Most event professionals can tell you exactly what will happen on stage at any given time. Yet far fewer can tell you exactly what would happen if someone collapsed in the ballroom.
Stay tuned as Eric tackles emergency preparedness and security.
Emergency Preparedness
A 70-page emergency manual that nobody has opened in two years is documentation, not a system. Emergency preparedness starts with the people responsible for responding, not with a binder, processes, or SOPs. Everyone needs to know their role and be ready to act when an emergency happens.
Know Who Does What
You need to know who makes the decision, who communicates, who executes, and who takes over if someone is unavailable. If you can answer those four questions, you have a true emergency preparedness plan you can act on immediately if something happens.
Medical Emergencies
For a medical emergency, decide who calls the emergency services, who contacts the venue, where the AED is, who manages the surrounding attendees, who goes with the individual, and who stays on site. It’s essential to discuss that before an emergency actually happens.
Safety and Security
You need to know who is defined as a suspicious individual, what constitutes a threat, who makes the decision, who gets called, and what happens if there is civil unrest or you need to evacuate. Your event team is not law enforcement, so you also need to establish when control transfers to venue security, police, the fire department, or other authorities.
Lead by Example
If something unforeseen happens, inform the people in charge, lead by example, and support your client. Everyone needs to communicate and be aligned on the action to be taken, with one person making the final decision.
Planning
You need a plan for hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, wildfires, and other events that could disrupt a meeting. Decide who makes the decisions, what the plan B is, what the hotel will do, what insurance is available, and what everyone involved will do.
Technology and Cyber
You need to know what happens if your registration disappears, the internet goes down, attendee data is compromised, your payment system stops working, the app fails, or somebody hacks the system. You also need to consider whether your meeting can continue manually if your technology fails.
Business Continuity
Owner-dependency problems must also be addressed. Think about what happens if you, as the business owner, are unavailable. Who has access to the bank? Who can authorize payment? Who has the passwords? Who handles communication? Who is running the company?
Communication
During an emergency, people become desperate for information, and if they don’t have it, they create it. Define who communicates internally, who speaks with the client and attendees, who deals with the media and law enforcement, who contacts families, and who is not authorized to communicate publicly.
Organizational Dependencies
Ask your team to imagine what would happen if you disappeared for the next seven days. If you couldn’t call, text, or email, and they couldn’t ask you a single question, what would they be unable to do? Their answers will help you identify the organizational dependencies that need to be addressed.
A Simple Plan
For each major risk, define the trigger, who leads the response, the first three things to do, who needs to be involved, who needs to be informed, who communicates, and who takes over if the designated person is unavailable.
Keep the Plan Current
Your plan needs to be a living document that reflects your experience, your tests, what you are learning in the industry, and new issues that can happen. Circumstances, the environment, and people change, so you need to review the plan regularly and train your team.
Test the Plan
After writing a plan, you need to test it. Create a scenario, present it to your team, and watch what happens. The more realistic and unexpected the example, the better you can see who takes control and who is the right person on your team to respond.
Build a Business That Can Handle Almost Anything
The objective is not to have a plan for everything, but to build a business that can handle almost anything and a team that is ready to act in any situation.
Eric Rozenberg’s Bio.
Rozenberg, CMM, CMP, is an entrepreneur, author, podcast host, and business mentor who has built, scaled, and successfully exited multiple companies in the Meetings & Events industry. As the founder and CEO of Event Business Formula, Eric helps event entrepreneurs build real companies—not just successful event businesses. Through practical frameworks and decades of real-world experience, he teaches business owners how to create predictable revenue, build stronger teams, reduce owner dependency, and develop businesses that are scalable, transferable, and ultimately sellable. Eric is also the founder of Eric AI, the Meetings & Events industry’s first AI-powered business mentor, available 24/7 in 77 languages. He is the author of Meeting at C-Level and Before It’s Too Late, and the host of The Business of Meetings podcast, where he interviews entrepreneurs and industry leaders from around the world.
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