Friends and Enemies of Event Org Growth
An excerpt from my upcoming 90-ish page book for Race + Event Directors, Getting On Path, now in final edits for projected release in free digital if not nominal-cost print around the Running USA conference, Feb 12-14 in Denver.
The book is written primarily for event directors who have reasonable but limited experience in Event Production - or in organization, processes, and documentation - but want to continue their young event or expand their event organization. It borrows many common themes from organizational growth text, but written in a simple and light language for the average Race Director.
This section is an introduction to a larger section that further discusses each of the key philosophies underlying the book, and how they relate to growing a race organization beyond the Race Director's head and immediate circle.
The Friends and Enemies of Event Org Growth?
“Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.”?
- Michael Corleone
Before we get to the meat of this book, I want to introduce some basic concepts that I consider essential to growing your event planning beyond yourself and the info in your head.? These were hammered into me directly and indirectly over the last 10 years, and I hope they can be absorbed more softly by you.? We’ll deal with three personal philosophies (“Friends”) and three external ideas (“Enemies”),? but they are all based on one larger precept that you may know and I have made my mantra:
Preparation Prevents Panic
Over the years, I have grown to gauge an event on first glance by observing - how relaxed do they look on race day?? How quickly and calmly can they respond to challenges?? Are they eating dinner with their team by 8pm the night before?? How early do they have to show up in the morning?? And how late are they there after the event? *
*For an even quicker spot judgement, I look at how their truck is packed before and after an event.??
?It may seem simple, but if I put a concrete rule to the otherwise abstract idea of Basic Race Production Success - it’s this:? if no one gets lost, there’s enough bathrooms, and everyone gets a medal, you’ve hit your baseline goal.?
Beyond this, your goal is to hold the best event, minimizing things that go wrong, and if (when) they do, making sure participants don’t find out. How you achieve this goal, and how you can feel able to scale to achieve this in the future, is nicely measured by the above.? If you are coming into race day panicked and still dealing with issues and communication, you are NOT going to be doing your best work.
???I often tell people that if you are not hitting some key philosophies, you will work twice as hard, spend twice as much money, and/or do half as good of a job, which of course in this fuzzy math means your event can operate at as much as one-eighth of its maximum potential.??
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By keeping an organized and fluid process, you can move into your race weekend, communicate effectively, and come out of it ready to prepare for the next event.? The 3 internal philosophies (“Friends”) that can help achieve this are:
Each of these is an internal philosophy that lets you shape your own thoughts into something that can combat the three “Enemies” of event growth.? Each of these is an external factor - an aspect of working in a larger organization that can cause conflict or inefficiency.? I call them Enemies half-jokingly because, while largely unnecessary in a single-person organization, they are indispensable and often roadblocks for growing past one.? You will find these repeated in many a more weighty tome on small business growth, and for good reason.
If you’re a “mom and pop race shop,” up until this point your planning may have been done in your head, on note cards, basic spreadsheets, etc.? Your ‘crew’ may well be family and friends, whose support may be limited by many factors.? Without these tools, you may hit roadblocks or points where your structure fails, and the process gets increasingly contained in your own head.??
By embracing the concepts above, we can build a plan for growing your organization beyond yourself and your immediate circle, into something that can be simply, easily communicated to outsiders from volunteers, to municipal bodies, and to first responders.?
Conversely, nearly every growing event business failure I have seen - and I’ve seen a few at every level of the industry - has come from a failure to embrace these concepts and transfer the mission and passion of the owner to those who they work with, and work for. ? This in turn results in miscommunication with customers, frustrated staff, and overall an unstable organization.? At worst, this can create a splinter in yourself, your organization, or in the volunteer groups and community partners that you depend on for success.
The 3 Friends - Simplicity, Structure, and Scalability
Your key information needs to be kept simple enough that a reasonably intelligent human being who has seen other events can glance at it, and get the gist of your event.? This had the added benefit of building the proverbial “Elevator Pitch” and letting people fill in the gaps.? Runners who have run several events or staff who have run and worked at other events, have expectations of how a race “should” work. If you have a simple and obvious race that doesn’t violate any of these expectations, you can get by on the minimum of information.? You too should understand and communicate the key points of these basic expectations.?
Big parking lot?? 1 tent up and an arch? Course with 4 right hand turns and plenty of visibility? Great.? You could throw a 100-person 5K with a few dozen participants on a single-tab spreadsheet with a few members of your running club. Meeting at the pub the night before.? 8am start, see you there! This can be, and I'm almost 100% sure has been, done many times.??
Beyond this?? Identify the minimum amount of standard information that needs to be communicated, and keep it in one place as long as possible, certainly until it is finalized.? then, identify anything outside the basic expectations, and list it.? Publicize nothing until it is final, and duplicate nothing that you might be changing in multiple places (or forgetting to) later on.?
The section continues on in the First Edition of "Getting On Path", coming soon digitally and, tentatively, limited print.