A week(ish) in the life of an Event Organiser

Happy Weekend!

Thought I'd break it down and share what the team at Livescape did in a one week as an Event Organiser from the 11th November - 22nd November //

11th Nov - We kicked off with flights into Singapore for It's The Ship 2019. We had a team already onboard the Genting Dream for pre-sailing setup, faced with some slight weather issues - the team have it locked on. We get fragmented but important updates on how our team is doing on the ship from our GM, Matthew and appointed production team -EHQ, building the production beast that we will unleash to our Shipmates for the 13th - 15th November.

Upon landing, back-to-back meetings began, starting with a meeting with the head of sales of cruise charters to plan next year's ambitious 3-sailings in China, Korea and Singapore. Negotiations are always important here and Livescape has the right person leading that pack, Edwin Koh. At the same time, Darren Waide leads mapping and show running for a TV Awards show that we are organising in Singapore later this year.

12th Nov - We meet up with our financial advisor, to get an idea on if we are achieving our targets and also run through our performances for each country, and where should our time be invested on heavily for 2020. We also got some good face time with our ITS Korea team who were excited to come onboard ITS Singapore and who came to learn, watched, observed and asked many great questions that we were all happy to answer. This runs concurrently with Artist arrivals into Singapore lead by Samira, and we have Mandy leading our manifest finalisation and preparation for accepting 3,800 shipmates on the 13th. Joanne and her team lead the final preparations for our ITS pre-party taking place at Ce La Vi that night.

And what a kick-off that was for It's The Ship's pre-party. A great ice-breaker, but also a great indication of what epicness is expected to come over the next few days.

13th -14th Nov - It's the morning of our 7th sailing, I kicked off with one last meeting before I made my way to Marina Bay Cruise Centre to regroup with the team - we can hear Shipmates chanting 'It's The Ship', 'It's The Ship'; roaring to get the party going; we get in earlier and start doing walkabouts to fight any small fires that may have to arise on board. Rakesh leads our consumer journey team and due to a slight delay in departure of people from the previous cruise, we had to look into working overtime to get "Shiptown" up and running. We were also faced with some slight delays getting our VIP deck up. Some that were free, headed to the crown stage to start assembling tables and clearing the main deck, making sure it was ready for our shipmates.

Meanwhile our team outside started processing everyone really fast - so we needed to quickly put in the finishing touches to ensure that they have a great experience coming in and wondering about the belly and facilities of the ship, while we made sure we got production and the VIP deck up and running to get our shipmates excited for the next 2 nights of absolute madness!

During the ship, there are constant in and outs between the teams, making sure that everything we've prepared over the last 6 months happened to the tee - we were always working towards making sure that our Shipmates have a fantastic experience throughout their journey onboard. There are of course things out of our control, the weather that made us have to move things around - but for doing this for so long, we have been trained to not sulk in what it could have been - as the show must go on.

So what happened on ITS Singapore 2019? I'll leave it to KIX to tell that story once the Aftermovie comes out :)

15th Nov- On the final day of ITS, the crew starts to tear down and pack up - we need to leave the cruise spotless; as if we were never even there for the next charter to fill up.

Leave. No. Trace

In comparison to the years before, we have this sorted, mapped out and executed. We leave some of our crew members behind while the rest jump on a bus waiting to bring everything back to Kuala Lumpur.

16th Nov - I take a flight back to KL, get some shut eye and attend a friends wedding.

17th Nov - Im back in Singapore - finishing up final numbers for ITS, investor relations and also following up with all the potential partnership meetings we had on board (You see, while ITS is catered to the thousands of shipmates to have a good time, we also schedule in a lot of meetings with potential partners and investors who are interested to bring ITS to their territory). It makes sense for them to experience ITS and know exactly what it is before bringing it to another country.

18th Nov -  I speak at The Special Events Asia conference - sharing our experience in running a music festival at sea in comparison to one on land. It's always very interesting to see how people react when they start to understand the true nature of running a festival at sea, the many moving parts and the uphill battle you start with - and the satisfaction we ultimately get when we see smiles of joys on our Shipmates with the memories they have on ITS.

That night, Michael, Joanne, Kate, Caryn and Matthew joins me as we attend an awards ceremony that we were nominated for - and to our genuine surprise; we won Best Music Event for our festival in Jakarta called FutuRepublic in partnership with the F-Thing from MNC Group. I had such joy from the good news and could not be more proud - it was a sweet ending for us, as we kicked of 2019 with that Festival.

I fly back home to a buzzing office - remnants of the memory of ITS Singapore is still there - I can see the satisfaction in some of our team back home. But there is a new buzz happening... as we are closing up and starting our post-mortem reports for ITS, we are already working hard for our next festival launch...

Rockaway 2020 and FutuRepublic 2020 scheduled for March and April respectively...

Followed by ITS Korea in August, ITS China in September, and ITS Singapore in October

What a year it has been, and what a year 2020 is going to be for us!