Every event runs late somewhere.
I’ve written run-of-show documents for trade show booths, customer dinners, more than 300 golf tournaments, eight New Year’s Eves and a live awards broadcast, and I have yet to see one survive the day exactly as typed. That’s fine. What I care about is whether the document tells a room full of busy people what to do when the day stops matching it, and most of the ones I’m handed are silent on that.
The run of show guides that rank for this are good on the basics, and I’d tell you the same things they do. Lock your fixed times first. Give every cue a duration instead of a hand-typed start time, so a long keynote pushes everything downstream on its own. Put one owner on every line. Add your audio and lighting cues, build in buffer, rehearse, and send the final version to everybody who needs it (including the caterer, who is always left off the email). All true! What none of them say is what happens when the welcome remarks run twelve minutes over and the buffer is already gone. Somebody has to decide what gets cut, and if that decision gets made live, by whoever happens to be holding the clicker, it usually gets made badly.
I Start at the Cue That Can’t Move
On New Year’s Eve that cue is midnight, and I’ve written about producing the countdown backwards for eight straight years. I start at 11:59:50 p.m. and walk the night in reverse. Champagne poured and staged by 11:40, every time. Anything that can be fixed before 11 p.m. gets fixed before 11 p.m., because in the last hour of the year every errand takes three times as long.
Corporate events have a midnight too, though it’s usually less fun. The room flips to another booking at 5. The dinner reservation for forty people at the restaurant down the street will not hold your table while your panel finishes its thought.
Find that cue and write the document from the bottom up. When I ran artist relations at the Latin Billboard Awards, my unit of measure was the call-to-position, and I ran the clock backward from every one of them: when glam finishes, when the artist starts moving, who’s holding the elevator. Writing forward from doors open gives you a schedule. Writing backward from the immovable thing tells you where the slack actually lives, and where there isn’t any.
The Column I Add That Nobody Else Does
My run of show has the usual columns. Time, duration, cue, owner, notes. Then one more on the far right, labeled “If late.”
Every line gets an answer in that column before the day starts. Most of the answers are boring. “Hold.” “Shorten to five.” “Fold into the next break.” “Push to after lunch, tell the speaker at the break.” A few are “Cut,” and those are the ones that matter, because that’s the cut list, ranked, agreed with the client in a calm meeting a week out instead of a frantic whisper by the AV table.
For a partner roundtable it might look something like this. If we’re running ten minutes behind, the second customer video goes. Fifteen behind, the open Q&A shrinks and the moderator takes two questions instead of six. Twenty behind, the sponsor thank-you moves to the printed menu at dinner, and I’ve already told the sponsor that could happen so nobody’s surprised. The networking break never gets cut. Ever. It’s the reason half the room flew in, and I wrote a whole Field Note about how the unrecapped half of an event is where pipeline quietly moves.
The ranking is the opinion part, and I’ll defend mine. Cut content before you cut conversation. A B2B audience will forgive a missing video. They will not forgive losing the twenty minutes they planned to spend cornering the one person they came to meet, and they’ll remember which company’s event ate it.
One Name Per Line, Plus One Name for the Clock
The guides are right that “AV team” is not an owner. A name is an owner.
I go one step further and write a single name at the top of the document: the person allowed to call the cut list. Usually that’s me. The executive sponsor gets a vote in the meeting a week out, and then on the day exactly one person reads the clock and says “we’re at fifteen, the Q&A drops to two.” It’s the same rule I give the booth team the night before a trade show, where one person owns everything broken and everyone else keeps talking to the human in front of them. Two people calling the clock is how you end up with a moderator stretching while the stage manager is trying to wrap.
Rehearse the Recoveries
Broadcast taught me this one, and I brought it home to every ballroom since. In corporate work people rehearse the plan. The awards show rehearsed what we’d do when the plan got hit, because a live performance runs long, or a stage reset eats ninety seconds of your changeover, and the commercial break is already sold.
So at the walkthrough I pick the two cuts most likely to happen and say them out loud with the people who’d have to execute them. The moderator hears the words “two questions” before showtime. The AV lead knows which video file is the one that disappears. It takes about four minutes, and it means the cut looks like a choice when it happens.
Some recoveries can’t be rehearsed. The day a breakout speaker walked on stage with no screen, because a sales rep had forgotten the TV, there was no line in any document for it. I drove to Target. What made that possible was everything else in the room already having an owner who didn’t need me for the next twenty minutes.
Bold the Load-Bearing Lines
A run of show for a full conference day can run several pages, and nobody reads several pages at 6 a.m. with a coffee in one hand and a radio in the other. At Presidio Golf, after a dozen tournaments of trying to be everywhere, I figured out that each day had about fifteen moments where the wheels could come off and only five that were truly load-bearing: check-in, the shotgun horn, the turn at Hole 10, the scoring tent, the awards. If those hit clean, everything else could absorb a little friction.
Every run of show I write now has those lines in bold. Somebody skimming it in a freight elevator should be able to see, at a glance, which five things the whole day hangs on.
Paper
Print it, because phones die and the stage manager’s tablet always seems to pick the busiest hour of the day to install an update.
The Takeaway
A run of show is a promise about time. The “If late” column is the part where you admit, in writing and in advance, that you’ll break a small promise to keep a big one, and you decide which small one while everyone is still calm. Clients notice when an event runs late and nothing important goes missing. They assume it was luck. It was a column in a spreadsheet and a four-minute conversation at the walkthrough.
If your team has a program that has to land on time, with a room full of people who flew in to talk to each other, let’s talk. I’ll bring the spreadsheet, and I’ll already know what we’re cutting first.