On-site, unreachable, losing the next one
You are three days into an install. Phone in a pocket, hands full, a client who needs you every twenty minutes.
Someone who saw your last event calls about a hundred and twenty people in May. They get voicemail on Tuesday, voicemail on Wednesday, and on Thursday they call the planner their venue recommended.
You find out a month later, if at all, that there was an inquiry to lose.
What it does
- Answers while you are on-site and says plainly that you are working an event and will call back within the day.
- Asks whether they have a venue before almost anything else, because that one fact decides whether and how you can help.
- Asks whether the date is fixed or can move, since a weekend of slack opens venues that a fixed date closes off.
- Takes headcount, event type, and the date resolved to a real day.
- Asks about budget once, lightly, and takes a decline as an answer.
- Hands you a structured brief, so your first call back starts from the facts instead of from the beginning.
What it never does
- Quote a price, a per-head figure, or what an event usually costs.
- Say a date is available, or that a venue is. Neither is its call.
- Promise that you will take the event on.
- Recommend a venue, a florist, a caterer or a photographer.
- Ask whose wedding or whose birthday it is. Volunteered names are not recorded.
- Discuss another client's event, even in the abstract.
Call it the way a referral would
Say you are planning something in May for about a hundred and twenty people. Notice that it asks about the venue before it asks about the budget. That order is the difference between an intake form and a planner's assistant.
It will tell you itself, before you hang up, that it is a demonstration line and that nothing it took was real.
Which watch fits an events practice
All three answer while you are on site. What separates them is the proposal that went quiet and the corporate client who ran an annual gala and then skipped a year without telling you.
First Watch
Fixes the referral you lose on day three. Nothing else.
- Asks about the venue before the budget, because that answer decides whether you can help at all.
- Takes headcount, event type and a date resolved to a real day, and hands you a brief.
- Transfers to one named destination on the calls you say must reach a person — one number, no ordered list, no confirmation that it connected.
Standing Watch
Narrower here than elsewhere: proposal follow-up and an annual touch, not a high-frequency engine.
- Chases the proposal that went quiet — the single biggest leak in event work.
- Notices the annual client who skipped a year.
- Escalation tree with confirmed handoff.
Silent Watch
For a planner whose client list is the business.
- Up to twenty lines under one intake standard.
- The same escalation tree as Standing Watch.
- A written response commitment, plus a quarterly review of what the lines were asked for.
The only price published on this site is the $300 Line Audit, and it comes off the setup if you go ahead. Build time to live is four weeks.
Compare all three →Request a Line Audit →Want to know what your line does while you're on-site?
We'll call it, write down exactly what happens, and show you the gap between the calls that come in and the ones that turn into booked work. If the math doesn't pencil out for you, we'll say so and leave you alone.
Request a Line Audit →