Case study: 80-person corporate holiday dinner
A company knew it wanted a holiday dinner. That was the entire brief. Everything else had to be built, then handed to someone else to run.
- Format
- Corporate holiday dinner. 80 guests. Small-city venue with limited vendor access. Canada.
- Problem
- No plan, no defined vibe, minimal vendor access in the local market, and no articulated guest experience. The date existed. Nothing underneath it did.
- What I did
- Pre-event planning, experience design, decor direction and build. Handed off a full itinerary and cue sheet to the on-site coordinator so the plan ran cleanly without me holding the walkie-talkie.
- Outcome
- Called the company's best event in years. Repeat requests to plan future events have kept coming in.
The first decision was the feel of the night, not the logistics. How guests should move through the room, when the energy should lift, where people would naturally cluster. Every later choice got measured against that.
A small market changes the math. With limited vendors, you design toward what is actually available instead of designing freely and quietly cutting things in the final week. Naming those constraints early kept the plan honest.
Decor was direction plus build, not a mood board. Knowing how the room would be lit and where guests would stand made the styling decisions concrete rather than decorative.
The final deliverable was the handoff. Run of show, vendor contacts, cue sheet, and the contingencies written plainly enough that the on-site coordinator never needed to call me. That is the part that made the night run.