After 5 EventsThe venue's 'full AV system' is a ceiling speaker and a lapel mic
Most conference venues list audio-visual equipment as an inclusion, and most of that equipment was installed when the building opened and has not been specified since. The system works adequately for a single presenter and forty people in theatre seating. It does not work for a seated dinner, a three-person panel, a film screening, or any event where the audience is eating and talking before the speech begins.
You discover this during the site visit you did not do, or during load-in on the morning when it is too late to bring in a separate rig. The venue contact is surprised you expected anything else. The line in the contract said 'sound system included', and technically it was not a lie.
The question: ask the venue to send a specification sheet for the installed system, including speaker locations, microphone types and the year of the last upgrade. If they cannot produce one, the system is not adequate.
The speech is written for a script but delivered from memory
A founder has been with the company for twenty years and knows the story. They do not need notes. What they do need is a way to stay on time when the story they are telling live turns out to be eight minutes longer than the version they summarised in the brief.
You notice halfway through the second anecdote that has not been rehearsed. The dinner service is stalled in the kitchen. The band's set time is now cutting into the window the venue gave you to pack out. The speech is good, but it is not the length anything else was planned around.
Rehearsal in the actual room, with the actual microphone and the actual autocue if there is one, is not a luxury for nervous speakers. It is the only way to know how long the speech runs when delivered at event pace, and it is the moment when the speaker realises they do need the script after all.
The presentation was built in the office and has never been seen on a large screen
A timeline of the company's history looks sharp on a laptop. On a four-metre screen it is a grid of unreadable text. Photographs taken from the website are correctly sized for web display, which means they are a quarter of the resolution the projector needs. The company logo is a vector file that renders beautifully at any size, except the version in the presentation is a screenshot.
You see it for the first time during the technical run-through on event day, when the designer who built it is not in the building and the founder who approved it is in a meeting two countries away.
The question: send the presentation file to whoever is running the projector, and ask them to open it full-screen and photograph what it looks like. If the text is not comfortably readable in the photograph from three metres away, it will not be readable in the hall.
The production was parcelled out to the cheapest bid on every line
Sound from one contractor, lighting from another, staging from a third, video from someone's nephew who owns a camera. Four suppliers who have never worked together, no single person responsible for making sure the laptop output reaches both the projector and the recording feed, and no time in the schedule for anyone to test a full run-through because each contractor is only paid for their own load-in.
It is cheaper line by line. It is dramatically more expensive when the microphone channel that should feed the recording is patched to the monitor instead and nobody notices until you watch the film back three days later with no speech audio.
There are two kinds of production company: the kind that takes your brief and forwards it to subcontractors they source per event, earning a margin on every line, and the kind whose own crew quotes, rigs and operates the room. The second kind costs more in the tender and less in the hours you spend project-managing four separate schedules. After 5 Events is the second kind, because the same people who answer the brief are the ones in the ceiling at seven in the morning.
The organiser is also the site manager, the runner and the stage manager
Somebody from the company has to be there. That person ends up holding the only set of door codes, fielding every supplier question, making sure the caterer knows the dietary requirements, cueing the speeches, and carrying the birthday cake in from the kitchen. They do not see any of the event they organised. They see the back of a laptop and the inside of a storage cupboard, and at the end of the evening they are too tired to mind.
If the event has a technical build, it needs a site manager who is not also the host. If it has a running order, it needs a stage manager who is not also answering emails about parking.
The weather plan is 'we'll move inside if it rains'
An outdoor anniversary event in a courtyard or a garden makes for better photographs than a conference hall, right up until the hour when you realise the indoor space you have as a backup holds sixty people and you have a hundred and forty confirmed. The forecast was clear all week. The rain started during the welcome drinks.
Moving inside is not a weather plan unless the indoor space was booked, set and fully rigged as though it were the primary venue. If it was not, your weather plan is to continue outside in the rain, and that requires a roof structure specified and costed in the original brief.
What to settle now
Not whether you need a production company — if the event includes a speech, a film, a presentation or a live performance, the production is not optional. The question is whether the same people quoting the work are the ones who will rig it and run it, or whether your brief is a line in a forwarded email to a crew who have never worked together.
Before you call anyone: decide the venue, write the running order, and know which speeches are scripted and which are not. Everything after that is solvable, but none of it is solvable faster than the time it takes to get the right equipment into the building.