Running a booking agency can be stressful, right?

I can tell you how to make your life much *better*!

Booking others out doesn’t have to be messy each time.

Here’s how to get a head start on booking, hiring and managing special event services with smart digital and mobile technology.

With all those spreadsheets, tools, templates, mobile apps and desktop applications you use, does your head start to spin? How do you keep track of everything? The goal is to book smarter and not harder, but that’s easier said than done. We usually get distracted with little things and spend too much time doing paperwork.

TL;DR Summary

The best advice on “smart technology” for your entertainment agency is NOT a list of 20 apps to load onto your mobile phone to “help” manage your events. Customized event apps are the best solution to event management of your clients, team, talent, suppliers and vendors. And don’t miss the “5 Top Elements of Booking Smarter” below.

How do I know all these things?

With over 10,000 events under our belt over 2 decades, our team encountered all types of clients and challenging situations. I remember those frustrating afternoons doing paperwork during the first few years of building my event planning company.

Creating a couple contracts took up most of the afternoon. Other days, I spent a lot of time shuffling through papers on my desk trying to organize and find things. Always doing Copy and Paste. Nothing was ever easy or straightforward. We’ve been there so many times before and wanted an easier way!

“Booking smarter” will use more organization, efficiency and communication – and you’ll get more sanity!

What About All Those Free Tools Out There?

We’ve all read those blog posts about “20 Secret Tools for Productivity” and “15 Free Apps for Your Event Company”. Yes, we all need better tools and apps to help us along. But a tool that is “free” may not be worth all its trouble it takes to use it wisely. There’s always a too many hoops to jump through daily with all those tools.

More apps will unfortunately spread out your contacts, workflow, and event info. This will not help to streamline but may make your work harder! Could be just harder to find things! A business of greater size will need different applications to run their full operation, but a cluster-fest of free apps won’t cover all the bases.

What else is missing from all these free apps when running an event agency?

There are valuable pieces that are missing from using all the free tools. A Contact Relationship Manager CRM is what holds all the apps together, finding the contacts you need right away. Mobile versions are missing from many of these tools, so they are not optimized for mobile use. A workable customer base is missing as well.

Is this Event Technology for me?

Event management, event planning, talent coordination and vendor management are done by many, many types of businesses. Event planners, wedding planners, musicians, talent agents, booking agents, photo booth companies, bounce houses, caterers, DJs, face painters, balloon artists, magicians and other performers are those who do these tasks daily when servicing events. What is the best technology solution for you? We recommend finding the right app that is customized to what you need as a planner and booker.

Easy to Use, Making Your Work Day Easier

Event management should be a process that should become easy to do, once you have the right tools. Yes, there are always challenging issues when working. But having all bases covered will simply make things easier when challenges arise. The software should have an intuitive easy-to-use navigation.

You have been doing gigs and special events and would like to grow your business. You’ve seen old-school planners doing things in long form, and realized there’s got to be a better way. Stacks of invoices? Mind-numbing spreadsheets? Of course, there’s a better way! Booking apps will simplify your job flow and your booking process, and reduce your paperwork.

How do you become a fantastic event planner? Truly there is professional working wisdom that you are not going to find it in any book or online. But how?? By doing it over and over. By going through the challenging moments, By responding to client complaints and working through them. From years of experience, literally.

Imagine having your time freed up to concentrate on strategy and working your wisdom with clients, instead of being stuck on manual paperwork at your desk. Imagine having a booking app that changes any real-time event info immediately, updating everywhere your team and talent can see on every device. Accurate info that’s up-to-date is critical to your events. That’s the power of booking automation.

Increase Agreement, Reduce Disagreement When Booking Others For Your Events

Find an event management solution that is simple to use and also makes daily tasks much more easy. Whether you’ve got a brand new business, or have been doing event bookings for a while, your work life will be much easier when your event app does automated tasks. When you do automated bookings, the details come out the same each time. This will remove the chance for error, increasing the chance for agreement between you, your team, talent, and vendors.

When things get going, you’ll be doing a lot of simultaneous activities and bookings. Things will be happening all at once, and you’ll need the support of a booking system. Powerful coordination and fast tracking are your new best friends. These features can quickly do what one of your staff could do in one afternoon at their desk.

Book Smarter, Not Harder

GoDaddy’s recent global survey mentions how 200 million entrepreneurs now exist globally. Their survey states that 81% of these small business owners state that technology had made starting a business much easier. Barriers that used to exist years ago are now gone, and the road to business automation now has many less bumps!

https://www.godaddy.com/garage/godaddy/godaddy-global-entrepreneur-survey-2016-new-era-entrepreneur/

How do you choose between the whole world of apps, templates and spreadsheets, and software that can help grow your business? The top power tools should keep track of everything and optimizing your total work hours. You have so many choices that it’s numbing. My opinion is the less apps, the better! It’s important to get started correctly. It’s all about getting a tight system that works for you. A system where you know where everything is – and all the info you need is at your fingertips within a couple clicks.

Why not automate the busy-work tasks so you know that all these bases are covered by the software? In the long run, it’s best to automate the smaller tasks that pull from your valuable time. Then you can focus on your best skills towards your client, which is your knowledge and expertise on planning! Your skill set of event planning services and unique talent resources are your two primary resources when it comes down to show time.

Streamlined Booking and Sub-Contracting

The heart of event management and planning is subcontracting of services from vendors, talent, staff members and venues. A streamlined solution should come with:

• Delivering Job Assignments to Talent and Staff Members
• Making Billing, Invoicing and Contracting with 1-Click
• Tracking and Managing Payments and Wages
• Clear and fast group communication to all parties involved

You will effectively gain growth in your company by duplicating what you do. All of these things have a delicate balance to deliver the timely and correct services to the ever-vigilant and demanding client.

5 Top Elements of Booking Smarter:

There are significant benefits to starting the use of strong event technology early in your career.

Disorganization can result in missing a gig. Not hiring enough. No hiring soon enough or filling job assignments. Reducing Chaos of all those stacks of paper everywhere on your desk.

Organization is everything. When you’re organized, you can get things done easier. Disorganization frustrates everyone, but sometimes it can’t be helped by themselves. Booking smarter and managing smarter means planning for your future gigs.

1. Relationally Connected

Booking apps give you the strength to stay relationally connected with your customers and team. Great way to stay in connection with your client base. You will need to get a customer base some day if you want to maintain your business long-term. It will be in your best interests to put things into place that you want to keep handy. You simply can’t have your cell phone hold all your gig information. . . Businesses will survive because of great relationships with all your connections.

2. Relational Database

The critical tech tool for event management is a relational database behind all your connections. Once this is in place, your workflow will be tight as possible. This is something that’s not provided by Evernote, Slack, or Google Docs. Your daily flow of work that incorporate the CRM feature is the most optimal way for running events. Even the giants like Salesforce.com will not be optimized for your workflow of doing business.

3. Always At Your Finger Tips, In the Cloud

No operating system updates or hard drive crashes to worry about. Smart technology uses the cloud as a secure base of operations. Many web applications world-wide use Amazon Web Services AWS for storage, and we know that Amazon is one of the most secure systems out there.

Cloud-based applications will always have benefits over desktop software.

In spring 2017, a major global hacking threat was posed to many Windows-based machines around the world. These ominous hacks are based in email attachments that spread viruses.

Don’t forget to ask your applications if they use hard drives for storing all data. There are far better benefits trusting in web applications in the cloud than over local storage on hard drives.

4. Automate, Automate, Automate

Automation takes the work out of your hands. Less entry and less copy and pasting. Automate the menial tasks to make your team more productive. Look for event manager strengths that work for you, and ensure that automation by technology like #EventTech happens for you. Never-ending headaches always come from finding things on spreadsheets. Hunting through emails and folders is tiresome. Make your business life better by automating all the re-typing you do. There’s a better way! Strive to maintain a booking system that pushes your business to grow.

Automation will make repeat bookings much easier on you and your clients.

Business that repeats is the best type of business to have.

5. Faster and Cleaner Communication:

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate!

Communication is at the top of importance for pulling off great gigs and special events. The most efficient and streamlined manner of communicating to your clients, talent, staff team member, vendors and venues is in order.

Optimized communication is never having to spend time hunting down contacts. They now have a context, and can be found easily.

GigBase Pro app will do all the busy office paperwork for you . . . If you just sit back, don’t you hear the music now?

Read another blog here: 14 Reasons Why You Need An Event Contract

About the author Patrick Duffek and Event LightNing: GigBase Pro was born during the busy celebrations of the Dot-Com-Boom era in Silicon Valley, CA. Our own events have numbered over 10,000 containing multiple artists and talent bookings. GigBase is the booking solution that will free up your time, make you more money, and give you a better tracking system to navigate more successful events. This Sales CRM makes these event contracts with 1-Click! Instant contracts and invoices will save your day!