The third time you run the same annual conference, someone on your team opens a blank document and writes the same brief again. Same venue, same trouble with the loading door, same argument about presenter files two days out. A long term AV hire partner, meaning an ongoing arrangement with one audio visual (AV) supplier instead of a booking made from scratch every time, is what stops that repeating. It is worth being precise about the phrase, because the industry uses it for two different things.
What a long term AV hire partner actually is
Search the term and most of what comes back is equipment rental measured in months: a screen or a sound system that sits in your building until you send it back. That is a useful arrangement. It is not this one.
The version that matters to an event organiser is a production relationship. The same company handles your conference in March, your awards night in October and the roadshow that appears in the diary with six weeks’ notice. Our position is that splitting audio, lighting and staging across separate suppliers moves the coordination work onto you, and that is true within a single event. Across a year of them it compounds.
The brief you stop rewriting
The Health and Safety Executive asks event organisers to develop a safe overall phased programme of work that takes account of contractor risk assessments and communicates it to everyone involved. On a first booking, that programme is built from nothing. Your supplier has never seen the room, so the site visit and the discovery that the goods lift will not take a full length of truss both happen for the first time.
On the second booking they happen once, in a file someone already owns. The venue’s rigging limits, the position of the nearest distribution board, the fact that the get-in (the window when equipment can be brought into the building) closes at nine because the hotel has a breakfast meeting in the same space: none of that has to be rediscovered.
What does not change is who carries the duty. The HSE is clear that the organiser holds prime responsibility, and a familiar contractor does not shift it. It just means you are checking work rather than explaining the building.
Familiarity is measurable, not sentimental
“You will get the same crew” sounds like a sales line. It is one of the few claims in this industry with real evidence behind it.
Researchers at Harvard Business School studied team familiarity across software projects, measuring how often the people on a team had previously worked together. Their 2008 study found that a one standard deviation increase in team familiarity produced an 18.6% decrease in expected defects, and increased the odds of a project hitting its schedule targets by 44%. The mechanism they describe is coordination and shared tacit knowledge, which is exactly what a crew builds by rigging and de-rigging the same ballroom twice. De-rig is the part where the build comes back down.
Nobody has run that study on event production. The finding still transfers, because a show is a coordination problem under a fixed deadline and so is a software release.
The same kit, not just the same company
Consistency of equipment is the part that gets overlooked. If your presenters have learned that the lectern microphone is the one with the black band, or your content team has built a year of graphics for a particular pixel canvas, changing the inventory underneath them undoes that quietly.
An ongoing arrangement lets a supplier hold a sensible position on this. We can keep the same processing and the same panel type across your year, carry the spares that match it, and keep the patch documentation from the last build rather than drawing it again. We supply audio, video, lighting, rigging and staging from one source and deliver nationwide from Manchester, which is what makes holding a consistent inventory for a client possible in the first place.
Ask what happens in peak weeks. Every hire company cross-hires equipment from other firms when December fills up, and there is nothing wrong with that. There is something wrong with not being told.
What two events for the same client look like
We have published two AllSaints events, and the pair is more instructive than either one alone. The first was the brand’s 30th event, where we designed and installed the lighting, handled the rigging and provided audio, video and technical support on site.
The second was the AllSaints SS24 show for London Fashion Week, staged in the unused Union Street tram station in the Kingsway Tram Tunnels. No power, no wifi, no phone signal, an uneven floor and poor acoustics, with a preview show for head office staff earlier in the day and the main show that evening. Our project managers and technicians built sound, lighting, power, infrastructure and staging into it against the clock.
A client does not hand a disused tram tunnel to a supplier they met last week. That job is what a second booking buys you.
The debrief nobody schedules
The HSE calls it good practice to debrief after an event, and certainly after any incident or when changes to venue design or procedures are being considered. In practice it is the most useful improvement available to a repeat event, and the first thing dropped when everyone is tired and the vans are loaded.
A partner arrangement is what gives the debrief somewhere to live. Twenty minutes on the phone the following week, written down by whoever reads it back in eleven months, turns a bad stage position into a decision rather than an anecdote. Without an ongoing relationship, those notes go into a folder nobody opens.
Putting it on paper
If you buy through a procurement team, this arrangement already has a name. GOV.UK defines a framework agreement under the Procurement Act 2023 as a contract between a contracting authority and one or more suppliers providing for the future award of contracts, with a maximum term of four years for most frameworks. Individual events are then called off against it.
Plenty of private-sector organisers run something looser: an agreed scope and a review each year. Either way, writing it down is what turns goodwill into something your successor inherits. The point is not to lock anyone in. It is that a supplier who knows there is a year of work ahead will plan crew and equipment around it.
What to agree before you commit
The questions worth settling early are mostly about people and process rather than equipment. Much of this overlaps with what to ask any AV supplier before you book, with a few additions that only matter over time.
- Who is the named contact, and who covers when they are on another site.
- Which technicians you can expect to see again, and which roles are subcontracted.
- When equipment is cross-hired, whether you are told.
- Where the site information lives, and whether you get a copy of it.
- How the debrief happens, and who writes it.
- What the review point is, and how either side ends the arrangement.
That last one matters more than it sounds. An arrangement that is easy to leave is one both sides keep earning, which is a healthier basis than a long notice period. And if things do go wrong with an existing supplier, the mechanics of replacing one at short notice are worth understanding before you need them.
Where this leaves you
A single booking is judged on the day. An ongoing arrangement is judged on whether year two is easier than year one, which is a harder test and a fairer one. If it is not easier, something is wrong with the arrangement rather than with the idea.
If you run more than a couple of events a year and you are tired of starting again each time, we are happy to talk it through, whether that is a conference programme, a run of corporate events, or a mix of both across the calendar. Tell us what is in the diary and what went wrong last time. You can reach us through the contact page or by email at hire@eventproductiongroup.co.uk, and we will tell you honestly whether an ongoing arrangement would actually help or whether you are better served booking each event on its own.
