Top 5 Must-Have Resources For Your Next Corporate Event

Planning your next corporate event? It’s important that you have a few key resources on hand. These resources will help you stay focused and organized while you pull off a successful corporate event that will have your industry talking for years to come.

Timeline: Your timeline is the starting point for successful corporate event planning. Select a date for your event and be sure it’s on a date that is convenient to your attendees and conducive to a complete planning process. Most professional event planners suggest that you should start planning 18 to 12 months before the date of the event.

Budget: Before making any concrete plans, get your event budget prepared and cleared by upper management. This will affect a lot of the future decisions about the event, so it’s important to get this settled as soon as possible up front. If you’re exploring new corporate event entertainment options or are considering a new venue, get a quote first so you can include this in your budget.

A corporate event planner or event-planning expert: A corporate event planner can be an invaluable resource when it comes to creating a memorable event. They’ll be able to suggest reliable vendors that they’ve worked with before, have insider knowledge of the best way to create an event schedule and give you extra support on the day of the event. Hiring an outside planner can help ensure that your event goes off just as planned.

Event entertainment: “Exciting” and “corporate event” aren’t always used in the same sentence, but that can change when you hire professional event entertainment. Corporate entertainers can take your event to the next level and make it an exciting and memorable experience. Look for entertainers that have experience with a corporate audience so you won’t have any embarrassing surprises on the day of your event.

Plans for following up with attendees: You can make your corporate event planning better and better each year when you get feedback from the attendees. Surveying your participants will help you and the planning team see opportunities to make things even better next year. You can distribute survey cards during the event, have team members follow up via phone or send out an email survey a few weeks after the event.

These five must-have resources will keep your corporate event on track and set your organization up for success.

David Thomas has over 30 years of event entertainment and planning expertise. As the Owner of Shows In A Box he has overseen thousands of shows, events and corporate functions for charity and fortune 500 companies around the world.

 

Striking a Balance in Dealing With Cost Variances

Work in management or around management and at some point in time or another you are sure to hear the term or terms concerning “Analyzing Cost Variances”.  Just what do these terms mean and what are their great potential implications overall to management, their management and leadership decisions and to the long term health of the company or enterprise?

The term ‘Analyzing ( or analysis) of Cost Variances”  refer to the strategies and analytic workups and conclusions  accountants and accounting bean counter types derive when they  encounter a deferring tally or differences  between what might be called the “real” ( on paper or computer spreadsheet) budgeted costs and actual spent costs. The phrase may well be heard from the mouths of, memos and emails of management and upper management to accounting – I (we / the team) wants and answers to the discrepancies and disappearances between the two values. Further management may demand that they want an answer promptly or at the least within a reasonable enough time period to take good corrective action and actions.  Significant differences of this figure or value (accountants have a habit in their “lingo” of referring to these tallied differences as “variances” in either real dollars terms or more innocuous “figures” as if they are simply chits on the table. Yet to a legitimate and astutely run operation all deferring figures and variances should be identified and targeted promptly for full, complete and comprehensive corrective action. Yet its often more than difficult if not impossible to change a direction or even heading of a ship either putting out good speed , or even direction if a ship of great weight of inertia.

In many companies , firms and organizations themselves , it can be said and clearly noted that accountants , and their associated “accounting departments” , with all the plethora today of computers , great and cheap computer power “in the cloud” along with a host of complex and even cryptic algorithms spend so much time identifying variances  and ensuring that they are allocated to the right , specific and correct accounting time period  that for the most part that they never  really get around to telling and explaining to management – both upper and middle management levels – what these variances really mean or indeed what might of caused them.

It can be said that it can be best and the wisest choice not  to assume that the experts in the accounting dept or the specific accountants involved actually know , have a good fix or perhaps even have the smallest inkling and inklings  of the cause of every variance on their books.

It can be said that a wise and experienced strategy by management is to ask , or even insist , on a plain-language explanation or what caused the variances – or at the least some optional and potential reasons or even suspicions of what did cause these discrepancies or variances.  If the “bean counters” can back it up with actual hard data, at least you will have hard to base your decisions on, rather than flying blind.  Other times it may be an amalgam of potential answers without full supporting data.  Its then up to you and the “management team” or teams to come up with a plan of action and a host of decisions with which to implement these policies , plans and procedures fully.

Kirk B. Stephens

Senior principal Ace Employment Services – Winnipeg’s Manitoba  temp service employment service