Tag: Get Ahead Berkshire

The Operational Edge, Post 4 of 4

I did not set out to build a career in event management. I came from a corporate background in HR and performance, and event planning arrived through the side door: initially something I took on because it needed doing, and gradually something I became good at and sought out.

What I did not expect was how much the discipline of running complex events would teach me about business. Not about events specifically, but about the kind of operational and commercial thinking that underpins any well-run organisation.

This is the final post in a series built around that premise. Not as a neat argument constructed after the fact, but as something I have come to understand through the work itself.

The information timing insight

The most transferable thing event work taught me is deceptively simple: people cannot act on information before they are ready to act on it.

In an events context, this is practical and immediate. Send a delegate their travel details three months before the event and they will not know where to find them when they need them. Send them two weeks before and they will use them. The information is identical. The timing is what changes the outcome.

I apply the same thinking to how I communicate with clients. Not everything needs to be shared immediately. Some things are better held until the moment when they are actually useful. The discipline is knowing the difference, and resisting the temptation to communicate for the sake of it.

What joined-up support actually looks like

One of the things event work made concrete for me is what it means to bring different kinds of expertise together for a single outcome.

An event needs copy written. It needs a logo and a landing page and printed materials. It needs someone to manage registrations, liaise with the venue, brief the AV team, and be on-site when the day comes. None of those things requires the same person. All of them need to work together.

For a client without an internal marketing team, I might pull in three hours of a graphic designer’s time for the branding, write the copy myself, manage the registrations, and bring in additional support on the day. The client gets a complete service without employing anyone permanently. They pay for what they need, when they need it.

That is also, precisely, how Get Ahead works. The model was not new to me because I had already been living a version of it. What Get Ahead provides is the structure, the network, and the matching process that makes it work across a much wider range of business needs than events alone.

What reputation actually builds

My current event clients did not find me through advertising. They found me because someone they trusted had worked with me and recommended me. Several of them were delegates at events I ran for other clients, who subsequently asked me to run events for their own organisations.

Reputation in that sense is not something you manufacture. It is the cumulative result of doing the work carefully, repeatedly, and without making clients feel the effort behind it.

I think about that when I work with businesses through Get Ahead. The support I provide is not visible to their clients. It is not supposed to be. What is visible is the effect: a business owner who is calmer, better prepared, and more present than they would be if they were trying to carry everything themselves.

Why I do this work

I am sometimes asked what the connection is between a corporate HR career, years of running scientific conferences, and being a Regional Director for a business support network.

The honest answer is that they are all versions of the same thing. Understanding what a person or organisation needs to perform well. Building the conditions that make that possible. Getting out of the way when it is working.

The businesses I support through Get Ahead are run by people who are good at what they do. They do not need me to do it for them. They need the operational breathing room to do it better, and the confidence that comes from having the right support in the right place at the right time.

That is what this series has been about: not event management for its own sake, but what the discipline of running complex operations under pressure teaches you about running anything well.

If any of it has resonated, I would be glad to have a conversation. Not a pitch. Just a conversation about where your business is right now, and whether the kind of support I provide through Get Ahead could make a useful difference.

The event planning and debrief framework from Post 3 is available to download at [link].

The three other blogs in this series are:

About the Author

Read more about Suzanne here.

The Operational Edge, Post 3 of 4

Most businesses treat the end of a project the same way. Relief that it is over. A brief internal conversation about what went well. A vague intention to do things differently next time.

Then next time arrives and nothing is different.

The post-event debrief is the stage of event management that most organisations compress or skip entirely, usually while still running on adrenaline and the relief of having got through it. It is also the stage that compounds the value of everything that came before it.

Two kinds of review

There is a version of the debrief that most people recognise and most people avoid. It is the one that feels like a post-mortem: what went wrong, whose fault was it, how do we make sure it doesn’t happen again. Even when framed constructively, it is uncomfortable.

The debrief I run is different in purpose, though not in structure. The question is not what went wrong. It is what did we learn. Those two questions produce completely different conversations.

The first looks for problems to fix. The second looks for patterns to carry forward, improvements to embed, and things that went well that need to be protected rather than allowed to drift.

What the debrief actually looks like

Within two to three weeks of any event, I sit down with my client to review four things: the numbers (delegate attendance against target, revenue against budget), the logistics (what worked, what created friction, what we would handle differently), the feedback gathered from delegates, and ideas for next year.

That last category is the one most people underestimate. Capturing ideas for the following year while they are still fresh is not about planning too far ahead. It is about not losing the thinking that happens in the room but never makes it into the formal record.

I keep a running note system throughout every event, logging observations in real time as they arise. Not problems necessarily, just things worth revisiting. By the time I sit down for the debrief, I have a physical record of things I noticed on the day that would otherwise have faded. Small details, things a delegate mentioned in passing, moments where something worked better than expected. All of it goes into the conversation.

The small things that last longest

A few years ago, a delegate mentioned to me in passing that the event lanyards only had names printed on one side. When they turned around, as they always do, the name became invisible. Scanning badges, making introductions: small frictions, repeated throughout the day, across every delegate.

I fixed it. Every event I have run since has had names printed on both sides.

Recently, a director at one of my events specifically thanked me for it. He had noticed. He had no idea it had come from a delegate comment several years earlier. He just knew it was a detail that had been thought about.

That is what the debrief builds over time: a layer of small, considered improvements that accumulate into an event that feels genuinely well run, rather than just well intentioned.

Listening over assuming

There is a version of the debrief that confirms what you already believed. And there is a version that challenges it.

A client had been talking for some time about growing their annual event. Bigger venue, more delegates, exhibitor space. The assumption was that bigger meant better, and that attendees would welcome the change.

Throughout the event I had been talking to delegates, gathering feedback in conversation rather than through formal surveys. The picture that emerged was the opposite of the assumption. People came back year after year specifically because of the size. The conversations were good. They met people they actually wanted to meet. They could not have done that at a larger event.

That feedback shaped the following year’s planning in a way that no survey would have captured, because it came from the right conversations at the right moment, listened to and recorded rather than assumed away.

What this means for your business

The debrief habit is not just for events. Any significant project, campaign, or period of change in a business deserves the same treatment: a structured review, conducted while the detail is still accessible, with the explicit goal of carrying forward what was learned.

What makes it hard to build as a habit is the same thing that makes it valuable: it requires you to stop, at the exact moment when the instinct is to start the next thing.

The investment is a few hours. The return is a compounding improvement in how you work, built gradually, across every project that follows.

The final post in this series draws the thread together: what event management taught me about growing a business, and why the operational thinking I built over years of running conferences is the thing I bring most directly to the clients I support through Get Ahead.

If you would like a practical starting point for planning and reviewing your own events, I have put together a simple framework covering all six phases from commissioning through to debrief. You can download it below.

Our Event Planning Framework

If you would like a practical starting point for planning and reviewing your own events, I have put together a simple framework covering all six phases from commissioning through to debrief. Do let me know if you find it useful.


The Operational Edge: Event Planning and Debrief Framework

About the Author

Read more about Suzanne here.

The Operational Edge, Post 2 of 4

Events have a way of expanding to fill all available time. That is not a criticism of events. It is a structural problem with how most businesses approach them.

The issue is rarely that running an event is too difficult. It is that the wrong people end up running it. And when the wrong people are managing the logistics, the right people stop doing what they are actually there to do.

The question that has to come first

Before any venue is booked or speaker is confirmed, there is one question that determines whether an event will be worth the investment: why are you running it, and how will you know if it worked?

I have seen events drift badly because nobody agreed this upfront. Marketing runs with enthusiasm. The original commercial objective gets diluted. Nobody is quite sure, afterwards, whether the event was a success or not, because nobody agreed what success looked like at the start.

This is the first conversation I have with any client. Not what do you want, but why do you want it. Delegate numbers. Leads generated. Relationships deepened. Profile raised with a specific audience. Agreeing this at the commissioning stage is what makes every subsequent decision easier, and what gives you something meaningful to review in the debrief.

The mistake that costs the most

A client I work with is now in its fifth year of running an annual conference. I did not run the first year. They did, using their own marketing and business development team.

They swore never to do that again.

Not because the event failed. It did not. But their business development team, the people whose job is to build relationships and convert conversations into business, spent the event day running logistics. Checking people in. Managing the catering. Pointing delegates to the right room. None of that is what a business development team is for.

The event happened. The return on the event did not.

The real cost of running an event yourself is rarely whether it goes smoothly. It is your best people doing the wrong job at exactly the moment when doing the right job matters most.

The decisions only you should make

There are things in any event that should not be delegated. Agreeing the budget and who has final sign-off. Deciding why the event is being run and what a successful outcome looks like. Choosing the format and the audience. These are strategic decisions that belong with whoever owns the commercial objective.

Everything else is operational. Venue liaison, delegate communications, logistics, supplier management, on-site coordination: all of it is delegatable. More than that, it needs to be delegated if the people who should be working the room are going to be free to do so.

What trust looks like when it builds

One of the most meaningful moments in a long client relationship came at the end of an event I had been running annually for several years. The director who had commissioned the work thanked his team, then mentioned, in passing, that he had had nothing to do with the event that year. He had simply arrived as a delegate.

He said it as a compliment.

In the early years of our working relationship, he had been closely involved in every decision. He wanted to understand the process, check the detail, stay across the logistics. That is entirely reasonable when you are entrusting something important to someone new.

By year three, we had developed a shorthand. If I swapped two speaker slots the day before, I sent him a brief note. No explanation required. He had enough experience of how I worked to know that if I had made a change, there was a reason for it.

That level of trust does not come from a contract. It comes from consistently doing what you say you will do, communicating only what the other person actually needs to know, and not creating work for them when the situation does not require it.

What this means for your business

Owner-led businesses often underestimate how much they are carrying themselves. Not because they have not thought about delegation, but because explaining something and managing someone else doing it can feel like more effort than doing it themselves.

Sometimes that calculation is right. For routine, low-stakes tasks, perhaps.

For an event, it is almost never right. The preparation required to brief someone properly is an investment that pays back on the day, when your commercial team are free to do what they are actually there for.

The next post in this series takes a slightly different angle: not what happens during an event, but what happens after. Specifically, the debrief most businesses skip, and why skipping it costs more than it saves.

The first post in this series, which discusses the planning required for a successful event, is here.

About the Author

Read more about Suzanne here.