Most event planners are not hired. They are made by accident, the day someone walks up to their desk and says: "You're good at this kind of thing, could you take care of the client day?" Or the team offsite. Or the Christmas party, the product launch, the 20-year anniversary.
The person at that desk was not an event planner. They were an office manager, a marketer, an executive assistant, a sales lead with a free afternoon. And now they have an event to deliver, on top of the job they were actually hired for. If that person is you, this article is for you. A recent survey in Australia and New Zealand found that 87% of organisers planned events alongside their primary roles. There is no reason to believe Europe and the USA look different. Most events in the world are organised by people who would never put 'event planner' on their LinkedIn.
That is not a problem in itself. Part-time planners deliver good events every week. The problem is that nobody ever told them which parts of the job are dangerous. Full-time planners don't have more talent; they have scars, and those scars have turned into habits. Five of those habits do most of the work. None of them requires experience. All of them require doing them early.
Habit one: plan backwards from the date, not forwards from today
The accidental planner opens a document and starts a to-do list. Book venue, send invitations, arrange catering, order name badges. It feels productive, and it is the first mistake, because a to-do list has no sense of time. Everything on it looks equally urgent, which means nothing is.
Professionals do the opposite. They start at the event date and walk backwards, asking one question at every step: what has to be true by this date for the next thing to happen? Catering needs a final headcount 10 days in advance. The headcount needs registrations closed. Registrations need an invitation that went out six weeks earlier. The invitation needs a venue, a date and a programme, which means the venue was booked before anything else existed.
Written down that way, your event is no longer a list. It is a chain, and a chain has a critical path: the short sequence of dates on which everything else hangs. Usually there are only five or six of them. Venue confirmed. Invitations out. Registration closed. Final numbers to suppliers. Print and signage deadline. Set-up day. Miss any one of those and the whole event shifts; miss anything else and you can recover.
Put those five or six dates on a calendar with reminders this week. If you prefer a structure with task owners and deadlines that already knows how events are built, an event project management tool can provide that. The point is not the tool. The point is that you know, today, which dates you cannot move.
Habit two: one owner per decision
The most common sentence in a failing event project is "we still need to decide about the catering". The word doing the damage is we. A decision owned by a group is a decision owned by nobody, and it drifts until it collides with a deadline, at which point someone makes it badly and in a hurry.
Professionals assign every open decision to a single named person, with a date by which it needs to be made. Not the person who will do the work - the person who gets to say yes. For a lot of corporate events, those are different people, and the gap between them is where the weeks disappear. Your CEO may want to approve the keynote speaker. Fine. Then the CEO's name is next to that decision, with the date, and you chase them like any other supplier.
Keep a short decision log: the decision, the owner, the deadline, and once it is made, what was decided and when. It takes five minutes a week to maintain. It saves you the conversation three weeks before the event where someone senior says "I never agreed to that", and you have no way to prove otherwise.
Habit three: treat every number as perishable
The number of attendees is the single most important figure in your event, and it is wrong from the moment you write it down. It is wrong on the day you book the venue because the invitation hasn't gone out yet. It is wrong to have registrations close the week before, because people register and don't come. It is wrong the morning of the event, because some of the people who said they weren't coming will turn up anyway.
Experienced planners never carry one number. They carry three: invited, registered, expected. The last one is the only one that matters to your caterer, your venue and your budget, and it is always lower than the second. Depending on the type of event, whether attendance is free or paid, and how far in advance people register, no-show rates for free corporate events can run well above a quarter of registrations. Anyone who has organised a free breakfast seminar knows the feeling of fifty name badges and thirty-two people.
So build the gap into the plan. Order catering for expected, not registered. Confirm with your venue what their deadline is for final numbers and what it costs to go up or down after that. Send a reminder two days out that asks people to confirm or cancel, and be explicit that cancelling is fine - you would rather know. Then do one thing most part-time planners never do: write down your registered and actual figures afterwards. After two or three events you will know your own no-show rate, and it will be more accurate than any industry benchmark.
If you are managing registrations in a spreadsheet, that works for a while. When it stops working - usually around the second round of "did she say she was coming or not?" - registration software with check-in at the door, like Tickets by eventplanner.net, gives you the three numbers automatically. But again: the habit is the thing, not the software.
Habit four: the day itself is a different job, so write the run sheet
Everything up to the morning of the event is project management. The day itself is operations, and it runs on a different document. Planners call it a run sheet or a call sheet, and it is the thing that most clearly separates people who have done this before from people who haven't.
A run sheet is the event, minute by minute, from the first delivery to the last person leaving. Each line has a time, what happens, who is responsible and where they are. The AV supplier arrives at 07:30, not "in the morning". The CEO is briefed in the green room at 08:40 by you, not "before the start". Coffee is refreshed at 10:15 by the venue, which someone has actually confirmed with the venue.
It also has a column that most first-timers leave out: phone numbers. Every supplier, every speaker, the venue duty manager, the person with the key to the storage room. On the day, you will not have time to look anything up. The run sheet goes to everyone who has a role, two days in advance, and it is printed, because at 07:30 in a loading bay the Wi-Fi is not your friend.
Writing it forces the questions you haven't asked yet. Who is meeting the speaker at reception? What happens to the coats? Who has decided whether the doors open at 08:30 or 08:45, and has the venue been told? Half the value of a run sheet is in the gaps you find while writing it; three weeks before, they would have found you.
A spreadsheet is fine. If you want a template that already has the right columns and lets each person see only their own lines, the Callsheets software is built for exactly this.
Habit five: a contingency line, and a decision about who can spend it
Ask an accidental planner what their event budget is, and they will give you a number. Ask them what is in it and the answer often ends with "...and I think that's everything". It never is. There is the extra AV technician the venue requires. The dietary requirements that arrived after the catering was confirmed. The signage that had to be reprinted because someone changed the programme title. The parking. There is always parking.
Professionals budget for what they don't yet know. A contingency line of around 10 per cent for a straightforward corporate event; more for anything outdoors, anything with a complex programme, or anything you have not done before. This is not padding. It is an honest statement that you do not yet know everything, made at the moment when it is cheapest to admit.
The second half of this habit matters as much as the first: decide in advance who is allowed to spend the contingency, and up to what amount, without asking. On the day of the event, the caterer will tell you that the oven at the venue is not working and that they can bring in a mobile unit for a few hundred euros. You need to be able to say yes in thirty seconds. If the answer is "I'll have to check with finance", you have a problem that no amount of planning fixes.
Keep the budget as a living document with every line tagged as estimated, quoted or invoiced, so you can see at any moment how much is still uncertain. A spreadsheet does this. If you are running several events a year, or several versions of the same budget as the programme changes, Budgets software keeps the versions in sync so the number you show your manager is the number that is actually true.
The habit after the event
There is a sixth habit, and it is the one that turns a part-time planner into a good one. Within 48 hours of the event, while it is still fresh and before the thank-you emails have gone out, sit down for twenty minutes and write three lists: what went well, what went wrong, and what you would do differently. Include the numbers - invited, registered, attended, budget versus actual.
Nobody will ask you for this document. Nobody at your company will read it. But in eleven months, when someone walks up to your desk again and says "that went really well last year, could you...", you will open it, and you will be the person in the room who already knows what the catering actually cost and how many people really came to a free breakfast seminar. That is what experience is. It is just notes, kept.
The one-page version
Five or six critical dates, in a calendar, this week. One named owner and a deadline on every open decision, in a log. Three attendance numbers, with catering ordered for the lowest one. A run sheet with times, names, places and phone numbers, printed and sent two days out. A contingency line of around ten per cent, and a written answer to the question of who may spend it. And twenty minutes with a notebook, two days after.
None of this takes skill. All of it takes doing it before the week you suddenly need it. The people who plan events for a living are not calmer than you on the day. They just moved most of the panic a month earlier, when it is cheaper.
And know when it isn't your event to plan
One last habit, and it is the one that takes the most confidence: knowing when to stop. The five habits above will get you through a client day for sixty people or a team offsite in a hotel. They will not get you through a product launch for 400 guests with a live stream, a celebrity host, and a CEO whose name is in the press release. At some point, an event stops being a task someone handed you and becomes a job that other people spend years training for.
The question to ask is simple. If this goes wrong, what does it cost - in money, in reputation, in the next conversation with that client? If the answer makes you uncomfortable, that is the moment to bring in a professional event agency. Not because you can't do it, but because an agency fee is a known number, and an event gone wrong is not. You will still be the one who owns it. You will just be owning it with someone next to you who has seen the oven fail before, and has the mobile unit on speed dial.
That is not a failure of the accidental event planner. It is the first thing the professional ones learn.
Source: Photo: iStockPhoto 1187468407
