Gates open at eleven. By ten past there is a queue at the wristband exchange and nobody at all in front of the pitch, and the first instinct is to start rewriting the prices on the board. While it is a common instinct, experience shows it is usually the wrong move.
Gates, exchanges and bars are crewed to a plan signed off weeks before you load the van. A site running festival staffing by Event People across those positions is clearing that queue with people who have worked one before, and your trading day starts the moment they finish. Read the site plan with that in mind and your own first hour becomes predictable: you open on the back of the gates, and you staff the counter for the wave behind them.
Set the Pitch Up for the First Wave
Get the stock out of the van, count the float, pair the card readers to the site signal and test them on a one pound sale, then write and price the board. Two hours of call time buys you all of that and a margin for the reader that will not pair. Walk the ground properly once you are set: the nearest bar, the nearest toilet block and the nearest cash machine are the three questions you will be asked all day, and a trader who answers them gets people back at six. Pace the route from your customers’ gate to your counter as well, and count the pitches they pass before they reach you.
A Rota Beats a Rough Plan
Fourteen hours is what a Saturday on site actually runs, and two people covering it on goodwill is how a pitch loses its Sunday.
Two numbers in the rules on rest breaks at work give you the shape of a rota that holds: an uninterrupted twenty minute break for anyone working more than six hours in a day, and eleven hours of rest between working days. Build backwards from those and you need a third person for the middle of the day rather than a fourth for the whole of it. That third person is paid for out of one busy hour of Saturday. Put the break times on the rota itself, with a name against each one, or they get taken at four o’clock when the queue is worst.
The Licence Deadline Belongs to One Person
If your bar sits outside the main site licence as a separate small event, under five hundred people at any one time including everyone working it, a temporary event notice covers you and it needs at least ten clear working days of notice. Those working days exclude the day you send it and the day of the event, so ten of them is a fortnight on the calendar. Give the job to one named person and put the submission date next to the stock order, well away from whoever is pouring on the night.
What Happens When It Rains?
Rain empties the open ground and packs the covered rows. When the weather turns, a setup with just one person serving and two restocking in the back guarantees a queue that moves too slowly. Put another pair of hands at the front, and give someone on site permission to make that call without waiting for approval.
