The first ten minutes decide the rest
Guests make up their minds about your event almost before they sit down. Most of that judgement is formed in the short walk from the door to their seat.
By FrontHAUS Team · Editorial
Part of the Event check-in & registration guide →
People decide how they feel about your event much faster than you'd like. By the time a guest has found their seat, they've usually already formed an opinion, and they did most of it in the first few minutes, before a single word was spoken from the stage. The walk from the front door to the room is doing far more work than it gets credit for.
It makes sense if you think about how arriving anywhere feels. Someone has travelled to get to you, maybe rushed, maybe a little anxious about being late or being in the right place at all. They're slightly on edge. What happens in those first minutes either settles them or winds them up further, and whichever it is, that mood walks into the room with them and stays.
A good arrival is mostly about removing friction and small frictions add up fast. Is it obvious where to go? Is there a queue, and if there is, is it moving? Does getting checked in feel quick and warm, or does it feel like being processed? When a guest reaches the desk and the person there finds them in a couple of seconds, gets their name right, and sends them on with a real welcome, that whole knot of arrival anxiety just dissolves. They walk in feeling expected. That's the feeling you want them carrying.
When it goes the other way, it's painful and entirely avoidable. A clump of people at the entrance because the desk is slow. A guest standing awkwardly while someone scrolls a list looking for their name. Being asked to spell it twice. None of it is catastrophic on its own, but it's a sour first impression, and a sour first impression takes the whole morning to recover from, if it recovers at all.
This is exactly why we're so particular about the door. We want check-in to be the fast, almost invisible part of the day, the bit guests forget about because it gave them nothing to remember. At a banking client's conference recently, several hundred people arrived inside half an hour and the longest anyone waited was a moment or two. Nobody complimented the check-in, and that was the win. They walked straight in, found a coffee, and were in a good mood before things even started.
If you're going to fuss over one part of your event, fuss over the arrival. Get the first ten minutes right and you've earned yourself a forgiving audience for everything that follows. Get them wrong and you spend the rest of the day paying it back.