There’s a reason that Victorian businesses seek expert corporate party catering in Melbourne when they’re arranging corporate events. The fact is that so much can go wrong when planning a key event. It’s only with meticulous planning and usually the efforts of a whole team of people that the best events go off without a hitch.
If you’re planning a corporate event soon, here are some of the hardest things to get absolutely right. Expect at least a few issues in these key areas:
- Budgeting and Spending
If you’ve planned many corporate events before, you may have a firmer grasp on the likely budget. The problem, however, is that it’s very often the case that no two corporate events are alike enough to simply “copy and paste” the budget from a previous one and make it work for a new upcoming event.
Even if the budget is set by someone else, sticking to the budget while creating an event that satisfies all of your professional goals and is also something that’s engaging, exciting, memorable and an event that everyone wants to positively attend is a real challenge. The only way to avoid budget problems is with very meticulous planning, and analysing how every decision you make will impact that budget moving forward.
- Time Management and Scheduling
Time management problems can occur both in the planning and execution phases of your corporate event. What’s most common is starting plans too late, or leaving certain elements like catering until the last minute and being left with a hard time finding a reputable supplier who can meet your schedule on time.
Even when the planning stages go perfectly and everything is timed and planned down to the nanosecond, scheduling problems can and do arise on the day(s) of the event itself. People may arrive late, suppliers and vendors can get stuck in traffic, attendees can get lost on the way to the venue…the list goes on and on. Experienced planners will tell you that it’s always best to leave some flexibility in the schedule to allow for things going wrong.
- Making Every Moment Engaging and Exciting
So many corporate events are measured as successes or failures depending on how memorable and engaging they were. Even if the professional content is really excellent, it might fall on deaf ears if you don’t have the right kind of entertainment for the periods of downtime during the event, or if you don’t create an eye-popping stage and presentation area that keeps people watching.
It takes a lot of thought and consideration to get corporate events absolutely right in this regard. You have to tap into your audience and think about what in particular will keep them interested, and, more importantly, what will make them come back to future corporate events that you organise.
- Catering and Numbers
Providing enough, or too much, food is another issue that’s commonly gotten wrong at corporate events. Either there just isn’t enough to go around and satisfy everyone, or you overorder (and overspend) and end up with a great deal of waste, which in some cultures might be seen as generosity, but in Australia with our growing consumer focus on eco-friendliness and ethical food consumption may be seen as wasteful and immoral.
- Transport and Transit
Finally, organising transportation to collect attendees from one place and bring them to the event can be problematic. If even one person misses that bus and complains that they were left behind, you’re then stuck trying to find them a solution. Alternatively, you might request attendees make their own way to the venue, in which case there can be issues with people getting lost, or there not being enough parking spaces for everyone.
