How we work
Who does what on an event day
Six jobs have to exist on an event day. A producer who owns the decisions, a show caller who calls the cues, a stage manager who owns everything behind the curtain line, an AV lead who owns sound and the microphones, a floor lead who owns the door and the room, and one person, exactly one, who talks to the venue. At sixty guests one person holds three of those. That is normal. What is not normal, and what goes wrong most often, is a job that has quietly stopped belonging to anybody.
Almost nothing on an event day fails for want of skill. The trophies end up in the wrong room because four people each assumed somebody else had them.
What does each of the six jobs own?
The producer owns decisions, not tasks: when a keynote runs eleven minutes long, one person has to be allowed to say what gives. The show caller owns the cues, live, in the second they happen. The stage manager owns backstage. The AV lead owns sound, screen and the microphones. The floor lead owns the door, the desk and the room.
And somebody owns the venue conversation. That one rarely makes a list at all, which is why it goes missing. All of it belongs in the run of show, one name against every line. This piece is about who those names are.
Can one person call the show and fix a microphone?
No, and it is worth saying why, because on paper it looks survivable.
A radio mic dies during an awards segment. The person calling the show goes to fix it, because they are the one who noticed. They are now behind a speaker stack with a transmitter in their hand. The next cue is a lighting state and nobody calls it. The one after is the emcee handing to a video, so the video does not roll and the emcee fills in front of the whole room. None of that is a mistake. It is one person holding two jobs that happen at the same second.
Give the show caller a second job and you have not added a job. You have removed the first one.
Who talks to the venue?
One person. Not the team, not whoever is nearest, not whoever the venue met first.
With two, this is how it plays out. The banquet manager is told at seven that dessert follows the awards, and at half past by somebody else that dessert goes out during them. They act on the last instruction they heard, because they have a kitchen to run and no way to rank two people who both sound authorised. Nobody has lied. The room gets a version of the night neither of your people intended.
Name that contact before the day, tell the venue who it is, and route everything through them. It feels slower once. Two contacts is slower all night.
Which roles does your event actually need?
Not all six. The answer moves with size, and with whether anybody walks onto a stage.
The role matcher
Set the size, then say whether there is a stage moment. The six jobs sort themselves into the ones needing their own person, the ones somebody can hold alongside another, and the ones that do not exist yet. Open a row for the reason.
Which job disappears first when the team is small?
The door.
Registration looks like the job you hand to whoever is free, and it is the job that sets the mood of the entire first hour. Most guests arrive inside the same ten minutes, into whatever they find. A desk with somebody behind it who knows their name gives you a room that is talking by quarter past. A list on a table and nobody standing there gives you a queue, and a room still quiet an hour later. The programme does not get that back.
So the desk needs an owner who does not leave it, and somebody to escalate to when a name is not on the list. It is also why manpower is a line on the quote: reading one properly is partly counting whether the people on it match the jobs the day has.
What has to be in a handover?
Long days run in shifts, and a handover that only covers what happens next is not a handover. Three things have to cross. What has already changed from the plan, since the sheet in somebody's hand is rarely the current one. What is unresolved and who is chasing it. And who the outgoing person owes an answer to. The third gets dropped: a supplier promised a callback at four does not get it, and by six has made their own decision to fill the silence.
None of this needs a big team. It needs the jobs named out loud beforehand, and belonging to somebody once the day starts. We hold these six for clients across every format we run, so the client can be a host.
Working out who you need on the day?
Send us the headcount and the shape of the night. We will come back with the roles the day actually needs and an itemised quote you can read.