Growth Exposes The Work Between Tools
Katie McKellar and Kristen Rosello McVey from The Workshop join Archer Lawrence from Loophole Automation to discuss what happens when an event business grows faster than its internal processes. The Workshop had tripled its events, with full-time employees, seasonal staff, and a crew pool of more than 100 people. That growth made staffing coordination harder to manage through the existing mix of spreadsheets and tools.
A staffing request does not end when someone accepts a shift. The team also needs to know who is available, which roles are covered, what hours were worked, and what information should reach payroll. When those details live in separate records, someone has to carry changes between them and check that everything still agrees.
Understand The Work Before Choosing Software
The discussion starts with the way the team actually works. A spreadsheet can contain years of practical knowledge: which details matter, how exceptions are handled, and which decisions need an experienced person. Replacing the spreadsheet without understanding those decisions can leave the same coordination problems inside a new tool.
The speakers describe an operations-first approach: discover the real process, agree on shared terms and responsibilities, connect the information, and then automate the steps that repeat. The aim is to make the work easier to carry out and review while keeping the team in control of decisions that require judgment.
Make The Staffing Process Explicit
A shared process starts with a shared meaning for the records. A crew member, an event, a role, and a shift are different things. Availability also needs to distinguish between someone being requested, accepting work, declining it, or remaining partially available. Without those distinctions, two people can read the same spreadsheet and leave with different assumptions.
The staffing example follows five steps: plan the event and required roles, request availability, confirm assignments and coverage, capture actual hours and approvals, and hand off the validated information for payroll. Documenting those steps gives the team a common way to see what is ready and what still needs attention.
Connect Staffing With The Finance Handoff
The proposed connected platform brings event, crew, and shift information into a consistent set of records. Existing information needs to be cleaned and reconciled during migration, rather than simply copied into another system with the same gaps.
Once the records agree, routine outreach and confirmations can follow the process. Hours and exceptions can go through review before the approved information moves to finance. Required fields, clear statuses, and visible ownership help the team catch missing information instead of relying on someone to remember every handoff.
See A Staffing Platform In Practice
Orion Entertainment provides a working example. The session shows the owner’s staffing view alongside a portal where qualified staff can find available work and see their assignments and expected pay. The tools support the same staffing records, giving the business and its staff a clearer view of the work.
The Workshop discussion looks at how that approach could apply to its own operation. It distinguishes the current challenge from the intended outcome: less information to copy between tools, clearer assignments, and an easier handoff to payroll. The audience questions then examine privacy, access controls, software ownership, continuity, and making room for exceptions.
