Tips & Tricks for Managing an Excellent Business Event

Business events are key to building your organization’s reputation and growing your business. However, planning and managing a business event can leave event managers feeling overwhelmed. The following are some tips that can help make the process easier.

Get an Early Start

Start the planning process early. The larger the event, the earlier you should start. Successful business event managers will typically start planning for an event between one year and six months in advance. Smaller events may not need as much leeway. In any event, the sooner you start the task, the more time you will have to adjust for any unforeseen problems that arise. All vendor contracts should be signed and completed well in advance of the event.

Avoid Rigidity

As you go through the process of planning your event, unforeseen challenges will arise. The event time may change, the preferred location may become unavailable, or even the type or purpose of the event might change. You need to keep yourself flexible so that you can address the demands of change.

Everything Has Its Price

Don’t listen to vendors when they tell you that something is non-negotiable. Everything has its price. Vendors want to make a profit, and there is a line that they cannot drop beneath. At the same time, most vendors are able to tweak their profit margin in order to make the sale.

Negotiation is important because as you go through the event planning process, unforeseen expenses are going to pop up. And these are going to require money. The lower that you can negotiate prices with a vendor, the more flexibility you will have in your budget. Meet with the vendor, and offer them five to 10 percent lower than your budget allows. The vendor might push back a little bit. However, in the end, you will win because they want your business.

Make Good Use of Cloud Technology

Cloud technology has made real-time collaboration easier than ever before. Digital spreadsheets, online accounting software, and event staffing software can help you organize an event and communicate information seamlessly to other members of your team.

Use shared documents and shared software efficiently. Everyone should be able to refer back to this central source of information if they have a question. Having the entire team be able to access this information means that there are more eyes on the project and more people who could potentially identify if something is out of place.

Organize and Delegate

Don’t try to do everything yourself. Managers need to manage. This means delegating and assigning responsibilities. Look at the entirety of your event. Break it up into sections. Assign a group of people to work with registrations, transportation, catering, etc.

From each group you create, select one individual to be the team captain. The team captains should report back directly to you and serve as your management team. Since each team captain is only responsible for their little piece of the event, they will be focused on getting things right and will identify where changes need to be made.

Create a Plan B

You would be hard-pressed to find an event planner who can tell you about events that went off without a hitch. They can tell you about keynote speakers who arrive late or don’t arrive at all, catered meals that get lost in transition, and a whole host of other issues. You want to have a backup plan for all of the major aspects of your event.

Take Your Plan Out for a Spin

A few weeks before the event, perform a run through of the entire program. Talk to your team to help mentally walk them through everything that is going to happen. This includes monitoring the initial set up and going through the follow-up process. Doing a dry run or running through the plan in a group meeting usually brings errors to the fore that can be promptly corrected.

Conclusion

After you have planned the perfect business event, step away from the logistics of everything and follow-up with the attendees. You can use social media. The goal is to build on all the work you did planning the event. This will turn that detailed planning into revenue.