Originally shared with our LinkedIn subscribers in March 2026.
Four thousand people. A new CRO’s first sales kickoff. A new CFO in the room. Acrobats flying around the stage. A Jumbotron hanging over the audience. Cold sparks firing from the floor.
We’re headed to Portland, Oregon, and every member of our team is packing a bag right now.
There’s a version of my job that lives in spreadsheets and email threads and permitting applications. And there’s a version that lives on the floor of a venue with a headset on, calling the show in real time. The second version is the reason I got into this work. I think most people in production feel the same way—the planning matters, but the doing is what drew you here.
Something shifts in a team when the show gets close. I want to talk about what that shift actually looks like.
What changes in a team as a show gets close?
In the weeks before a show, everyone’s internal gauge on “how done is this prep” gets incredibly sensitive. People start imagining themselves on the playing field. They’re mentally on-site. And the moment someone says something on a call that doesn’t match the plan, every hair on the back of your neck stands up.
That needs to get addressed right now. Not tomorrow. Not in a follow-up email. Now.
We spent weeks wrestling with permitting for the cold sparks on this show. Cold sparks aren’t fire—you can point them at a piece of paper and nothing catches. But Portland isn’t Las Vegas. In Vegas, nobody bats an eye. You go to a smaller market and they tell you the state has to sign off. So we jumped through weeks of bureaucracy for an effect that literally cannot ignite anything. And everyone treated that as mission-critical.
That’s what the sharpening feels like. Details that would have been a footnote three months ago become urgent, non-negotiable, solve-it-today problems. Because the show is real now. Everyone can feel it coming.
Why does execution feel different from planning?
When you’re on the floor with thousands in the audience, decisions have consequences and they need to be made now. There’s no delay. No buffer. No time difference between thinking and doing. It’s a completely different brain.
There’s a version of you that drafts an email, takes two hours to polish it, maybe runs it through AI, edits the joke, sends it when it feels right.
That version disappears the moment you’re about to go live.
I don’t care what job you have—you have an email. You have a desk. You have the version of your work that involves sitting and typing and waiting. But somewhere in your career there’s also the version where you throw the lever. The firefighter version. The surgeon version. The circus performer version. The moment you stop being email-you and start being the thing that actually drew you to this profession.
That switch is what production people crave. The planning brain is careful, thorough, necessary. The execution brain is fast, present, alive. When you’re in it, every barrier between you and the outcome is gone.
Everyone Speaks Up
The energy shift isn’t just individual. It hits the whole team.
As the show gets closer, nobody is afraid to speak up on calls. Everybody who sees something, says something. The usual deference, calling for a regroup meeting after the call or sending a slack message later, that evaporates. Because everyone is imagining themselves standing next to the problem, and nobody wants to be the person who saw it and stayed quiet.
We talk a lot about “having each other’s backs” and “speaking truth to power” in our company. No one gets admonished for asking questions. Or having a new idea. It’s especially important when complex systems are integrating that everyone feel empowered to speak up.
And that attitude has to carry right into show time. If you see a teammate is overwhelmed, what can you do to help? If you’re over-capacity—you can ask for help! And we encourage you to.
When you’ve worked with a team for years and you’ve gelled, you can rely on each other to execute—especially when the unexpected shows up. And the unexpected always shows up. That trust is what lets you move fast without a meeting.
Not Every Show Is This
Most productions are professional. Competent. Solid.
Then you get one where they hand you a creative leash and say “go.”
People who work project to project crave this. The variety. The execution. The chance to do something that pushes beyond the standard presentation show. When a client gives you latitude to program performers, special effects, and custom scenic and says make it incredible, that’s a gift.
I try to reinforce that for the team. This is a special kind of show. You don’t always catch shows like this. We get to have fun. We get to do the creative work. And we have to relish it and deliver.
The Portland prep was a grind. Weeks of table reads, permitting, paper-tech throughs, renders from every seat in the house. But that grind is part of the privilege. You wrestle every detail through because the show deserves it, and because the new CRO stepping on stage for the first time in front of their entire salesforce deserves to walk into something extraordinary.
The Lever
Our team is in the air right now. Laptops closing. Headsets charging. Checking comms.
But this feeling isn’t unique to event production. Every professional has a version of the moment when the planning stops and the doing starts. The board presentation. The build goes live. The sales kickoff. The client pitch where you’ve rehearsed for weeks and now the room is full and it’s time.
That’s when the thermometer spikes. That’s when the team sharpens. That’s when the careful, email-polishing version of you steps aside and the version that actually loves this work takes over.
The desk stuff is the price of admission. The show is the reason you’re here.