After 5 EventsGet the venue decision in writing early
Everything else can move. The venue cannot. If the guest list grows from forty to seventy, you need to know now, because the room that holds forty comfortably becomes standing-room chaos at seventy, and no amount of good catering fixes that.
For a logistics company, pick the venue the same way you would pick a supplier: location, capacity, access. A conference hotel near the terminal with parking beats a beautiful hall in the old town that half the drivers cannot reach after a shift. The people you are hosting arrive by car, often directly from a depot or a run. Make it easy.
Get the executive to confirm the venue and the headcount range in an email. You will need it when costs are questioned later.
Write the run-sheet the executive will actually read
The CEO will not read three pages. Write one page with times, cues and who speaks when. Include fallback positions: if the speech runs long, what gets cut. If the guest of honour is late, what happens to the welcome. If the screen fails, does the presentation still work.
The run-sheet is your documentation that decisions were made and agreed. It is also the thing you hand to the crew so that everyone is working from the same timeline. A logistics operation respects precision and loathes surprises. Treat the event the same way.
Build in fifteen minutes of buffer before anything the executive does personally. Speeches always start late. Plan for it.
The microphone is the single point of failure
You are not measured on the food. You are measured on whether the executive was heard, clearly, by everyone in the room, with no feedback and no dropout. The moment of risk is the speech.
Two things matter: the microphone works, and it was tested with the person who will hold it. A sound check with the crew is not the same as a sound check with the CEO. Managers in logistics companies do not perform often. They hold the microphone too close, or turn away from it mid-sentence, or stand directly under a speaker. All of these are fixable, but only if someone has seen it happen during rehearsal.
If the executive will not rehearse, get a recording level check thirty minutes before doors. The crew needs to hear their voice in that room.
Plan transport home before anyone drinks
Your staff drive to work. If the event includes alcohol, transport home is not a courtesy — it is a liability question. A coach back to the main depot works. A block-booked ride-share account works. Hoping people will sort it out does not.
This is especially true if the venue is outside the city centre. The event that finishes at eleven and leaves forty people trying to find taxis from an industrial estate is the event that gets remembered for the wrong reasons.
Confirm transport in the same communication as the venue and the date. It signals that you have thought past the opening speech.
Know the difference between the planner and the crew
There are two kinds of event company. One takes the brief, marks it up, and forwards it to subcontractors they have never worked alongside — a catering company here, an AV supplier there, a staffing agency for service. They coordinate by email and earn on every line.
The other kind quotes the job, builds the room, and runs the night with the same people. The rigger who loads in at seven is still there at midnight when a microphone battery dies. That is not a better business model in some abstract sense. It is a different quality of problem-solving when something goes wrong in front of your CEO and a room full of guests.
You will hear both described as full-service. Ask who is actually on-site.
Build the approval trail as you go
Executive assistants manage upward, and upward management requires documentation. Every decision — venue, date, headcount, budget line, schedule change — should exist in writing, ideally as a reply from the executive confirming it.
This is not about covering yourself, though it does that. It is about having a record when the CEO asks, two days before the event, why the screen is rear-projection or why the bar closes at midnight. The answer is the email thread from six weeks earlier when they approved the floor plan.
Logistics companies run on dispatch systems and load manifests because oral agreements do not survive a shift change. Treat the event the same way.
What to settle before you call anyone
The crew writing this guide works as After 5 Events — the production and staffing side of the house, not the performance side. We build the room, run the sound, and stay until the last case is back on the truck.
Before you call us or anyone else, settle three things with the executive: the venue or at least its location and access requirements, the guest count as a range, and the format of the speech or presentation. Everything else can be priced and planned around those, but nothing can be accurately scoped without them.
The decision you face now is whether this is something you can coordinate yourself by contracting each supplier separately, or whether you need one crew that quotes the whole evening and is accountable for all of it on the night. The first is cheaper on paper if nothing goes wrong. The second is structured so that when something does go wrong, it is solved by the person standing next to the problem, not by a phone call to someone who has left for the night.
Know which kind of event this is before the first quote arrives.