What chef wishes the BEO actually said
Five department leads open the same BEO at 7am on the morning of a 300-pax gala. They are looking at the same piece of paper. They are reading five different documents.
The chef is reading for the dietary count and the service times. The banqueting manager is reading for the setup style and the table count. AV is reading for the access window, the mic count, and the run order. The duty manager is reading for the weird thing nobody warned them about. The planner is reading for reassurance that what they sent on Wednesday is still what is happening on Saturday.
Each of these people will spend roughly thirty seconds on the BEO during their first read. They will return to it during the day, but the first read is the one that sets their plan. If you have buried the thing they need in paragraph four, you have already lost.
A well-written BEO knows it has five readers and five priorities. It surfaces each reader's thing at the top of their section, then lets them dive deeper if they need to.
The chef
Chefs do not read top to bottom. They open a BEO, glance at the date and pax, scroll to dietaries, scroll to service style, scroll to menu. If those four are clear and current, they will keep reading. If any are unclear, they will pick up the phone before their first coffee is finished.
Things the chef wants near the top of their section, in the order the chef looks for them: total pax, dietary breakdown (vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, dairy-free, nut allergy with severity flagged, shellfish, kosher, halal, other), service style (plated, family, buffet, cocktail or canapés, grazing), service times keyed to the ROS (canapés out at 6:30, entrée at 7:15, main at 8, dessert at 9:15), and any special items the planner has agreed to with the client and forgotten to mention to the venue.
Things the chef does not need on the BEO: the song the DJ must not play, the seating chart for table 14, the names of the speakers.
A BEO that leads its kitchen section with the dietary breakdown gets read. A BEO that buries the dietary breakdown under three paragraphs about the speech order gets a phone call.
The banqueting manager
Banqueting reads next. They want setup style, table count, service flow, and where the dietaries are seated.
Setup style is one line. Rounds of ten, twenty-six tables, head table of twelve. Theatre, three hundred chairs, centre aisle. Cabaret, eighteen tables, presenter side. That one line is the rest of their morning.
Service flow is the choreography. Entrée from kitchen left, main from kitchen right, dessert via the side service door because the band is in the way of the main service path. Almost nobody puts this on the BEO. Banqueting wishes you would.
Where the dietaries are seated belongs on the floor plan, but a one-line note on the BEO ("vegans on tables 4 and 12, anaphylactic peanut on table 7, vegetarian children on table 18 with the family group") saves twelve minutes of asking around at 5:30.
Things banqueting does not need: the welcome video script, the keynote's slide build.
The AV lead
AV is reading for three things: when they get the room, what is being cued, and when they get the room back.
The access window. AV are usually first in. If access closed is 5pm but AV arrived at 9am and the room was still being vacuumed at 11, AV cannot test sound. Put the AV access window on the BEO, separately from the general access window if they differ. They usually do.
The mic count. Wireless lapel, wireless handheld, fixed lectern. Two presenters, three speakers, a panel of four. Total number of mics, total number of channels, who is using which.
The run order with cues. Not the full ROS. The cues. House lights down at 7:30. First slide at 7:32. Walk-on music at 7:34 (track name, please). Speakers in the order they appear. The award presenter who is going off-script and announcing winners is the one AV needs to know about most.
The get-out window. If vacate is 1am, AV are last out. Tell them. Tell them what the venue's rules are about overnight gear storage. Tell them whether the loading dock is shared with the next morning's setup.
Things AV does not need: the dietary breakdown, the menu, the bar package.
The duty manager
The duty manager reads the BEO last and quickest. They have 15 minutes between two events. They are scanning for the unusual.
The single most useful block on a BEO, for the duty manager, is a three-sentence top-of-page summary that names the three things that are weird about this event. Maybe it is a Cabinet member at table 1. Maybe it is a release ban on social posts before 9pm. Maybe it is a cake reveal involving live pyrotechnics that the venue has signed off on and forgotten to tell maintenance about.
Without the summary, the duty manager has to read the whole BEO to find the weird thing. With it, they read 30 words and know what to brief their staff on at the 5:30 huddle.
Names. The duty manager wants the planner's mobile, the client's mobile, the production company's mobile, and the AV lead's mobile. Not extension numbers. Mobiles. They will be ringing one of them tonight.
Escalation. If something breaks, who calls who. Two lines. The duty manager will not read more.
Things the duty manager does not need: the full menu, or the dietary breakdown unless it includes the words "anaphylactic" or "VIP".
The planner reading back their own BEO
This one is for the planner.
When you have finished writing the BEO, before you send it, read it as each of the four people above. Skim for the chef's section. Is the dietary count visible in the first five seconds? Skim for banqueting. Is the setup style obvious? Skim for AV. Is the access window separated from the general access window? Skim for the duty manager. Is there a three-line "what is weird about this event" block at the top?
If any of those answers is no, you have written the BEO for yourself, not for them. You will be the only person on Saturday who has read it.
What to leave out
A unnecessarily long BEO is a worse BEO. Every department reads less of it.
Leave out anything that is not changing from the standard. If the venue's house bar package is the default and you have not negotiated changes, do not list every spirit. Write "house bar package" and let the venue's standard speak for itself.
Leave out marketing or emotional language. The BEO is an operations document. "Magical" and "unforgettable" do not appear in operations documents. They make the venue's team trust the rest of the BEO less.
Leave out anything you are uncertain about. An uncertain item on a BEO is worse than a missing one. Missing items get asked about. Uncertain items get assumed.
A quick word on length
A good BEO is one page where it can be, two pages where the event genuinely needs it, and never three. If you have written three, you have either combined two events into one BEO (separate them) or you have written a planning document instead of an operations document (cut the planning).
If your BEO is live
Everything above quietly assumes the BEO is a piece of paper, or a PDF, or a document that gets sent and re-sent. Most BEOs still are.
If yours is live, one source, every department reading the current version on their phone, most of the staleness traps disappear. You can stop dating revisions because there is only one. You can stop telling people to read the latest version because there is only one.
Live does not mean each reader gets their own filtered BEO. It means everyone reads the same page, and the page is current. The writing advice above is what makes that one page work for all five readers, the way good document design has always worked. Live just lowers the cost of getting any of it wrong.
If you are still in the printed-BEO world, the dating and version-stamping habits are what to do until you are not. 1pm.app does this if you want to skip the in-between. Otherwise, keep dating, keep stamping, keep reading the BEO as each of your five readers before you send it.
Closing
If you write BEOs for crew, the people on the other end of them will not tell you when one is bad. They will just call you with questions. Three questions per event is a sign your BEO is two paragraphs short of doing its job. Zero questions, three events in a row, is a sign you have started writing BEOs that the people reading them actually read.
Chris
Founder, 1pm.app
