“Some Guy From the Crew” Part 3: Budgeting & building a team

Mikey Mioduski (00:01)
Welcome back to Presentation Thinking in a New Year. This is the Storyteller Study Club and we have a very special part three of A Guy from the Crew with Cameron McGee, founder, owner of Odd3, event production, excellent agency. Cameron, welcome back to the show.

Cameron Magee (00:22)
Glad to be here. Yeah, part three, I can't believe it. thought for sure you guys would have said, I know we said three, but two did it. So thanks for bringing me back for three. ⁓

Mikey Mioduski (00:27)
No. ⁓

Molly Geoghegan (00:29)
No, come on, three act structure? We're so committed to this. Yeah, and Cameron, just to shout out, the Some Guy from the Crew series, if you haven't tuned into episodes one and two of Cameron's three part series, has been really helpful for all of our, like, the numbers have really, have grown in a way that not a lot of new episodes do. And so you were a large part of the reason that we had one of our highest listening months ever back in November. So, cue the.

Mikey Mioduski (00:31)
The people have spoken. Yeah, they want more.

Yeah

Molly Geoghegan (00:59)
like audience cheering sound, And so we're so grateful and this must be striking a chord with, I mean, there's a mill, it's January everybody, it's event season, SKOs are happening, people are getting their event, they're starting to plan their events for the end of the year conferences. So if you are in any of those boats, especially if you didn't study event planning and you find it intimidating, listen on because we have a especially helpful

pull back from the curtain, pull the curtain back today to talk about how to build a team, what your budget, what you might get with your budget. I feel like people are so afraid to talk about that, right? So Cameron, yeah, we'll come back.

Cameron Magee (01:43)
I'm glad to be here and honored to talk about the hard stuff like money and and crew. Sometimes people don't want to talk about crew because they don't want to say, I don't need this person not trying to get somebody fired or something, but I want to just face the awkward stuff. Let's talk about the headcount. Who's doing what on the crew, the budget? I just I hope this is successful and I hope it reaches people because I just want to be a teacher. I just want to help teach this stuff. As you said, a lot of people didn't study this and kind of fell into it. And even those who said, no, I did study this and I did not fall into it. I want to do this for 30 years.

Molly Geoghegan (01:51)
Sure.

Cameron Magee (02:12)
Great, well let's help with that continuing education. So I'm excited to teach.

Molly Geoghegan (02:15)
Yeah, let's go.

Mikey Mioduski (02:16)
And when

we are kind of new to events, if you've kind of shown up to a corporate event, you go backstage, you're getting mic'd up or whatever, you're kind of coaching your exec until the last minute, you're like, damn, there's a lot of people back here. And so I think Cameron, what's the deal? Like, who are these people? And I think you talked about maybe there's some different thresholds of event size where you might start to see different structures and different teams back there.

Molly Geoghegan (02:30)
Thank

Cameron Magee (02:43)
Yeah, I love that reaction. There's a lot of people back here. Great. I'm glad that you didn't know, you know, I love showing people around. Sometimes, you know, it's better that that to walk out there and say, there's a lot of people back here because that's the secret sauce why things are going so well out there is there's a lot of people back here. That's a better reaction than there's nobody here. Sometimes you go into a breakout room and you're like, there's nobody here. I want people in this room. And so there's, I hear both reactions. hear.

Mikey Mioduski (02:48)
You

Molly Geoghegan (03:03)
I'm nervous, yeah.

Cameron Magee (03:08)
you know, why is there only one tech in my breakout room? I'm, you know, I'm not the CEO, but I'm the senior vice president of global whatever. And then the other reaction in the general session of, yeah, there's a lot of people back here. So I'm excited to talk about that. And I want to talk about it. I think t-shirt sizes are helpful just to do small, medium and large. Some people like to say good, better, best. I'm just going to literally say small, medium and large. And I'm going to use the medium.

on these hypothetical conferences is really what I'm talking about here. I'm not talking about outdoor music festivals. I'm not talking about anything other than just a conference. And a conference to me is 500 to 1,500 people. A conference might be an SKO, a sales kickoff. That's a sales conference. It might be a user conference. It might be an internal meeting of a large corporation. That's kind of a conference in a way. It's people getting together. And so I almost want to think of these as small, medium, and large.

If we were to put numbers to the audience size, this is a little tough, but we could say 500 people, a thousand people, 1500 people. But I've also done some really large budget events that are only 60 people. So it's a little difficult to do that, but for the sake of teaching today, let's try to give ourselves something to grasp onto. Is that making sense so far, Mikey?

Molly Geoghegan (04:11)
Thank

I drew a little diagram, yeah, small, medium, large. I was like, I need the numbers to it, yeah. So we're thinking about the size in that way, yeah.

Mikey Mioduski (04:25)
Yeah.

I imagine like venue size also just reflects those, some of those capacity changes, right?

Molly Geoghegan (04:34)
Yeah.

Cameron Magee (04:37)
Yeah, yeah. And so small is, you you could fit that at any, I don't want to say double tree, but most hotels in even Cincinnati, like a smaller market, you know, medium is like you're going to the Gaylord, you know, the Texan or, somewhere you're going to a Gaylord and then large is like, shoot, this is the Las Vegas Convention Center. This is in Orlando, it's Orange County Convention. You know, these are larger spaces and those numbers, obviously, those are million square foot facilities, you know, Chicago, Vegas and stuff. But what I'm talking about is the general session capacity.

Molly Geoghegan (04:43)
Hm.

Cameron Magee (05:06)
I'm talking about the main stage, main room. Maybe there's 3000 people in the expo, trade show floor. That's wonderful. I'm talking about the main stage because this is presentation thinking. This is where we're talking about decks. We're talking about main stage moments with this audience. And so that's kind of what I'm referring to. But let me break down just we did kind of one, two, three on those sizes. Let me break down. I think the crew fits in three buckets, too. And so if you're looking at your quote, you know, I assume we're talking to event planners or presentation folks here who are

Molly Geoghegan (05:15)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Cameron Magee (05:35)
reviewing this, maybe they're working with an agency or something. I think there's three types of crew members that you're seeing and I would label those, now that I know you're taking notes, that's awesome, I'm just thinking I'm talking on somebody's ride home. I would call the crew, first you've got your project leads and this is your production manager is a term that we use at Avod 3, other people may call it a technical director, but this, as a project lead, this is your person that when you choose the AV company, when you choose the event production company,

Molly Geoghegan (05:47)
haha

Cameron Magee (06:04)
This is the person that's gonna spend six months with you. This is the person you're gonna bring on the site visit. In episode two, we talked about site visit last month. This is the person who kinda has your back all the way, and they're with you for six months, and different people bill for that differently and stuff. But that's your project lead. That's the first person on the crew. Y'all jump in, whatever, I'm just going for it. okay.

Molly Geoghegan (06:27)
Is that, no, I'm

Mikey Mioduski (06:27)
No, I love it. Yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (06:29)
like, wait, feel like you're, you're a good teacher, Cameron. Yeah, I can feel it.

Mikey Mioduski (06:32)
Is that also synonymous,

would some agencies call that ⁓ executive producer type function? Okay, yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (06:37)
wondering about producer. Yeah.

Cameron Magee (06:38)
Yes, exactly. Yep. so,

and again, it's so difficult to, you know, if I could look at the audience in the eye, I know we're not on stage or something, but if I could figure out who we're listening to, if this is a purely agency audience, I would talk more that way. I'm trying to keep it pretty broad because I imagine there's a mixture, but yeah, executive producer for sure is your lead crew person. And on our largest events, we retitled the production manager as an executive producer.

Molly Geoghegan (06:55)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Cameron Magee (07:04)
and we put an assistant production manager below them, there becomes all these layers on the larger crews. But anyways, the crew, the first third is those project leads. The middle third, when we're thinking about the crew, what I would call the show crew. How big of a headcount are you running in the show? And so for a general session, maybe that's 10 or 15 people. I'm gonna break that down in a second. But that's the show crew, the actual operators. How many people are running PowerPoint, keynote, playback?

The audio, how many people are micing you up, the lighting, switching, camera operators, the actual people that are operating the show crew, that's the middle third. And that's the part that most of the invoice is. That's the part that most of the headcount of the attention is. And then the last third is the setup and strike folks. And so this is, if you think about it in an arena when we do a really big room, this is the rigging crew. The riggers come in and help us get stuff in the air, but they don't.

Molly Geoghegan (07:33)
Yeah, lights.

Yeah, most bodies.

Cameron Magee (07:55)
sit around on the payroll, know, eating three meals a day while we're in the show, they come for setup, they come back for strike. And I think when you're looking at a quote from an AV team or you're setting your budget aside, just think about that, you know, maybe 70 % of it is the show crew, maybe 10 % of it is that person who's carrying you for six months and 20 % is that setup and strike crew. I hope that's helpful to kind of give us a structure to start with.

Molly Geoghegan (08:21)
Yeah, and if any non-theater kids are listening, Strike is where you take down the set. And if you were in high school theater, you had to do that too. You had to do all of it.

Cameron Magee (08:28)
Yes, thank you. Tear down. That's awesome.

Mikey Mioduski (08:31)
That sounds to me like,

not to project, that sounds like the least stressful one. It's like, could I just be a strike dude? Yeah. Call me Cameron, if you need a strike guy sometime. Sounds fun. uh huh.

Molly Geoghegan (08:36)
Yeah, it's muscle. It's muscle.

Cameron Magee (08:37)
Yeah. Yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (08:43)
Yeah, Mikey's ready to like, see, use a drill.

Take some stuff.

Cameron Magee (08:48)
I

get together next week with, I have formed this little production company owner cohort and there's this very small group of people that are very trusted. We're open book with one another. We talk about all the hard stuff of running a business and we get together next week in New Orleans. I can't wait to get them together. And every time we always joke that we would make a terrible show crew, because we're always like, okay, I started as an audio tech or I started as a video tech and we think we could do a show together and we all say, we don't want to, we'll just all come for strike. We just want to be a tear down crew. If you get all the...

Molly Geoghegan (09:05)
Yeah

Mikey Mioduski (09:08)
Mmm.

Molly Geoghegan (09:15)
Yeah, it's full

of us. Everything's done. You're just like, where I put that? Yeah, organizing the truck nicely. Yeah. Ooh, I'm a big like, I like to make the car Tetris when I'm packing the car. That's really satisfying. So that could be really fun. Okay, so we got the show set up and started.

Cameron Magee (09:16)
Owners together is the lowest stress moment. Yeah, put it in the truck. That's a good ⁓ feeling. ⁓

Yes, love the Tetris. So good. So, yeah. And so when

we think about, you know, today, the premise of what we're talking about is this crew, you know, it's what's the dream team, I think is the way that you guys worded this, what's the dream team. And so I want to kind of talk about those three chunks and I want to talk about it in terms of small, medium and large. ⁓ And I even I know we're going to talk budget later, but

I want to just almost qualify real quick. If you're listening to this and you're like, okay, my budget is $8,000. I don't want to say hang up the podcast, but this is for a real budget. so to put some real numbers to that, we'll do that later. But for now, I'll just use headcount. And I think a small, medium and large show crew, let's call it five, 10, 15 people. Now we have larger shows. have a show that the show crew is 40 people. mean, 40 people is a lot.

Molly Geoghegan (10:14)
Mm-hmm.

Mikey Mioduski (10:26)
Jeez.

Yeah.

Cameron Magee (10:26)
But that's

because we've got primary teleprompter operator, secondary teleprompter operator who's making edits while this person's on stage. We use these big physical ⁓ teleprompters. I think I talked about in one of the episodes that it's a big piece of glass and it moves with the person on stage. So that's an operator. And then they have a backup, you know, and there's an audio tech and then there's an audio system tech. You can get kind of crazy where the audio department has six people in it. And that's a 40 person crew, you know, but for today...

Mikey Mioduski (10:38)
Mm.

Molly Geoghegan (10:42)
So rad.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

That's crazy.

Cameron Magee (10:56)
just to keep it within a range, let's call it five, 10, 15 people, okay? And I'll do them in order. I think it's easier to build up than to walk back. Once you have 15 people, it's hard to imagine doing it with five. So five people, first, your point of contact that was your project manager throughout the whole six months, they're absolutely working on all these crews. This is not somebody just sitting around. And so that production manager, the executive producer, they're probably standing next to the stage.

And kind of being a stage manager and calling the show and kind of helping presenters get mic'd and un-mic'd, they're really the only one on the crew that's not tethered to a console. They're not tethered to a switcher. They're not stuck in the back of the room or stuck behind the drape. And so we would typically put them on a wireless headset and they become every presenter's best friend because they're the only one on the crew that you can find and get a hold of, you know? And then the other seats are pretty clear. And obviously after that, there's an audio tech.

Mikey Mioduski (11:37)
Mm-hmm.

Cameron Magee (11:55)
There's a video tech, there's a lighting tech, and there's probably one camera operator. If the show is not streamed or recorded, then that fifth seat becomes a utilitarian. It could be a dedicated graphics operator. If Ghost Ranch is there and we have real decks, we're going to want a dedicated graphics operator even on a five-person crew. ⁓ But typically, that's a five-person crew. Does that make sense so far? then I'm going to complicate it and go to 10 and 15.

Mikey Mioduski (12:00)
Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (12:11)
You

Mikey Mioduski (12:16)
Yeah,

if there's not a dedicated graphics op, what's the alternative there? it just sell like a, okay, okay.

Molly Geoghegan (12:17)
I like that.

Cameron Magee (12:22)
The video tech becomes,

Molly Geoghegan (12:24)
multi hat.

Cameron Magee (12:26)
yeah, so, and because if you think about it on a small crew like that, the video tech, you know, there's not five cameras. They're not cutting like a broadcast. know, the video tech is they set up the projectors and screens or the LED nowadays, and they're running a switcher. And the only thing they're switching is, okay, we're on this keynote now, and for the next 45 minutes, this deck is live. So then they are running the deck, the keynote, the PowerPoint, the clicker.

Mikey Mioduski (12:35)
Okay, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Cameron Magee (12:51)
They're tracking that. That's a great question.

Mikey Mioduski (12:53)
Okay,

great.

Molly Geoghegan (12:53)
Yeah.

And this is, mean, from your perspective, I'm sure when you bring people onto a VOD, there's a lot of people that have multiple talents within this realm, but it's good to gauge like who knows what so that you can know who's your kind of like extra card to play when and if you need it. Is that true? Yeah.

Mikey Mioduski (13:01)
Mmm.

Cameron Magee (13:10)
That's what's so fun. And

I find, I find that to be true in the whole industry because ever, you know, people started maybe in theater, theater kid, like you said, maybe somebody started as a camera operator for their sports team or something, you know? And so just because they're a video tech, they may have started on camera or they may have started with graphics. Maybe they were a graphic designer at first. And so, you know, on a typical week, we're in three places in the country. And so each of us has to go be the generalist and kind of run and lead the crew. But on peak weeks where we're all in the same room, it's fun to specialize for sure.

Mikey Mioduski (13:13)
Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (13:15)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mikey Mioduski (13:39)
That's cool. Okay, so that's the small up to 500 general session style.

Cameron Magee (13:41)
⁓

Yeah, and

that's tough. mean, that's like, everybody's like, there's not a lot of rehearsals, there's not a lot of, you know, layers, or if you need to edit something while we're live, you can't, you know, but that's a real crew that can get stuff done. I mean, we've done some pretty big shows with that, you know.

Mikey Mioduski (13:46)
Yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (13:48)
Hustling.

Mikey Mioduski (13:58)
Okay, that, yeah,

it's pretty scrappy, but everyone has to show it. yeah, if someone shows up sick, sleeps in, that could break that show.

Cameron Magee (14:02)
It's scrappy.

Molly Geoghegan (14:07)
Right. That's a

problem. ⁓

Cameron Magee (14:10)
And

that's what's ironic. know, a lot of times when there's a small budget, hear clients say like, hey, you we don't have a lot of seats on the bus here, hotel rooms or budget, whatever. So we really need you to bring your A team. And I think what's, what's interesting is in those moments, they're saying we have the least money. Go get the best people. And I don't think, I don't think that works usually. And with a lot of production companies, you know, their best people are on the bigger shows. And at a Vi3, I don't want to make this a commercial, but

we've really tried to say like, the smaller shows are harder and we're gonna send our best people. so ironically, sometimes we'll send a more expensive person because this one video tech in this example we're doing is kind of the video tech and the graphics operator. And so we're sending a quote unquote more senior or expensive person to do that in a weird way. Whereas if you have a six person audio crew, one of those guys can be kind of green, you know, and there's layers, you know.

Molly Geoghegan (14:41)
Yeah.

Mikey Mioduski (14:44)
Hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (14:56)
Mm-hmm.

Mikey Mioduski (15:00)
Makes sense, yeah, it's the...

Exactly. Some training

Molly Geoghegan (15:05)
Yeah,

Mikey Mioduski (15:06)
moments, economy of scale a bit. Yep.

Molly Geoghegan (15:09)
Yeah, some shadowing apprentices. Yeah.

Cameron Magee (15:09)
That's right. So,

so let's get into this hypothetical 10 person crew. Like how are these departments going to kind of get more complex? Well, um, working our way through it, kind of left to right. I'm talking with my hands on us and audio podcast, sorry. But the production manager is going to get a show caller and this, this person is going to actually call the show. This is a very important role in theater, you know, in theater, every queue, this is, this is the one person who's saying ready and.

Go, you know, go pyro, go drape, go orchestra, whatever. The show caller is going to free up that production manager to then roam, be in the hallway, troubleshoot with you, go grab a presenter who's lost and let astray, who needs to get mic'd. ⁓ So the show caller is the first seat that's going to expand. Working right through the departments, audio is going to get an A2, an audio assistant. That person's going to be backstage dedicated to micing people up. And that's important. If you brought in a keynote presenter or somebody, you know,

Molly Geoghegan (16:02)
Mm.

Cameron Magee (16:06)
We had a show recently where I think they spent more on this guest speakers speakers fee than our entire production budget. And we had a real budget. And so this is a very important person who's being S quarterback stage. You want a professional handling her, know, and miking her up and not having to do it out at the booth like you would with a five person crew. So the A2 is going to exist. The video world is where we're going to really expand. And so we're going to get a dedicated graphics operator dedicated to the decks. And then we're going to get a dedicated camera director.

Molly Geoghegan (16:22)
You

Cameron Magee (16:34)
if we're in this, this is silly to do, just a hypothetical 10 person crew, but that's how we would splinter that out. So now the video tech is responsible for all things video, all the screens, the recording, the streaming, everything. The camera director is deciding what camera goes up when and how the recording's working, which is becoming so important for content and things. And then the graphics operator is the person who's really wrangling all the decks.

Molly Geoghegan (16:35)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, Cameron, is these like these categories I'm kind of like tracking here. We've got the logistics with like the show caller, the project lead, the leadership piece, and then we've got the audio and then we've got video components. And then there is, of course, I know there's that muscle piece that might be just like the setup and the strike, because that's kind of how you view the categories. Yeah, lighting.

Cameron Magee (17:17)
Absolutely. Yeah. Audio, video and lighting are the three categories. Our name

of i3 is basically audio, video and lighting. I had a really deep meaning when I named the company, the three had all these spiritual deep meanings to me. Essentially people just, it's audio, video and lighting. Those are really the three principles of event production. AV is audio visual. Yeah. And I don't know why the L just, it doesn't get the love, know, it's terrible.

Molly Geoghegan (17:25)
Right, yeah.

Yeah, I guess that's true. And isn't that what AV, what does AV stand for? Like AV Club. ⁓ Yeah, yeah.

It was when it was radio broadcast stuff, but yeah. Cool, okay.

Mikey Mioduski (17:45)
Yeah.

Cameron Magee (17:45)
Yeah,

so the fifth seat that we get in a 10-person cruise is just simply another camera operator. The interesting thing about lighting, and I'll talk about lighting a little bit more in a second when we get into the setup crew and I'm watching the time, ⁓ lighting, you can have a really, really big lighting rig. You still don't need like two or three lighting technicians. The largest touring concerts, these huge Justin Timberlake shows, it's still kind of like one lighting person.

Mikey Mioduski (18:11)
Yeah. Really?

Wow. Yeah. Sure. Yeah.

Cameron Magee (18:14)
They have an assistant backstage if a fixture goes down, but

in lighting, you don't start to have like two or three consoles doing it until it's huge. If it's a stadium show, you splinter off into a second console just for the follow spots basically. then anyways, but lighting doesn't really scale. And so I always advocate for lighting. It's funny you mentioned like where's the L in AV because lighting is where your budget goes the furthest. It's kind of ironic that video is a black hole of budget. I mean, it gets expensive fast.

Molly Geoghegan (18:19)
That's...

Mm-hmm.

Cameron Magee (18:44)
Audio is kind of black and white. It's nuts and bolts. It's like can you hear or not? So audio doesn't really have a good better vest as much lighting is just this amazing spectrum of every five ten thousand dollars in lighting goes really far and Really shows up. So I'm chasing a rabbit there, but that's a ten person crew. Does that make sense so far? Okay, and then in this hypothetical 15 person crew Again videos where it's gonna get expensive. So we would add a graphics

Molly Geoghegan (18:56)
Yeah.

That's fun. Yeah, we're in. I love it. That's the medium size.

Mikey Mioduski (19:02)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Cameron Magee (19:11)
editor, essentially, a secondary graphics person, not a graphic designer, not what y'all do, not the person who's the artist, but the person who, while the first keynote of the day is on stage, the second keynote comes backstage and says, hey, legal actually just said we can't show this slide. Can I edit this real quick? And that's the secondary graphics person. That's the person we would add. We would add a teleprompter operator because most of these larger shows are getting scripted. Legal is becoming more important on what we can and can't ⁓ basically claim from the stage.

Molly Geoghegan (19:27)
Yeah, live edits.

Mikey Mioduski (19:34)
Mmm.

Cameron Magee (19:41)
since there's cameras everywhere now. So we're going to add that teleprompter person. then again, lighting doesn't really need to scale. Audio, once it has two people, it's probably good. So the rest of the headcount is pretty much going to go to cameras. It's nice to get what we would call an assistant PM or an assistant stage manager, someone just like there's the show caller in the back of the room, a dedicated stage manager so that your executive producer or production manager can truly be anywhere. They can be with you.

The venue has a budget situation, whatever's going on. An assistant stage manager, an ASM is nice. And we would typically put them up there where they're on the front row, the audio two persons in the backstage. But most of headcount is going to go to cameras because at that point you have a three or four multi-camera setup. So that's as quickly as I can get through like a five, 10, 15. How does that sound? Any questions there? And then I'll keep going.

Molly Geoghegan (20:33)
No, I love it. The 15s where we're like in Vegas. ⁓ Again, yeah. Yeah, that's ideal.

Mikey Mioduski (20:37)
yeah, yeah, Moscone Center

Cameron Magee (20:37)
15 is what you want. Yeah.

Mikey Mioduski (20:41)
and NSF, like, yeah, we've seen them, we've seen the big ones.

Molly Geoghegan (20:45)
Cameron, we've

interviewed a few rancheros that have been on site as that person, the live editor for like, you know, when the keynote has an edit or, you know, someone's trying something out, the slide doesn't really work with the animation. And I would have loved to have talked to you first for this context of like, what scale were we talking about? Like, you know, we've talked about Tabrizian tomorrow, Mikey, after these big conferences that they've been part of. And now I have an even deeper understanding of like what they were working with and the scale of like how many people were there. So this is really fun.

cool to put it ⁓ to the actual real life experience.

Cameron Magee (21:18)
I think a lot ⁓ of corporations, lot of client teams, they have some sort of a comps person who's got an opinion about that stuff. And depending on what level of agency is involved, if y'all are there, if there's a really big agency there, there's droves of people who have led to the art that we're seeing on screen, animators, all this stuff. I'm referring to this second person as like a production person. They're on headset. At that point, the files have kind of been handed off to the crew.

And we're trying to protect like the sanctity of that revision within a version control that's going to need to get tested out on the LED screens. ⁓ So that's kind of agnostic at that point of like, you know, who the, I always say artist and I mean artists, who the artist was. It's like at this point it's in the crew's hands, but the graphics operator is running the live show who's editing is a loose word. Who's revising the next deck and making sure it doesn't have any glitches.

Molly Geoghegan (21:56)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Cameron Magee (22:16)
That's the scary part is when just the graphic designer has added it and said, hey, I know you're on V8, here's a V9, and they're taking the stage. You really want the crew to have tested that on like a private monitor to make sure it's good, you know?

Molly Geoghegan (22:29)
Mm-hmm,

definitely.

Mikey Mioduski (22:29)
And those

people, like you said, they might not claim to be, ⁓ they might be good designers, but typically they are just technically insanely proficient with, they could do PowerPoint with their eyes closed, hotkeys, they're just ridiculous with those software, slideware programs in general. Yeah.

Cameron Magee (22:37)
They're technicians. That's right.

Yes.

Molly Geoghegan (22:47)
Yeah, familiar.

Cameron Magee (22:47)
Yeah, yeah, they've

chosen a different path with their career, you know, it's not an artist or an illustrator path where they're there. They would never be able to sit in a conference room the way some people do and say, OK, I'm going to close my eyes. Tell me what you're trying to convey and then I'll make something up. They can't do that. But they have learned all the little resolution errors that a computer can spit out or we didn't load this font. We've got to load it quickly. But let's make sure we grab the italics version. All that quirky stuff that can mess up when it goes from the the true artists.

Molly Geoghegan (23:01)
Yeah.

The technical wizards.

Mikey Mioduski (23:13)
Yeah.

Cameron Magee (23:17)
Mac Pro to like this machine that we're running on site. That's that person. And when they're, when you meet these people, they're really good at it, but it's different. It's different.

Mikey Mioduski (23:25)
Yeah,

on that note too, before we go into like the budget talk, and this kind of has something to do with it, I'm curious about where you find these people. Cause I know you probably have core staff that you carry ⁓ annually, maybe on payroll, but largely from what I've sensed, this industry is very gig oriented. And it's also like, you build the people that you trust and it's like,

If you did well on the last show, you're gonna get called back on the next show. where do you find these people? What kind of training do they have? Is there like a linear pathway or do they come from all walks of life?

Cameron Magee (24:05)
You just said, I wouldn't revise anything you just said. I'll attempt to add onto it how I'm finding them. I'm asking ⁓ the other production company owners that I'm friends with, who do they use? Who do you trust? Because we've got about 150 or 200 people at this point on the bench that we trust and they're vetted. When we find them, we kind of interview them almost like it's for a job. We do a Zoom call, we talk to them and understand. Not that we don't trust the referral.

Mikey Mioduski (24:06)
Okay.

Molly Geoghegan (24:18)
Right, right.

Cameron Magee (24:33)
We want to know where they're best and some people are like, man, I'm a killer PC or I'm a killer Mac or I'm really good on this audio console, but not that one. I'm great in breakouts because I got a great personality or don't put me in breakouts. I don't like people. So we interview these people and figure out where they're good. But if you think about that, I have 150 or 200 when I have friends that own production companies and they have 150 or 200, we build a pretty, pretty big, you know, yeah, pretty big bench.

Molly Geoghegan (24:43)
Right.

You

merge the list.

Yeah.

Cameron Magee (25:02)
And

then just literally just this morning on a group chat, I'm talking about my cohort a little too much, but on a group chat, somebody said, Hey guys, I mean, I think it's, it pronounced Tempe, Arizona? I feel silly saying it, like T E P I'm in Arizona next week and are, you know, this person, their baby came early. I need a, type of like laser operation, like a very specific person. And a guy responded right back and said, yeah, this guy lives there. He's great. It's amazing. You know, it's.

Mikey Mioduski (25:11)
Right, sure. ⁓

Molly Geoghegan (25:12)
I actually don't know. Yeah.

Perfect. That's

Cameron Magee (25:26)
We just find these people, we vet them,

Molly Geoghegan (25:27)
so specific.

Mikey Mioduski (25:27)
I love that.

Cameron Magee (25:29)
and you do forge relationships in the trenches. I feel like coming back from the World War together, it's like, hey, you had my back, let's stick together, you know?

Molly Geoghegan (25:34)
Yeah. Yeah,

Mikey Mioduski (25:35)
Yeah.

huh. I love that.

Molly Geoghegan (25:37)
totally. That is also a testament to finding your niche people because there's people there. Definitely. Okay, Cameron, we've been building up to it and we'll get to like sort of the how do you organize a crew, especially like when you get up to 40 people. But I know everyone is at the edge of their seat wanting to know what are the numbers assigned to this? Like we've got the small, the medium and the large. Again, like the double tree, the Gaylord and the Vegas. And if I remember the comparisons there.

Cameron Magee (25:41)
Absolutely.

Molly Geoghegan (26:03)
Yeah, what can people expect to be spending or, yeah, get into the budget a little bit.

Cameron Magee (26:08)
Yeah, so I'll just

give three numbers and then I'm going to talk about kind of why I picked these numbers because it's all completely made up and massive swings could happen. the three numbers I picked was I 150,000 as a middle budget. I cut it in half and did 75,000 for a small and I doubled it and did 300,000 for a large. It's hard to say if that's a literal five person, 10 person, 15, but I want to explain why it's hard to say and

Molly Geoghegan (26:21)
Mm-hmm.

Cameron Magee (26:34)
What factors are leading to your budget final number adding up to what it is that maybe you don't necessarily realize? I think that's the most important thing if this is an educational, informative, helpful podcast. Like, how the heck did this number get to this big? And so what I want to talk about is with these budgets, and that's gear and people, the first thing to keep in mind is most, most,

Mikey Mioduski (26:53)
Mm-hmm.

Cameron Magee (26:58)
the time, which I'm kind of laughing at myself because every event is different and no one would want me to tell them their event is typical. Your event is your baby, it's very unique, but most events, ⁓ about half your budget is going to equipment and about half is going to labor. It's 50-50. We discovered this back then, years ago, we were sending all these quotes and we recognized this pattern. And how we recognized it was we had basically signed a, let's call it a medium show.

Molly Geoghegan (27:06)
You

Cameron Magee (27:25)
And so it was 150,000 in our classroom today, 75,000 in gear, 75,000 in people. And they got another sponsor. And so they wanted to make it way nicer. And so they wanted to plus up a bunch of stuff. guess what? Everything that we showed them to plus up was gear. Hey, we should do an LED wall over here. We should do more moving lights up here. We could do audio in this other room. We added all that gear. It did not increase the head count.

Mikey Mioduski (27:39)
Mmm.

Cameron Magee (27:48)
and learn the hard way. There's a pretty ⁓ healthy balance here of if there's going to be this, and it's just foolish. I was young and dumber than I am now, a little bit smarter now, but we were adding gear and not adding people. And so I would challenge you, it's a dangerous principle, but look at your quote and see, is this like 80 % equipment and 20 % people? Because you're going to feel underserved. That's like walking into a restaurant. You can tell nobody came to work today. It's a huge dining room, but there's not enough people in here, you know. Whereas the other way,

Molly Geoghegan (28:00)
That's yeah.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Cameron Magee (28:18)
If you get a quote and it's a lot of labor and not that much gear, I bet it's not labor headcount. I bet you don't have a 15 person crew running a gear that's ⁓ a third of that. I bet you just have really high labor rates. And those really high labor rates may be coming from the venue agreement that you've entered into. A lot of venue agreements are getting a bigger and bigger cut of the in-house AV. And so, you know, a

Molly Geoghegan (28:45)
Mm.

Cameron Magee (28:46)
reasonable and this will show my age and this will make this podcast age. I don't think this is wrong to do, but a reasonable day rate when I was getting started in the industry was about $400 a day. That's about $40 an hour for a good technician. Today that's doubled. It's $800 a day, maybe $1,000 a day, $80 to $100 an hour is a really good quality technician. Whether that's a staffer coming from a ViD3 team or a freelancer, wherever they came from. if you're looking at your quote,

then you're like, man, this labor is out of control. Look at the per person price. Maybe they didn't include that, but you could ask for it. And if you're paying $130 an hour, $150 an hour, that starts to be like agency rates. That's what you pay the graphic design. I don't want to diminish what we do, but we're the worker bees. We're the blue collar sounds terrible, but we are the technicians. We are not the consultants. And so just make sure you're not paying consultant hourly rates for your crew, because I can assure you.

Molly Geoghegan (29:17)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Cameron Magee (29:44)
No one on the crew is making that much. There is a middleman that is getting a lot off of that. And I'll pause there because I'll get out of soapbox.

Mikey Mioduski (29:51)
That strikes

a chord though, because again, it feels like a more standardized regulated industry in terms of pricing. There's not like, from what I've seen compared to a consultative firm where the rates could be all over the place, if you're talking to Deloitte versus Mom and Pop. So is it safe to say it's like there's some industry norm day rates to expect and things that are generally kind of.

regulated?

Cameron Magee (30:21)
We do an informal audit every year. We do it annually, we're doing it right now. And we actually audit every single piece of gear that we're charging for every price and every labor price too, to make sure that just because we used to charge this price for TVs, and if you've shopped for a TV lately compared to five years ago, the prices are half. It's fascinating what's happened to TVs. Meanwhile, I just got back from lunch and my lunch cost twice as much today as it did five years ago. So prices change. ⁓

Molly Geoghegan (30:29)
It's cool.

Mikey Mioduski (30:31)
Sure. Yeah.

Right. Yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (30:42)
I just got one. Yeah, it's true.

Mikey Mioduski (30:48)
Right.

Molly Geoghegan (30:48)
Right.

Right.

Cameron Magee (30:50)
And so we're doing an annual audit all the time. And so while it's not regulated, it's the opposite of banking, there are no regulatory anything in our industry. It's the Wild West. I have found that pretty much what we charge for a console and our pricing is pretty much what everybody's charging for that console, which in a sad way starts to make the industry, if you're kind of pessimistic and have a negative viewpoint, you start to say, it's just a commodity. It's just a commodity. You know, it doesn't matter where I get this console from.

Mikey Mioduski (31:15)
Right.

Molly Geoghegan (31:16)
Mm-hmm.

Cameron Magee (31:19)
Why would I get it from this person? I can get it from that person. And I would say, yes, the gear is a commodity. A console for me is the same, because we both bought it from Yamaha. It's one manufacturer. It's in a road case. Get the console. The people are the opposite of the commodity. And I think we all know that we love to work with people who we like. And so what's ironic there is the day rate may be $800 or $80 an hour for my audio technician or that audio technician, this audio technician. Make sure you work with people you like.

Molly Geoghegan (31:21)
Yeah, what's

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Cameron Magee (31:48)
Don't meet them at load-in when you find out, this guy actually works at the hotel and he's a valet guy, but today he's the audio tech. Like, make sure if you're paying that you love the crew, you know?

Molly Geoghegan (31:55)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah,

yeah. And if I'm remembering like your project lead or the producer, and then especially if a show caller gets added, which I'm kind of envisioning as like the wedding coordinator, honestly, like you're going to a lot of time with this person if you're the one playing. So it's worth getting someone that you're aligned with that you like, because that makes good projects.

Cameron Magee (32:09)
Well said.

That's right.

Yeah,

and I'm going to get myself in trouble with saying all these numbers and, you know, in six months, some of these will change and stuff. But I think because people have that fear, they won't talk about it. And so I don't mind coming on here because it's just a classroom example today. We're just using hypotheticals, basically, you know, a small, medium and large. And what is a day rate and helping inform this? I really think it can empower people and just take all of it with a grain of salt that it could change in six months or shift. But this is better than just

Mikey Mioduski (32:23)
Right.

Molly Geoghegan (32:24)
Ha

We can black it out later.

Mm-hmm.

Cameron Magee (32:47)
reaching around in the dark and not really understanding what we're reading on these quotes.

Molly Geoghegan (32:51)
Mm-hmm, yeah.

Mikey Mioduski (32:52)
It's why it helps

to talk to someone who's done it thousands of times. And you know, what, and I think you alluded in the first couple of conversations to the importance of planning and prep because as you know, like again, with these standardized sort of practices that I've seen is like, Hey, if the crew has to stay past a 10 hour shift, you're moving into time and a half, or if they pass, go past X number of hours in a day, they're to go into double. And then they have to start tomorrow on a double if they don't get this much rest in between or something. So.

Molly Geoghegan (32:55)
Yeah, experience sells.

Mikey Mioduski (33:22)
Can you talk to us about a couple of those other watch outs and the importance of investing upfront to plan ahead so you avoid those like lengthier bills maybe?

Molly Geoghegan (33:29)
expected.

Cameron Magee (33:31)
That's why it's so fun to do this episode with you two, because Mike, you just hit the nail on the head. You're knowledgeable, even though the crew stuff isn't your career, you are in parallel. You're right next to these crews. And so you've learned all this stuff by being right there. What you said is exactly right. Most of the industry, 10 hours is a regular time day. Some of the industry, it's eight hours.

Molly Geoghegan (33:53)
Mm-hmm.

Cameron Magee (33:56)
Some unions have written the rules a little differently where it depends on what time of day we started. That gets complicated. I want to teach kind of the middle, you know, north star today. And so 10 hour day. So using our $800 day rate, yeah, you're paying $80 an hour for 10 hours. And I actually think that's great. You know, most of the world bankers, you know, most people work eight hours. You know, we're willing to work for 10 hours at this regular hour rate. After 10, it goes to time and a half.

Molly Geoghegan (34:11)
Okay.

Cameron Magee (34:22)
And that's where the industry standard starts to kind of fall apart. We were just in Florida down there. It's almost, ⁓ I don't want to say like back country, you know, kind of goofy, good old boy, but there are pockets of the country that have decided in Vegas, here's how we're doing it. And in Orlando, here's how we're doing it. so my understanding is that parts of the country after 12 hours are going into double time and others are doing it after 14 or 16.

Mikey Mioduski (34:38)
yeah. Interesting.

Molly Geoghegan (34:39)
Interesting. That's

really

Mikey Mioduski (34:46)
⁓ wow.

Cameron Magee (34:50)
We have company policies of what we charge our client with prices, and we kind of round down some of that to try to kind of tamper that and keep it under control. ⁓ But then, you know, there's freelancers you hire, there's different situations where you have to use this union, or you have to hire this person in this, you know, seat because of the venue relationship. ⁓ So absolutely. What I'm seeing more and more of, hotels are getting smarter using data.

in realizing they want to minimize how many days we're in their hotel. They are making a hotel room block on those 1,500 attendees for three nights. They don't like us tying up the ballroom for seven days beforehand. so hotels are shaving off the load-in days ⁓ for their sake so they can get a different group in there the week before and a different group the week after. And I think it's just important for event planners when they're signing these three to five years out.

Molly Geoghegan (35:29)
Right.

Mikey Mioduski (35:33)
Mm-hmm.

Ugh. Right.

Cameron Magee (35:48)
that they realize that hotels are starting to do that, which I understand why. It's not a villain. Like that's what they need to do for their business. But that's probably gonna make it where your three days instead of four days before those three days are gonna be 12 hour days instead of 10 hour days to get the same thing done.

Mikey Mioduski (36:00)
Right. Okay.

Molly Geoghegan (36:02)
Yeah, makes sense.

Mikey Mioduski (36:03)
That's super important to keep in mind.

Molly Geoghegan (36:05)
Yeah.

Cameron Magee (36:06)
Yeah,

and it's important that you don't have executives saying, I'll fly in that day and I want to swing by about 4 p.m. to run, just to click through my slides. And that turns into a three hour live editing session on stage. Yeah. And the crews in overtime. And then if it was already going to be a 5 a.m. or 6 a.m. call for the opening general session, maybe there's a penalty for tomorrow too. all of those rules, sadly, the unions and things have been made because people haven't been cared for.

Molly Geoghegan (36:15)
Yeah. Red flag. ⁓

Mikey Mioduski (36:18)
Yeah. Right.

Molly Geoghegan (36:25)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Cameron Magee (36:33)
It's just like most policies and companies, it gets made because somebody broke the rules. So if you'll just care for the crew with reasonable hours and reasonable meals, you're not going to run into those things.

Molly Geoghegan (36:43)
Yeah, care for the crew, exactly. And they'll care for you. It's part of it. Two-way street. Cameron, I'm very interested with, especially when we're getting to these bigger teams, ⁓ and just in general, what's the process look like for briefing documents and organization, getting all those people on the same page with how you're going to execute, especially as venues change from place to place and new people are brought on. What's that organizational process look

Cameron Magee (36:46)
That's right.

Yeah, I'll just keep talking in threes. I'm not trying to make a joke about our company being called a VOD3. I just am on a three kick today, I guess. ⁓ There you go. the first, it's a six month project, I mean, majority of that time, most information is kind of staying in the notes and in between the ears of your one or two project leads, your production manager, your technical director, your executive producer. About 30 to 60 days out is when we're starting to share that information. And then,

Molly Geoghegan (37:15)
No, we love them. Three extracts? Yeah.

Cameron Magee (37:39)
This sounds crazy. Don't freak out but most event crews are really not really looking at your show until about ten days out And that's not crazy. That's just they're on another show and so they're not really looking at it They're like, okay looks like I'm gonna be on the same console again in a different ballroom and a different zip code See you there. You know, it's not there's not as much to it Yeah

Molly Geoghegan (37:45)
Yeah.

Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, they don't need add six months out like the

manager does the planner does. But like, yeah, that makes sense to me. It's.

Cameron Magee (38:05)
What we have

found is we've got to be really clear in our communication at that last minute. It's almost like a football team, like an all-star team that hasn't been together all season. And they're just now getting thrown together for this special all-star game. They get a week at training camp and what are the plays? And so we have to really have a show binder, which we do digitally now, but here's everything. Here's the floor plans. Here's the production schedule. Here's meals. Meal, I don't know if you guys know this, last 10 years, food allergies are way different than they were when I was kid growing up.

Molly Geoghegan (38:15)
Mm-hmm.

Cameron Magee (38:34)
That has become a big deal and we need everybody's dietary things. Are we respecting their privacy with that? All these things, their travel, hotel, their flights, all that information, getting that together. I was joking when I was jotting down some notes because I figured you would ask this. We can't seem to kill email. We actually hate email, but clients, the whole world still operates in email, no matter how much we all love Slack and different tools. Forever email will exist and so...

Molly Geoghegan (38:38)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, forever.

Cameron Magee (39:01)
We typically will email that out to the crew just so that everybody's on the same page. But internally, we use Basecamp. mean, there's monday.com. There's different apps that are more ⁓ feature-heavy than Basecamp. We've just fallen in love with it and stuck with them now for 12 years. So we use Basecamp to organize that. So shout out 37Signals. I love their philosophy on work. ⁓ So we use Basecamp to stay organized internally. ⁓ Most of our...

Molly Geoghegan (39:16)
shout out.

Cameron Magee (39:27)
templates and things, which we put all that out on LinkedIn. I'm not trying to get followers, but all these like templates that I'm talking about are all free on our website and LinkedIn. do promotions and send those out and things, but most of our stuff is made in Google Suite. Not because it's more powerful, Excel is better, but we use Google Sheets for the collaboration. And so some important documents, ⁓ you know, we talked about email and Basecamp and Google Suite, but what I want to talk about is the documents that are going to organize you. If you're an event planner,

Molly Geoghegan (39:33)
I was going to ask.

Yeah.

Cameron Magee (39:57)
listening to this, what are the documents you need to be thinking about coming into it? What is your crew making for you? What are you making with them? And I was going to say, you four quick documents. So I'll break my rule of thirds here for a second. The first one is the show flow. And this is this is like a one pager. That's the whole flow of a session of one general session. Let's say general session, God forbid, is not longer than two hours. You know, it's in a two hour block. We get all those segments on one piece of paper.

Molly Geoghegan (40:12)
Yeah, I was wondering.

Cameron Magee (40:26)
This is an industry standard. see it in television shows, see it on news broadcasts. It's one piece of paper. What are all the rows and columns? And you can Google that. Show flow template. I'm sure that'll come up on somebody's website if not ours. Show flow is number one. Second is the script. And this is where I really see people kind of opening a blank word document with a blinking cursor and just starting to type. And that's a bad idea. There's a format to scripting where you need to have

Molly Geoghegan (40:38)
We'll link it.

Mikey Mioduski (40:49)
Hmm.

Cameron Magee (40:52)
the headers for the presenter, the different color coding for notes, if there's a video here, this has a cue or this is a prop. And so there's script templates out there as well that I would recommend. And then the third document is your week at a glance, which event planners used to do that from an attendees standpoint, but kind of flip that behind, know, almost go like if that's the front of the house, let's go in the backyard for a second and look behind the scenes of what's the production week at a glance, like when are we loading in? When are the rehearsal blocks?

Attendee schedule may say okay breakouts are all afternoon. Well guess what in the general session that means you're doing rehearsals for tomorrow's closing session So that production week at a glance is a killer document and then fourth I'm talking fast because I'm watching our time is the production schedule and this is a beast This is showing everything from 5 a.m. The venue needs to unlock the ballroom 6 a.m. The fire marshal needs to be standing by because we're going to turn on the haze the lighting fog stuff 7 a.m. The crew is in the room 8 a.m. Rehearsals have started

Mikey Mioduski (41:27)
Right.

Molly Geoghegan (41:27)
Right, right.

Cameron Magee (41:49)
9 a.m. that crew needs to take a quick bio break. It's again, talk about taking care of the crew. If you're not thinking about these guys have to go to the bathroom too. We got to take a quick bio break. Having those blocks in the production schedule is a beast and it gets to be too detail oriented. But a lot of times I see event planners looking at those four documents and if they don't think about it that way, they're doing it all in the script. They open a Word document and they start typing. And all four of those documents are basically on one run on sentence and it's just not good.

Molly Geoghegan (42:12)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's so helpful. And we will link a lot of this in the spice cabinet, which I think we can go ahead and enter. A little spicy final guy from the crew series. ⁓ is where the camera gets to leave any resources and recommendations. And yeah, I know I just asked you, yeah, shout out Basecamp, but yeah, any organizational tools you'd recommend for like the, yeah, if someone's listening as a member of the crew, as someone planning their event, what do you recommend for folks?

Mikey Mioduski (42:25)
Ooh!

Cameron Magee (42:47)
I was talking to a young person the other day on the weekend and they were asking me some questions kind of like this. They basically had their phone out and wanted to go to the app store and like, okay, tell me all the apps that you use. And I was like, I got good news and bad news. The good news is they're already on your phone. The bad news is this is not going be a very sexy conversation. So most of the tools that I use and that our crew uses, they're kind of humbling. We're running the whole company on Google Sheets. These are,

Molly Geoghegan (42:55)
That's hilarious.

Mikey Mioduski (43:00)
Mm-hmm

Molly Geoghegan (43:01)
I

Yeah, yeah, this is simply the new thing.

Yeah.

Cameron Magee (43:15)
I journal so much, I got up at five a.m. this morning, I had so many ideas, I couldn't sleep, and just started journaling in Apple Notes. You there's so many things that I'm just doing where I'm dreaming of this show and, what if in the lobby this was actually a social component and we could have people gather there? And I'm always journaling. So most of my tools are not really sexy recommendations, they're kind of dumb tools with just trained habits that I've learned. When I have this idea, I need to get to Apple Note.

not complicating it with, now I've got to open monday.com and get to that folder and all this stuff. So that's, I'm not the guy for like the whiz bang tools. I'm kind of old, or not old school, but just dumb, I guess.

Molly Geoghegan (43:45)
No, I relate to that.

No, I love it. think that's, yeah, fundamentals. And I think not over-complicating things is important. It's not as...

Mikey Mioduski (43:53)
It's the fundamentals, baby. Yeah, Yeah, yeah. ⁓ I love your book recommendation. I wanna hear it, Cameron.

Cameron Magee (43:55)
Fundamentals, yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (44:02)
Yes.

Cameron Magee (44:03)
Yeah, so I had three here. ⁓ You're asking for resources or things for people to go get. Again, this is fundamentals. Maybe I'm the old man. Number one book when you said what would, because you were asking what books would I recommend for an event planner? What would I recommend for somebody who's in this line of work? And ironically, I said, Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. But I want to say why, and that's because almost everything in this industry, as you alluded to earlier, is not regulated. It's actually quite negotiable.

But negotiation hinges on being relational. And people will negotiate with someone that they like. And I am a big believer, all of our client facing people have to read this. I wish all of our clients would read it. Because then our clients are the ones talking to the venue. And the venue can make or break your week with simple things. Can we get on the dock a little bit beforehand? Can we stay a little bit later? Is that way we can get out of here?

And so I'm pretty big on how to win friends and influence people. And then I thought that may be too lame. So my second book recommendation was, ⁓ the checklist manifesto. This is one of the dry, probably the second driest book I've ever written. The driest was called true alignment by Edgar Patkey. That one's deep, but this book is called the checklist manifesto and, ⁓ talk about a boring book. just talks about checklists for like six hours of reading. ⁓ but this has changed our business and

Molly Geoghegan (45:20)
I love this.

Cameron Magee (45:25)
And we do over 150 events a year and a lot of our event planner clients do like three to five. But it's amazing how quickly you get on site, you're tired and you forget every morning that I'm on site. I need to go check with the venue and make sure that the banquet event orders, the BEOs that we've looked at the allergies for today because a new person checked in. And so we have made so many daily, weekly, monthly checklists. We have a 30 point checklist ju