Planning a corporate event?  With only one chance to make it work,
don’t get it wrong from the start…and make sure it lives on after the last speaker finishes

Michael Jackson is a full time professional speaker and Master of Ceremonies, who over the last fifteen years, has worked with many of the world’s top companies and personalities in planning and presenting hundreds of corporate events all over the planet.

Why host a company event in the first place?  In truth there are probably only five major reasons why businesses undertake them at all.  There’s either a need for communication or some form of collaboration, or a climate audit is necessary due to some form of pending change, or there’s a type of a caucus or celebration necessary to ‘rally the troops’.

Many businesses fail to have corporate events altogether and some spend way too much time and energy on them for their own good. The majority seemingly undertake with them with a marked reluctance and view them as an uncomfortable or unnecessary add-on to the marketing and HR budgets.

Successful corporate eventing is one of the most cost-efficient communication methodologies your business can employ.  Business demands presentation skills and all five of the above scenarios are generally best served through the medium of a live, face to face event.

Sadly, in my experience there is one general common denominator which can usually be applied across the entire world of business to business events; which is that companies are usually fairly terrible at executing them. All too often desired outcomes simply fail to materialise due to some fairly basic and common mistakes.

In truth, corporate events need to be seen, presented and understood as a specific form of live theatre; because when utilised correctly, they become a brilliant example of successfully narrowcasting - delivering specific messaging in a clear, concise and condensed manner; and they get results.

Sadly, and all too often, they become an expensive stale and turgid cornucopia of choreography, clutter and condensed office manuals wrapped in a curtain of corporate egos and achieve the sum total of nothing, save for denting a budget.

Blame for a poor event is inevitably always laid at the door of something else when in fact the company concerned should be rapping itself on the knuckles.  “The traffic was bad this morning, so the crowd didn’t pitch” or “the speaker we used wasn’t on brief and lost the crowd”.  Trying to explain in a whisper that “everyone knows our CEO can’t speak in public/doesn’t know our customers/drones on for hours and sends people to sleep” also doesn’t cut the mustard. 

Very few corporates are brave enough to admit that their event was destined to be a disaster before the invitations were sent out, and yet everyone understands that the results of poor planning and preparation can only be negative ones.

So why are companies so bad at ‘DIY eventing’?

Hollywood would never send out an inexperienced crew to film a potential blockbuster, and nor would it allow a bunch of unknowns to get starring roles unless they had been carefully schooled, coached and had the basics of an acting talent to begin with.  Yet companies do: and they do it all the time. 

Marketing, sales and HR people are expected to be able to perform in front of a crowd along with anyone with a title on their business card that remotely resembles the word ‘director’.  Mostly, they aren’t good at it; without first having the proper schooling and preparation, and such skills usually don’t get taught along with Business 101.  This is one arena where bull dust doesn’t baffle brains.  Just as you instantly spot a bad actor in a movie; so too can conference audiences.

Next there’s the time factor; something which companies normally bleat about having very little of on any given working day.  Successful events need to be carefully planned and scheduled.  Preparation is everything to the planning as well as the messaging content, the delivery style as well as the venue itself and all the surrounding logistics that need to go into such an activity. 

Put together a committee of part-time people responsible for doing their demanding jobs every day whilst attempting to juggle the specific and dedicated needs of preparing an internal event and I’ll show you which one will fail, hands-down, every time. 

Nor is this a suitable excuse to rope in a pool of otherwise magnificently able executive assistants and expect them to be able to swim this one through – they’ll sink, I assure you and go home in tatters – along with your company’s reputation.

This explains why, on your last event, the internal speakers were changing their PowerPoint slides on the podium during the tea break right before they were due to present.  It’s the reason that some of them were very off brief – as well as the reason that the outside speaker or MC you selected from a TV soap opera, radio show or journalistic newsroom somewhere instead of a professional speaker told inappropriate jokes or mispronounced the name of the Chairman, or worse still, your company.

It will also help explain why “Death by PowerPoint” has become an insider joke in the industry, and that no-one present other than your Financial Director understood or even bothered to care about the content of their completely illegible and unintelligible slides. 

You’ll understand now why people are bored to death when watching the umpteenth winner of your next award stand for another interminable two minutes posing for a photograph in front of the assembled throng with nothing but painful silence ringing in your ears and that the ceremony only finished one and a half hours after it was scheduled, with a bar bill that was 50% over budget.

You need a completely professional image on your stage; anything less is corporate suicide.  If you plan it correctly from the start and apply the necessary time to the project whilst using the correct professional experience to help you achieve the success you seek you only need four outsiders on your team.  An events co-ordinator, a speaker bureau or agency and professional audio-visual people are the three who always need to be involved from the get-go, on anything bigger than a 50 person event, and they will advise you on everything from timings, staging, sound and lighting as well as function length, cost and venue selection amongst a myriad of other items – and then bring it all in on budget. 

The value you receive from planners and co-ordinators will far outweigh the cost of their services, and help set you apart from the herd in this era of instant gratification and the media ‘sound bite’.  If you’re even considering a function of some sort, I urge you to call in the professionals.  You’ll be bloody glad you did.