Google Drive, Slack, and Spreadsheets: The Hidden Cost for Event Production Companies

When your company’s knowledge is spread across 12+ platforms, your team is disorganized not just, but losing hours and days of productivity in the process.

Why Event Production Companies Lose Time to Disconnected Tools {#why-event-production-loses-time}

Event production is a highly coordinated activity. The vast majority of external vendors and local suppliers are required to be managed by the event production company, in addition to the on-site production staff. This means the event production company must be flexible, as events run late, clients approve aspects of the production on the fly, and the site can throw up all sorts of issues. The schedules of the production crew are also key to the event production company to manage effectively. The process of ensuring that all the items relevant to the event production company reach the correct person at the correct time is a difficult operation to manage effectively even when organized perfectly.

Most tech stacks I see rely on Google Drive for contract and run sheets, Slack for time boxed conversations, a shared spreadsheet with information on all relevant vendors and their budget lines and milestones per production. Some people may store client information in HubSpot, some may use a project management tool and 2 people may be using 2 different tools to manage the one project.

There is no meaningful integration between these tools. So all information ends up in the most convenient tool for the job at hand and then it just stays there, unindexed and non-searchable from the other tools. So as a coordinator looking for a venue’s electrical specs, you don’t search one place, you search 5.

That's not a bad habit. That's the architecture.

What the Research Says About Information Search Time in Event Firms {#research-information-search-event-firms}

The numbers are specific enough to sting.

McKinsey found that employees spend an average of 1.8 hours every day — 9.3 hours per week — searching and gathering information. The reality of many businesses today is that they are hiring 5 people but only 4 of them are showing up to work every day. The fifth person is somewhere looking for answers that are never found within the walls of the business.

As already mentioned Event production teams are not the exception to these general principles. A typical Product development team is more of an example.

This production manager is responsible for a 3-day corporate conference event and stated that prior to lunch she checks Slack threads, a shared Drive folder, a Google Sheet, a vendor email thread, client approval history in HubSpot, and a cloud-based CAD drawing file. She has to login to each of these sources, do a search and then make sense of the information she finds to verify that it is the most current.

The most obvious loss is time. The less obvious but deeper loss is trust in information.

Where the Productivity Loss for Event Production Companies Actually Shows Up {#productivity-loss-event-production-shows-up}

Conservative data around time spent searching for information is around 1.8 hours per day according to McKinsey and according to Coveo research that is the floor as opposed to the ceiling at 3.6 hours per day. For an event production team of 10 people, 18 hours of person time per day at the low end of time spent searching could disappear daily. That time is not getting spent dealing with issues caused by delays from vendors, difficult clients or other issues that occur in the production of events. That time is getting spent searching for information that already exists somewhere.

$40/hour × 10 hours/day × 10 employees = $4,000/day. A 10-person company would be between $720/day and $1,440/day, or $14,400/month and $28,800/month worse off in retrieval friction (i.e. the amount paid to employees to do nothing).

Even in a normal week, performance deteriorates when the frequency of questions is increased. But during an event week, even larger decrease in performance is observed because the questions are being posed at the highest frequency and errors will have the highest penalty.

The loss appears in four places that any event firm quickly recognizes.

Many of the questions that the Coordinators ask in Slack are already answered. The Coordinators sent out a Slack question recently that received zero responses because the team found out that the question had been answered in another Slack channel 6 months prior. Nobody was able to dig up the prior answer and instead the team went back to re-track information that they already knew.

Version confusion. An updated load-in sheet had been put up in Drive, but the crew were working from the copy of the load-in sheet which had been downloaded from Drive last Tuesday when they received it. Two versions of truth were in existence at the same time.

Onboarding drag. A new production assistant spent the first 3 weeks of his job asking where things were located. The problem is that things are located in different places for different tools, projects, and even people.

Decision lag. Your client would like to know if you have ever used a particular AV vendor before and what the result was. That information could reside in an email, a Slack thread or a spreadsheet row. It takes you longer than you’d like to gather that information and respond to your client.

Each of these issues can cause some stress, but they are normal issues that are part of event planning and are typically something that event producers are used to dealing with on an ongoing basis.

This is not normal behavior, this is a choice that the architecture made.

What a Knowledge Layer Does for Event Production Companies {#knowledge-layer-event-production}

I wanted to make sure that I articulated one key point about the problem that event planning companies are facing with using many different tools and possibly even deciding to use fewer. That problem is that there is currently no single point of knowledge (SPOK) within an organization that can sit on top of all of the various tools that an organization may use to collect and share information, and then be able to retrieve that information when it is needed.

That's what a knowledge layer does.

LemonLime connects with your event production company’s tools (Google Drive, Slack, HubSpot, Microsoft and more) with a single sign in. No data migration, no scripts, no IT ticket needed. LemonLime automatically ingests your data, structures it for AI retrieval and reasoning in an optimized layer, and will keep it up to date as you grow with the tool.

Here is an example for event production team of how a coordinator can ask a simple question and get the answer from the company’s knowledge bank for that question: Which AV vendors have been used at this venue? What were the load-in notes from the March conference at this venue? Is the current budget the approved budget by the client for last week?

LemonLime is a great option for a event production company that runs complex multi-source events where the cost of incorrect or missing information is visible on the show floor. LemonLime automatically aggregates knowledge as it’s ingested. It’s very simple to connect and for teams to sign-in. As knowledge compounds rather than fragments the value increases the longer you use it.

"When we finally had a single place where AI could actually pull from our project history, our vendor database, and our client notes at the same time, the coordination work got faster and the mistakes got fewer.", director of operations at a regional event production company.

How Event Production Companies Can Stop Losing Time to Scattered Tools {#stop-losing-time-scattered-tools}

More tools = More places to look for information.

You need to add a layer under your current collection of tools. This layer needs to be able to read out the current state of knowledge, to structure it and to be a good source of knowledge for the AI.

Three things to do this month.

Audit what you’re searching for. For one week, your team should log every search that has to leave their initial tool in order to find what they are looking for in another. I believe that the number of searches logged will be greater than anticipated. LemonLime replaces this number of searches.

Your Highest Friction Knowledge, The information your team uses most, that they fear the most to be inaccurate. For our example this would be: The history with the various vendors your company has worked with in the past. The production runsheets created for each of your jobs. The approval given by the client for your work with them. Your crew's contact information.

Connect one source and test it. LemonLime is currently accepting waitlist signups at lemonlime.ai. Link a single source (e.g. your Slack workspace, your Drive) and see which new questions your AI can answer that it was not able to answer before. This is much faster than an audit.

Every month your organization runs on a number of disconnected systems. The hours of work (1.8 – 3.6 person hours per day) by your team of people to manage these systems is considerable. The technology to manage these systems already exists. What remains to be decided is whether your team can implement the technology before the next event cycle or after the event has cycled.