After 5 EventsTwelve weeks: settle the date and the room
Product launches slip. Funding rounds close late. Pick a date that can move once without breaking everything, and tell the venue that when you book. A venue contracted for a Saturday in June can usually flex to the Sunday or the following weekend; one booked firm on a single date cannot.
The room size follows headcount, and headcount is guess until a week out. Startups invite the full team, key clients, a few partners, the previous investors and whichever minister the comms lead thinks will come. Sixty names on a list becomes thirty-five in the room or a hundred and ten, depending on how many people forward the calendar invite. Book for the middle scenario and confirm the floor plan can stretch.
Ten weeks: who is speaking, and for how long
Anniversaries are content-heavy. A founder's speech, a company timeline, a video with testimonials from clients, sometimes a presentation with financial charts the board has already seen. All of it goes on a screen, most of it involves a microphone, and none of it works if the person coordinating it has never run a rehearsal.
Decide now whether one person is producing the content and another is running the room. If those are two people, introduce them to each other on a call before anyone starts designing slides. A presentation built for a sixteen-by-nine screen does not fit the projector the venue owns, and the person who finds that out should not be doing it at five in the afternoon on the day.
If someone is being flown in to speak, check the venue has a lectern and a confidence monitor before the flight is booked. If a video is being made, ask who is delivering the file, in what format, and whether they will be there to play it or whether the AV tech is pressing go on something they saw for the first time during soundcheck. Most problems with presentations are handover problems.
Eight weeks: the production brief
This is the call where budget becomes real. An anniversary for sixty with a speech and a projector costs one number; the same evening with a stage, a branded backdrop, two cameras, a live feed to a screen in the lobby and a three-minute film scored to music costs another number, often five times the first. Know which you are paying for before the designer starts work.
Two kinds of event company bid this. One plans it, writes the brief, then sends it to subcontractors they email twice a year—a lighting company, an AV company, a staffing agency—and earns a margin on every line. Another quotes from the crew that will build and run it: the production team are the same people who unload the truck. The difference shows up in two places: how quickly a problem gets solved on the night, and whether the microphone that failed during the speech has been tested with that microphone, that cable and that speaker before anyone arrived.
After 5 Events is the second kind. The people who quote are the people who rig.
Six weeks: the photographer and the usage rights
An anniversary is photographed for the website, the next investor deck, the LinkedIn post the comms lead has already drafted, and the all-hands three months later when half of tonight's attendees have left. The photographer needs to know that before the event, because a few dozen images for internal use is a different deliverable—and a different licence—than fifty edited files cleared for commercial and promotional use indefinitely.
Brief them on what the photo will be used for, who needs to be in it, and whether there is a moment that must be captured. The founder and the minister shaking hands is that moment. The founder mid-sentence during the speech is not. If the timeline or the video is the centrepiece, shoot it lit and from two angles; one will be unusable.
Four weeks: rehearse the run of show
A timeline is a Word document until someone walks it in the room and discovers the speeches run an hour past dinner. Print the run of show, assign a person to each moment, and speak it aloud with a timer running. The parts that sound awkward in a meeting room will be worse in front of eighty people.
If there is a presentation, run it on the laptop that will be used on the night, connected to a screen of the same resolution. If there is a microphone handover, practice it. If someone is being introduced from offstage, time the walk and confirm the microphone is live before they start speaking. Most audio problems are not technical; they are choreographic.
Two weeks: lock the floor plan and the headcount
This is the last point at which adding twenty people is a floor plan change instead of a crisis. Send the final guest list to the venue, confirm the table count, and tell the caterer and the production team the same number. A room set for sixty and filled by ninety becomes a different event in ways that cannot be fixed from the truck.
If the room is staged, confirm the sightlines from the back. A six-foot backdrop looks fine on a plan and disappears behind shoulders when the room is standing.
One week: the site visit
Walk the space with the production lead and the venue manager at the same time. Locate the power, the load-in door, the ceiling height and the rigging points. Confirm where the screen will be, where the speakers will be, and what is behind the wall the projector is pointing at—because if it is glass, the image will be half as bright as the test suggested.
If anything in the brief assumed a detail about the room—a grid for lighting, a flat floor for staging—this is when that assumption is tested. Better now than the morning of, when the truck is already on the road.
The decision now
You know the date, the rough guest count, and whether the evening is thirty people and a speech or a hundred people, a stage, and a film. The next question is whether you are coordinating three suppliers or calling one team that does all of it. Both work. The first is cheaper if nothing goes wrong; the second is simpler when it does, because the people solving it are in the same room and have worked together before.
Settle the content format and the headcount before you call anyone. Everything else can move.