Kimberly Hobscheid shares what went wrong at her London live event: microphone failures during translated hot seat sessions forced her to improvise with a single lapel mic and a translator standing next to participants. She stresses the need for backup systems, backup people, and backup schedules to keep a three-day event from falling apart.
Hey folks, it's Kimberly Hobscheid with Entrepreneurs Rocket Fuel. I am just finished with an event this evening that went very, very well. But for several reasons, we actually ended up enacting one of the things that I make sure that entrepreneurs know whenever they put on events. One of the things that you need to know when you put on events is that things definitely will go wrong. All right? So there will be things during your event that are unexpected that happen. Even though you have planned and checked and made sure of things definitely things will fall apart. And so you need to have backups for all of your systems in place for all of the things that you have organized. All of your technical stuff needs backups, your people need backups, your schedules need backups. All of the things that you have planned need to have backups just in case something doesn't work. And in this case, we actually had backups and we had backups for, for our backups, we had situation, which I highly recommend. And I was taught that by my mentor and I think it's a fantastic piece of advice because if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. And usually at the worst possible time. That's Murphy's Law. And in this case, we actually are here at an event in London and we did have challenges with tech, which we had backups for, no problem at all. But then we had additional issues that snow snuck in on top of us. But luckily we had backups for that as well. We're dealing with a bunch of really cool stuff here in London. We're actually dealing with some, some cross cultural phenomenon here where we're actually doing translation of our speakers. We decided that normally we would have events during our, our regular events in the US and Canada and wherever we have spoken before that we have.
Hot seats where we do sort of an on the spot diagnosis of somebody's business and what's going wrong with it. And so we decided to do that here and it was part of the plan. Everybody was really excited about it. And then we realized that because we are translating this into Arabic, that we had a challenge because the Arabic translator couldn't handle two different voices at the same time. We actually did have two translators, but we didn't have two microphones. And when we do. And when we had two microphones, if we had actually we had five microphones, but four of them did not work. So even though those were backups, they did not work. So we had one microphone that was working and that was a lapel mic that was attached to our main speaker. But we had to be able to translate the people in the audience that were actually speaking as well. So what we ended up doing as a backup to the backup to the backup to the backup is we actually put one of our translators who was. It was only for about a half hour, 45 minutes. So we put one of our translators right next to in front of one of the people in the hot seat that was getting diagnosed. And then we put our other translator on the lapel mic of the speaker. So that worked really well until we had audience participation and the audience started chiming in and out, adding their questions as well. And so we had to slow things down and repeat questions and use backups for that as well. Anyway, I just wanted to give you sort of a day in the life of putting on an event and what things can go wrong will go wrong. Sometimes you need to plan ahead for contingencies and sort of think things through, but then also just have backups in place and alternative plans and learn to be flexible while you're giving events because as much as you plan, things will change and adjust based on just who's in the room and the conditions at the time. And that's my story for tonight. So I hope that was helpful for you this evening. Definitely have backups and backups to your backups and then backups for those. This is Kimberly Hobscheid with Entrepreneurs Rocket Fuel. If you don't already have a mentor or Coach, go to entrepreneursrocketfuel.com apply, fill out an application. You and I will get on the phone and we'll talk about where your business is and where you want it to be and talk about which of my mentorships programs might be right for you if there are one. Be happy to work with you, because my business is trying to get you to get your genius out there, whatever that is. I'm Kimberly Hobscheid with Entrepreneurs Rocket Fuel, and I look forward to working with you. Cheers.
