You Sell Out - Now What?

When you sell out a day or two before an event you get one option: congratulate yourself on good budgeting and keep plugging away at the last minute details you need to complete to pull it off.

To our extreme pleasure, we sold out an event, twice. Once three weeks before the event and again eleven days before.

When you sell out weeks before an event, you get options: 1. Open a bottle of champagne celebrate that your event will go as planned knowing you have a strong plan of action, or 2. Pour a cup of coffee, grab a pencil, sit down and consider how to make adjustments to accommodate more people.

Adjustments can mean a variety of considerations from the extreme: secure a new venue or add another day to the less drastic change of furniture or room layout.  Each carries additional questions that relates to settings, seating, menu, budget, staffing, and materials.

Don’t Sell Out Strategy.  To make the important decisions to change an event, circle back to the strategy. What’s the simplest reason to host the thing in the first place? To make money? Connect people? Educate?  Go through your strategy and think through how all, not just the additional, people will be served.

Do the math. All of it. How many additional tickets you have to sell to make financial sense of the added work to reconfigure the setting for new seating and additional menu items, the material and staff time? Will everyone get what they paid for?

Consider the time. Do you have enough time and energy to pull it off?  Do you have enough staff to manage the day with additional people? Can you order and ship more give-its for the swag bag? Print more materials for the packet? Make additional custom birch-bark name badges?

Consider the place. Sure, maybe you CAN fit 75 more people in the back of the room, but really, SHOULD you make them stand?

Carry the torch. Don’t forget about messages! Can you quickly create a new plan to clearly communicate the new world order? Do you need to create additional signs or activities to maximize your space or guide people to the new meeting place?

Congratulations you sold out!

Rachel
Reach Partners