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Company Party

Company Party — a guide for the team lead

The truck arrives at seven and the venue manager points to a goods lift that fits one road case at a time. By nine the PA is flown, the bar is dressed, and the question you should have asked two weeks ago is suddenly obvious: can this room hold the evening you described?

A team party with no calendar date attached gives you every format and no template. That freedom is useful — you can shape the night around the group — but it also means the venue has to flex in ways a set-menu gala does not. Most mistakes happen in the gap between what the space looks like empty and what it can actually do when forty people are talking.

The venue decides the format, not the other way around

You know the group. You know who talks to whom, who needs drawing out, whether the evening works better with structure or with permission to wander. The venue has to make all of that possible, and most of them cannot.

A glass-walled conference room throws every voice straight back. A restaurant with good food has no PA points and a neighbour who complains at ten. The terrace everyone loves in summer has no weather plan and no power past the string lights. Walk the space when it is loud, not when it is being sold to you, and ask what happens when the format you want meets the room as it actually is.

Power, rigging and the hour before doors

If the evening includes a short programme — a speech, a presentation, a toast — you need a microphone people can hear from the bar. That means a PA, which means power the building can supply and a ceiling that can take the weight or floor space no one is standing on.

Most venues will say yes to everything and then tell you on the morning that the circuit is shared with the kitchen. You need the answers early: how many kilowatts, where the distro lives, whether rigging is allowed or whether everything stands on the floor. If the answer is vague, the answer is no.

The other constraint is access. A sixth-floor venue with a narrow stairwell means the PA stays small, the lighting stays minimal, and load-in starts four hours before you think it does. If the evening includes a DJ or a live act, the access route decides what is possible.

Programme first, then music

A results celebration wants a moment — someone speaking, a screen, a reason the group is in the room. A thank-you evening wants less structure and more licence to move. Both need the same thing: a PA that can cover the whole room and then step back when the talking starts.

The common mistake is assuming the programme and the music are separate problems. They share the rig, the power, the console and the technician. If the programme audio is an afterthought, you will hear it.

Plan the sequence. If there is a presentation, it happens early while people are still settling, not at nine when half the room is outside. If there is a DJ, decide whether the set begins as background or as the programme itself — the rig changes depending on the answer.

Bars, sight lines and the groups within the group

A standing event with sixty people breaks into smaller conversations immediately. The room either helps that happen or forces everyone into a single loud centre.

You need more than one place to stand. A bar that is also the only furniture creates a queue, not a party. Poseur tables, a second bar, a terrace door that is actually open — all of those make it possible for the group to split and recombine without anyone being stuck.

Sight lines matter more than floor space. If half the room cannot see the speaker, they stop listening and start talking, and then no one can hear. Test it from the corner where the quiet ones will stand.

Two kinds of supplier

There are agencies that plan an event and then send the brief to a lighting company they met once, a caterer who has never seen the venue, and an AV supplier who arrives on the morning. The client gets one contact and a margin on every line.

Then there are the companies whose own people quote, rig, and run the night. The person who walked the venue is the person on the console. The PA that was promised is the PA in the truck. When something needs to change — and on a team event with no fixed template, something always does — the decision is made by someone who knows what the rig can actually do.

You will not see the difference in the proposal. You will see it at eight in the evening when the format you described is the format in the room.

What the reader now decides

You know the group and what the evening should feel like. The question is whether the venue can hold it and whether the supplier is the one doing the work or the one coordinating people who have never worked together.

Before you call anyone, settle three things: the venue and its constraints, the sequence of the evening, and whether there is a programme moment that needs proper audio. Everything else follows from those.

This guide was written by the crew at After 5 Events — the people who walk the venue, build the rig and run the night.

Who is writing this

A crew, not a middleman

These guides are written by After 5 Events — the team that grew out of the After 5 band and DJ roster and has stood on the stage itself. We are not an agency that forwards your brief to subcontractors and takes a commission on every line: the people who plan your evening build the stage, run the sound and light, and are in the room when the doors open.

When you get to booking

The pages this guide has probably made you want to ask about.

The same reader, other occasions
The same occasion from another chair
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