Assembling a Crew to Work in a Seminar

If you are going to hold a seminar right now or sometime in the future, you have to be particular about planning it. More often than not, you only have one chance to gather many people to hear what you would like to offer or tell them or teach them. Finding the perfect speaker for your seminar is just one of the hardest steps in planning one. The other half of the job would be to assemble a crew.



If you can, try to include your speaker as part of your crew. While speakers are normally paid by the hour, you might as well pay him extra if he will stay after the seminar is over. His presence during mealtime is going to be very important. Because at that point, people can easily talk to him, ask him questions, or even mingle with him to get to know him better, being the important person that he is.



Your speaker is your most important crew. Treat him like a king. Give him everything he needs and compensate him extra for his time. Speakers staying a while after the speech will give your seminar a more intimate feel. Besides you will be able to acquire more information about your attendees if they decide to stay after the talks because they want to meet the speaker personally.



But more than the speaker, you should also be particular with the other people in your crew. You need to hire at least three people for every seminar that you hold. Of course, the more people you can hire, the better. And that's because an extra hand will definitely help you serve your attendees more and give them everything they possibly need.



First off, you need people at the registration table. You need at least two people manning that area at the start of the seminar. One person would be checking the tickets and tearing out the stubs. If your seminar doesn't have tickets and members need to pay during entrance, then you have to get somebody to collect the fees.



The other person at the registration table would be manning the attendance sheet. He or she would require every attendee to sign the information sheet. The information sheet is very crucial because you might want to contact your attendees again for future seminars. Also, the same person will be in charge of handing out all the seminar materials to each of the participants, as well as writing their names on the ID badges.



The third person would be escorting attendees to their proper seats and providing for their special requests. The third person is also in charge of overseeing the attendees as they go through the admission process, signing of the forms, and getting their seminar kits. If you don't have an extra hand to do this job, you can probably do it yourself.



During the seminar proper, your three-man crew has to stand on the sidelines to attend to the seminar participants and the speaker himself. One person should be right behind the projector and the computer system to make sure that everything runs smoothly and to show the slides and presentations in accordance to what the speaker is saying. One person should attend to the refreshment table, especially the one that will be given to the speaker right after his talk.



Meal times are the most crucial time of a seminar. Regardless if you are just serving snacks or refreshments after the talks or if you're going to serve lunch or dinner, you need all the help you can get. You need somebody to prepare all the food on the table and make sure everybody gets their share. You also have to hand out these foods to the attendees or at least the utensils required, especially if you're going to follow a buffet style of a meal.



After the snacks, you also need to clean up all the used utensils or the wrappers from the food you've served. You are required to keep the cleanliness of the place where you held the seminar. So it is going to be quite a task if you only have three people in your crew.



But more importantly, you have to employ lots of people at the sales table if and when you decide to sell something, like a book or a CD recording of the seminar. You don't want to lose sales just because there are simply not enough people to handle the purchases of the attendees.