The cost is not on the plan, it is on Saturday morning
Drawing a plan badly costs nothing: what costs is what happens when that plan reaches the room. The tables are already placed and dressed, the caterer is unloading, and someone eyes the gap between table 12 and the column and says a tray will not get through. From that moment everything you do is expensive, because you do it against the clock with people already on the payroll standing around.
The sum nobody does: if this happens at three weddings in a season of forty, the annual cost is more than several years of floor software.
The four expensive mistakes, in order of how often they happen
None of them is a design mistake or a matter of taste. All four are measurement mistakes, and all four get caught earlier on a plan drawn to scale.
- Measuring the distance between table edges instead of between centres: once people sit down, chairs go back 40 to 50 cm and the gangway disappears.
- Treating the licensed capacity as the banquet capacity: the licence counts people, not tables with a service gangway around them.
- Forgetting the parts of the set-up that are not tables: the bar, the buffet, the dance floor, the stage, the gift table and the photographer’s route.
- Not leaving the escape route clear in a straight line: it is the only one on this list that is also an offence, not just a nuisance.
How to work out the cost in your own room
From three figures you already have. First, the hourly cost of one set-up person including on-costs. Second, how many people it takes to move a dressed table in your room, which is nearly always two or three. Third, how many times last season you had to reposition with the room already laid out — the head waiter knows that without looking anything up.
Multiply the three and you get a number that usually surprises people, and that is good for the thing that matters: to stop treating planning as an administrative task and start treating it as what it is, the part of the event where the margin gets decided.
What is not on the bill and weighs more
Slow service. When the service gangway comes down to sixty centimetres, the waiters do not stop working: they work worse. Plates leave the kitchen just as fast and reach the table later, the main course overlaps with the speeches, and what the client feels is that «service was tight», even though the number of waiters was right.
That feeling is what decides whether the venue gets recommended. And of everything on this bill, it is the only thing overtime cannot buy back.