The 30-day AV run-up: a checklist for corporate events

The thirty days before a corporate event decide how the event goes. Almost every show-day failure — the missing dongle, the cropped slides, the presenter nobody microphone-checked — is a thirty-days-ago failure that went unnoticed. This is the advance timeline we run internally, written out so you can steal it. Use it with us, use it with another provider, use it to audit your own plan; it works regardless.

Days 30–22: lock the physical facts

Confirm the room, in writing, with dimensions. Not the marketing floor plan — the real one, with columns, chandeliers, door swings, and ceiling height. If the venue can’t produce one, someone should walk the room with a laser measure.

Get the venue’s logistics answers. Load-in path and dock schedule. Freight elevator dimensions and booking process. Available power and where it lives. Rigging rules. The house’s quiet hours and union or exclusivity requirements. Every one of these is cheap to know now and expensive to discover on the day. (If your venue is a hotel, read the AV clause guide before assuming anything.)

Freeze the format decisions. Screen or LED wall, stream or no stream, recording or not. These choices drive everything downstream — equipment, crew, budget — and every week they stay open costs options. Our cost guide covers what each decision moves.

Name one owner per side. One person on your team owns event decisions; one person at your AV provider owns technical delivery. Committees advance nothing.

Days 21–15: the program takes shape

Draft the run of show. Not the agenda — the run of show: every segment with times, who’s speaking, what’s on screen, what audio plays, who moves where. The first draft will be wrong. That’s what drafts are for.

Count every input. Each presenter, panelist, video, playback source, and the band or DJ if there is one. This number sets the microphone plan and the console spec, and it always grows — so count early and pad.

Set the content spec and the deadline. Slide dimensions, video format, and a delivery date with consequences — we recommend content due five business days out, with a stated rule that late content gets tested last. Send presenters the template now, not the week of.

Decide the remote audience question honestly. If people are watching from elsewhere, that feed needs its own plan and its own audio — the reasons are in our hybrid audio piece. If nobody will watch remotely, say so and save the money.

Days 14–8: pressure-test the plan

Review the technical plan against the run of show. Walk cue by cue: who turns the podium microphone on, what’s on screen during walk-in, how the Q&A microphones reach the audience, what plays if a video fails. Any cue without an owner is a future incident.

Confirm crew and call times. Which humans, which roles, what hours, and who is at the console during the program itself — “during the program” being the phrase that matters. Get names.

Schedule the rehearsal. Even thirty minutes with real presenters, real microphones, and real slides finds problems nothing else finds. Presenters resist rehearsal until the one time they don’t get it. Fight for this line item.

Chase the risky content. The board video from the outside agency, the remote CEO’s welcome message, anything with music licensing — the content most likely to arrive late is the content most likely to matter.

Days 7–2: everything becomes real

Content deadline hits — enforce it. Everything received gets loaded on the actual playback machines and tested at full resolution. Fonts, embedded videos, aspect ratios: verified, not assumed.

Tech-check remote presenters. Anyone presenting from elsewhere gets a scheduled check on their real setup in their real location — camera, audio, connection, backup phone number for when their building’s Wi-Fi picks show day to fail.

Publish the final run of show. Times, cues, names, phone numbers. Everyone working the event — AV, venue, catering, your team — works from the same document with the same version number.

Reconfirm venue logistics. The dock booking, the elevator window, the room access time. Venues juggle many events; the reconfirmation email takes four minutes and catches double-bookings while they’re still fixable.

Where AV meets the rest of the plan

Three coordination points deserve a named minute in your timeline, because they sit between vendors and therefore belong to nobody by default. Catering and the program: dinner service is loud, and the courses need to land between program segments, not under them — put the banquet captain and the show’s timeline in the same conversation by day 14. Photography and video: your photographer wants to know when the confetti hits and where they can stand; your AV team wants to know where the photographer will be during the reveal. Introduce them. The venue’s other events: if another load-in shares your dock or your wall, find out by day 21, while the schedule can still flex around it.

If you have less than 30 days

It happens — the venue moved, the event got approved late, someone left and you inherited this. The compressed version keeps the same priorities in the same order; it just deletes the slack.

Week one: physical facts and format decisions together, in one venue call and one vendor call. Week two: run of show, input count, and content spec go out simultaneously, with the content deadline set at three business days out instead of five. The final week runs as written above — the tech checks, the reconfirmations, and the full system test are the items that never compress, because they’re the ones that catch what the compressed schedule missed.

What gets sacrificed on a short runway is optionality, not safety: you’ll take the equipment and crew that’s available rather than ideal, and the rehearsal may shrink to a cue-to-cue walkthrough. Say yes to whatever rehearsal time exists. Thirty minutes is not zero, and zero is the number that shows.

After the event: the fifteen-minute debrief

The cheapest planning you’ll ever do for next year’s event happens within a week of this year’s, while everything is still vivid. Four questions, one page:

• What broke or wobbled, even invisibly? The microphone that got swapped, the video that started late — small saves this year are failure predictions for next year.
• What did we not use? Equipment or crew hours that turned out unnecessary are next year’s honest budget cut.
• What did the venue teach us? Dock realities, power quirks, the banquet captain’s name — write it down; this is exactly the room knowledge that makes the next advance shorter.
• What would we tell the next planner? If you rotate off this event, this paragraph is worth more than the entire file of invoices.

Send the page to your AV provider too. The good ones fold it into next year’s plan without being asked twice.

Show day: the last checks

The crew loads in against a written plan. The system gets tested end to end — every microphone, every input, every screen, the stream if there is one — before doors, not during walk-in. Presenters get microphone checks as they arrive. Someone owns the clock. And your job, if the advance was done right, is to host your event.

The pattern across all thirty days is one sentence long: convert every assumption into a confirmation while confirmations are still cheap. If your current AV provider runs a process like this, you’re in good hands. If you’d rather it be our process, start the conversation — the advance is most of what you’re hiring.