With over 25 years of experience as a Producer of Corporate Meetings and Live Events, I am extremely mindful of the budgets that I have to work with. The largest part of any of my budgets is Labor. I’m always looking for ways to maximize the talent I have for my programs. I have limited time and resources to load-in these events and get prepared for rehearsals and show. The major area where I’ve seen so much time and effort wasted over my career is creating structures to span doorways, either in public view or backstage, for cable runs over the doorways. Not every situation allows you to run cables on the floor in front of doorways and tape them down. We have to go up and over doorways to make it safe for attendees to egress our event spaces or we cannot block a service door so the House can provide meal services for the event or to make a path to bring in and out our lifts without running over cables or cable ramps. Whatever the reason, sometimes up and over is the best or only solution. Unfortunately, we’ve all had to dedicate several Utility Techs on our calls for multiple hours to build these structures, run the cables and then dress the structures that are in public view so they look presentable. And if you have a bad cable or need to run additional lines for an unforeseen reason, you have to take the dressing apart to run additional cables and put it back together, wasting more time. This has been the bane of my events as these structures add significant costs in lost time and wasted labor to deal with something that should be easily remedied. The Utility techs on our calls are a valuable resource that could be better used helping in the Audio, Lighting and Video departments or with anything else needed to get show ready.