Your Busy Season Runs on Heroics. That’s the Problem.

Originally published in Exhibit City News.

It’s the Thursday before move-in. A booth that shipped to the wrong dock, a labor call that fell through in a second city, a client who changed the graphics package at 4 p.m. And one person — call her Dana — is on three phones, rerouting freight, pulling a favor from a foreman she’s known for a decade, and somehow the show opens clean Monday morning.

You know Dana. Every company in this business has one. Maybe two.

Monday night you tell her she saved the show. You mean it. And in the debrief you say what most owners say after a season like that: “I need more people like Dana.”

You don’t. Or at least, that’s not the real problem.

The real problem is that your entire busy season depends on a handful of people being exceptional at the exact moment everything goes wrong. That feels like strength. In my experience, it’s a design gap wearing a cape.

Heroics are what you do when you don’t have a system

Here’s the pattern I see across exhibit houses, labor firms, logistics providers, and show services companies. The work surges hard and seasonal. The margins are thin enough that you can’t overstaff for the peak. So the peak gets absorbed by people. Specific people. The ones who hold the context in their heads, know which vendor will actually answer at 6 a.m., and catch the mistake before the client does.

That’s heroics. And heroics are what a company relies on when it doesn’t have a system yet.

At $8M or $10M, that’s fine. It’s more than fine — it’s how you win. One or two people can hold the whole operation because the operation is small enough to fit inside their heads. Fast decisions. No handoffs. No documentation, because the person who needs to know already knows.

Then you grow. You add shows, markets, crews, service lines. And you keep running the bigger company the same way you ran the small one. On heroics. Just more of them, from more tired people, across more moving parts.

Nobody decides to do this. You just feel the season getting heavier every year. You assume you need better people, or more of them. What’s actually happening is that the way work gets done stopped scaling three years ago, and you’ve been covering the gap with adrenaline.

And the vise is getting tighter. Demand has come all the way back — B2B exhibitions run above pre-pandemic levels and still take the largest share of most companies’ marketing budgets. The labor to deliver it hasn’t kept up. In the Event Industry Council’s 2025 staffing outlook, 89% of event professionals said staffing shortages hurt their ability to deliver events, and hourly turnover in this business runs near 63% a year. The work is there. The people to do it aren’t. And the ones you have keep leaving. That’s the environment that turns heroics from a stopgap into a way of life.

What it actually costs

Heroics don’t show up as a line item. That’s what makes them dangerous. But they cost you in three specific places, and each one hits money.

First, they hide the real cost of the work. When Dana absorbs a broken labor call by working the problem for two hours, that time never gets priced, never gets tracked, never shows up in the job margin. The show looks profitable. It wasn’t. You paid for the fix out of a person instead of out of the P&L. Multiply that across a season and you’ve got margin leaking in a place your accounting will never find, because the cost was paid in effort, not dollars.

Second, heroics cap your growth at the size of your heroes. You can’t take on the next tier — the bigger program, the multi-city rollout, the anchor client — if the honest answer to “can we deliver it?” is “if Dana holds it together.” When you sell past what your heroes can personally carry, the season doesn’t get harder. It breaks. Usually on your best client, at your worst moment, because that’s the job you stretched hardest to win.

Third, and this is the one that ends companies: heroics burn out exactly the people you can’t replace. The reward for saving the show is that you get handed the next crisis. Your best people figure this out. They do the math on another year of being the reason it didn’t fall apart, and they leave — often to a competitor, sometimes to a client. And they leave with the context. All of it. The vendor relationships, the workarounds, the thousand small judgments that never got written down because they lived in one person’s head.

Well, you might be right that Dana is exceptional and you’re lucky to have her. But in my experience, when the whole build depends on one person being exceptional, you don’t have a talent advantage. You have a single point of failure that you’re actively exhausting.

What it looks like when the bill comes due

I’m inside a company right now whose owner wants to sell. My job was to confirm they’re ready. They’re not.

I interviewed fifteen people about how work flows through the business. Two of them even attempted an answer. The rest couldn’t describe it, because there was nothing to describe. The process lived differently inside each person’s head. “Truth” was scattered across the project software, three separate document vaults, a library of recorded calls, and a hundred habits nobody had ever written down. Nothing codified. Nothing systematized. The company ran, and ran well, entirely on people who each held their own private version of how things get done.

To the owner, that feels like a team of committed experts. To a buyer, it reads as risk. And buyers price risk. It shows up as a lower multiple, a bigger earnout, and a longer leash tying the owner to the business for years after the deal. The payout he spent two decades earning starts to look less like a check and more like a new job with a countdown clock.

You may not be selling. Most readers aren’t. But a buyer’s diligence only asks the question your own growth will eventually force anyway: can this business run without the heroes? If the honest answer is no, you don’t own a company yet. You own a very capable group of people who could leave.

Why this industry is built to hide it

The tradeshow and event world rewards heroics more than almost any business I know. The deadlines are immovable. Everyone sees the booth, and nobody sees the process behind it. So the culture runs on war stories. We celebrate the save. We promote the firefighter.

Which means the behavior quietly capping your company is also the behavior you keep rewarding. The person who builds a calm, boring, repeatable process gets less applause than the person who pulls off a miracle. Guess which one your ambitious people learn to become. That’s how heroics stop being a stopgap and turn into the operating model — not because anyone chose it, but because you kept paying for it in praise.

How to tell if you’re running on heroics

You don’t need a consultant to diagnose this. You need to ask three honest questions before next season.

What only lives in one person’s head? Vendor relationships, client quirks, the real install sequence, where the schedule actually has slack. That context is an asset you don’t own. You’re renting it from an employee who can walk.

What breaks the week your best PM is on vacation during move-in? If the answer is “a lot,” you’ve confirmed the dependency. A real operation survives its best person taking a week off in the middle of the season. Most can’t.

And the hard one: which of your top performers is one bad season from leaving? You usually know. You just haven’t wanted to price what their exit would cost you.

Turning heroics into capacity

The fix isn’t to stop being good in a crisis. Crises will still happen — this is live events. The fix is to stop making the crisis the plan.

With the company I just described, that’s where we started. Not with software. With four questions. What roles do we actually have? What is each one for, and how will we measure whether it’s working? How does work really flow through the business, and how should it? And what decisions can each person make on their own to do their job and keep the work moving? Answer those honestly and you have a foundation. Skip them, and every tool you buy just becomes a fifth place the truth gets stored.

From there, get the context out of people’s heads and into something the company owns. The things that only Dana knows — the vendor list with the real contacts, the client-by-client landmines, the sequence a complex install follows when the schedule compresses. If it lives in one skull, it’s a liability, no matter how good that skull is.

Then take the failure modes you already know cold — freight goes sideways, labor falls through, clients change scope late — and build the response before the season forces it, instead of improvising live. You’ve handled each of these dozens of times. Handled means you have the raw material for a process. Write it down. Assign who owns it. Make the second person able to run it without the first.

And build the layer underneath your heroes on purpose. Not by cloning Dana — you can’t. By breaking what she does into pieces other people can own, so the whole thing doesn’t rest on her staying, staying healthy, and staying willing.

Last, put the surge in the number. If your peak requires premium labor, expedited freight, and your best people working past reasonable, that’s a cost of the work. Companies that run on heroics eat it and call it service. Companies that scale charge for it and call it capacity.

You built something real. The season proves it every year. But look hard at how it actually gets delivered, because there’s a difference between a company that performs under pressure and a company that only works under pressure.

So here’s the question worth sitting with before the next season starts: if your two best people didn’t show up for the peak, would you have a capacity problem — or would you have no company?

If you want to find the answer before the season finds it for you, that’s the work I do with owners: mapping where the surge gets absorbed by a person instead of a process, and building the capacity to replace the heroics before they walk out the door. Book a complimentary 30-minute call.