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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“A 70-page emergency manual that nobody has opened in three years is not a system. It’s documentation.”
Eric Rozenberg
Full transcript of episode 337 of The Business of Meetings podcast, a solo episode with Eric Rozenberg. Lightly edited for readability.
Hello and welcome to a new episode of the Business of Meeting Podcast.
Most event professionals can tell you exactly what’s happening at 8:00 a.m. when the CEO walks on stage. Far fewer can tell you exactly what happens at 8:02 a.m. when someone collapses in the ballroom. And that’s what I want to talk about today: emergency preparedness.
And yes, we’re talking about AI. And yes, we’re talking about developing businesses. And yes, we’re talking about being responsible, having your own business. But I don’t think we’re speaking enough about emergency preparedness and security. And although nothing really major has happened recently in our different meetings, I think that is something that we cannot avoid talking about. So let’s go into it, and let’s talk about what we do in our industry, because we’re always obsessed with preparation.
We have timelines. We have product schedule. We have speaker rehearsals. We have the backup PowerPoints, the transportation manifest, the BEOs, and everything. We know when the coffee is going to arrive, when the doors are going to open. And sometimes we know exactly how many seconds a walk-on song should play. But what happens when something totally unexpected is happening, something that is not in the run of show? A guest that has a heart attack. A hurricane that is changing direction. An active security threat. The power disappearing — yes, it happened to me. Your technology gets hacked. A bus carrying 50 attendees has an accident. Something happens to you, the owner of the business. And that’s when we discover the difference between being organized and actually being prepared.
So let’s talk about, first of all, the illusion of “it won’t happen to us.” Do you remember? Well, you might not. I do remember it. And this is a story.
On a Friday at lunch — I had my corporate event agency in Brussels — I was having lunch with a bunch of friends, and one is a private pilot. And he said, “No, no, I’m not having wine at lunch.” And yes, by the way, it’s totally fine to have one or two glasses of wine for lunch in Brussels. And then his phone rang. He picked up the phone, hung up the phone, and said, “Eric, give me a glass of wine.” And I said, “Mark, you just told me that you were going to fly this afternoon, so you couldn’t drink.” He said, “Yeah, well, they’re closing the airport.” And I looked outside — blue sky, not one cloud. I said, “Are you kidding me?” He said, “No, there is this volcano in Iceland that erupted a few days ago, and now the cloud of ash is moving over Europe and is closing one airport after the other.”
Quite frankly, before that, if you would have been sitting in a security workshop or emergency preparedness workshop, and the person presenting would ask you to be creative and think about something, and you would have mentioned a volcano erupting in Iceland and closing all the airports in Europe one after the other, probably the person managing the workshop would have looked at you and said, “Yeah, right. I mean, it’s good to be creative, but still we need to be a little bit realistic.” Guess what — that happened. And if it was only that… do I have to remind all of us about COVID? Of course not. Do I have to remind about the hurricanes that have forced events to evacuate or relocate? The wildfires disrupting destinations and transportation. The medical emergencies during conferences. The cyberattacks and ransomware. The security threats. The power failures. The transportation accidents. The speakers, the executives, or the employees suddenly becoming unavailable. This is not something that is in the air or in the movies. This is something that can be happening.
So the first thing to do is not to start with the binder and the processes and the SOPs. It’s to start with the people. If you ask your friends that are preparing for an event about emergency preparedness, they’re probably going to tell you, “Yeah, we have a crisis plan.” “Wonderful. Where is it?” “SharePoint.” “Great. Try to access it. Who has read it?” And then you have a big silence. Because a 70-page emergency manual that nobody has opened in three years is not a system. It’s documentation. It’s checking the box. It says “I prepared that,” but it’s not efficient. It’s not ready to be activated.
And so we need to be able to answer four questions. One: who makes the decision? Two: who communicates? Three: who executes? And four: who takes over if that person is not available?
And so if you can answer those four questions about the decision making, the communications, the execution, and who’s taking over if somebody’s unavailable, now you have a true emergency preparedness plan. And now you can really activate that plan. That means that if something happened, everybody knows what their role should be.
So we’re looking, in general, at five types of emergencies that any event business should be prepared for.
The first one is medical. Someone collapses during an event. What’s happening?
I had a sales meeting at the Forte Village in Sardinia years ago. It was about 2:30 in the middle of the night. We were preparing the closing video with the AV team, and I said, “Oh, I would like to light a cigar now. They have those big matches downstairs. I’m going to go get some matches. I’ll be back in five minutes.” Going down, the door of the elevator opens, and I see people that are surrounding one person whose head is bleeding, and I say, “What the hell is going on here?” I approached, the person really was bleeding. The person basically fell and hit the corner of a table. And so I knew — and by the way, it was not somebody who was from our group, but obviously I didn’t know, and that didn’t matter at that moment — but I saw, in the corner of my eye, one of the country managers of my client, and I knew that she had a nurse practitioner background. And so I asked her immediately to come, and she looked a little bit and said, “What’s going on?” And she said, “Well, you might have broken something, a bone in the head. If we press too hard, we’re going to basically get into the brain and he’s going to die. And if we wait too much, if it’s the artery, the blood there is also going to… he’s also going to die.” So I asked her, “Is he transportable?” And she said yes. I said, “Okay.” And so I went to the reception and said, “What have you done?” Because we had prepared the procedure. He said, “Oh, I’ve called the doctor.” I said, “No, you don’t call the doctor. Call an ambulance right now.” He said, “Well, the procedure is to call the doctor.” I said, “I don’t care about the procedure. Call the freaking ambulance right now.” Unfortunately, that person was not ready to do anything else. He called the doctor. So I called our local partner, the DMC, that had just left, and I told them, “Call the ambulance, tell them to come now, we are going to have this emergency, and bring that person.”
Long story short, as we were saying that and looking at that person, a van pulled up, and it was somebody else who had twisted their foot that was going to be brought by that van to the hospital. And so I said, “I’m sorry, this is a question of life or death. Put the person who was bleeding in the van.” Somebody said, “He cannot be transported.” I said, “Listen, I have a nurse practitioner, she said he can. We’ve taken the decision. Let’s go.” And we started driving to the hospital. So I called back the DMC. I said, “Please call back the hospital, tell them that the ambulance is going to cross paths with a van, and we’re going to flash the lights as soon as we see the ambulance.”
Long story short, the ambulance saw us. We stopped the van. The person was transferred, was saved. And guess what? The next evening, that person was with a big Band-Aid around the head again, drinking beers at the bar. I am not making this up. This is crazy.
And so I went back to the room afterwards, which was like 45 minutes later, and they look at me and say, “Oh, you said you were going to go for five minutes.” I said, “Yeah, well, we saved a life in the meantime.”
This is, to me, the perfect example, obviously, of a medical emergency, but also of people just following the process. They’re just following it so that nobody can blame them afterwards. Anyway, this type of scenario can happen, and this is the type of scenario that needs to be discussed. Who’s calling the emergency services? Who’s contacting the venue? Where is the AED? Who manages the surrounding attendees? Who’s going with the individual? Who’s staying on site? All those elements need to be discussed.
So, first category of emergency preparedness, the medical emergency. The second one is safety and security.
We haven’t talked a lot, we haven’t heard a lot about safety and security the last months, but unfortunately, to me at least, I’m convinced it’s only a question of time before another [unclear] or Islamist terrorist starts again shooting somewhere. And so we need to be aware of the surrounding, but we need to be aware of the safety and security procedure. We need to know when — and what we define a suspicious individual. What’s a threat? Is there anything nearby in case of an anonymous call for a bomb threat? Who’s taking the decision? Who’s being called? If there is civil unrest, if we need to evacuate — and so that’s where actually the ego becomes extremely dangerous. And it’s much, much, much better to have process defined, to know who’s doing what.
Your event team is not law enforcement. And so the system needs to establish when control is transferred to the venue, the security, the police, the fire department, other authorities. And also, when you are in a situation with something happening, you, as the business owner, if you’re on site, need to take the lead and lead by example.
I remember being with a client — we had chartered a plane, and we had an incentive trip to Marrakesh. Everything was great. We spent the day by the souk, in the Jemaa el-Fnaa square. It was beautiful. And the next day, we were ready to leave. Everybody’s in the plane, we’re going to close the door, and then I got a call from my business partner and said, “There’s been an explosion in a restaurant in the Jemaa el-Fnaa square, and they might close the airport.” And guess what? He immediately told me that there was suspicion of terrorism.
So what I did: I went to the cockpit, I informed the pilot. He said, “I have no information.” I said, “Trust me, I trust my business partner, he has the good sources. Please be ready to leave as soon as we can, because obviously we don’t want to be stuck here. But in the meantime, we’re going to be airborne for three and a half, four hours, so I don’t want all the families in Belgium trying to — starting to panic, not knowing what’s happening.” And so I called my client with a big smile and asked him to come, like if we were preparing for another surprise.
And so we went just outside the plane, on the stairs. I informed my client. They were a little bit shocked and said, “Do you want me to talk to people?” I said, “Sure.” So I took the PA and I said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re ready to leave and fly back to Belgium, and we just been informed there has been a little explosion in a restaurant on the Jemaa el-Fnaa square, where we were yesterday. So, you know, in this day and age, people might be wondering — that’s probably nothing, but if you want, just before we leave, switch on your phone and call back your family, say that everything is fine and we’re about to leave” — which they did.
Afterwards, I went back to the cockpit. The pilot thanked me. He had received the confirmation that it was a terrorist explosion, and we were ready to leave. So we left. Everybody obviously had to switch off their phones afterwards. And when we landed in Brussels, in Zaventem, all the phones open up, and everything was starting to cling with all the information.
Bottom line, you might be faced with a situation that you have never had before, that you’ve never trained necessarily for. And the goal is always to inform the people in charge, to lead by example, and to be ready to support your client. But once again, it is important that all the parties involved are communicating with each other and are aligned on the action to be taken, and there can only be one person making the final decision.
So we talked about the medical emergency, we’ve talked about safety and security. Now let’s talk about weather and natural events.
I remember being stuck at the Ritz-Carlton in South Beach — there was Hurricane Jeanne — and we had a wonderful program, but two days before, I was debating with my client what to do, because we were not used to hurricanes. The sun was shining, it was beautiful. I was watching this hurricane getting closer and closer and closer, and I told him, “We need to evacuate on the Saturday afternoon. We have the big party on Friday night, and then we need to get people out on Saturday morning or Saturday afternoon.” On Friday afternoon, it was announced that for the next day we would have a mandatory evacuation. So we went straight from nothing to mandatory evacuation. And there were some people that could not fly out, that all the planes were full. And so I negotiated with the GM at that time — I was a very experienced GM — and I said, “I suppose that you are staying with some people in the hotel.” He said, “Yes, I have clients here from Europe, they’ve never been through a hurricane. I definitely don’t want to send them to a public shelter. Are you okay that they stay in the hotel if we sign a waiver, a disclaimer?” I said, “Yeah, so yes, we’re going to do that.”
So that’s exactly what we did. I was stuck in my room during Hurricane Jeanne. So imagine being in the Ritz-Carlton, in a room, in Hurricane Jeanne, and your friends and family that are reaching out from Europe: “Are you okay?” So the first time, I said yes. And the second email, “Are you okay?” I said, “Sure.” After the fifth email, I said, “Okay, no, everything’s fine, but I see cows flying.”
Anyway, could have a worse condition to go to the hurricane. But now, in all seriousness, especially living in South Florida, I can tell you that every year we prepare for the hurricane, what needs to be done. And it’s the same goes for your meetings, wherever you go. What’s going to happen, who’s going to make the decision, what are the insurance you can take, what is the plan B, what is the hotel going to do — all the people that are involved in this situation, everything should be prepared and agreed upon. And I’m not only talking about hurricanes, it could be tornadoes, flooding, wildfires — anything can happen. So basically, weather and natural events is also something to consider.
The fourth one is technology and cyber. What’s happening if your registration disappears? What’s happening if the internet goes down? If the attendee data is compromised? If your payment system stops working? Or if the app is failing? What is happening if somebody is hacking the system? Can your event continue manually? And sometimes the most sophisticated companies become the most fragile, because they have eliminated every and any analog backup. So that is also something that I would definitely consider: okay, if something is happening in terms of the technology and the cyberattack, can our meeting continue?
And then the fifth one — and really, this is something very important, as a business owner, and especially as a small business owner — is business continuity.
What is happening if something is happening to you? And I know we don’t like to talk about it, it’s not PC, it’s — you know, don’t jinx it. But something can happen, and what’s going to happen to you? And I would have to tell you that when I started my first business almost 30 years ago now — my first business was a corporate event agency, I was a small business [laughter] — at the beginning I was on my own. And so my first client, I put myself in their shoes, and one of the main concerns that I would have had if I hired a small business is, “What’s going to happen if the person died?” And they say, “Oh, Eric, don’t, don’t say that.” I say, “No, no, no, I really — obviously I want your business, but I want you to understand what is in place. So the banker is aware, the DMC is aware, the hotel is aware. So worst case scenario, this is the plan, this is the operation sheet, this is the program, these are the people, and your program will go to the end.” And so that even became a selling point that I was offering to my prospects and my clients, because I was only dealing with, you know, large firms, Fortune 100 companies.
But so, need to think in terms of business continuity. What if you aren’t available for, I don’t know, 72 hours? Who has access to the bank? Who can authorize payment? The password, the communication, who’s running the company? Those are all owner-dependency problems that need to be addressed beforehand, so that if that’s happening, you have the solution and the client is reassured.
Now, another element which is extremely important when something is happening is communication, because during an emergency, people are desperate for information, and if they don’t have the information, they create the information — they have a lot of rumors, and it’s spreading like wildfire. And so your communication protocol needs to be very well defined, obviously, before the emergency: who is going to communicate internally, who’s going to speak with the client, with the attendees, who’s going to deal with maybe the media, with law enforcement, who’s going to contact families if necessary, and who is absolutely, absolutely not authorized to communicate publicly. And remember that fast communication is not necessarily good communication. So you need to be accurate, and you need to have a line of command, to know exactly who is allowed to speak, so that if anyone is asking for information, they will be directed to that person.
So if you really want to talk about the test that you can be doing, this is the best one I can think of. Gather your team and the people you’re working with, and then ask them the following: “Imagine if I disappear for the next seven days. You cannot call me, you cannot text me, you cannot email me, or you cannot ask me a single question. What’s breaking?” And then wait and listen. Every answer they’re going to give you will identify an organizational dependency: the bank authorization, the sales proposal, the client escalation, the payroll, the pricing, the supplier approval, the contract [unclear] decision. All those elements are things that need to be thought about and clearly explained.
But don’t just write the plan, you need to test it. Just like airlines don’t simply write emergency procedures, or just like hospitals are not having only the procedure, they have drill emergencies. The military runs simulations. So you need to do that. You need to create the scenario, and the next team meeting you can say, “Well, it’s 10:15 a.m., we’re running a 700-person conference, someone collapsed outside the general session. Go. What do we do?” And don’t help them. Watch what’s happening. Look who’s taking control. And the more realistic the example you’re giving, and the more unexpected the example you’re giving, the better you will see who is reacting, and who might actually be the right person in your team to do that.
So again, you don’t need to start with a 100-page manual. You just start with one page. And for each major risk, you need to define: what’s the trigger, what happened, who’s the leader, who owns the response, what are the immediate actions — in other words, what are the first three things to do? What about the escalation? Who’s getting involved, who’s informed first — the venue, the emergency services, the authorities? Who’s communicating, and who’s responsible for that? And in terms of backup, who takes over if the designated person is unavailable?
So I can go on and on and on. Obviously, this is a topic that is very dear to my heart, and we, in this industry, have been faced by so many different situations that we can write books and books and books about it. But for me, preparedness is really a leadership issue — not only in the way you’re preparing yourself, but how you react, are you ready to react. And I don’t want to scare you into thinking that this is going to be the end of the world. But imagining all the things that can go wrong is actually part of a preparation, so that things are going well.
And so if you ask yourself, if something goes wrong tomorrow, “Have I built an organization capable of handling it?” and your answer is yes, then you’re prepared. But then again, circumstances change, environments change, people change. So you need to repeat, you need to train, you need to be able to have a plan which is a living document, which is based on your experience, your tests, but also what you’re learning in the industry and the new issues that can happen.
So the objective is not to have a plan for everything, but the objective is to build a business that can handle almost anything. In other words, to have a team that is ready to act if anything is happening.
And so my challenge to you is: the next team meeting you have, gather your team and ask them, if you become completely unavailable tomorrow, and something went seriously wrong, do you know exactly what to do? If the answer is not an immediate yes, you know that you need to work on your emergency preparedness.
Thank you for listening, and I look forward to seeing you at the next industry event.
Thank you for tuning in to the Business of Meeting Podcast. I hope you found today’s episode valuable. If you enjoyed the show, the most important thing you can do is leave a review and share it with your colleagues. It really helps spread the word. I truly appreciate your support. And if you’re ready to take your business to the next level, don’t forget to visit eventbusinessformula.com to learn more about how we are helping event business owners like you. Thanks again for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
