Today’s guest contribution is written by Caryl Lyons of ROAR events. She has been planning and producing corporate events for over 25 years, first working as an event manager for corporations and then running my own business. I’ve invited here to share advice for those of you wedding planners looking to expand into corporate events.

Do you want to know the biggest mistake an event planner can make? And it doesn’t matter if you are a corporate planner or a wedding planner. This mistake and lead to the ultimate event fail. You can lose clients, your business, vendors. Does this sounds dramatic? It should because it’s one that sneaks up on you and you don’t even realize until it happens.

It’s ASSUMING!

You assume someone is doing something because they said they were. Why shouldn’t you believe them – right?

Your hotel contact told you they made all the changes in the contract. You assume they did because they said they did so you don’t go through and double check. Oops – they missed one and now you’ve already sent it over to the client and they catch it.

You assume a venue doesn’t charge for tables and chairs because they have them at their facility – but they do and you didn’t budget for it.

You assume the venue has house sound and you can tap into it, but you later learn that they don’t and didn’t budget for external speakers.

The hotel is on the beach and you sell the client on a beachy welcome reception only to find out that it’s not allowed or it is allowed, but you can’t have any amplified music.

I could go on and on. Bottom line is always ask questions, no question is a stupid question and asking questions could save your client money and you from embarrassment. You don’t need to look like you know everything. I’m learning something new every day and that is because I’m trying not to assume.

I can’t tell you to never assume, because you will. Hopefully you will catch yourself doing it and especially when you hear yourself saying – “well, I assumed…”

Caryl Lyons began her events career in publishing, first in fashion at Condé Nast Publishing’s Mademoiselle Magazine and then in tech for Ziff-Davis’s PC/Computing Magazine. She loved tech so much, she decided to make the jump into corporate where she managed teams at PeopleSoft, Tesseract and Symantec Corporation. You can find her on instagram at @roarevents and @hotelwanderlust. AND – check out the ROAR mini-email course which shares all about the corporate events world. You can sign up by heading to: www.roarplaybook.com/jumpstart.