuse the telephone or the internet, you are out. It will be added to their record and that will affect parole and getting out.”

As such, staff are treated like any other employees and are paid a wage, around £35 per week, receiving bonuses for their performance, quality of work and attitude.

However Aylott is quick to point out that this business model is a far from easy way of recruiting cheap labour. “We don’t make a fortune through paying low wages to prisoners. For all the benefits that you might save on the wage bill, it is bloody hard work. It is fraught with risk. We have to train staff for up to six months, some of whom might not even have been to school.”

Yet the risk taking seems more than justified, and from the 300 people that have come through Summit’s system, Aylott claims that you can count on two hands those that have abused the trust. “And in that, no one has tried to escape or anything too serious,” he adds.

By 2005, Summit was growing quickly. “I was spending every day of my life in the prison,” says Aylott, “as was Marion, my mother. And we, quite simply, ran out of space.

“By chance, we found a lovely farm just minutes away from the jail. The plan was to set that up as our HQ – allowing staff to come out of the prison during the day to work. It also came with 65 acres of land and we decided to set up an equestrian centre, allowing staff an interesting incentive.”

That “plan” has grown into one of the largest and most active polo centres in the UK, with Aylott chairman and founder of the White Rose Polo club.

One of Summit’s biggest success stories comes from one former inmate, who worked with Summit for five years, before winning early release… and before being deported back to Prague.

Good fortune

“He had 26 years to serve and was released after 11,” says the Summit boss. “He is now head of operations and technology and is in charge of 50 people. We would never have moved to Prague had we not met this guy inside... Previously he was a coach driver.

“There is good fortune in all this. But you make your own luck. We work very hard.”

While Aylott is proud of Summit’s social achievements he is, of course, keen to shout about the agency’s wider business success too.

“The prisoners are only 20 out of 100 staff. Now if the prison were to close, we would continue. Four years ago it would have been the end of Summit. We are a top ten agency. We compete head on with all the big names... It is a very different model, but the quality of the work speaks for itself.

“As well as turning people’s lives around, we turn people’s businesses around too.”