As with any operation or business that you will run in your career, ensuring a high level of quality across your products is of the utmost importance. In fact, even at the early stages of your company’s existence, you can ride through storms of the lack of quantity of contracts or a less than healthy financial situation. However, it is my firm belief that if you get the quality control aspect of your business right, then the appropriate results will naturally follow. In this article, we discuss three simple ways to ensure your events are always at a high level of quality.
A High Quality Crew
First things first, the members of your team should be people that you not only can trust, but that you can trust to get the job done to a very high level of satisfaction. (There is a difference between the two if you think about it carefully.) As mentioned previously in many of my articles, you can’t expect any one person, least of all yourself, to know everything, so ensure that you assemble a team that is of a supreme caliber. With specialists and experts (to a degree, at least) littered across your team, that will guarantee a minimum level of quality in your final product.
You can take this one step further and add a specific role to your roster – namely that of “quality control manager”. In other corporate sectors, quality control managers do the job of ensuring that operations run smoothly and efficiently. They also make sure there is an effective communication stream between different parts of the team and higher management. Obviously, as the title suggests, they are there to enforce a basic standard of quality predetermined by the company. With respect to the events industry, there are many ways of fitting such a portfolio on to the team. It is easy to see just how such a position can help you maintain a set level of quality across the board and make sure that standards for your event do not slip.
Have A Checklist
A second way of knowing that a minimum standard is met is first to know what exactly those standards are. This is where it is important for management to set very clear targets and communicate these effectively to the whole team. But even then it is best to avoid ambiguity. What I would suggest is to craft a checklist. This will provide everyone with a clear rundown of what is required for any event and can and should extend from the pre-publicity phase all the way to the post-event evaluation. At every stage, use this checklist as a guide and theoretically your team shouldn’t drift too far away from the intended targets. This in turn will keep quality levels high.
Sample questions can include:
- “Was every attendee sent constant reminders as to the date of the event itself together with other details?”
- “Was the event team prompt and clear in their responses to queries from guests?”
- “How much of an impact did pre-event marketing have?”
- “Was registration smooth?”
- “Was crowd flow well-managed?”
Playing around with tenses and where in your event timeline these questions are asked gives you flexibility but yet ensures that at every moment there is reflection on what is going well and what isn’t. This enables high levels of quality to be kept and also keeps options open for lessons for the future.
Penny Wise, Pound Foolish
The third thing you must do to avoid compromising on quality is too not scrimp unnecessarily. The adage in the subheading is true across many different fields – being stingy might win you some short term gains but you will lose sight of the bigger picture and thus suffer a disadvantage in the long term. Therefore be not a Scrooge – be willing to spend on quality or, in other words, look for the value of things and not just the price. Money well spent translates directly into better effects or products which then translates into a better produced event. This has an immediate impact on your clients and gives you a good reputation with which you can secure your future.
That’s It
For any business, being known for always producing high quality products is essential to your long term survival. It is no different for events management. With these few simple ideas, you too can ensure that your company’s standards for quality are always met.
