The 5 event planning steps that come before everything else
Table of Contents
There are five event planning steps that everything else in your plan sits on top of. Until those are settled, every document you build gets rewritten, and every person waiting on you stays stuck.
You can close whichever one is still hanging open today. Here are the five, in order, and how to tell which one is yours.
Prefer to watch? The full breakdown is in the video below. Otherwise, let’s dive in.
Closed means you've committed, not that it can never change
The thing I've watched hold up more events than anything else is decisions nobody ever committed to. So before the five, we should agree on what closed actually means, because this is where a lot of people get stuck.
Closed means you've said, this is it, I'm committing to this. You might still need to make changes or tweaks later, and that's totally fine, because that's events. Events are fluid. What you've done is say this has been decided, so now we can move on to the next thing it affects.
Leaning toward something isn't the same as deciding it.
If you're leaning, there's nothing to write down and hand to somebody, so everyone whose work depends on it is still waiting.
One more thing before we start. These come in a specific order, and the order matters. Each one gives you what you need to make the next, so going out of order means guessing at answers you don't have yet.
The five, in order
Decision 1: What this event is meant to do
This isn't the theme. What I mean is what the people in that room should be getting out of all of this. Are they supposed to know each other by the end? Are they supposed to leave having made a decision they've been avoiding? Are they there to learn something specific, or to be sold something, or to be thanked?
Every choice after this gets judged against that answer, which is why it goes first.
Knowing that answer is what tells you how to set the thing up. The agenda, the structure, the topics, how much time people get that isn't scheduled. Plenty of events are doing more than one of these at once, and a lot of what I ran was training and networking at the same time. What matters is that you know what you're going for, so that when you're deciding how the days run, you have something to decide against.
You'll know yours is still open if you can describe your event, but you can't say in one sentence what someone gets out of being there. Or if two people on your team would answer that question differently.
Decision 2: What kind of event this is
The format. What kind of event is this, and how long does it run?
Retreat, conference, workshop, summit, team offsite. One day, three days, four weeks, something that meets every week. Is everyone in the room the whole time, or are breakouts running in parallel? Is this fully in person, hybrid, or virtual?
Format decides what kind of venue you're even looking for, how many people you need working it or assisting, and how much content you have to build. A three-day retreat for twenty and a three-day conference for two hundred need different venues, different numbers of people running them, and a completely different amount of content, even though they take up the same number of days on the calendar. There's a fuller version of that gap in what changes when your event goes from twelve people to a hundred and twenty.
You'll know yours is still open if you're calling it different things in different emails. One place says retreat, another says summit, and somewhere in your notes it's a workshop.
Decision 3: Roughly how many people
Roughly is the operative word, and this is where people freeze, because they think they need a final number before they can say anything. A working number is enough.
If you have a list of who's being invited, start there. At the firm, our sector meetings came with a list of names, so we knew the total invited and which office everyone sat in. From that total, we'd estimate how many would say no, and we'd look at what happened at previous events to get a feel for it. Then we'd account for the people who cancel at the last minute, because there are always some. That lands you on a rough number of people you think will actually walk in.
If you don't have a list, two questions get you there. How many people do you want in that room, and how many do you honestly think would come?
That number is doing more work than almost anything else on this list. It sets the size of the space, the catering, and the staffing. Your venue and your caterer will come back to you closer to the event with a date by which they need your final numbers, and you don't want yours to have moved wildly from what you told them. What the rough number gives you is permission to start making decisions now instead of waiting.
I've watched a group book their venue and then keep inviting people past what the room could take, in a city that was sold out because it was conference season. There was nowhere to put the extra people. Nobody had ever settled on a number, so nobody knew when to stop.
You'll know yours is still open if the number you give people changes depending on who's asking, or if the range you're working with is wide enough that it would change which venue you'd pick.
Decision 4: When
Actual dates, or at minimum the window you're working in. "Sometime in the spring" doesn't count.
The date is what makes everything else pricable. Flights cost what they cost in that specific week. Venues are available, or they're not. Your speakers are free, or they're already booked. Until the date exists, every quote you get back is a guess.
There's a layer to this that gets missed, which is that some times of year are simply harder than others. September and October are conference season. Everybody's back from the summer, school has started, work has started back up, and hotels get booked fast and well in advance. Do you want to be competing with that? August has its own problem, because a lot of Europe shuts down, which makes putting a September or October event together harder than it sounds. December and January go quiet around the holidays.
Flights follow the same pattern. Certain weeks cost more than others, and tourist season wherever you're headed shows up on every single ticket.
Settling the date early is also what lets you give people real notice. Once somebody knows she has a spot, she can go and book a cheaper flight. It's also how you find out whether the speakers you want are still free, before somebody else takes them.
Moving a date can feel harmless. Your venue, your flights, your speakers, your pricing, and how much notice your guests get all run off this one decision, so this is one to decide and commit to. What that date then does to the shape of your last month is its own subject, and I went through it in what the final three weeks of event planning actually do.
You'll know yours is still open if you're still naming a month rather than dates, or if you have dates but nobody has checked them against your speakers or against what else is happening that week.
Decision 5: The number you're planning against
Your budget. Nobody loves that word, and budgeting is nobody's favorite part of putting an event together.
A budget ceiling is the highest number you believe this is going to cost. It's your best estimate, not a limit you're hoping to squeeze under. You can also build it before anything is final, and that's the part that matters most here, because waiting for final numbers is exactly what keeps this one open for months.
Start with which costs are actually yours, because that changes completely depending on what you're hosting. If you're running a retreat, your guests are probably booking and paying for their own flights, and what sits on your bill is the space, the food, the lodging you've blocked, the people working it, and whatever you're putting in their hands. Know which costs are yours before you try to size any of them. The categories that tend to go missing are in the hidden event costs most budget templates leave out.
Then take your rough headcount and the two or three locations you're considering, and price that same rough plan in each of them. Not a finished plan. The same plan, three times. The same event costs different amounts in different places, and putting those three numbers next to each other is often what makes the location decision for you.
Then put cushion on top of it. There's always at least one thing you can't pin down until much later, and cushion is what absorbs it.
At the firm, my manager built our estimates, and she always added cushion. Ours was a corporate setup, so we were paying for people to fly in, and travel was the cost we could never predict. It depended entirely on when people actually booked and whether they followed the rules they were given or went and changed things afterward. The cushion is what covered that. Nothing was ever set in stone by category either. It was never, this money is solely for travel, this is solely for lodging, this is solely for food. She built in enough room that if one area went over, another one gave.
Cushion only works if it can move.
Toward the end of my time there, that changed, and it's the clearest example I have of why this matters. People came in who didn't understand how fluid an event is, and they worked off fixed numbers per category. If we had money left over in one area, they'd say, well then you don't need that anymore, and take it back. Then another area would go over. Somebody would decide they wanted sofas in the conference room instead of the chairs that came with the space, and there was nothing left to cover it, because the thing that used to cover it had already been taken away.
So when you build yours, put the cushion in and then leave it there. If one area comes in under, that money isn't spare. It's what covers the area that's about to come in over, and you don't get to know which area that's going to be until you're much closer to the event.
After the event, we'd run the actual numbers next to the estimated ones in a second column, so we could see where things went. That's how you get better at estimating the next one, and it's worth doing at any size.
You'll know yours is still open if you have a feeling about what this should cost but you've never put that feeling next to real numbers.
Somewhere to put the answers
If you want somewhere to actually put those five, that's what The Event Brief is for. It's a free workbook that walks you through four short sections. What the event is and who it's for. How many people. When, where, and how long. What you can spend.
At the end, it pulls all of it onto one page, along with what's still open.
That last part is the useful bit. It doesn't pretend everything is settled. It shows you what isn't, so you can see which open question is holding up several others.
Which one is yours
Those are the five decisions that need to be made. What this event is meant to do, what kind of event it is, roughly how many people, when, and your budget.
Go through them in that order and stop at the first one where you can't say, I'm committing to this.
Then close that one today. Decide it, write it down, and let the people waiting on it know.
Half-answered feels like a decision
These five are the foundation of the whole thing. You can't really plan an event without them, which is what makes it strange how often some of them sit half-answered.
There's a real difference between having a rough idea of your date and having committed to it, or between thinking you'll probably land around thirty people and having actually said thirty. Half-answered feels like a decision, and it doesn't work like one, because nobody else can build on it.
So go and find yours this week. Read the five in order, stop at the first one you can't commit to out loud, and give it an hour. Write the answer down somewhere your team can reach it, whether that's The Event Brief or a document you already have open. If you want the longer version of all five with the vendor and venue details underneath them, it's in How to Plan an Event from Scratch.
