Events
What running events taught me about operations
Events compress a year of operational lessons into a single night. Everything you got wrong shows up at the door.
Jonathan Longares · May 28, 2026 · 7 min read
In a restaurant, a bad process costs you slowly. At an event, it costs you in fifteen minutes at the door.
The first lesson is that the plan is not the operation. The plan is a shared reference that lets people improvise correctly when reality changes.
The second is that the bottleneck is almost never where you expect. It is usually entry, bar service or bathrooms — three things that get planned last.
The third is that guest experience is mostly waiting time. Reduce waiting and the same event feels twice as good.
Everything I now build into software started as a clipboard, a radio and a problem I did not want to have again.