Speaker 1: ♪ MUSIC ♪ ♪ MUSIC ♪ ♪ MUSIC ♪ Hello there, I'm Robert West and welcome to another episode in our Event Management Series. I'd like to talk about staffing in this episode of our series and what kind of staffing you might use and how you might use personnel if you had them. You've pretty much at this point understood that you have a budget to live in, you have a venue, you have an idea, you know some of the staffing requirements but you really haven't put it all together. Let's find a way to finalize that to make it work because some people will get a lot of volunteers and that's great and they can't figure out what to do with them. Other people won't have enough volunteers or they won't have enough management staff and they can't figure out how to make their event work. And so hopefully this video will give you some ideas in how to manage that. And the first thing we need to talk about is role delegations. What you need to do as an event coordinator or a person on a team is figure out roles. Now not everybody has had military experience, not everybody has been a manager of any kind. They might have been just one of those simple self-employed guys and all of a sudden you've got 20 people looking at you trying to figure out what to do. So what you need to do is to predetermine in a list, I usually suggest doing it in writing of some kind, a hierarchy of who's in charge of what and who's in charge of each other when it comes to making decisions. Now most decisions at an event are going to be made on the fly and that's okay. But a certain amount of decisions should always get pushed to the top. And if people don't know where the top is, they have a problem. So when people come to volunteer for you or when they come to work for you, they always like to know who do I respond to, who do I get in touch with, who is my responsible, and it's up to you as an event manager or a coordinator to tell them. So we have volunteers. Okay, so if we have volunteers, what do we need? A volunteer coordinator. Now who does the volunteer coordinator talk to? The event coordinator or the assistant coordinator if there is one. What if it's a matter for the press? Should any individual talk to the press? Maybe, it's probably okay. What if there is an accident and somebody wants to talk to the press? Who should do it then? Well, your press contact should do it then. Could your press contact be your marketing director? Surely could. They could even be your media guy or your internet manager. But what line should he be speaking? And the answer is whatever line the event manager tells him. So you have an event manager. You might have an assistant event manager. And then the next people down you're going to have are your stage managers. And you might have one that manages three stages with a volunteer at each stage because it's just that simple as getting a yoga instructor on and off the stage or getting a band manager on and off the stage. Or it might be so difficult that the stage manager has to deal with a lighting guy, a sound guy, and a bunch of bands on his stage. And because of this, and you have more than one stage, you might have more than one stage manager. You might have an entertainment manager that's going to keep track of all the bands coming in, all the performing acts coming in, especially if you have anything over ten. Once you hit that number ten, you really need to have a manager. If you've got ten bands coming in, you need an entertainment guy. If you have three stages, you probably need a lead at each stage. If you have 25 to 100 vendors coming in, you need at least one vendor and probably two, at the time, vendor assistants. Now, once the event begins, they can go help and work on stages or they can go off and do whatever it is. But generally, when you have 100 people showing up to set up their ten-by-ten tents, if it takes two and a half minutes for your vendor coordinator to talk to each one of them to tell them where to go, you've lost 200 minutes. Two minutes times 100 becomes 200 minutes. That's three hours. They cannot possibly get the job done. You need to be able to give instructions within the 30-minute window, always. So this 30-minute window dictates that if you have 30 minutes and you have 100 people coming in and 75 of them are going to set up an hour before the event, you take that 30-minute window and divide it, and you'll figure out pretty quick that you need four people handling your vendors for that moment. And don't forget, you've got your talent coming in, you've got your volunteers coming in. So as your system expands, you need to expand with it. So be ready to do that. And in your role delegations, you're going to state what each one of those people is going to do. So an event manager, he's going to watch everybody, right? But he's not going to handle the press. So what's your press manager going to do? What's your press manager going to do? Well, your press manager is going to, ahead of the event, set up things like newspaper interviews and TV interviews and work with your internet marketing guy. And he's going to help design posters. And then he's going to have an official statement for public service announcements that he's going to send out about his event, your event, or perhaps even commercialize your event according to other events and passing out flyers. So that's what your press contact's going to do. That's his role delegation. Your vendor, your vendor has his, your vendor coordinator has his role delegation. He's going to, or she is going to, sorry, work with those people that are going to become vendors at your event. The people that have signed up on your website or contacted you by phone or by mail. And that person will then coordinate with those vendors, get them into spaces after assigning them spaces, get their checks, pass that off to the person that's handling the money, make sure everybody has their spaces, has their power, has their drape wall, has their chairs, has their tables, whatever it is that they've contracted for at your event to make sure all that is there. What's your stage manager's job? Should he work with the vendors? No. No, stage manager works with the staging. He works with the lighting guys, he works with the sound guys. Maybe you've hired a lighting and sound company to run all your stages for you. Great. Maybe they're going to do the stage manager job. Great. But their role delegation does not change and you need to factor that in because when you send a volunteer over to work on their stage to handle equipment for those guys, they should be able to walk up and go, hey, I'm looking for Ed because Ed is the stage manager of this stage. I worked at an event last year where the stage manager was a volunteer. That's okay. They were supposed to manage the classes. Well, they were doing it for free and they were doing it kind of for food and they were more interested in eating so they didn't bother to work at their stage or even show up. So the first class went an hour long. Well, that kind of was the second class that was coming along. So then when the third class got there, they said, hey, I want to start. And since the first class decided they didn't want to finish, it made it pretty tough. Well, the fourth class came along and said, hey, everybody's got to get out of my way because I need to set up for the class. And so what you had was a bunch of instructors at this event all upset at each other because there was no one there to coordinate the problem. The stage manager needed to be there. The person responsible needed to be there so that they could tell that first group to finish up within their 50-minute time slot and move on down the road because you have other people that you've contracted with. And this is a big problem in events is that two things happen. Number one, there is no cohesion in the role delegation of the people running certain parts of the event. And number two, people pay or have paid to come to that event to teach or to perform or to provide some sort of service, and they can't because somebody else has got it up their sleeve that they're bigger, better, or whatever they happen to be, and there's no one there to tell them, no, we made agreements, this is your agreement, that's their agreement, you need to move on. And that's why you have stage managers. These are role delegations, and for everybody that you have, even your food, you have to figure that out. And in your role delegations, you should also think about your people that are going to take on secondary jobs like part of your incident team. We'll get to that later on. Let's talk about traffic plans. So you've figured out your schedule and you've figured out your role delegations and you have your event in mind. Now you have to figure out your traffic plans. So let's use an X for a moment in our thinking, and north, south, east, and west. So let's say we have one stage and it's on the north side of the building. We have a whole bunch of vendors coming in, and we have a parking lot on the east and west side of the building, which will later on also become parking for our attendees, and then we have a general public entrance at the south side of the building. That makes your traffic plan pretty darn simple, doesn't it? Your entertainment's going to come up one side and they're going to enter in through the back door on the north side. That's part of your traffic plan. Your vendors are going to enter in on either the east side or the west side. Now why do I say that? Why can't they enter through both sides? I mean, heck, you've got two doors, right? Well, let's think about that, because your vendor coordinator needs to be somewhere where he or she can be found. And because of this, you want to put them on one side. This way, as people come through, they meet the vendor coordinator, and if people have a question, they can go back knowing that that person will probably be at that door, or an assistant will be at that door, controlling the flow and helping people get in. And this creates stability. So everybody has gotten stability from knowing that if they're an entertainment person, they come in through the north side. If they're a vendor, they're going to come in through the west side or the east side, but one door. And if you have food service people, where are you going to bring them in? Probably the same door, if you can. If you can't, use the door on the other side for your food service people, and have a volunteer or coordinator at that door handling just the food people, so all the trucks maintain their position on one side, the vendors on the other, the staging's up here. And now, last but least, when we're ready to open, the crowd can line up where? At the south door. And nobody's going to get in their way. Now, if you're at a fairgrounds and you've got a bunch of gates, then you have to take your plot plan and maybe try to figure out an exit. It's the easiest thing to do. And set up your gates to work out. Your volunteers and your staff might come in the north gate next to the horse barns, and your vendors might come in the east gate next to the baseball diamond or the field or whatever it happens to be, and then there's the main entrance to the fairgrounds. That's pretty obvious. That's where the crowd's going to line up. You're going to have to make some adjustments depending on that site, but that's creating a traffic plan. Now, something else I want you to consider in your traffic plan is not just how to get the vendors in and the entertainment in and the people in, but how to get them out. Because when the whole thing's over again, you need to reverse the process. And we're going to throw one more wrinkle into this whole thing. That's right. We're going to throw the wrinkle in what you do when there's an emergency. Now, we covered traffic plans in that last little bit there. Let's talk about staff just a little bit more. If you have any questions at this point on people that you need or how to use people, write me, and I will try and figure out a way to help you out figuring out how much staff or what kinds of staff that you need for your event. But let me explain something very clearly. I'm used to be given staff. So when I was at the Sea Scout bases or the military bases, we had staff assigned to us. They had to volunteer. So we always had plenty of bodies. So it's actually very easy because we always had extra bodies that we didn't know what to do with. You may not be so lucky. So when you have staff, make sure that you understand where and how you're going to use them and what their responsibilities are. And make sure that they show up. If you're going to have volunteer staff and you don't think they're going to show up, you've used the wrong criteria or what we call the wrong lure to bring your staff in. I know a lot of people do Comic Cons and Ren Fairs and Celtic Fairs and festivals and all sorts of kinds and act as a volunteer for a four-hour window of an eight-hour event. And then they get to go spend time at the event. Well, that's great in the morning because then they go get to see the event in the evening. But what if they're on the evening shift? You know, there's not much going on in the morning. So with those staff, I try to fade in a little bit and then kind of just disappear away into the crowd. And then you'll never know who they are or where they went. You'll be a person short. So watch what kind of deals you make with people to be staff, whether paid or unpaid. But be very careful about how you pick them and how many that you need and then how you're going to keep an eye on them. Because some people just get their nose in their phone and they're worthless. I'm sorry. That's just the way it is. Whereas other people are highly interested and you never know who it's going to be. It might even be the person you didn't think was interested. So staff. Staff is important. And make sure you have enough. If you have 100 vendors or one vendor coordinator, you probably need a couple of people to help them out. Just the way it is. We talked about that rule about talking when they're coming in. But even during the day, the power can go out. They may have problems getting food. It could be any number of things. So you're going to have to do a watchdog program, a roping program. Once the vendors are in a place that you kind of drove through once in a while, you check through them for the first couple of hours, ask them if everything's okay. Is everything nailed down? And that's something else. If you're outside, you should visually check to make sure everybody's nailed down. I was at a festival last year. And at that festival, a big wind came up and took a bunch of pop-ups with it. So it's kind of your job in maintaining a safe area as part of an event, no matter what position you have, to make sure everything around you is being done reasonably safe. I can talk about vendors for a moment. What is a vendor? A vendor is anybody that sells anything. A performer is anybody that performs. A patron, an attendee, a visitor is anybody that isn't performing and isn't selling anything or isn't part of your staff. Why is it important to make these definitions? Because coordinators, managers, staff will need to know who's who. So those are your roles. There's only those kinds of people. You may have people that came in, like myself, that work for a press group or work for a local TV station. If you can't figure out who those people are on your own at the staff level, you've picked the wrong staff. It should be pretty easy to find out. The guy with the giant camera is probably with the press. He's probably not mom and dad. Could be, but probably not.