How to Choose the Right Event Management Company for Your Event

The factor that matters most is harder to put on a slide than “10 years’ experience” or “500 events delivered”: does this company actually care whether your event goes well, or are they optimising for their own margin and their own ease?

“Find a company that genuinely cares about your event going well” says Kirsty Davidson from our team. “Not for their own personal gain, but because they care about you.” That’s not a soft, feel-good metric, it shows up in concrete ways: how quickly they reply, whether they push back on your brief with reasons or just push back, and whether the quote you signed is the number you actually pay.

That last point is where clients most often get caught out. Ask directly whether there are hidden costs, or fees added after the event, before you sign, and get the answer in writing rather than as a verbal reassurance. A surprising number of event management contracts leave room for this, and it’s rarely explained upfront unless you ask.

The other factor clients consistently underweight is how much of your event a company owns and delivers directly, versus how much it coordinates from the outside. Ask whether they have their own AV production and entertainment capability or whether those are being subcontracted to whoever is available on the date.

At Clownfish, both are in-house. The team setting up your sound and staging is our team; the entertainment we propose comes from our own roster. For everything that is genuinely external venues, catering, staging fabrication, security, transport every company in this industry works with a specialist network, and the honest ones will tell you exactly who is in theirs and how long they have worked with them. As Rebecca Wheatley from our team puts it: “What support do they have their little black book?” The quality of that network, and how openly a company talks about it, tells you a lot about how the day will actually run.

That network typically spans catering, staging and set build, security, transport, and specialist entertainment, each requiring its own vetting, insurance checks, and relationship management that a single in-house team could never credibly replicate. When a company is vague about who actually delivers each part of your event, that’s usually because they haven’t asked themselves the question either.

It’s also why we back every booking with our own Satisfaction Guaranteed Events promise, so “genuinely caring” is a commitment you can hold us to, not just a line in a pitch.

Most event management companies charge one of three ways: a flat management fee, a percentage of your total event budget, or a day rate for the planning and delivery team. None of these is inherently better than the others, but each creates a different incentive worth understanding before you sign anything.

A percentage-of-budget model can quietly reward a company for spending more of your money, not less, since their fee grows in line with your spend. A flat fee removes that incentive, but only works well if the scope is defined tightly upfront, otherwise scope creep becomes the mechanism for extra billing instead. A day rate tends to be the most transparent option for planning-heavy events, but can make delivery-day costs harder to predict if it isn’t capped.

Whichever model an event management company proposes, ask them to walk you through it before you sign, and get specific about what’s included versus billed separately. Overtime for late finishes, breakdown and de-rig, storage, and cancellation or postponement fees are the ones that most often surface after the event rather than before it. This is exactly why the questions below matter as much as the pitch itself.

Getting quotes from more than one company is sensible, but only if you’re comparing like for like. A lower headline number often reflects a narrower scope, not better value, so before ranking quotes by price, check that each one covers the same deliverables: the same AV specification, the same staffing hours, the same contingency cover.

Ask each company to break its quote into the same categories so you can compare directly, rather than working from three completely different formats. It’s also worth asking what it would cost to match another quote’s scope exactly, sometimes a slightly higher number already includes things the cheaper option would charge for later. The cheapest option on paper is rarely the cheapest by the time the event is actually delivered, once you’ve adjusted for everything the original number left out.

A quick example: two proposals for the same 150-person conference might both total £45,000. One includes AV, staging, and a contingency crew on the day, the other quotes the room and catering only, with AV and staging added afterwards as separate line items. On paper, they look identical. In practice, only one of them is a complete number.

Some red flags are obvious. Slow replies during the sales process rarely get better once you’ve signed. But the warning signs that actually matter are subtler, and they’re the ones people outside the industry tend to miss.

The first is how a company responds to your brief. Not listening to the brief and trying to force their own ideas because it’ll be easier for them, is one of the clearest signs something’s wrong. Most things can be achieved in event planning. If a company keeps saying no without explaining why, that’s not a capability problem, it’s a red flag about how much they’re actually listening to what you want.

The second is transparency, or the lack of it. They aren’t being transparent. This could be with costs, time, or hiding potential issues. Counterintuitively, a company that agrees to everything isn’t necessarily a good sign either. Being a yes person isn’t as great as you might think. They should be challenging things upfront rather than waiting for them to go wrong down the line. A good partner tells you about a problem in the planning stage, not the week of the event.

A third sign is subtler, and it shows up before you’ve even had a call: how specific the first proposal is. A generic document that could be sent to any client, without your event’s name, dates, or goals reflected back to you, tells you the company hasn’t actually engaged with your brief yet. The ones worth hiring show their thinking in the first document they send you, not just in the sales conversation that follows it.

You can surface most of the above before you commit to anything, just by asking the right questions upfront. Based on what actually separates good fits from bad ones, here’s what to ask any event management company before you sign:

• “Do you charge any fees after the event, and are there any hidden costs I need to take into account?” Get this in writing. It’s the single question most likely to save you an awkward invoice later.
• “Have you done events like this before?” Not just “have you done events”, specifically ones like yours, in scale, format, and audience.
• “Will you be my account manager throughout, and will you personally look after my event?” Find out who you’re actually working with, not just who’s in the pitch.
• “Can you show me a similar event you’ve delivered, and can I speak to that client?” A company confident in its work will make this easy. One that hesitates is telling you something.
• “How do you handle changes once we’ve signed?” Guest numbers change, dates move, briefs evolve. Ask what that costs and how flexible they are, before you’re locked in.
• “What’s your process for making this feel like our event, not a template?” This is the question that tells you whether you’re getting something tailored to your goals and your people, or being slotted into a format they run for everyone.

If a company answers these clearly and specifically, that’s a good sign in itself. Vague answers to direct questions are usually a preview of how the rest of the relationship will go.

Fit isn’t a fixed quality, it depends on what you’re actually planning. A 40-person team offsite and a 500-person awards ceremony need genuinely different things from whoever is running them, and the same company isn’t automatically the right choice for both.

For an intimate offsite, what matters most is flexibility and a personal touch, a smaller, senior team who can adapt quickly and get to know your people, rather than a large-scale production machine. For a big conference or awards night, what matters most is depth of technical capability: AV production, staging, and the logistics of moving hundreds of guests through a room without friction.

This is part of why the “have you done events like this before” question from the list above matters so much. A company can be excellent at one format and genuinely the wrong choice for another, not because it isn’t good at its job, but because your event needs a different kind of good.

Not every client is the right fit for every company, and we’d rather say that upfront than pretend otherwise. It’s not uncommon for us to refer to someone else when it’s not a right fit. We’d rather point you toward a company that suits your event better than take on a job we’re not the best match for.

What we do bring, is high energy and a can-do attitude. We want to help and do a great job for you and your event. We genuinely care. That’s the thread running through every answer above: transparency about cost, honesty about our network, a genuine read on your brief, and enough flexibility to make the event feel like yours rather than a template.

We also don’t take on every enquiry that comes in. If your event needs a specialism we don’t have in-house, or your dates or budget don’t line up with the kind of event we do best, we’ll say so directly rather than stretching to fit. It’s a deliberate trade-off: fewer clients we’re wrong for, in exchange for the ones we’re right for getting our full attention.

If that sounds like what you’re looking for in an event management company, we’d like to talk. And if it turns out we’re not the right fit, we’ll tell you that too, and point you toward someone who is.