Define the event’s role in the business
Start by choosing the change you want to provide for participants and the commercial role the event serves. It may introduce an approach, prepare a decision or start a learning relationship. The experience needs to justify participation in its own right while keeping the connection to the next offer understandable and explicit.
In earlier editions of AdSummit, I designed the event as a lower-friction entry for people who did not yet have enough confidence to buy a more demanding offer. The experience let them get to know my work and encounter different perspectives. That was a choice within the strategy I was pursuing at the time.
What I take from that experience is the importance of intention. The event had its own function and a relationship with other offers, without needing the ticket to carry all the business's profitability. This does not turn historical prices or the products presented then into current recommendations for every person planning an event.
Before deciding on a price, write down what participants receive and why this first step suits the audience. Then assess the resources required to deliver the experience. An accessible price only makes sense when the proposition remains understandable and there is a responsible way to support the overall project and fulfil its commitments.
Design the path from registration to participation
Walk through the event as someone who has just registered: confirmation, access, timings, support and later materials. Each transition needs clear instructions and an owner when it fails. This preparation reveals the necessary work before selecting tools, so participants do not have to discover for themselves how to use what they purchased.
Describe the journey in simple language: someone chooses to participate, completes registration, receives confirmation and enters the right space. Then add the situations that might interrupt that journey. An unconfirmed payment, an incorrectly entered address or an access difficulty should not depend on the memory of whoever happens to be available at that moment.
You do not need to automate every exception before starting. You need to know where exceptions are detected, who handles them and how the person receives a response. Manual work may suit a particular volume, provided it is planned and the team can carry it out without abandoning the rest of the event operation.
The same concern appears when building a funnel the sales team can work with. A handover is only well defined when the person's status and next action are clear. For an event, this prevents confusing purchase intent with confirmed registration, or an email that has been sent with access that has actually been tested.
Give speakers a useful brief
Each contribution should advance the event’s objective and respect what the audience already knows. Share context, important questions, duration and its place in the sequence. A brief helps speakers choose examples and depth thoughtfully, while allowing organisers to identify overlaps or gaps before finalising the programme and the materials participants will receive.
A generic title rarely provides enough direction. “Sales for businesses” could become an introduction for beginners, an analysis of processes or a session about negotiation. If the organisers have a specific need, they should make it visible before the guest invests time in a direction that will later require changing to fit the programme.
When preparing earlier editions of AdSummit, I combined two approaches to selecting contributions. Sometimes I started with a person I wanted to invite and found a suitable topic; at other times, I identified a necessary topic and looked for someone to develop it. In both cases, the connection with the programme needed to serve participants.
Expertise should appear in the contribution as well as in the biography. This resembles the reasoning behind differentiating services in a crowded market: identifying what that person helps others understand or do. A recognised name may attract attention, but the session still needs a concrete function within the event and a reason for occupying that slot.
Assign responsibilities and rehearse the journey
A stable broadcast also depends on who handles access, questions, speakers and programme changes. Define owners, replacements and decisions that require confirmation. The rehearsal should cover the complete experience, including a plausible failure and recovery, to establish whether the team can coordinate its response without leaving participants unsure about what to do.
I have organised events with more operational tasks on my own side and have also used studio support to concentrate on presentation and content. These are different options requiring different resources. Planning means recognising the work within each role, without assuming it disappears because you have selected a platform with a more complete feature set.
Someone presenting may be unable to resolve access problems, guide a guest and control the broadcast at the same time. If the format depends on combining those tasks, the rehearsal should make that visible. You can simplify the experience, redistribute duties or hire support, but the choice needs to happen while preparation is still possible.
The approach to defining who approves each project decision applies here too. Decide who can change the programme, communicate an interruption or authorise an access change. People doing the work need to know their limits and whom to consult when a situation arises that the plan did not anticipate or explicitly assign to them.
Present continuity with a clear transition
When a commercial proposal is presented, participants should recognise that the offer presentation has begun. Explain its relationship to what they have just learned, the need that remains and the next commitment. Allow time to understand conditions and fit while preserving the space promised for content and questions during the event.
Consider a hypothetical example: after exploring criteria for organising a sales process, an event presents support for applying those criteria within a business. The transition can revisit the implementation need and explain the available help. It does not need to suggest that the content stops being useful for anyone choosing to do the work independently.
It also helps to distinguish a brief mention from a complete presentation. Saying there will be an offer later can contextualise the programme, but it does not replace the time needed to explain delivery. If you scatter fragments of the offer across several contributions, people may finish without understanding which conditions actually apply to them.
The journey should retain the clarity of a funnel the team can follow up. Participants can listen, ask for clarification or buy, and those are different actions. A good transition makes the next step visible without assuming that the attention you received amounts to a commercial decision the person has already made about the offer.
To work on an event with me, introduce the audience, objective, format and available resources. If you need a speaker, explore business and entrepreneurship talks and send an invitation through the internal form. If you want to discuss event organisation as part of your business model, individual mentoring is the route for sharing that context. AdSummit is part of my background; its results and conditions are not a forecast for another event.