After 5 EventsWhat moves the cost
The two decisions that determine the invoice are power and access.
If the building's supply is live and load-tested, you hire what fits in a van. If it is not, you hire a generator, a qualified operator, distribution boards and cabling capable of the draw, and the cost doubles before you have added a single speaker. That decision is usually not yours — it is made by the general contractor's schedule — but it must be confirmed in writing a month out, because the hire market for generators during summer opening season is shallow.
Access means when the crew can begin work. A venue that allows load-in the evening before costs less than one where the first truck is permitted at seven on the morning of the event, because the labour is spread across two days instead of compressed into one. If the building is still a construction site, access may also mean safety inductions, high-visibility clothing, hard hats and a site manager's sign-off on every placed item. Plan for that to take an hour you do not have.
The kit that gets specified last and noticed first
Microphones. The programme includes a speech by the head of the company, remarks by a local official and possibly a ribbon-cutting with six people standing in a line outdoors. Each needs a microphone, and those microphones need to work in different acoustic environments: a reverberant atrium, an untreated open-plan office, a street with passing traffic.
A wired lectern microphone is stable and invisible but requires the speaker to stand in one place. A wireless handheld works anywhere but becomes a prop that nervous speakers grip too tightly or hold too far from their mouth. A lapel microphone is unobtrusive but needs a technician to fit it, and it will pick up the sound of a lanyard or a name badge rattling against the transmitter pack.
Decide the format of the speeches first — lectern, roving or staged — and the microphone specification follows. Do not assume the venue has anything usable. What most unfinished buildings call a sound system is a ceiling speaker connected to nothing.
The schedule you do not control
Construction delays are the norm, not the exception. The floor is finished but not sealed. The glass is in but the film is not applied. The furniture arrives the morning of the event. You cannot plan around this; you can only plan for it.
Build a concealed delay into every dependency. If the contractor says the space will be available at noon, assume three. If the caterer needs two hours to set up, give them four. If the crew needs access to rig overhead lighting, confirm that the ceiling is accessible, the fixing points are rated and there is no other trade working at height during that window.
The single question to ask the contractor early: what is the last item on the critical path before handover? It is rarely the thing you expect. Often it is something mundane — a fire safety inspection, a commissioning test, the final clean — that can delay access by a day.
What the guests see versus what the guests need
The ribbon and the scissors are sorted. The branded backdrop for photographs is sorted. What is almost never sorted is the route the guests take through the building.
A grand opening is a tour, and a tour needs flow: where people enter, where they pause, where they collect a drink, where they are guided to leave. The room that looks impressive is often not the room with the capacity or the sightlines for a speech. The atrium that was chosen for the reception may not have anywhere to put a bar that does not block the fire exit.
Walk the space with someone who has run an event, not someone who has designed a building. Ask where the bottleneck will form and whether the acoustics allow speech without amplification. If the answer to the second question is no, you need sound reinforcement even if the programme is short.
The vendor question that predicts everything else
Are you calling a production company that builds the event with its own crew, or a planning agency that brokers every element and adds a margin to each line?
The difference is not ideological; it is practical. A company that owns the equipment and employs the technicians can tell you in one conversation whether the venue will work, what the constraints are and where the cost sits. A broker needs to send the brief outward, wait for responses and coordinate between parties who may never have worked together. Both can deliver a successful event. One can do it on a six-week timeline when the venue is not finished.
The question to ask in the first call: who will be on-site? If the answer is a subcontractor the agency uses regularly, ask how many events they have worked together. If the answer is that it depends on availability, you are in a supply chain, not a production team.
What to settle before calling anyone
Three things need answers before a production company can quote accurately.
First: the power situation. Confirmed live supply, or generator required. If you do not know, the venue's main contractor does, and they will tell you because it affects their handover schedule as much as yours.
Second: the format and location of the speeches. Indoors or outdoors, static or roving, how many speakers, how much ambient noise. This determines the microphone package, the speaker placement and whether you need a technician present throughout or only for a sound check.
Third: access. When can the crew begin work, and are there site restrictions — inductions, insurance, supervision, working-at-height permits — that add time or require additional personnel.
Those three variables account for most of the cost range in a quote. Settle them and the brief becomes specific enough to act on.
This guide is written by the crew at After 5 Events — the people who pull cable at seven in the morning and pack the last case at midnight. If the above describes the event you are planning, the decision now is whether to bring in a team that runs the production themselves, or coordinate it across a list of vendors you will meet for the first time on the day.