One of the most interesting things that came out of this year’s crew pay rate report was that event companies are paying less in 2017 for their crew than they did in 2016.
We were extremely curious to know what you thought about this trend, so last week we sent out a poll. From the fantastic response, we can see that you’re all just as interested to learn why this is happening as we are! Here are the results.
While “experience” was rated the #1 reason for this crew pay rate decline, “competition” and “reclassification” were not that far behind. It is clear from these results that there’s no one reason for this downward change – there are several things in play here. And, while we did have a few people respond that this is not a trend that they are experiencing, by far the majority of you are seeing this occur within your own company.
In the poll, a few of you expanded upon your response or added to the options in the “other” category – here are some highlights of what some of your peers had to say:
- “Clients are wanting more production services and content with smaller budgets.”
- “We now offer half day minimums which allows us to be more flexible with staffing. We raised hourly rates, but decreased overall spend because of this.”
- “Greater access to a wider pool of talent and reports like the ones you produce are giving companies better information and the ability to bring rates more in-line with industry norms.”
- “Our labor list has tripled in size from a year ago. We continually have people submitting resumes to join our labor pool.”
- “Our clients have been asking for bigger cuts and we are just passing it down the line.”
- “The experienced people we would prefer to hire raised their rates so fast and too high that we cannot pass the change through to our clients, so we have opted to use younger, cheaper, less experienced people and have our in-house managers spend more time supervising.”
There were other great responses that we will address in the coming weeks. What do you think about these results? Do you agree/disagree? Shoot us a note and let us know!
Related Resources:
- Highlights from LASSO’s 2017 Crew Pay Rate Report: Infographic
- Labor Management in Event Services: [Survey Results – Video]
- Show Profitability Tops the List of Metrics Most Important to Event Production Companies [Survey Results]
