Risky Business - why you should let the professionals manage your event

When it comes to producing an event, there are often many moving parts that it can be very easy to miss something that can cause considerable problems when trying to manage your event. I’m not trying to frighten anyone off but we’ve been doing this line of work for years and I’ve got to say that I still lay awake at night thinking, “is there anything we’ve missed!”. Attention to detail is imperative but it’s also much more than that. It’s about understanding how to connect all the dots and knowing how to make the connections successfully from one dot to the next dot and so on. Often these connections aren’t necessarily obvious. 

Events are made up of multiple suppliers all coming together in a perfect sequence to ensure the dots all connect. There’s a well thought out order to the chaos to ensure ‘A’ follows ‘B’ follows ‘C’, etc. When things go wrong and the dots don’t connect problems ensue that can end up adding a lot of unexpected additional costs to the overall budget. 
Let me give you a couple of examples:

• A furniture supplier has a truck load of tables and chairs ready to be unloaded and set up by the caterer’s staff. The truck can’t unload though until the Audio Visual team have finished rigging all of their lights, video and audio equipment onto the truss that is sitting on the floor waiting to be flown into the ceiling. The caterer has staff on standby to set up all the tables and chairs but can’t do so until the truss has been flown and the furniture supplier has unloaded. Depending on the scale and size of the event, the above scenario can add a couple of thousand dollars to your event budget. Ouch!!! And why? Because clear and instructive communication may have been missed by the Event Manager or Organiser on a effective bump in schedule.
• You have an event that starts at midday and to save money on accommodation you decide to fly in your speakers that morning. Let’s say the event is in Melbourne and your speakers are in Sydney. What could go wrong right?  Qantas has half hourly flights, if they miss one, they’ll be on the next. The logic works. Well, yes until Sydney airport is closed for a  couple of hours due to fog and the airport now has thousands of delayed passengers to move. 
• You’re in the middle of an event that has a very tight start and finish time and your Keynote Speaker has gone overtime by 10 minutes and still going. You’re catering team have mains ready to go and to ensure they can deliver desserts before the scheduled event finishing time they need to ‘go’ with mains now but you have clear instructions to not serve food while the Keynote is speaking. What do you do? How do you get the event on time again?

The role of a good professional events team is to foresee the problems that may arise and to have planned for them without you ‘the client’ ever being aware of the problem. Additionally, being able to manage the problems immediately in a calm and collected way as they arise.  
Events can and sometimes be ‘Risky Business’ but it’s about how you manage the risk. It’s our job to stay awake at night running through all the scenarios and ensuring we have plans in place to manage the risks, not yours! That’s why we’re the Event Professionals.  

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