Ask anyone who has run a company event what went wrong, and they will rarely tell you about the venue or the catering. Those get chosen carefully, by committee, months out. What they will tell you about is the forty minutes everyone spent standing in a car park, or the fact that the second half started twenty minutes late because half the room was still finding their way back from lunch.
Corporate events almost never fall over on the big decisions. They fall over in the gaps between them.
That is a useful thing to know early, because it changes where you put your attention. Here is what actually holds a day together.
Decide what the day is for before you decide where it is
The first question is not the venue. It is what you want people to leave with.
A team that has been remote for two years needs time to actually talk to each other, which means fewer sessions and longer breaks. A sales kick-off needs energy and a clear message, which means tighter sessions and a strong finish. An end-of-year function needs to feel like a thank you, which means nobody senior should be working the room with an agenda.
Write the outcome down in one sentence. Every decision after that — length, format, venue, whether there is a speaker at all — gets measured against it. Without it you end up with a day that is technically well organised and quietly pointless.
Get your numbers before you get attached to a venue
Numbers are the constraint everything else bends around, and they are the thing people leave until last.
Work out the realistic attendance, not the invite list. For an internal event, expect a portion of your people to be on leave, on site, or on a client job. For anything with partners invited, the split is rarely what you assume.
Then get the number to the venue and the caterer as early as you honestly can, and tell them when it will firm up. Venues are used to movement. What they cannot absorb is a number that changes the week of.
The budget lines people forget
The obvious costs get budgeted. These are the ones that turn up late:
- Setup and pack-down time. Some venues charge for access before your official start.
- AV that is not included. Check whether the screen, microphones and a technician are in the room hire or quoted separately.
- Staff time. If three people spend a fortnight organising this, that is a real cost even though it never appears on an invoice.
- The bar model. On consumption looks cheaper until it is not. A package is predictable, which is often worth more than the saving.
- Getting everyone there and home. More on this below, because it is the one most likely to be an afterthought and the one guests notice most.
Rank your line items by how much they affect the outcome you wrote down. When something has to be cut — and something usually does — you want to be cutting from the bottom of a considered list rather than from whatever you happen to be looking at.
Ask the venue the questions nobody asks
Venue tours tend to cover the room and the menu. The things that cause problems on the day are more mundane:
- What time do we actually get in to set up, and what time must we be out?
- Where does a delivery vehicle unload, and how far is that from the room?
- Is there a second space we can move to if the weather turns?
- Where can a coach legally stop to set down and pick up, and how many can wait there at once?
- Who is our contact on the day, and will they be on site the whole time?
That last one matters more than any of the others. A venue with a mediocre room and an excellent duty manager will run better than the reverse.
Your run sheet lives or dies on the transitions
Most run sheets are a list of sessions with times against them. The sessions are the easy part. The transitions are where the day is won or lost.
Every time a group of people has to move — from the room to lunch, from the venue to a second site, from the event to home — you have created a point where the day can stall. Twenty people move quickly. Eighty do not. Eighty people with bags, a few with mobility needs, and one who cannot find their phone will take three times as long as you think.
Two habits fix most of it. First, put a realistic duration on every movement, not an optimistic one. Second, build in slack you are allowed to lose. If your day only works when everything runs to the minute, you have not built a plan, you have built a hope.
Getting people there, and getting them home
Transport is usually decided last and remembered first.
If your event is anywhere other than the office, how people arrive shapes the first twenty minutes. Arriving in ones and twos across an hour means a slow, awkward start. Arriving together means the room is full when you begin.
A few things worth thinking through:
- Where the coach can actually stop. Plenty of city venues have no legal set-down point out the front. This is worth knowing before the day, not on it.
- Loop time, not vehicle size. If you are shuttling between two points, the round trip time decides how long the last person waits. Sometimes two smaller vehicles beat one large one.
- The last run home. People judge the whole event by how it ended. A long wait at the end undoes a good night, and if drinks have been served, a planned way home is a duty of care question rather than a convenience.
This is the part we are asked about most often, and the part most often left to the week before. If a group is travelling together, book the transport when you book the venue.
Food, access, and the things that quietly exclude people
Ask about dietary requirements early and ask properly — not just a tick box, but enough detail that the kitchen can plan. Then check what the alternative actually is. Being handed a plain salad while everyone else eats a plated main is technically catering for someone and does not feel like it.
The same applies to access. Step-free entry, a lift that works, seating for people who cannot stand for two hours, a quiet space for anyone who needs one, and a vehicle that someone using a wheelchair can board. None of these are difficult if you ask in advance. All of them are impossible to fix on the day.
Put one person in charge on the day
Whoever planned the event should not be the one solving problems during it. They know too much and will be pulled in ten directions.
Name a single decision-maker, tell the venue and every supplier who it is, and give them the authority to spend a small amount without checking. Most day-of problems are minor and cost forty dollars to solve. They only become real problems when three people have to agree first.
The (almost)
Here is the honest part. No event has ever run perfectly in the history of events. Something is always late, missing, double-booked, or louder than expected.
That matters, because if your plan requires everything to go right, you have built something brittle. The measure of a well-run event is not that nothing went wrong. It is that nothing which went wrong was visible to the people you invited.
That is what the slack in the run sheet is for. It is what the spare vehicle, the second contact number and the decision-maker with a budget are for. You are not trying to eliminate problems. You are building enough give into the day that the problems get absorbed before anyone notices them.
Plan for the almost. It is the only version that has ever existed.
Moving a group for a corporate event, conference or end-of-year function? We have been running charters across Perth since 1987, with vehicles from 12 to 83 seats and a workshop of our own in Welshpool keeping them on the road. Tell us the plan and we will work out the transport around it — request a quote or talk to our team on (08) 9351 8980.
