After 5 EventsBook the venue before you plan anything else
You need a room that holds your headcount for dinner, then clears enough floor space for dancing without moving every table out. Most venues that look good online cannot do both. The photos show the room set for one thing.
Call with three dates, in order of preference. If all three are gone, you are choosing from what December has left, and what December has left by October is the new build on the ring road or the basement with the bolted tables. Venues know this.
Ask: does the seated capacity assume a dance floor, or does the dance floor assume we move sixty chairs somewhere? Ask where. Ask how long that takes and who does it.
The room's sound system is not a sound system
The venue will say it has sound included. What that means is a ceiling speaker for background music and a handheld microphone that worked fine last week at the product demo for eleven people.
You have a room full of glasses, scraping chairs and a hundred conversations. You have a managing director who speaks quietly and a CFO with an accent. You need a microphone that does not feed back, a speaker that covers the whole room, and a person who knows where to put both and how to make one not audible out in the corridor when the doors open.
If the quote for the evening does not include a sound engineer in the room for the speeches, the sound engineer is you, holding a microphone stand you have never seen before while the MD waits.
Dinner length decides when the music starts
Three courses, four speeches and two awards is two and a half hours if it runs on time. It does not run on time. The caterer is late bringing mains, someone decides to say something unscripted, the award becomes a photo line, and now it is quarter past ten and no one has danced.
The band was booked for three hours. If they start at ten fifteen, they finish at quarter past one. That is later than most of your colleagues want to stay, and you are paying for the last hour in a thinning room.
Agree the running order with whoever is speaking, then work backward: if the band starts at nine thirty, speeches finish at nine, mains are cleared by twenty past eight. Give that to the caterer as the plan, and give yourself fifteen minutes of margin you do not mention.
The band and the DJ are not interchangeable
A live band fills the first hour and a half on stage better than anything else you can put there. They also need a stage, backline, a sound check in the afternoon, and a second engineer if the room is large. A DJ needs a table, two speakers and thirty minutes to set up.
If your evening is seated until late and dancing is the last ninety minutes, a DJ makes sense. If you want people on their feet before eleven, the band does that faster.
Some production companies quote, then forward your brief to a band and a rental house they met that week. The band shows up without having spoken to the engineer, the lighting does not match the stage, and when something breaks no one on site works for the company you booked.
Other companies send their own crew: the same people who quoted run the sound, set the stage and know the band because they worked the same stage last weekend. That is not a service promise. It is a fact about how the company is structured, and you can tell which is which by asking who will be in the room.
What breaks on the night
The microphone for the speeches feeds back because it is pointed at the speaker.
The award recipient does not know they are receiving an award and is in the bathroom.
The venue has two toilets for a hundred and twenty people and both have queues by nine.
The lights go dark for the band and half the room thinks the evening has ended.
Someone asks for the music louder. Someone else asks for it quieter. They are both directors.
None of this is unusual, and the way it gets handled is whether someone in the room has done this before and is being paid to stay until it is finished. That person is not the venue manager, who goes home at eleven, and cannot be you, because you are also a guest.
What to settle before calling anyone
The date, held in writing with the venue. The headcount, seated. Whether the floor space is already clear or the furniture moves. What the venue's included sound is, specifically: how many speakers, where, and whether an engineer is in the room or the microphone is on a stand.
Whether you want a band or a DJ, and whether the performance is two hours or three. What time the speeches finish and what time you want music.
Then ask for a quote that names who will be on site, doing what, and at what time. If the answer is that the lighting supplier will confirm closer to the date, you are being brokered to a subcontractor the company quoting has never worked alongside.
We are the crew that quotes, rigs and runs the room. After 5 Events. The decision now is whether you are planning this evening yourself or handing it to people who will be there when it happens.