BizBash New York: 7 Ways To Save Up To 10 Percent Off Your Next Event
BizBash New York was held Tuesday, Oct. 28th at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center where nearly 300 event marketers, planners and vendors gathered for a day of networking and learning. The beginning of the day began with a workshop series where they offered four tracks for you to choose to attend. The room was full for the “Staging and Production on a Budget: the 7 Habits of Highly Cost-Effective Events” moderated by Scott Cullather, Global Managing Partner of inVNT. He briefed the attendees on the following seven steps that can help you save up to 10 percent off the total cost of you next event:
Develop a standardized request for proposal (RFP) template
Develop a standard RFP to be used for your clients. As the vendor, your RFP should include a purpose, questions, deadline, conditions and pricing among the other items that are of importance to you. As the event planner have a standard budget template to track expenses and a project change notice template (PCN) to track any changes in price throughout the event planning process.
Put events out to bid
For a savings of 1-3 percent put your events out to bid to at least three companies. This allows you to hopefully get the best pricing and to score that savings.
Negotiate multi-year contracts
For a savings of 2-4 percent, try to negotiate multi-year contracts. Vendors may be more willing to work with you on pricing when signing a longer-term contract.
Look for volume-based discounts
When looking for volume-based discounts look into your total food and beverage amount and requests discounts for revenue targets. For example, if you spend $400K request a 3% discount. Volume-based discounts can result in a savings of 2-5 percent.
Create economies of scale
To create economies of scale try to repurpose assets used in a previous event or create multi-use designs. This can result in a savings of 3-5 percent.
Negotiate
Negotiation is a great way for a savings of 1-3 percent. Negotiate charges to the master account for items such as Internet fees, power and hook up fees, rigging and point fees and handling fees.
Use the economy
Use the economy to participate in face-to-face appointments since cost of travel is down. This will allow you to negotiate with your vendors and can help save you up to 1 percent.
As a vendor or event planner, what are some ways you save on your events? Leave them in the comments or tweet them to me at @wtwh_heather.
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