Hiring the right-fit production partner can have a substantial impact on the quality and ROI of your event. If your event is small and contained, a transactional production vendor may best serve your needs. For more complex events such as conferences and multi-location series, you may save both time and money by tapping a true production partner.
Here are 3 key factors to help you decide what type of production partner is right for your event.
1. Event Plan Development
Production partners collaborate with you to understand your event objectives, and then develop a customized plan to meet your unique needs in the best way possible. Best-in-class production partners anticipate your needs, think about factors that perhaps you have not, and bring creative ideas to the table for consideration. They are also mindful of your budget, ensuring the time spent in planning will yield a practical plan that is spot-on with your needs.
Production vendors typically follow a menu-driven system and expect the event planner to provide detailed direction about their precise needs. Their prices are pre-determined, and experience is usually limited to generic, non-customized solutions.
2. Project Management
Properly planning out tasks, roles and responsibilities for events at the very early stages helps to save time, money and frustration. Without a detailed project management plan, you may find yourself unsure who is handling the many moving parts of the event and whether or not certain tasks have been completed, leading to time wasted in overlaps, gaps, rework, and ultimately needless stress.
An experienced production partner will have a proven methodology for project management, such as the ATX Event Systems Roadmap To Success, and will take the production lead – allowing you to effectively delegate a large portion of event oversight.
A production vendor will expect the lion share of project management to be on your shoulders and will look to you to dictate detailed schedules to them.
If your event is complex, or you find that your time would be more impactful focusing on other aspects of your event, you may want to consider the time savings of bringing in the horsepower of a production partner versus adding downstream vendors that you now need to manage.
3. Communication
Excellent project management is meaningless without excellent communication. At a minimum, you and your production vendor should routinely discuss what has already happened, what is happening now, and what needs to happen in the future.
Quality production partners proactively schedule meetings and calls as informed by the project plan timeline and milestones. They also use cloud-based project management tools so that both parties can easily view completed tasks, turning meetings from arduous, tactical checklist reviews to strategic and creative discussions.
ATX Event System’s has a long history partnering with companies around the world to produce top-notch events
Who is the right production partner for me?
We’ve covered how smart planning, expert project management, and proactive communication are important factors that impact your time investment as well as the success of your event. By carefully considering where your time is most impactful and the experience level needed to meet your event objectives, you can make a more informed decision on which production partner is right for your event.
Interested in learning more about ATX’s unique approach to event production partnerships? Schedule a meeting with one of our producers.
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