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December 11th, 2004 · Gaming

The Essential Steps to Starting an Event Management Business

The U.S. Department of Labor’s research shows that getting your event management business plan together is a smart move right now. The industry is growing faster than most, learn more about corporate event production.

And because no specialized training is required to start one, you can expect to start turning a profit much, much faster.

How do I start my own event planning business?

Like any small business, you have to start out by doing a lot of research and creating a plan for what services you’ll offer and how you’ll market them.

You’ll also have to figure out things like budgeting, whether or not you’ll want to expand your team with event staff or other specialists, and administrative tasks like quoting, billing, etc.

As you can already tell, most of the work is done up front. But you only have to do it once! And even though you’ll most likely tweak your plan as your business continues to grow, the work you put in now will largely serve as a foundation of the company for years to come.

How to start an event planning business

If you’re looking to snag one of the 116,700+ (on average) jobs available to meeting, convention, and event managers out there, here’s what you’ll need to get started.

Step 1: Determine if it’s a good fit.

Like most jobs, your skill set and personality will largely determine your success in this field. And while you don’t need to check off all the qualities on this list, here are some things to consider before you start an event management business:

  • You can keep the big picture in mind while still taking care of all the little details.
  • Whether it’s Sunday brunch or the company holiday party, you’re everyone’s go-to person for all group events.
  • Working within a budget and strict timeline makes you feel creatively stimulated, not stunted.

Try the most popular event management business software

Get Started Free

Step 2: Research certifications.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that demand for event managers will grow an additional 11% by the time we reach 2026. With such a positive industry outlook, it’s good to find new ways to stand out amongst the competition as new event planners enter the market in coming years.

Certifications are fantastic ways to add credibility to your business, regardless of your experience level. Besides proving you’re dedicated to further your education in the field, these credentials show that respected institutions can vouch for your abilities (and your business).

Some of the top certifications event managers pursue include:

  • Certified Special Events Professional
  • Certified Event Planning Specialist
  • Certified Quality Event Planner

There are lots more options to choose from, but these serve as a great jumping off point. However, if you aren’t able to acquire one right now, you can still get your business off the ground without it.

It’s worth noting that beyond certifications, there are no strict college degree requirements (although it seems most event planners do have some sort of bachelor’s education under their belts when starting out).

Step 3: Fill out an event management business plan.

Any cursory Google search for the phrase event management business plan will inevitably lead you to some free wedding and event planning business plan templates.

However, you’ll find that the one we’ve created (below) provides a not too much, not too little approach you won’t find in any other guides.

Each point has been carefully selected so that you can create the event management business plan of your dreams without getting overwhelmed or missing out on details you definitely need to include. As long as you check off the items we listed, you’ll have a solid business plan ready to go in no time.

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Diddly Squat

December 10th, 2004 · Personal

HEALTHY VS. UNHEALTHY EXERCISE

Why do you exercise? How do you know if you are engaging in healthy exercise, or unhealthy exercise?  Did you know that unhealthy exercise was even a thing??? Check out the best ikaria lean belly juice reviews.

There are lots of myths in our society about exercise-that you can never exercise too much, that you should only do a certain kind of workout or it doesn’t “count”, that exercise should be a priority above all else.  In an effort to encourage ourselves and others to engage in activity as part of a healthy lifestyle, we have WAY overcorrected and created a shame-based culture around exercise.  We feel ashamed that we’re not moving enough, and/or we create a rigid work-out routine and feel like a failure the moment we deviate from it.

As a Licensed Professional Counselor-Supervisor and Certified Eating Disorder Specialist, I talk about exercise A LOT.  Over time, some themes have emerged in these discussions.

Unhealthy exercise tends to involve rules and rigidity, be joyless, shame-based, and shame inducing. Unhealthy relationships with exercise tend to not be sustainable over long periods of time.  We burn out.  We all know what happens then.  We end up feeling badly about ourselves, and the cycle begins again.

On the other hand, healthy exercise tends to be flexible and fulfilling.  It varies in the type of movement we are doing and the amount of time we are devoting to that activity.  This allows us to have a long-term relationship with movement, although our activity may look very different over time depending on our season of life.

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text input boxes

December 2nd, 2004 · Software

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

The GUI expansion continues!


Here I have a text input box set up. I’ve always had text that you can change, but I’ve never wrapped it up into something like this. Meaning the input text (standalone) only accepts input after the text itself is clicked, not a certain area (like a box). Obviously this had shortcomings (like what happens if there’s no text to click??). It’s good I was finally able to make the input text object “whole” by placing it in the text box widget, which now lets you click anywhere on the text box to enable input, and also automatically handles input clipping.

input clipping? Well, the way this text box is set up, you can enter in as much text as you want – when you reach the end of the text box the text will scroll. When you finish input, the text will snap back to the beginning, showing all the text it can inside the box. The when you start input again, the text snaps to the end so you can add text. You can also set the text box to stop allowing input when the text string reaches the end of the box, rather than letting it continue and scroll.

Note that the text box itself is just the rectangular area of the image. The text box widget can have its border a different color than its background.

As usual, you can run the test app yourself by downloading it. Source is included, as always.

Let me know if you discover any bugs/issues!!

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Barrel Rolling

December 1st, 2004 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

So I finally created a cool game at the gym last night. I’ve always been kinda jealous of the fact that some of my other coach buddies have come up with cool games to play with the gym equipment. So I was just lying on a barrel, which is used to teach back handsprings, and I was just rocking side to side listening to a conversation. I was a little bored. Then I rocked to far and the barrel rolled over and tipped me off onto the floor. So I got back on and started rocking again, although this time when the barrel rolled I rolled too – in the opposite direction to stay on top. It didn’t work so well and I fell off again. But now I was starting to get weird looks from my friends. So I hopped back on and let the barrel start rolling again, only this time I managed to roll opposite fast enough to stay on top for one revolution. Now everyone else was catching on (either that or I was calling them out) and soon we had like 5 barrels of various sizes on the floor with everyone seeing how many revolutions we could get before we got thrown off. And when you get thrown off you can get seriously thrown off. You’re moving pretty fast pretty quick. As a testament, I got some nice rug burn from the floor after trying to roll on the teeniest barrel the first time

So anyways we had a good time. I don’t think any of us got more than two rolls in, one of my friends got more but he was kind of cheating, using his hands too much when you have to lie flat. I took some videos with my digicam too.

Vid1
Vid2
Vid3
Vid4
Vid5

PS – I’m the guy wuth the red shirt and hat in case you didn’t recognize me

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Progress being made (literally)

November 27th, 2004 · Software

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll



Ta dum! I give you progress bars!!

Not bad, a widget a week eh? Sounds like a good pace to me. Hopefully I can make it two widgets a week tho. That would be nice since I still have 4 or 5 more to go.

Anyways on to the details. What you see here are actually two different kinds of progress bars. The horizontal bar is made up of two images, while the vertical bar is just made up of two rectangle primitives. Because image and rectangle objects both inherit from a base class, I’m able to use the same code for both of them. Meaning my progress bar class never needs to distinguish between the two objects, it’s able to just use the functions from the base object. I could, if I wanted, make the outline a graphic and the bar a primitive, or vice versa.

The horizontal bar is demonstrating the advantage of a graphic progress bar: masking. This lets you make the bar appear to slim up or even (not demoed here) seem to empty a bottle or around a curve. You get the idea.

The vertical bar is demonstrating the advantage of a primitive progress bar: color change. I suppose I could make the grahpic bar a sprite instead of an image so that can switch bar colors too (I’d have to add that functionality) – but this way is so much simpler. And since you can have a bar primitive with an outline graphic…

The way the demo works is I set up two timers. The timers, every set number of milliseconds, message the app saying they’ve expired. The app then updates the proper progress bar. When the progress bar updates, it calls back the app and the app updates the text and colors. Simple.

As with the last demo, you can download it here. The source is included.

Once again, comments are appreciated!!

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IT’S ALIIIIIIIIVE!!!

November 21st, 2004 · Software

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Well, I finally finished up my GUI interface and my first widgets, the horizontal and vertical scrollbars. Yes!! And it works! YES!!

*does happy dance*

This is freakin awesome. Now that the GUI framework is in place, I have a set structure to follow in creating the other controls, which makes it easier. I successfully replaced all the Boost::Function calls with the Boost::Signals library. Now GUI widgets can callback more than one object (same for object and button callbacks). Sweet.

I think this is time for some reflection. Let’s see… The earliest date I can find for the Katana Engine is 3/8/04. That’s the day I used Enterprise Architect to turn my UML design into a code framework from which to build off of. So we’ll say the Katana Engine was birthed in March. It’s now November, which means I’ve been working on it off and on for 8 months now. Not bad. The engine is made up of 81 seperate files totaling 8,523 lines of code (11,974 lines with comments included). Sweet. I love statistics . I started working on the GUI 10/7/04, so I’ve been at it for over a month now.

Oh yea! You can all see the GUI in action for yourselves! Check it out here. All the needed DLLs are included and whatnot. It just showcases the scroll bars scrolling an image. The scroll bars will behave like Windows scroll bars, with the exception that the drag bar never changes size and clicking and holding on the slider bar only moves the drag bar once. I’ve also included the source code. Not the engine source, just the source that makes the app tick. It’s only about 40 lines of code, since the files are all templates used in every Katana Engine application so you only have to add code in certain areas (marked by commented TODOs).

So enjoy! Tell me what you think!

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So It’s Been a While…

November 18th, 2004 · Personal, Software

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Well, so much for debugging and testing on Sunday eh? . I ended up spending the day at a gymnastics meet instead. Then Monday I was shopping all day for a bookshelf for my room and then spent the night catching up on email and forums and doing the GDNet newsletter. Then Tuesday I bought and assembled the shelf, and then spent the night out hanging with the guys like I do every Tuesday. I usually get in some decent code time on Wednesday, but I helped my friend tape him doing some gymnastics and stunts since he had to go to his daughter’s class and talk about his job as a coach and stuntman. It was fun. I bounced some tramp, he swung some bars, we both tumbled a bit. He did a handstand on parallel bars and I held the cam upside down zoomed in, and then pulled back and flipped it – just to trick the kiddies. Then we did some high falls, I taped him saying “and now, some high falls”, and then kept the camera on him while I fell backwards onto the crash mat. That was cool. After a few more falls we shot a fight scene too. So that was Wednesday night.

Then today I finally got about 4-5 hours in. I ripped out the boost::function callbacks and replaced it with the boost::signal library. Much better. The Katana Engine compiles again! w00t! I was going to test it but unlike the function lib, the boost::signal needs a DLL or at least a LIB to link to. Trouble is I have no clue how to use makefiles. I’ve just never had to use them. So I dug through the docs and downloaded bjam.exe and tried running it but it wouldn’t work, and now I’m trying to figure out how to configure the damn thing cause VC++ Express doesn’t have the same directories as VS .NET so the defaults paths for the vc7.1 build isn’t working. Pain in my ass. Stupid cross platform libs, making me compile my own damn libraries. Argh!!

So now I’m stuck again, on the verge of testing my blasted scrollbars. dammit. I’m going to bed…

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Stuff

November 13th, 2004 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

So today my local IGDA chapter held a sort of Breaking Into the Industry event thingy at a local college. It was pretty cool. I got to sit on a panel with some of the other experienced industry vets in the chapter and answer questions from the audience. We had a pretty good turn out – prob close to 50 people, even some kids that looked like they were from high school. They didn’t ask many questions though. Young fools. Of course I handled the programming panel discussion, along with a fellow programmer Nick from Gameloft. It was a fun time, I’d definetly do it again. Hopefully we’ll be able to post a video of the event online.

In other news, I’ve made leaps and bounds on my GUI. Finally got the scrollbars all programmed out. Still have some trouble using boost::bind to get the callbacks working properly, but I’ll have to save that for tomorrow. Tonight I cleaned out all the errors except the boost problem, so I just have to fix that and I can test this stuff out. Yey.

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I Missed Days?? What’s This??

November 9th, 2004 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Hullo. Yea I haven’t been updating regularily the past few days. The simple reason is that there’s not much to update on. This is, after all, a game development journal. And while I will admit to having a rather interesting personal life with many tales to tell daily, I don’t want this to become a blog about my entire life. Sure, I’ll take some time to recount some funny or insane events that have transpired, but I’m no longer going to post about my day just so I have a post for that day. Kinda pathetic. Mainly I’m going to focus on gamedev-related stuff from here on out (again, with anecdotes from my daily life when appropriate). So since I haven’t done much game dev this past week, I haven’t posted. I’ve only been able to dedicate 4-6 hours a day for game dev stuff lately, and that time has been taken up so far with stuff like selling my kite board, taking care of the new puppy (new puppy!!) and a few other small but time-consuming tasks. Ugh. But hopefully soon I’ll be able to code for a solid 4-6 hours sometime soon. That would be nice. Yes. It would. Aiight. So I’m gonna go now. Talk to you later. Bye.

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GUI Oooey

November 7th, 2004 · Software

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Got some more work on my GUI done last night. I implemented the base widget class, and started to implement the scroll bar widget. I got like a quarter done with that when I realized I shouldn’t be trying to combine both horizontal and vertical bars into one class, since they move differently and are set up differently. So I created two child classes to inheret the main scroll bar class to override certain functions so that one behaves as a horizontal scroll bar and the other a vertical. Much better. Yey OOP. So anyways I started getting into implementing those child classes when I hit a snag. See, I want to have a resizable widget, and that means the slide bar (the image that stretches between the two scroll buttons) and the scroll bar (the image that represents the bar you can click on to drag) have to be resizable as well. I realized I have no good way of doing this. So I took a break to read a book and think it over. Well, I ended up falling asleep, doh! So I’m still grappling with the resize problem, but I think I have a solution. Hopefully I’ll be able to test out the scroll bar widget tonight.

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