Freelance Meeting Professionals: A Cost-Effective Remedy to Rightsizing Your Event Workforce

In recent years, companies have faced challenges on how to balance their workforce capacity, given the drastic fluctuations in the business environment. Without a solution to this, organizations run the risk of having too large or too small a workforce to meet demand.

One workforce area that has been particularly tough to manage is meetings and events. From organizing conferences, trade shows, annual meetings, incentive programs, and more, planning these events requires a vast array of resources, but often face fluctuating volume and demand.

However, as the freelance economy continues to accelerate, there is a cost-effective remedy. Freelance meeting professionals can help organizations in their rightsizing dilemma by providing their expertise when needed, ensuring success without breaking the bank.

Freelance meeting professionals provide flexibility and scalability in ways that in-house M&E teams cannot. These industry experts can provide specialized skills that align with the organization’s objectives, delivering the expected results. Plus, every meeting is different, so identifying the ideal event team size is quite difficult, making it challenging to scale your in-house team effectively. Freelance meeting professionals eliminate this challenge, as sourcing can be done on an as-needed basis, ensuring workforce agility and preventing any over or understaffing.

Often, an organization’s meeting demand varies throughout the year, requiring a wide range of event talent to support. Relying solely on an in-house team causes you to over and understaff resulting in missed revenue opportunities.

On the other hand, using event freelancers provides considerable cost savings, and reduces the need for mass layoffs since you will only engage talent when required, therefore, minimizing your overhead costs and enabling your company to reduce expenses while still ensuring quality events.

With freelance meeting professionals, you have access to individuals with varied skill sets and expertise. They are known for delivering results and providing excellent solutions within the meeting and event industry. With their constantly growing network, they can connect with vendors, hotels, and others that will help to deliver successful events all while containing costs.

You also have a risk advantage since they have worked for multiple clients, and through experience, can provide solutions that are tried and tested – eliminating risks that can damage your attendee’s experience.

The time-consuming nature of event planning can divert the focus of your full-time employees (FTEs), from other critical areas of the business. Utilizing freelance meeting professionals to help with planning can alleviate this burden, allowing key personnel to focus on their core responsibilities while the freelance talent takes care of the complex logistics of meetings. Engaging freelance meeting professionals can balance the workload, ensuring that there is no overburdening of roles or personnel.

Before considering a reduction in workforce, or rapid freelance sourcing, take time to analyze any historical data, and metrics around your meetings & events. Identifying areas such as seasonality, industry trends or forecasted growth can help ensure proper resource allocation.

An important step to rightsizing your event workforce is to identify what roles and functions are essential for success. Contrary to popular belief, these roles do not need to be held solely by FTEs. Companies that get the most out of their meeting and event teams have a healthy mix of FTEs and elastic, freelance talent.

Whether you need 5 meeting planners this week and 70 next week, a blended workforce enables you to scale appropriately, and truly eliminate the need for massive downsizing or upsizing.

Sourcing high-quality, vetted event freelancers is of course essential to delivering success, but teams already have extensive responsibilities, and sourcing freelance talent shouldn’t be one of them.

A proven talent provider with experience in the meeting and event industry can truly help get your blended event workforce off the ground. Your partner of choice should alleviate the administrative burdens often associated with engaging freelance talent. From sourcing to compliance to payments, they should enable you to experience all the benefits of freelance event professionals without the headaches.

Rightsizing your meeting & event workforce can be overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be! Freelance meeting professionals provide flexibility, scalability, expertise, cost-effectivity, risk management, and eliminate workload – All of which make them the ideal remedy to any rightsizing dilemma.

If you are struggling with sourcing event talent or simply looking to start utilizing freelance support, a talent provider like Plannernet can provide a strategic path forward.

Contact us today to find out more about how we can assist you in creating a freelance event workforce capable of meeting all your unique requirements.