Approaching Events at Scale

A lot of clients and event professionals alike, have trouble discerning the differences required in skill and experience when planning an event at scale.

Some event professionals ( including myself ) can provide services "in-house" up to a certain scope. The important thing to know as someone hiring an event planner or as someone submitting RFPs, is what the true cap and reasonable size is that one can handle successfully.

An event at scale requires overall project management skills including communication, leadership, time management, budgeting, risk management, problem solving, negotiation, conflict and quality management and much more. These skills must be applied across a larger team, with strategic delegation managing time and spend.

For example, if you have a 2000+ attendee event is your rate better applied to the above project management skills or personally making center peices? This is not always cut and dry. You also need to factor in overall work load, time/people skills etc.

With smaller events, while it is fair to say that they require some, if not all of the aforementioned skills, there is also a need for doing vs managing. This is where a lot of folks get caught up... different business models and different professionals have different ceilings and methods for discerning what constitutes scaling. Event professionals need to be diligent and thoughtful about what their true scalable abilities are and those hiring them need to probe and trust that they have self-evaluated correctly in order for everyone to be successful.