Navigating Challenges in the Event Space: Lessons from a Tough Convocation Weekend

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The last weekend in January happened to be one of the longest and toughest weekends in my over a decade in the event space, and I am about to let you in on it.

As a student entrepreneur in the event space, when I got the information about the school's convocation 🎓, which was coming up, I thought to myself how I could position myself as a vendor to help graduating students get tents and canopies for their guests, but my doubts held me back because I had done one with a colleague, which turned out not so good, although it was partly her fault because she collected more than she could actually deliver, but that's not the story. While I was still struggling with my doubts, a very close friend of mine, a lady, came and shared the idea with me.

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The entrepreneur in me woke up, and my exact response to her was, I have actually had this thing in mind but did nothing based on a past bad experience, but we can partner and give it a shot together., I quickly contacted my younger brother, who is a graphic designer, who made a flyer for me to that effect after I had collected the phone number of one of the biggest rental vendors in town and asked him for their prices. This made us have an idea of what we set our own prices at, which we attached to the flyers for transparency.

I only really had to make a few calls to get the contact of that vendor since I was already in the event space asking from some colleagues whom we have worked with together in the past.

The flyer was ready in no time with both my business name and my partner's name on it. I had given my brother the full specifications of what we wanted the design to look like. Since I have a little knowledge of graphics, this made his work easy, but as soon as her attention was drawn to it, she called to say my name wasn't supposed to be there. Then I reminded her about my comment when she came up with the whole idea, and things seemed okay, and we received about 21 orders, of which there were 3 from my end and about 18 from hers with referrals she got from two of her friends and her younger sister.

During the course of the week, we had sent a list to our vendor, and his reply to me was to hold on, as there were lots of events he was handling during the week. This is a result of the fact that a lot of people leverage the dry season to have their events, and he would put a call across to me when he was less busy, but he asked me to drop my order in his WhatsApp, which I did.

Thursday evening I was in the midst of my friends in a group study when the vendor called and said that the list I had sent he didn't have the capacity to deliver all the canopies but that the chairs and tables weren't an issue. I quickly tried to contact another vendor, which I met within the week, but he was fully booked, so I asked what could be done to salvage the situation.

My vendor suggested that we could summarize the whole order into larger tents. Now, my mistake was the fact that I didn't carry my partner along. Due to the urgency of what was on the ground, I made all the arrangements and also made the payments. Unfortunately, on Friday, by the time the supply was delivered, we had an exam that afternoon, so we only came to show them the location where the tents would be set and left for our exam, and on our way, I made sure to brief her on all the arrangements that were made.

After our exams I quickly went to celebrate my friend @starstrings01 whose birthday was that Friday and then dashed to the venue we started allocation of spaces and quite a number of those we made orders for came to locate their tents in order to direct their friend and family who would be coming in by Saturday and I tried my best to explain the situation of things to them since my partner had refused to add the to the general group we created for Those that had made reservations with us and off course some understood while some didn't and a lady particularly told me we would have communicated to know if they were okay with the arrangements or not and that would have actually been easy if the what's app group was functional

After we had convinced those who came around to check their spaces about the arrangements and they left, we started arranging the chairs on tables, and after a while I got really tired because I was now having ulcer pain, then my partner's younger sister just got angry and started saying things and just expressing how she was so angry with me and said all manner of things, and I could only watch my partner, who kept mute all through. After a while I left the arena to have a change of clothes and get my chair covers, which some persons had booked, and also to get food. I came in as quickly as possible, and then my partner and her friend left.

I had called a guy to work with me, and together that night we rearranged the chairs and tables since my parent didn't really have an idea of events; she just arranged to the best of her knowledge, and after the rearranging and all, I found out we had people who hadn't received spaces, so I called our vendor and pleaded with him to help us supply another tent, which he did in the morning.

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My partner came in, and when she saw the rearrangement, she began to scream and shout at the top of her voice that I had scattered the arrangements and people didn't have allocation anymore when, in reality, she hadn't gone round to see that everything was still the same. She said really hurtful words, which I wouldn't want to go into details about, and I must say, in my 15 years as an event decorator and planner, none of my clients over the years has ever talked to me the way my partner and her sister had done in the few hours we had worked together.

We finished allocating spaces and later found out that two of the tents under which we had allocated spaces were our vendor's personal deliveries, so they quickly showed us a tent that was ours, which we had no idea about, and by the time we moved one person from that tent, we allocated bigger spaces to some other persons, forgetting there were two people we were supposed to move, and fast forward to when the whole event started, we had to beg one of the persons that had a large space for a space for the client who had no space. My partner practically joined a client as they both raised their voices at me while the client asked for a refund.

I had to settle the client with a bigger space, the sum of ten thousand naira for the space, and the lady I had just paid space for came also asking for a refund of fifteen thousand naira, which I gave her in the presence of my partner, and finally, because we had arranged chairs in a tent that was not ours originally, we became short on chairs, and of course, a client that paid for 3 bundles of chairs only got one bundle, which meant I had to refund another five thousand naira, making it a total of thirty thousand refunded, and my partner never asked about it.

I couldn't get myself to do anything meaningful for a while because my mental health was affected until I spoke with my mentor, who gave me tips on how to get over the situation, and so far it has been good.

Lesson learned.

1. No matter how good your intentions are, sometimes not everyone will be okay with your decision, especially when it comes to making corporate decisions.

2. The terms and conditions of every business venture have to be stated from the beginning.

3. Have someone you can always talk to in the midst of challenges.

4. People's true nature manifests when it comes to money issues.

Thank you for reading 🙏. See you on my next post.