After 5 EventsHow subcontracting is usually structured
You hire an event agency. The agency does not own the PA hanging in your conference hall or the uplights washing the walls. It hires a sound company for those, a lighting company for the rest, a stage builder if you need a riser, and contacts a band's manager and a DJ's booker if you want either.
Each of those companies sends a quote to the agency. The agency adds a margin to each line and forwards the total to you. On the day, five separate crews arrive — sometimes from companies that have worked together before, often not. The agency planner coordinates by phone and walks the floor, but does not rig the truss or patch the desk.
That is subcontracting. It is the industry default, and for some things it is the only option.
What it costs you in time
Every change goes through the same route it came in by. You want the first dance moved thirty minutes earlier. You tell the planner, who tells the DJ's booker, who checks with the DJ, who says yes but that shifts the sound check, so the planner calls the sound company, which says the crew is on another job until six and cannot start earlier, so the planner calls you back to say no.
Three days have passed. The answer is no, but you spent three days getting it.
If the person you are speaking to is also the person programming the desk and driving the truck, that conversation takes five minutes and happens while you are both looking at the same load-in schedule.
What it costs you in money
Subcontracting does not mean the agency is doing less work. Coordinating five companies is harder than coordinating one crew. But you are paying the agency's margin, the sound company's margin, the lighting company's margin, and the DJ booker's percentage, and each of those sits on top of the previous one.
The margin is not the problem by itself. The problem is that it divorces the quote from the cost. The person writing your quote has never touched the loudspeaker being hired or met the DJ being proposed, so the number comes from a rate card, not from what the job actually requires.
When the same crew that quotes also rigs, there is no card. The tech who walked your room writes the line for it.
What it costs you in risk
Five companies means five schedules, five vehicles, five site contacts, and if something goes wrong on the night, five people who can say it was not their part of the rig.
The lighting crew arrives and cannot hang the fixtures where the plan says because the staging company built the riser twenty centimetres forward and did not tell anyone. Whose problem is that? The planner's, who now has two crews standing idle and two invoices that will both include the waiting time.
Or the band's backline does not fit the stage as drawn, and the sound company's sidefills have to be moved, and the DJ who was supposed to set up during the band's soundcheck now cannot, and the start time slips by forty minutes. Nobody did anything wrong; the system just has too many edges.
When one crew owns the evening, the edges are inside the team. The rigger and the stage builder are on the same radio net. If something has to move, it moves, and nobody sends an extra invoice.
When subcontracting is unavoidable
Some things do not exist in-house anywhere, and should not. A client wants a specific tribute act that only performs fifteen times a year. A summer event needs a clearspan tent and the catering to fill it. A product launch requires a simultaneous interpreter or a pyrotechnics company with the liability cover and the permit history to set off fireworks in a historic courtyard.
Those are not core event infrastructure — they are specialist additions, and hiring them through an agency that knows which companies hold the right tickets and have worked that venue before is exactly what the agency is for.
The question is not whether subcontracting exists. The question is whether it is being used for the part of the event that happens at every event: power, sound, light, stage, crew.
The alternative model
Some companies build, perform and staff the event with their own people. The estimator who walks your venue is one of the techs who will rig it. The sound system lives in the company's warehouse. The DJ is on the company's roster, not represented by a third party. The same phone number gets you the quote, the site visit, the revisions and the crew chief on the night.
That model only works if the company has made the capital investment in owning the gear and employing the crew — and if it does a certain volume of work, because the fixed costs are high. It is not common, but it is not rare either, and it is what After 5 Events was built to be.
The test is simple: ask who owns the sound desk in the quote, and who the load-in crew reports to. If the answer is the same company you are speaking to, you are dealing with the second model. If the answer is three different companies, you are paying for the subcontracting whether you wanted to or not.
What to settle before calling anyone
Decide whether you need a specialist element that justifies a subcontracted layer — the rare act, the tent, the thing nobody keeps in stock — or whether you are hiring for the infrastructure every event needs and would be better served by the crew that owns it.
If you choose the latter, confirm during the first conversation that the people quoting are the people building. Ask where the equipment is stored, who drives it to site, and who you call if the schedule changes the morning of the event.
If the answer to all three is the same entity, you have one point of accountability. If the answers are three different companies, you are paying to coordinate them, and that cost is not always written down where you can see it.