Shake Creations has a number of clients who have previously managed events “in-house” and have come to us after realising the cost to their business and the greater effectiveness of having a professional producing an event. Have you ever stopped to consider the REAL costs of running your own events? In most cases the “hidden costs” associated with doing events in-house quickly spiral out of control.

Let’s take a simple example... A company wants to stage a promotional event in three or four months time. The General Manager appoints a small team of three marketing executives from the marketing department to organise everything - sourcing the venue, the event branding and marketing, the catering menu, the entertainment, the audio-visual and multimedia production, and so on. It quickly becomes apparent that this is a big job!

In the initial stages each member of the team spends two or three hours a week on the event and things are coming along quite nicely - so far, so good. A month goes by and the team needs to ramp things up to five or six hours a week to meet all the requirements. All good - everybody’s coping despite raised stress levels.

Three weeks to go and the team is pretty much working full-time on the event. The stress levels are beginning to expose cracks, but the event is taking shape and is showing promise of being a success.

STOP! What’s going on here? Why are so many people working so hard on something that’s not their area of expertise? The hidden costs are already apparent. Let’s assume that all the members of the in-house team have two or three years’ marketing experience and have a salary of $60-90K. Given the time spent on the event by each team member on the lead-up to the event, the hidden cost (for salaries alone) is already exceeding $6,000! Add to this the lost sales and productivity can run into the thousands whilst the team has been focusing on something other than core business and you start to get a fairly clear picture on how great the hidden costs of doing events in-house can really be.

These hidden costs are alarming enough, but remember - the members of the in-house team are not event specialists, so whilst the event might be successful, it’s likely that it would be more successful with an event specialist driving the project.

At the end of the day, it might seem more cost-effective to retain all the organisation for your events in-house, but the reality is that you’re more likely to end up with a better result for less actual cost by uitilising an events professional. Not only that, you’ll have a happier and more productive team looking after your core business.