Every event organiser knows the feeling. You’ve got a production schedule living in a PDF that nobody reads on their phone. You’ve got a sitemap that doesn’t show enough detail. You’ve got separate drawings for bar layouts, electrical runs, fencing plans, all floating around in different formats, sent to different people, constantly out of date. It’s organised chaos at best.
This year, we used EventLab for the first time at Party in the Paddock. And the difference was significant enough that we felt like we had to write it down.
Our site is basically a blank canvas, every single year
Quercus Park is a commercial venue, but it’s essentially bare land. Roads and a few fences. That’s it. Every year, all of our infrastructure comes in from scratch stages, scaffold platforms, major tents, fencing, plumbing, power. And when you’re doing that across a 1.2km site, placing everything in the exact right spot year after year is genuinely a skill.
In the past, we’d relied on pegs in the ground, aerial photos, or third-party apps to try to get accuracy. We’d even looked at bringing in a professional surveyor to GPS-map the site properly. The quote came back around $5,000. We didn’t go ahead with it.
This year, we used EventLab instead.
About six months out from the event, we used the EventLab mobile app with a Garmin GPS dongle to walk the site and mark the exact corners of our stages, scaffold platforms, and major tent locations. It took a few hours. Back at the computer, those GPS tags were sitting right there in the mapping software, and we were able to use them as anchors to build the rest of the site around them with real accuracy.
When it came time to actually set up on-site, the difference was immediate.
We cut site marking from 8 days down to 3
Normally, my business partner Alec and I spend between seven and eight days across a few weeks, after hours and early mornings, marking out the next stages of the build. Starting with the big stuff: stages, scaffold, major tents. Then working down through smaller infrastructure, plumbing locations, fencing layouts. It’s time-consuming, and it’s expensive.
This year, we did it in three days.
Because our structures were already GPS-located in the app, we weren’t guessing where things would land on an open paddock and manually checking that angles and distances were right. It was already there. Staff could open the app on their phone, see exactly where they were relative to everything else on-site, and get to work.
We also used drone overlay images in the map, which meant we could see exactly where we’d placed things the year before and make informed decisions about what to move or keep.
That reduction alone, from eight days to three, saved us thousands in wages and management time.
Less spray paint. Fewer questions. More getting things done.
When your whole team has the map on their phone with live GPS tracking, you stop having to spray so much onto the ground. We didn’t bother marking where the water tanks went or where the back-of-house fence lines ran – because anyone could zoom into the map and see exactly where everything sat, down to the fine detail.
And we’re talking real detail. Trestle table locations. Power point positions. Lights, chairs, couches. The contents and specs of every tent, which ones had flooring, what coloured skins were on them, where the bracing went. Our fencing contractors and tent contractors could open the app and see exactly what was required of them, in the order they needed to work, without anyone having to physically walk them through it.
In the past, we’d either have separate PDFs for inside each bar or marquee, or we’d just make it up on the spot and figure it out. Our electrical and plumbing teams would get a printed map with handwritten notes on top. It worked, but it was chaotic.
This year, it was all in one place.
Four kilometres of fencing across 1.2 kilometres of site
Fencing is one of those things that sounds straightforward until you’re actually doing it. We have four kilometres of fence on-site, spread across the full length of the property, coming from three different suppliers. Getting that right matters, your walkway widths have to be correct for emergency evacuation compliance, bracing and scrim needs to be exact, and if fencing ends up in the wrong spot, it affects the whole feel of the event.
Using the equipment list manager alongside the map, we could group fencing by zone, see exactly how many metres were needed in each area, and send the right number of stacks and blocks to the right location. Less confusion, less double-handling, and way fewer questions from contractors trying to figure out where something was supposed to go.
The schedule changed how our team worked
The built-in scheduler on the app was one of those features that quietly made a big difference. Staff stopped asking us where things were or what was happening next, they’d check the schedule and just get on with it. When tasks were ticked off at the end of the day, we’d review what was done, adjust what wasn’t, and everyone would wake up the next morning with a live updated schedule reflecting exactly where things stood.
That kind of real-time clarity across a whole crew is hard to put a dollar figure on, but it absolutely reduces the amount of time directors and senior management spend answering questions and physically directing people around a site.
The total saving: $10,000
Across all of it, reduced site marking days, less overtime, fewer management hours spent on logistics, less spray paint, fewer printed maps, no surveyor, and a significantly more efficient crew, we estimate we saved around $10,000 in wages and consumables this year compared to previous years. Can you put a price on efficiency and lower cortisol levels? I guess you can, but in the crunch, it’s priceless.
EventLab isn’t a traditional site map tool. It’s the full logistical, operational, physical delivery plan of your event, in one app. And for a festival like Party in the Paddock where everything comes in from scratch each year, having that level of clarity and accuracy at everyone’s fingertips made a genuine, measurable difference.
There’s nothing else on the market that does what EventLab does. And we’d know, we built it.
Party in the Paddock is held annually at Quercus Park near Launceston, Tasmania.
