After 5 EventsThe venue caps everything else
Pick the room before anything. Capacity matters, but what moves the cost is ceiling height, power supply and access. A glass-walled event space with two-metre ceilings cannot take a truss, so lighting lives on stands and the sight lines are terrible from the back third of the room. A historic hall with one service lift and stairs from the eighteenth century means the load-in starts six hours before it would in a ground-floor warehouse, and you pay for those hours.
Ask: where are the power outlets, how many amps, is there three-phase. Ask what time the crew can access the space and whether the building has a goods lift. If the answer to the lift is no and the answer to the floor is third, the quote will show it.
What the event is actually for
An anniversary is not a celebration somebody decided to have. It is a piece of communication with a specific audience: the investor who has been patient, the client who has been loyal, the local government whose permit you will need next year. That audience determines what gets staged.
If it is partners and press, the founders will speak and the screen behind them is half the production budget. If it is employees past and present, there will be a film or a timeline, and the room has to go dark enough at four in the afternoon that the projection is legible. If both, you are lighting for two opposing requirements and the compromise is visible.
Decide the format of the programme now. A seated dinner with speeches needs a stage, sightlines, a lectern with a confident mic, and a screen big enough to read from the back. A standing reception with the history on loop needs less lighting, more audio zones, and a way to drop the volume when someone is handed a microphone they did not expect.
The screen is never big enough
If anyone is standing at a lectern reading from notes on a slide, the screen needs to be twice the size the venue manager suggests. The projector that lives in the venue is mounted for a training day with twelve people, not a presentation to eighty.
The crew will bring a screen, but it takes time to rig and space to site. If the room has a low ceiling or a pillar in the sightline, it goes on stands, which means it is smaller. If you need two because the room is wide, you need two projectors, two feeds and a way to sync them.
Ask for the programme content early. A logo and some text can run off a laptop; a film with audio and live cuts to a camera feed needs a vision mixer and a sound desk that takes those inputs. The company's marketing team will have made something, and it will arrive the afternoon of the event in a format nothing can read. Plan for that.
Sound is never where you need it
The venue will tell you it has a sound system. What it has is a ceiling-mounted Bluetooth speaker adequate for background music during a wine tasting. It will not cover a speech, it cannot take a wireless mic, and it has no input for the film.
You need a PA — a pair of speakers on stands at minimum, a small desk, and as many wireless microphones as there are people who might be handed one. The founder knows they are speaking; the minister's assistant will confirm an hour before doors that she would like to say a few words, and there is no polite way to tell her no.
Count the microphones you need, then add two. A wired lectern mic, two wireless handhelds for the roaming speeches, a headset if someone is doing a presentation with their hands full, and lapels if the founder prefers not to hold anything. They are not interchangeable and swapping them during the event looks bad.
Lighting does more than you think
An anniversary is photographed, and the photographs will be used for years. Overhead fluorescents make everyone look tired and the room look like a canteen. If the event matters enough to stage, it matters enough to light.
The minimum is a wash — even white light that covers the space and does not cast shadows across faces. If there is a stage or a speaking area, add a front spot so the person at the lectern is not silhouetted against their own slides. If there is a film, you need to be able to drop the room lights without killing them entirely, or nobody can see their wine glass and the evening stops.
Lighting eats power and takes time to focus. Both of those move the cost.
What you can do in-house and what you cannot
Catering, invitations, name badges, transport: you know those vendors and you know when the quote is reasonable. Production is different. Some agencies plan the event, then forward the brief to subcontractors they have never worked alongside, earning margin on every line. Others send their own crew: the people who quote the job are the people who build the rig and run the sound desk that night.
The difference shows when something goes wrong. A laptop will not talk to the projector, a mic cuts out, the film file is the wrong codec. The subcontracted technician calls their dispatcher and waits. The in-house crew opens the kit box and fixes it, because it is their reputation in the room.
Ask who is actually on-site. If the answer is vague, you are hiring a middleman.
The decision now
You now know the questions that move the cost and the order to ask them. Venue first: the room sets the rig. Programme second: the content determines what you are lighting and amplifying. Then the specifics — screen size, microphone count, whether you need to black out the room at sunset.
Before you call anyone, settle: the date, the venue, the expected attendance, and what is happening on stage. Everything else can be solved, but those four cannot be guessed. After 5 Events is the crew writing this guide — the people who will quote, rig and run the evening if you ask us to — but the value of the guide is the same whether you call us or not: it is the list of things to know before you brief anyone.