Learn from the Olympics How to Organize your Events: Part 2 of 3 – Planning a Profitable Event
In the first part of this series, we looked at the logistics of an event, both the logistics of fans getting to the event, and the internal logistics allowing fans to move from one item of interest to another. This time we will look at how to ensure that our event is profitable.
The Olympics are a fun example of trying to put on the best show that the world has ever seen and still turning a profit. Every two years, usually about a month before the games, there will be newspaper articles about how far over budget and behind schedule the ticket sales the Olympic Games are. Fortunately, most of our events are not judged by the same standards that the Olympics are held to, but they do have evaluation criteria. One common feature of all events is that they have both a budget and an objective. The size of the budget and the scope of the objectives differ drastically, but that does not make them any more or less important to the person planning the event.
The 2002 Winter Olympics were a good example of working hard to stay on budget. At the time of the...