After 5 EventsDecide the date before anything else
Every venue that holds a hundred people and has a liquor licence is booked solid for the second half of December. The bands are gone. The good caterers are double-scheduled. You are not choosing a date that suits the team; you are choosing the last Friday the venue still has, and that decision happens in September.
The constraint is real. A date in early January solves it completely, costs less, and means the people flying home for the holidays can actually attend. If it must be December, call the venue now.
The room decides the rest
If thirty people are coming, a long table and a projector work. If a hundred and twenty are coming, you need a room that splits: one end for dinner with proper sound for speeches, the other end for a bar and a DJ later. The caterer needs to know which one you are.
Glass and concrete look good in photographs and throw every frequency straight back into the room. A speech without line arrays is mud. A band without a subwoofer sounds thin, and with one badly placed subwoofer sounds worse. The venue will tell you they have a sound system; they mean they have two passive speakers on stands. That is not the same thing.
If half the team is remote, the screen and the camera are not decorative. A laptop on a chair pointing at the stage does not work. A fixed camera on the back wall showing the room from too far away does not work either. What works is a wide shot for the room, a second camera on the speaker, and a monitor so the person at the podium can see who is actually listening.
Shape the evening so it has somewhere to go
Dinner at seven, speeches at eight-thirty, band at ten, everyone gone by one. That is the template, and the problem with the template is that by ten the room is half-empty.
The alternative: reception and drinks at six, dinner at seven, speeches by eight-fifteen, music at nine. The earlier start means the band plays while people are still present. It also means the kitchen can leave before midnight, which cuts the invoice.
Keep the speeches short and tell the person giving them that the microphone will be cut at five minutes. Not as a joke—actually cut it. A leader standing in front of a hundred software engineers and reading three pages of prose is a failure everyone will remember.
The sound system is not negotiable
This is the one place where an IT team will notice incompetence immediately. A delay between the screen and the PA, a microphone feeding back, a speech you cannot hear from the back—it reads as sloppiness, and sloppiness at a company event suggests sloppiness everywhere else.
The system needs to cover the room evenly, which in a rectangular hall means delays and zoning. It needs a wired microphone for speeches, because a cheap wireless will drop or hiss. And it needs a separate monitor feed for the remote attendees, not just the front-of-house mix, because the remote listener does not care about room ambience.
This is also where hiring an event production company and hiring a venue that "includes sound" stop being the same thing. A venue's in-house system was specified for background music. A crew brings the rig the room requires and tunes it to the shape of the space.
Two models, one invoice
Some event companies plan and coordinate. They take your brief, add margin, and forward it to the lighting supplier they found that morning and the caterer they have never worked with and the DJ whose availability someone confirmed by email. When something runs late or runs wrong, no one on site has authority to fix it.
The other model: the same people who quote the job build the stage, run the desk, and pack the truck at two in the morning. After 5 Events is that second kind—production and crew, not a booking layer.
The invoice looks the same. What is different is that the person on site when the video feed drops is the same person who ran the cable that morning, and they know where the spare is.
Catering scales badly
A plated three-course dinner for a hundred and twenty people means the kitchen needs space, the service needs time, and the programme is locked to the speed of the slowest table. It also means the vegetarian option was decided two weeks ago and the person who mentioned the shellfish allergy in Slack yesterday is now a problem with no solution.
Buffet or stations let people eat when they are ready, require less staff, cost less, and fail more gracefully. The vegan who shows up unannounced can simply skip two stations. The founder who wants to skip dinner and go straight to the drinks does not hold up the room.
Budget per head, not per line. A normal December IT party in Tallinn costs somewhere between fifty and ninety euros a person, depending on the venue, the food, and whether there is a band. Anything cheaper looks cheap. Anything much more expensive requires a sentence in the all-hands email explaining why.
What to settle before calling anyone
The date. The headcount, split between people in the room and people on a screen. Whether the evening is dinner then music, or drinks and music with food available. And the one thing you will not tolerate going wrong—because that is the thing the crew needs to solve first.