About the Episode
In this episode of Corralling the Chaos, guest host Dani Porter-Condon, VP of Marketing at LASSO, tackles a question hiding underneath almost every operational problem in live event production: why has this industry been so chronically underserved by technology? Dani unpacks the foundational reasons — from a missing industry classification in government databases to a decades-long confusion between event organizers and event operators — and explains why the chaos running in the background of your production business isn’t inevitable. It’s a category problem. And it finally has a name.
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Takeaways
Takeaway 1: The live events production industry doesn’t have a formal identity — and that’s cost it everything. Most production companies don’t realize their industry doesn’t have its own NAICS or SIC code. Dani explains why that bureaucratic footnote has massive downstream consequences: no formal classification means no clean industry data, no targeted investment, and no software built specifically for operators. The result? Decades of brilliant people duct-taping together solutions and calling it a system. “When your software wasn’t built for you, you build workarounds. And workarounds breed chaos.”
Takeaway 2: Event organizers and event operators are not the same job — and the tools built for one will never fix the problems of the other. Dani draws a clear line between the entity that owns an event and the company that physically executes it. Platforms like Cvent and Bizzabo were built for organizers — the registration, the attendee experience, the sponsor logistics. But AV houses, production companies, and crew staffing firms are operators. Their problems are crew scheduling, gear logistics, payroll complexity, and multi-show coordination. Handing an operator an organizer’s tool and telling them to make it work is exactly where the chaos starts.
Takeaway 3: If your business is still scaling chaos instead of solving it, you have a systems problem — not a headcount problem. Dani maps the predictable growth pattern most small production companies follow: survive on spreadsheets and group texts, then hit a wall where volume outpaces the tools. The instinct is to hire more people to keep up. But more people maintaining a broken process just means more people in the chaos. The companies that break through that ceiling recognize it for what it is: a systems gap. And they close it with a platform actually built for production operations — not a workaround that works until it doesn’t.
Ready to stop running your operation on tools that were never built for it? See what a purpose-built event operating system looks like at lasso.io/demo.
