What do you do when the AV truck shows up… and half the gear is missing? Then the second truck shows up with the wrong cables. This is just one of the ways event production keeps everyone humble

In this episode of Mayhem and Method, Jen sits down with Elias Puurunen, founder of Tractus Events, to talk about the beautiful disaster zone where hybrid event production, in-house AV, missing equipment, fire alarms, and client expectations all collide. What starts as a fairly straightforward three-day conference with breakout rooms, cameras, confidence monitors, and streaming quickly turns into a lesson in why "preferred AV provider" does not always mean "show-ready."

Elias walks through how his team stayed focused, used the delay to troubleshoot what they could control, kept the client insulated from the chaos, and still pulled off a smooth show once the doors opened.

Top Takeaways from Elias & Jen's convo:

• Trust your AV Spidey Sense. If the boardroom quote makes no sense, the rest of the gear list probably deserves a very suspicious eyebrow raise.
• Control what you can, fix what you find. Waiting on missing equipment? Great. Time to test cues, signal paths, streams, and all the tiny gremlins hiding in the setup.
• Emergency plans are not optional decor. Even in the case of fire alarms, evacuations, VIP security, and internet outages, event pros don't panic. They plan, radio, reroute, and maybe emotionally recover later.

Links:

tractusevents.com

@eliaspuurunen on LinkedIn

This episode was produced by Audiotocracy Podcast Production.