Champagne and resolutions are the word on everyone’s lips these days. We’ll gladly take a second helping of sparkly, however, we sometimes feel like resolutions are synonym to things we need to give up. We quit smoking, quit spending, quit complaining, quit jobs and swear to visit our mothers more often.
Here’s an idea, though. Instead of focusing your New Years’ resolutions on little old ‘me’, try and think of what a clean slate could mean for your venue. More and more often, we are seeing cultural venues using the start of a new year to mark a change of priority or focus. So why wouldn’t you?
To help you along, we’ve concocted a little list of three resolutions that you may wish to consider for your venue. A short read that won’t keep you from enjoying the season’s many treats. Pass the gravy, please?
Tightening that belt really should be on the bucket list for next year — as it has been for most of the last decade.
However, no reason to despair just yet. Every year budget serves as an opportunity, not so much to cut back as to ensure you are getting best value. There are always the obvious to-scratch-off-the-list items, but why not take things one step further? Just ask yourself this: is it cost-effective to pay a production assistant two hours’ salary to pull together information from numerous sources?
Don’t worry, we’re not about to give you instructions on how to unclog the dressing room drain with a screwdriver. We know nothing about that. Communication tools, however, we do know.
Remember the days before e-mail? Back when we had to talk to our colleagues or perhaps even use the memo template in versions of Word before 1997! Today, gatherings around the coffee machine are still happening, but we couldn’t quite survive the work day without Slack, let alone edit a document simultaneously in Google Docs or arrange a night out without a WhatsApp group text (impossible).
Don’t misunderstand me, though. I am not advocating a return to Post-It notes and pagers. Each of the aforementioned tools have their perks. Just this morning, I’ve discussed sales and marketing strategy with my colleagues through our Slack channel. As a group, we’ve edited a large request for proposal rather than e-mailing versions between each other, all the while discussing our March ski trip on WhatsApp.
You could do any of those things using the other tools, but we use those specific tools for good reason: because they are designed for either collaboration or communication and do their job in this department beautifully. So why would you act any different when it comes to building your event?
Here at Yesplan, we’re big believers in workflows. We make them, sure, but we use them just as well. That’s why we get all excited when telling about you how you can onboard a new customer or when talking about new features you can use to easily confirm and contract a performance at your venue.
This year, why not take a look and see if you can improve your own workflows? Don’t have any of that documented, you say? Then start doing so and find out where improvements can be made. Because knowing how and why you perform complex tasks or projects, makes it easier to spot mistakes or cross-train staff to work in the most efficient way possible. And efficiency easily translates into happy faces around the offices and happy numbers on the balance sheet. But then you knew that already.
‘t Is the season for changes, and chances are you have a few days off ahead of you. Why not use this time to think about how you and your team might could improve the way you work, both in terms of tools and efficiency. Because if there’s one thing that keeps this industry thriving, it’s constant improvement for the sake of delivering great cultural experiences to our customers.
