When the Other Shoe Drops

“It would have blown my budget completely, but that’s not something that you can be concerned about at a show,” she says. “I think we probably spent $250,000 for booth space, for travel, for setup, for the entire show budget. If you are going to spend that kind of money and show up and not have a display, then you’ve wasted a quarter million dollars. So, what’s another $25,000 if you have to rent a property to put into the space?”

In almost every case, a disaster can be downgraded to an inconvenience by simply allowing extra time on the front end. “We avoid having presenters fly in and present the same day,” Olinger says. “That’s just something we don’t want to do. It’s our job to eliminate problems and to train our clients to make the right choices. Oftentimes, clients kind of miss the big picture; they’ll want to save the cost of a room, so they’ll ask to fly the presenter in that day. But he’s the keynote speaker, and that doesn’t make any sense.”

Murphy’s Law of Meetings

Olinger says his firm spends fully half its event-planning time trying to plan for unknown variables. “You have to be as absolutely prepared as possible when you go to the meeting, because those variables are always in play. Your time when you get to the meeting is often consumed by those things that you don’t really have any control over.”

StoneArch once put on a huge indoor-outdoor event for several thousand people. The staff spent hours trying to think of every contingency, even going so far as bypassing the fire alarm in the venue’s indoor area because of smoke and other special effects. But an alarm went off anyway—right in the middle of the event.

“There were people outside grilling hamburgers for our lunch, and the smoke from the grill went into an adjacent building, where the fire alarm was still operational,” Olinger says. “You don’t think of that kind of stuff.”

Jill Kieser, senior project manager at Hoffman Communications, Inc., a production and staging company in Minneapolis, had a similar unpleasant surprise during a meeting in a hotel that “had an air conditioning unit that literally shook the building,” she says. “Because my company provides audio-visual support as well as creative production, we had projectors and screens and speakers hanging everywhere, and everything was shaking. We even had a pitcher of water sitting on a table, and it was just swaying back and forth. It was pretty significant.”

There wasn’t enough lead time to eliminate the problem completely, and they couldn’t do without climate control. But they did ask the hotel to reroute some controls, and they were able to add some shock-absorbing spacers.