Being part of the Web Rebels conference organizers is an amazing learning experience. I get to learn so many things that I a been hating with a genuine passion for years. I am not very good at organizing my finances, I have never understood accounting and I most certainly have not once been able to deliver an expense report correctly. Therefor it is only natural that these are some of the things I do as “the guy who does the boring stuff” for the Web Rebels Conference!

Oslo Love

Luckily in our home town Oslo we have a pretty vibrant scene of meetups and conferences organized by individuals (not many by companies, they tend to not last). It is probably due to the fact that it’s a small city where you know “everyobe” quite easily. Also companies are quite small so of you want to learn new stuff or hear about it, you’re forced to seek out meetups and similar gatherings.

Being a first time conference organizer it was a big factor contributing to our first time not being a total failure. When it came to budgets and stuff nobody in the organizing committee had a clue. Fortunately my friend Christian had done this for the Smidig Conference (Norwegian for the Agile Conference) in Oslo. His advice on structuring a budget was brilliant and allowed me to sleep at night.

Plan for the worst possible outcome

You structure your budget so that even with 0 attendees, you still break even. How you may ask? Well, you need to split costs into two parts. One part is the fixed expenses such as rent for the venue, renting of equipment, speakers travel and acomodation, etc. The other part of your budget is what gets covered by the attendant ticket price. What this does is that costs for one attendant can not surpass the ticket price. Food, drinks, t-shirt, etc are all costs which are paid by the ticket.

The result is that you work really hard making sure you have enough sponsors. If not, you can not run the conference without running the risk of ending up loosing money.

Another trick was to set up fixed costs in three levels. First level is the bare minimum need to have a conference. Then we added more stuff that would enhance the conference experience on the next two levels. This gave us specific targets for how much money we needed to get in from sponsors.

That’s it really. Not rocket science, but a conservative way of setting up a conference without running the risk of it effecting your personal economy. This isn’t the only way to do this of course, but for us it has been a great way to do things. I am pretty certain that anyone with some kind of business degree will say this is pretty obvious, that you separate variable costs from fixed costs. But, then again they probably use globals when writing their excel macros.