Most often opportunity comes disguised as weaknesses and threats to the events management company and the industry too. To unearth the real potential it is therefore important to’ assess the magnitude of repercussions if nothing is done to solve the problems.
This provides the impetus to act and hence leads to an effort by the events company at making the best of the situation. Thus, with a motive in hand, it is easier to grab opportunities.
And while at it, a good way to discern opportunities is to weigh the gravity and assign a probability figure as per understanding of the situation. This will provide a helpful index to sort the order in which to exploit the opportunities.
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The methodology followed for doing this analysis is that a list of all opportunities irrespective of how improbable they seem and in particular any opportunity associated with the specific company strengths, etc. is compiled.
This is followed by ranking the opportunities in order of their importance or contribution value to the firm. The compatibility of the opportunities with the company is then determined by checking how heavily the company will need to invest in the opportunity in terms of resources like time, finance.
Then the numeric values are assigned to the opportunities selected in terms of potential attractiveness and probability of success. These are then plotted on the opportunity matrix. We can see below how this is done in the A2Z Events case.
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A picture says more than a thousand words is an old Chinese proverb. Graphical representation has the power to drive home the point. The Figure 9.3 on the next page tries to achieve just that by converting the table 9.4 into a user-friendly matrix.
Once the events company is aware of the possible courses of action, it is imperative that it carries out a check on the resources available. Every business has its own constraints and obstacles. The challenge and thrill therefore lies in overcoming these constraints imposed upon the company.
Thus, understanding the limitations of resources available is crucial to authentically go ahead with any plan whether at the strategic level or at the individual event level. A check should be first carried out on the availability of financial resources to develop opportunities.
Need for personnel and ability of the organization structure to handle the opportunities should then be evaluated and redesigned if necessary. For example, if a corporate set up for an event company is a constraint, it could very well adopt the flexi-time and project teams’ concept of software companies for a better output.
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Also, if there are lacunae in the event research / creative department, then if needed, separate dedicated personnel should be assigned to convert a reactive sales response to a proactive marketing oriented approach.
An exhaustive research in understanding brands and their personality should be carried out and concepts should be built around this research thus providing an information resource bank. Still on the personnel resource check, it should also be ensured that adequate number of experienced volunteers and labour are available in the production / execution department. Also, dedicated, trained and event savvy sales personnel should be made available at all the branches.
After the financial and personnel resources come the networking components in terms of importance. The availability of their time and services is as much a constraint to the event companies as any other resource. If given due importance and sufficient time to deliver, this resource crunch can be tackled.
This is built on the foundation of professional relationships. Hence, most often, professionalism on part of the event company works wonders for the confidence of the network components and they become partners in the event rather than mere components thus eliminating a constraint.
Focus should then be shifted to logistics. Most often, the opportunity to invest in long-term use assets reduces the burden of sourcing and dependency on suppliers and transporters, thus improving the efficiency of the logistics function. The resources required for this should therefore, be assessed.
Public Relations effort needed to develop opportunities should also be studied since for an event management company, advertising essentially means an efficient PR, and creating hype about the events being handled becomes very important. And there should be sufficient funds and enough personnel for handling the same.
The resource availability analysis provides an input into the current situation of the event firm. In fact, it is this very limited resource that the strategy tries to deploy efficiently for maximum gain as guided by the mission statement. The strategy that flows from the mission statement tries to provide an answer to that ultimate question – Why a particular resource is being used the way it is being used?
Thus, without a constraint, there would be no need for strategy, and without strategy there would be no answer to the why, what and how. Efficient mobilization of resources is therefore a relative term that changes its definition as per the dictates of the strategic plan.