Exercises: The Event Planning Career
Part A recall · Part B application · Part C field work · Part D critique · Part M the book's final review · Part E extension.
Several of these have no right answer and are not meant to. The 🪞 items are for you, and nobody is marking them.
Starred (★) problems have worked answers in appendices/answers-to-selected.md.
Part A — Recall and Comprehension
A.1 ★ Name the seven destinations. Which three have no Saturdays, and what follows from that?
A.2 Give the six entry points and where each leads most naturally. Which is the hardest?
A.3 ★ What do certifications produce and what do they not? Give the three questions for deciding.
A.4 Rank what a newcomer's money and time buy, per dollar. Where does a certification sit and where is it usually bought?
A.5 ★ Give the six things to extract from assistant years, in order. What is the question almost nobody asks?
A.6 How long is assisting a training rather than a job? What is the test?
A.7 ★ Name the four first hires and what each frees. Which is most planners' instinct and which is most planners' answer?
A.8 Give the three parts of the transition from doing to leading.
A.9 ★ Name the five ways leading goes wrong, and the one that is not a failure.
A.10 Give the five phases of the year and what each does. Why do people leave in October?
A.11 ★ Name the four costs, and say which three are invisible.
A.12 Give the six things the ones who stay have in common. How many are decisions, and what is not on the list?
A.13 ★ State the threshold concept about stopping points. Why is "not too many" not a limit?
A.14 Give the three kinds of exit. Which is the failure mode and why?
A.15 ★ Give the five things to do if you are leaving.
A.16 Give the seven questions of the five-year plan, and when it is reviewed.
A.17 ★ In the eleven-year table, what happens in year four, what happens in year five, and what do the first four years total?
A.18 Give the six things nobody says.
A.19 ★ What is the off-season for? In what order, and why does the order matter?
A.20 State what the chapter says the work is for.
Part B — Application
B.1 ★ Map the seven destinations against your own constraints — money, geography, Saturdays, and what you are good at. Rank them honestly.
B.2 Research the three questions in §41.2 for your own market. Ask three real buyers. Report whether a certification is worth it for you.
B.3 ★ Write the three things you would negotiate before assisting somebody, in the words you would use.
B.4 Design your first hire: which of the four, what they own, and the authority boundary. Then compute what it costs and what it frees.
B.5 ★ Write your capacity ceiling as a number, with the reasoning. Then write the sentence you would say at 11 p.m. in February to defend it.
B.6 ★ Write the five-year plan. All seven questions, one page — including question seven.
B.7 Build the eleven-year table for your own practice, or your projection of it. Identify your inflection year and what has to happen in it.
B.8 ★ Design your off-season: the three reviews, the relationship work, the skill, and the four weeks. Put the dates in a diary now.
B.9 Write your stopping condition. Specific enough to recognise if it happens.
B.10 ★ Work the productive struggle's three offers against your own seven questions. Which would you take, and what makes it right rather than appealing?
B.11 Write what you would say to somebody in year three who is thinking of leaving. Use the eleven-year table.
B.12 ★ Identify who covers you. Then actually ask them, in both directions.
Part C — Field and Practice
C.1 ★ Find somebody in each of the seven destinations and ask what they trade. Report which destination surprised you.
C.2 Find somebody who left this industry. Ask why, and whether anybody asked them at the time.
C.3 ★ Ask three planners in year eight or beyond what changed at their inflection point. Report whether it was pricing, positioning, or something else.
C.4 Ask a venue events manager and an in-house corporate events manager the same questions about their week. Compare.
C.5 ★ Ask a planner who has hired somebody what was hardest about it. Record verbatim.
C.6 Find out what a certification in your market actually costs, in money and hours, and what three real employers or clients say about it.
C.7 ★ Ask somebody ten or more years in about §41.8a's six things nobody says. Report how many they recognised.
Part D — Critique and Judgment
D.1 §41.6 says the ones who stay are not the ones who love it most. Argue the opposite — that sustained love is exactly what carries people through. Then decide.
D.2 ★ The eleven-year table shows the curve turning in year five. Attack it as survivorship bias. What would the same table look like for the people who left?
D.3 The chapter says leaving is a legitimate outcome and spends a section on it. Is that useful realism or is it giving permission too easily?
D.4 ★ §41.6's six commonalities are "observed." They are also all things a comfortable person can do. How much of this is advice available only to people with a financial cushion?
D.5 §41.9 says the work has to be enough on its own or it is not enough. Is that a defensible position for a book to end on, or is it romanticising an underpaid job?
D.6 ★ The productive struggle rejects the venue job because it fails a stopping condition written years earlier. Argue that a stopping condition written at thirty-five should not bind a person at forty-one.
D.7 §41.8a says being excellent is not protective. Chapter 40 found that other practitioners can see it. Is that enough to build a career on?
D.8 ★ This book has forty-one chapters and recommends, at the end, that you go and be somebody's assistant for eleven days. Does that undermine it?
Part M — The Book's Final Review
Each of these requires material from at least four chapters. They are the closing assessment.
M.1 ★ (Ch.5, 14, 35, 41) Trace the guest count through cost, logistics, emissions, and capacity. Four domains, one number, and what it means for a career.
M.2 (Ch.26, 28, 39, 40) Name the four instruments, what each finds, and what each cannot. Then state the principle that requires all four.
M.3 ★ (Ch.27, 30, 31, 32, 35) Going first, five times. Name each, say who did it, and state what each bought.
M.4 (Ch.28, 30, 32, 34, 39) The same error, four times, and its fix. Name all four, the form, and the four-word convention.
M.5 ★ (Ch.24, 27, 29, 40) Trace Elena Reyes from first mention to Chapter 40's fix. What was noticed, when, by which instrument, and what remained fragile?
M.6 (Ch.36, 37, 38, 41) A planner earns $30 an hour, must bill $68, must clear $5,053 a Saturday, and gets 4–6 of their first ten clients from people who know them. Reconcile all four into one sentence of advice for somebody starting.
M.7 ★ (Ch.18, 22, 28, 40) Follow the ★ 19:20 cue from its invention to the moment somebody who had never met the couple was told about it in a four-minute phone call. Four chapters, four contributions.
M.8 (Ch.2, 27, 37, 41) What does a planner actually sell? Name it four ways, from four chapters, and say why none of them photographs.
M.9 ★ (Ch.21, 29, 33, 38) "Ask, do not provide" and "you are not the authority on anyone's tradition" are the same principle. Show it across four chapters.
M.10 (Ch.29, 30, 37, 38, 41) The disclosure problem, the praise problem, the credence-good problem, and the industry's silence about money. Are these four problems or one? Argue it.
Part E — Extension and Synthesis
E.1 ★ Interview five people at different stages — assistant, year three, year eight, fifteen-plus, and somebody who left. Ask each the same six questions. Report the pattern.
E.2 Research what is actually known about burnout and attrition in event work, hospitality, or an adjacent field. Report what is measured and what is not.
E.3 ★ Write 1,000 words on whether this is a viable career for somebody without a financial cushion. Use Chapters 36–38's arithmetic and §41.6a's table, and be specific about what would have to change.
E.4 Design the industry-body or professional-association intervention that would address one of §41.8a's six silences. Be concrete about who does what.
E.5 ★ Write your own version of §41.9 — what the work is for, in your own words, before you have done much of it. Seal it, dated. Open it in three years.
E.6 Compare career shape and attrition in this field with another seasonal, high-intensity, relationship-driven trade — teaching, farming, commercial fishing, tour management. Report two structural similarities and one difference.
📐 The Career Plan
One page. Seven questions.
- Which destination, named
- The ceiling, as a number
- The second line, or a deliberate decision not to have one
- What the money must be, by year five
- Who covers you, both directions, and whether you have asked
- What is not the job, specific and in the diary
- What would make you stop
Review it every November, with the fee review and the systems audit, on the same afternoon.
And do the thing nobody does: give it to one other person.
A plan nobody else has seen is a plan you can quietly revise into whatever you were going to do anyway — which is Chapter 39's second column, applied to a life.