The Spreadsheet That Runs Your Event

Every event team has The Spreadsheet.

You know the one. It started as a simple tracking document. Someone's initials in column A, tasks in column B, status in column C. Maybe a few tabs for different workstreams. Color coding that made sense to whoever created it.

And then it grew. More columns. More tabs. More complexity. Formulas that break when someone accidentally deletes a row. Conditional formatting that no longer quite works. Outdated information that nobody's bothered to fix because nobody's sure what's current anyway.

The Spreadsheet becomes too important to abandon and too broken to trust. So everyone keeps their own version. Their own notes. Their own understanding of what's actually happening.

This is how events get run. This is why so much goes wrong.

I've managed programs across 40 markets with hundreds of field staff. I've seen The Spreadsheet in every possible form. Airtable bases that sprawled until they became unusable. Notion pages nested so deep you needed a map. Google Sheets shared with so many people that version control was a joke.

The tools aren't the problem. The tools are fine. The problem is that no one's designed a system specifically for how events actually work.

Events are chaos. You're flying people in from multiple cities. You're coordinating with venues you've never seen in person. You're managing staff who've never worked together before. Everything changes constantly. The client adds something. The venue has restrictions you didn't know about. Weather happens.

The Spreadsheet can't handle that. It was never designed to.

Event Ops is what I've been building for myself, turned into something others might use.

Task cards with real-time status. Shift scheduling that actually updates. Crew check-in that works on mobile. Load-in and load-out tracking. Photo documentation. Incident reporting. A dashboard the client can actually look at without you translating.

It's not done yet. It's probably not done for a while. But I've been running my own ops on it for months now, and it works better than any spreadsheet I've ever used.

If you run event programs and you're tired of The Spreadsheet, let me know. I'm looking for a few beta testers who can help shape what this becomes.