After 5 EventsThe venue decision comes first, and it decides everything else
Pick the room before anything — date, programme, catering. A venue with low ceilings cannot take stage lighting. A listed building may not allow you to fix anything to the walls, which rules out most screen configurations that work for a remote audience. A beautiful glass-walled hall will throw every word straight back at the speaker unless you budget for treatment.
For an IT audience, the screen is not decoration. It is the primary surface. If half the team joins by video, they need to see faces at readable scale, which means a screen width equal to at least a sixth of the room width, not the hotel's default projector aimed at the back wall. If there is a product demo, check contrast in the room with the lights you will actually use. A washed-out screen in a bright room ends the event before the presentation starts.
Audio is the part venues consistently misrepresent
When the venue says it has a sound system, ask what that means in components. A powered speaker on a stand is fine for plated service and background music. It is not fine for a panel discussion, a remote Q&A or a founder speaking to eighty people. Voices need a mixer, wired or wireless microphones depending on the format, and enough headroom that speech stays clear when someone speaks quietly.
If anyone is joining remotely, test the audio path both ways before the day. The room hears them through the PA; they hear the room through a microphone that is not the one the speaker is using. That second microphone — the ambient or boundary mic — is the piece that gets missed, and its absence is why remote participants say they cannot hear questions from the floor.
Decide the format, then fit the production to it
A seated programme with speeches works if the content is genuinely essential and the schedule is under an hour. Any longer and you lose the room. IT teams have spent the day in meetings; an evening event that feels like another meeting is the thing they have already optimised their calendar to avoid.
Standing formats with short remarks, live demo stations and optional seating work better for attendance and for mixed in-person and remote groups. They also require less elaborate AV: fewer microphones, no stage in the classical sense, screens positioned where people naturally gather rather than front and centre.
If the evening runs past nine, plan for music and a shift in energy. A DJ works. A playlist does not, because no playlist adapts to the room, and by ten-thirty the room needs adapting to. This is the point where the two kinds of event agency diverge: one forwards your brief to a separate DJ agency and marks it up; the other's crew includes the DJ and the person running sound, who have worked the same room together before and will not need to be introduced to each other an hour before doors.
The load-in determines what is possible
Production does not arrive in a briefcase. A truss lighting rig comes in road cases. A modular stage comes in panels that weigh thirty kilograms each. Ask the venue how equipment enters the space: loading bay, service lift, double doors, narrow heritage staircase. If the answer is a staircase, the rig shrinks to what two people can carry, and some configurations are simply off the table.
Ask how early the crew can access the space. If the venue is in use until six and the event starts at seven, there is no time to build anything, and the production spec has to match that constraint. Most proper rigs need four hours minimum from truck to doors.
Budget the things that break first
IT company events rarely fail because of underspending. They fail because money went to catering and branding and the line labelled 'AV' was assumed to be covered by the venue.
Ring-fence the audio, the screens and the lighting as separate lines, quoted by the people responsible for operating them on the night. Know what you are approving: a lump sum from a planner who subcontracts everything is a different risk from an itemised quote from the crew that will be on site. The first optimises for margin. The second optimises for the part where it has to work in front of your colleagues.
If the team is partially remote, the video link is production, not IT. It needs a camera operator, a dedicated encoder and a microphone configuration that delivers clean audio both directions. Asking your own IT team to 'set up a Zoom' on the day is how you get a laptop on a chair pointing at the back of someone's head.
The two questions to settle before calling anyone
First: has the venue been chosen, and if so, can you get the crew in early enough to build what the event needs? If the answer is no, the production has to be designed around that limit, and some things you assume are possible are not.
Second: who is responsible when it does not work — the agency that sold you the event, or the technician standing next to the broken microphone? That is not a question about liability. It is a question about whether the person you are calling will be in the room.
We are the crew that quotes, builds and runs it. If the speaker cannot be heard, the screen is unreadable or the remote feed drops, it is our name on it and we are still there at midnight when the cases go back on the truck. Settle the venue and the format first, then call.