After 5 EventsDecide the venue before anything else
The room sets the ceiling. A hotel conference hall seats two hundred but the back third cannot hear a panel discussion. A repurposed warehouse has the capacity but no blackout, so slides wash out. If the executive is speaking, the room must carry their voice to the last row without them thinking about it, and the screen must be readable from every seat that has one. That is not negotiable, and it is the first thing to check.
The evening part usually happens in the same building. If it moves to a second venue, the transition becomes a gap in the programme where half the guests leave. Plan for one location or accept the drop-off.
The runway: twelve weeks is comfortable, six is tight
Invitations go out two months ahead. That means the venue, the programme outline and the day's structure are locked at that point. The detailed run-sheet—who speaks when, how long the coffee break runs, whether there is a livestream—can move up to the week before, but the AV specification follows the programme, and the AV is what takes time to spec correctly.
If the booking arrives with four weeks to go, the room you want is probably taken. If it arrives with two weeks, most of the technical choices have been made for you by whoever is available.
The technical brief: start with what every session needs
Every speaker needs a microphone, a screen and confidence monitoring. A lapel mic if they move; a lectern mic if they do not. The screen must be bright enough for a lit room, and large enough that the back row reads body text on a slide. Confidence monitors—small screens at the front that show the speaker what the audience sees—prevent the moment where someone turns their back to read their own presentation.
If any session is a panel, add a mixer and multiple microphones. If there is Q&A, add a roving mic or two fixed mics in the audience. If someone is dialling in remotely, add a camera, a decent mic feed and a technician who is not doing anything else, because remote audio fails more often than anything in the room.
Record the sessions if the executive or the communications team will use the footage. Do not record them as insurance. No one watches insurance footage, and it becomes a liability the day someone says something they wish they had not.
The changeover: this is where the schedule breaks
A session ends. The next speaker walks up. Their laptop does not wake the screen, or it does but the resolution is wrong, or it mirrors instead of extending. Forty seconds of silence in front of a waiting room.
The fix is a technician with a switcher and every presentation loaded in advance. Speakers send slides the day before; the technician runs them from a single machine. The speaker has a clicker and the confidence monitor, and the laptop stays in their bag. Changeovers take ten seconds.
If that is not possible, add five minutes of buffer between sessions and tell the technician to stay at the desk.
Catering and the programme
Coffee breaks pull people out of a session, so they go between sessions, not during. The programme lists the break, and the break starts on time even if the previous speaker is finishing a thought. Otherwise the entire day drifts, and the final session starts late in a room that is too warm and no longer paying attention.
Lunch is forty-five minutes if it is plated, an hour if it is buffet. The buffet always takes longer than the organiser thinks.
The evening event begins when the last session ends, or after a gap long enough that people leave the venue and return. There is no good length for a gap that is too short to go home and too long to sit in a corridor.
The evening: planned or inherited
If the conference is the point, the evening is usually an afterthought. The room is booked, the caterer is the same one who did lunch, and the assumption is that people will talk to each other because they have been talking all day.
They will not. The day was structured and the evening is not, so everyone stands in the same small groups they already know, and the room feels flat.
If the evening matters—if this is where the executive wants the board to talk to the regional managers, or where a partnership is actually discussed—then it needs a structure. That can be a hosted dinner with assigned seating, or a drinks reception with live music that gives people a reason to stay, or a short performance that resets the room's energy before the informal part begins. It cannot be unplanned and also important.
What you need in writing
The run-sheet, with timings for every session and the name of who is responsible for each transition. The AV specification, listing what every speaker gets and who operates it. The catering schedule, so the executive knows when to expect breaks and when to hold for them. A contact sheet with the venue's duty manager, the technical lead and the caterer's site contact, because the person who planned it is not always the person on-site when something stops working.
And a plan B for the microphone. The microphone always fails in front of the most important guest.
Who builds the room
Two kinds of company take this work. One plans the event and forwards the brief to subcontractors it has never worked alongside, earning a margin on every line and hoping the pieces arrive on time. The other sends its own crew, the same people who quote, build and operate, and they stay from load-in to load-out.
The difference is not visible in the quote. It is visible at four in the afternoon when a speaker's laptop will not connect and the person at the AV desk is the same person who specified the AV, not someone reading a hire sheet for the first time.
The crew writing this guide is After 5 Events. The decision in front of you now is whether you need that crew, and if you do, how much of the evening programme is locked. The day's structure can move; the evening's usually cannot, once the invitations are out.