Field notes

Notes from the field

Eighteen years of running event security, from a folding chair on a perimeter post to the trailer where the whole thing lives or dies. No vendor fluff. Just what actually happens out there, and what I learned building the tool I wish I'd had.

field notes · 8 min read

The post name that was a changelog

I pulled a real schedule export the other day and found a position called "Breaker #1 EAST (Moved from roamer 3)." That parenthetical is the whole problem with how we run events, written into a cell because there was nowhere else to put a decision. Here's what that one line tells you about the state of the tools.

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field notes · 6 min read

The open post nobody caught

A guard goes on lunch. You pull the next body over to cover. Simple. Except the body you pulled was holding a post too, and now that one's empty, and the whiteboard doesn't know that, and you won't either until the client asks why Gate 4 was dark for forty minutes. The math of relief, and why it breaks every tool that isn't built for it.

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field notes · 7 min read

Three numbers that should match and never do

What you contracted to cover. Who signed up to work. Who actually showed. On every event I've run, those are three different numbers living in three different files, and the gap between them is where you lose money and credibility. How I stopped reconciling them at 1am with a highlighter.

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field notes · 5 min read

Why I bill per event, not per head

Every workforce tool I ever used charged me per user per month. For an industry where the roster exists for a weekend and then evaporates. I want to explain why that pricing model is quietly hostile to how events actually work, and what I'm doing instead.

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field notes · 9 min read

What the client never sees, and why that's a problem

The contract says what you'll cover. Then the event happens somewhere the client can't see, on a whiteboard in a trailer, and at the end you send an invoice and hope nobody asks for proof. The day a client did ask, and what I wished I'd had to answer them.

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More notes as I write them. If there's something from your own site you want me to dig into, the early-access email reaches me directly.