When to hire an event planner

Erin Montgomery from Trendz Event Planning with six reasons on why you might need some professional help to pull off a successful event

Mar 1, 2012

by Alberta Venture Staff

There may come a time when your admin assistant, who usually puts together your company’s Stampede parties, golf tournaments and town halls, needs the help of an experienced event planner. There are a handful of ways to gauge whether the benefits of hiring an outside consultant to manage your event outweigh the costs, but the sooner in the process this decision is made, the smoother things are likely to run on the day of the event. “You could hire someone for just the day of the event to make sure everything runs smoothly,” says Erin Montgomery, owner of Trendz Event Planning. “[But] even then, you’d want to engage them a month in advance.”

Illustration Pete Ryan

1	Company’s Coming As more people get added to a function’s list of attendees, more work gets added to the preparations. Even if the staff member responsible for the event has the time to answer questions and requests from people attending, produce all the necessary materials or PowerPoint presentations and co-ordinate the logistics, the support of a professional will ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

2	Dollars Make Sense From a budget perspective, when an event looks like it’s going to cost $25,000 or more, hiring an event management professional can get you more bang for your buck and, potentially, stop that budget from running too high. They have connections with suppliers and can access volume discounts that can more than offset their fees.

3	Too Many Irons in the Fire Advertisement If the company meeting is at a local hotel that provides the audio and visual equipment, catering and one contact point for your employee to co-ordinate the event, you might be in good hands to go it alone. Once the in-house person has to start making arrangements with two or three other vendors – such as food and beverage, guest speakers, technical support and temporary staging – just co-ordinating the logistics can be a full-time job and perhaps better left to a professional.

4	A Matter of Time Depending on the size and scope of a corporate event, proper planning can take anywhere from five to 500 hours. “Not everyone has the time and wants to work outside of their normal business hours to plan that company event,” Montgomery says. It’s a matter of figuring out the best allocation of your company’s resources. You have to ask yourself if you have the internal resources to put on a solid event. One rule of thumb is that if an event will take up more than 20 per cent of an employee’s time, professional help might be in order.

5	Image is Everything If you’re playing host to guests from outside the company, having everything run smoothly is particularly important. People will always remember an event where things went wrong – where the audio kept breaking down or the catering company was a disaster. And that’s not the memory you want guests or clients to leave with.

6	Sit Back, Relax, Enjoy As well as planning, managing the actual event should be a key aspect of hiring an event planner. “An event planner does all the legwork, and if a problem arises, they can take care of it without alerting the host,” Montgomery says. “They can let the company enjoy the event and not let the company worry about the little details.”