Large Festival Planning

Shaky Knees 24 Retrospective

Phew. Shaky Knees 2024 is finally in the books! After a lot of prep work, sweat, and last-minute adjustments, I can look back on the weekend and pinpoint what did and didn't work for the next big festival.

- Gardner Davis

Inventory Management & Dry Ice

1. We used a 26-foot box truck to store 500 cases of pops across 4 dry ice bins, along with approximately 780 lbs of dry ice. I tried to over-order, but I could have easily ordered another 100 lbs, as this amount was insufficient for keeping both the pops frozen and the carts stocked with the necessary amount of dry ice.
2. We pre-packed the dry ice bins Thursday evening at P10 warehouse, loaded them into the box truck, and took the truck to KOP HQ that evening.
3. Bins were split between creamy & fruity insofar as was possible when packing them from the pallets at the P10 warehouse. We covered the bottom of the bin with a layer of dry ice, stacked the pops on top - keeping like flavors together - and placed another layer of dry ice on top of the pops, topping it all off with 2 blankets before securing the lid.
4. Friday morning at 8AM we took the box truck over to the festival grounds, where we had already arranged with the organizer to park the truck on-site for the weekend. They handed out parking passes at the pre-event meeting that was kept on the truck’s dash.
5. Having a central access point on-site for pop storage and restocking was invaluable. The only hiccup was on Sunday night, we discovered the truck’s battery had died over the weekend. We then had to wait for vendors next to us to pull out their trailer so we could bring a pickup truck close enough to the box truck’s battery to run jumper cables. We unpacked the carts, chalkboards, and trash from the box truck when we got back to HQ. Monday morning we returned the truck to P10, and received pop credits for the leftover pops

Staffing & Scheduling with Slingers and Runners:

1. We operated at 4 locations within the festival grounds, each manned by a slinger and supported by 1-2 runners as well as Ty and myself. Each station had 2 carts, 1 fruity and 1 creamy. We also had 2-3 additional carts used exclusively for running pops to refill the sales stations.
2. You can see on this map where each cart was located and where they were in relation to where we parked the truck for the weekend. The best-performing carts were “2” and “3”, at the intersection and at the Peachtree stage.
3. We utilized split shifts to prevent burnout and exhaustion. However, the transition between shifts caused some logistical challenges with our limited number of bands. Ty ended up running back and forth a lot when shifts switched over to make sure everyone was granted entry.
   1. Each day, the gates opened at 11:30AM. I made sure slingers arrived at the festival site no later than 10AM to ensure that carts were packed & at the serving locations on time.
4. Shifts had 30 minutes to an hour of overlap time to ensure a smooth transition from opening slingers to closing slingers. 
   1. Friday shifts began earlier as we had to bring in the box truck before 10am. Shifts that day were from 8:30AM- 3PM and the closing shift was from 2:30PM-11PM, but the shifts actually ran until 12:15-12:30 as we sold pops until the headliner was done at 11pm.
      Saturday and Sunday openers were from 10am-4pm and closers were from 3-11, but on Saturday they went until midnight, and on Sunday they ended closer to 11:30. However, we were greatly delayed in getting the box truck out as we had to wait on our neighboring vendor to leave before we could jump the battery. We finally got back to HQ around 1 am.

Areas of Improvement:

• Band Management/Shift Transitions

1. The handover process between openers and closers was hindered by the need to collect bands from scattered locations across the festival. Despite scheduling overlap time, this did slow down operations. 

• Dry Ice & Pop temperature

1. Despite our best efforts, some pops simply were too cold. There were at least two instances of the dry ice causing pops to stick to tongues & lips. Given the high volume of pops we were moving per day, limiting our inventory within the carts by using cold plates was not an option, so we had to verbally warn customers to let pops warm up a bit before consumption, which was not ideal.

• Too Many Flavors

1. A wide array of pop flavors lead to confusion and logistical difficulties during restocking, which caused some delays. Limiting flavor options to 6 (3 fruity, 3 creamy) per cart would streamline our operations without sacrificing flavor variety.

Miscellaneous notes:

Tips: As we used Spectrum’s Point of Sale, there was no way to attribute sales to slingers, and therefore attribute tips in a precise manner as we could’ve had we used goodfynd. A formulaic approach, which we employ for distributing catering tips, was adopted to evenly distribute tips among staff based on their shifts worked.

For example:

Slinger A worked 4 shifts over the weekend. In total, there were 40 shifts for the whole team. 4/40 = 0.1. That slinger then earns 1/10th of the tip pool.

Weather: Unfortunately, even our brightest minds at KOP still have not invented ways to stop it from raining when pop sales are going great. In preparation, I got ponchos for everyone, and the carts did a decent job of protecting the point of sale that was provided by Spectrum when the rain started to really come down.

One issue that popped up was carts flooding from rain. Some of our lids were a little loose or ill-fitting, and that allowed rain water into the carts.
This caused some of the pops to start melting. We tossed some dry ice in empty carts and ran them to the site where carts were flooding, then transferred pops from the flooding cart to the empty, dry cart.

Thankfully we had capable, quick-thinking folks on site and did not suffer a great loss of inventory, but I definitely want to look at repairing our lids to prevent this from happening in the future.