AV & LED Wall Support Checklist: 20 Things to Confirm Before Your Event

What this AV & LED wall support checklist is for

LED video walls, displays, sound systems and technicians for stalls, stages and conferences.

There are two kinds of checklist. One is a list of topics, which makes everybody feel organised and catches nothing. The other states what has to be true and what happens if it is not. This is the second kind, which is why each line is a sentence rather than a heading.

Work the phases in order, and do not let enthusiasm start one early. A stand that is late almost never got slow in the workshop — it got started twice, because the phase it depended on had not actually closed when the next one began.

This list is written for event managers, corporate communication teams and agencies running conferences, launches, dealer meets and public shows. Who holds the pen changes from project to project — a marketing head, a procurement team, an agency producer — but the sequence does not. Give it one owner on your side and one named project manager on the build side, and review a single shared copy weekly rather than two versions drifting apart in two inboxes.

Stage, owner, deadline

Dates slip because stages have no owner, not because people are careless. The table below is the spine of the project: one line per stage, one accountable party, and a deadline expressed in weeks before the show so that it survives a change of date. If the show moves, you move the column rather than rewriting the logic.

The useful column is the right-hand one. It tells you which slips are survivable and which are not, and the answer is rarely intuitive: the glamorous decisions are usually floatable, while the paperwork is what everything else is standing on.

Phase 1 — brief and budget

This is the cheapest phase to get right and by far the most expensive to get wrong, because everything downstream inherits it. A brief is not a creative document; it is a constraints document. Area, open sides, height limit, access hours, budget band, and the one visitor action the stand exists to produce.

An experience strong enough that guests film and share it, with a clear brand moment and a call to action timed in the show is the outcome worth writing down before anybody opens a drawing. Teams that skip that sentence end up approving the stand they liked the look of rather than the stand that does the job, and the gap only becomes obvious on the second afternoon of the show.

• The single visitor action that matters most: a demo, a meeting, a sample or a signature — stands designed around three competing actions deliver none of them well
• Budget band and exactly what it has to cover — a figure that silently excludes transport, installation, dismantle and taxes is not a budget, it is a deposit
• Brand assets at print resolution, with logo variants and Pantone or CMYK references — a low-resolution logo pulled off a website is the most common reprint there is
• One named owner for this checklist on your side, with the authority to decide rather than only to report
• Who will physically staff the stand, and whether they are free every show day — a roster agreed in week one avoids a stand run by whoever happened to be available
• Which competitors are exhibiting, and roughly where — position changes what your stand has to do to be noticed from the aisle
• Maximum height, rigging rules and setback from the aisle, in writing from the organiser — a design drawn above the limit is a design that gets rejected after you have paid for it
• Build-up, show and dismantle dates with the access hours attached — your usable build time is set by the organiser, not by your plan, and night-shift labour is priced differently

Phase 2 — signing off the design properly

Sign-off means two separate things and most exhibitors do only the first. The visual sign-off says the stand looks right. The technical sign-off says the stand can be built, powered, carried, approved and dismantled. A project that has had only the visual sign-off is not ready for production, however enthusiastic the approving email was.

Changes at this stage are free. Changes after production release are paid for in material, labour and time. Changes during build-up are paid for at night-shift rates using whatever material happens to be in the van. The entire value of this phase is that it is the last moment where "actually, can we move the counter" costs nothing at all.

• Lighting count and position marked on the plan — hall lighting is designed for circulation, not for your product, and an unlit stand reads as under-funded whatever the joinery cost
• A deliberate decision about what the stand does not do, written down, so scope does not grow quietly through the approval chain
• Materials and finishes named with codes: laminate, veneer, paint, acrylic, fabric, metal. A finish schedule is what stops the built stand drifting from the approved visual
• Storage checked against what you are genuinely bringing — the standard allowance is 10% of the area up to 18 sq.m and 15% above it, and stock that does not fit ends up stacked in front of buyers
• Electrical load added up circuit by circuit and declared to the organiser, with the point of supply located on the plan
• Sightlines tested from the two or three aisles that actually feed your stand, rather than from the one the render was drawn in
• Every graphic panel checked for text size and safe margins, because type cropped at a panel join cannot be fixed at the venue
• The hero product's position fixed first, with everything else arranged around it rather than the other way round

Dispatch is a decision, not a date.

Phase 3 — the queues that decide your date

The work here is mostly waiting, and waiting is the hardest thing to manage because it generates no alarm. Submit early, chase deliberately, and treat every outstanding approval as a stopped production line rather than as an administrative loose end.

Treat the organiser's rulebook as a design input rather than a formality. Height limits, rigging permissions, fire ratings, floor loading, setback and the dismantle window are not negotiable on site, and a resubmission after a rejected drawing costs a working week that nobody has budgeted for.

• The exhibitor manual read by somebody rather than filed by everybody — most of what goes wrong on site was written down in it months earlier
• A structural engineer's certificate wherever there is a double-decker, a hanging structure, a staircase or a raised platform that carries people
• The written scope frozen and signed line by line, so that what the workshop builds and what you believe you ordered are demonstrably the same list
• Drawings submitted in the organiser's required format, and the stamped approval received back — a submission is not an approval, and the gap between them is a queue you share with the whole hall
• Insurance and public liability cover in place for the build crew and the show days, in the name the organiser asks for
• Floor loading checked against the hall's limit for anything heavy — a machine, a vehicle, a water feature or a fully stocked store
• Payment milestones aligned to the production schedule, so finished work is never held at a workshop over an invoice during the last fortnight
• Print-ready artwork released at final dimensions with bleed, to a named date — "coming shortly" is not a date and cannot be scheduled against

AV & LED Wall Support scope: the lines that must be in your order

Everything in the order should be a line with a quantity, a material and a finish against it. A lump sum hides the two failures that cost real money: an item you are paying for twice because two suppliers both allowed for it, and an item nobody has quoted because each assumed the other had.

Confirm the service scope first, then go hunting for the omissions. Freight, crew, strike and tax between them account for most of the gap between two quotes that look like they describe the same stand.

• Indoor P2.5–P3.9 LED walls — write down who supplies it and who installs it; the items that go missing are always the ones both sides assumed the other was bringing
• Touchscreens and kiosks — check it against the venue's rules on height, load and fire rating before it is produced rather than after it is standing in the hall
• PA systems and mics — ask what happens if it fails on day one — whether a spare exists, and who is carrying it
• On-site AV technicians — confirm it is priced inside the figure you are comparing, rather than noted as available on request
• Installation, supervision and the crew size that will genuinely be on site, not a nominal figure
• GST, organiser charges and any venue levy, shown on their own lines rather than folded into the build
• Dismantle and clearance inside the organiser's window, including removal of waste from the hall
• Electrical fittings, distribution and the labour to connect them, which are frequently a separate trade and a separate bill
• Storage of reusable elements between shows, and who pays for it

Phase 4 — pre-dispatch, the last cheap fix

For AV, stage and show work the pre-dispatch check is a kit prep followed by a technical rehearsal, and the two are not interchangeable. Every screen, projector, media server, mixer, microphone and cable is powered up, loaded with your actual content at the actual resolution, run from the actual cue sheet, and then packed alongside the spare that will save the show. Equipment that has only been checked on a packing list has not been checked.

Use one question as the gate: is this good enough to show a customer today? Not good enough to finish on site, not good enough with a bit of touching up — good enough now. Anything less and the load stays where it is, because site time is the most expensive time there is.

• A copy of the packing list held by the exhibitor too, so a missing crate can be identified by somebody other than the person who mislaid it
• Graphics checked against the final approved artwork file, not against the version that was approved three revisions ago
• The load secured and sheeted for the actual journey, since a scratched laminate costs far more to repair on site than it did to make
• Fixings, spare laminate, touch-up paint, spare lamps, cable and tools packed deliberately rather than remembered at the last minute
• Stock, samples and giveaways counted and packed separately from the build, with their own list and their own owner
• A named person travelling with the load who has the authority to decide if something goes wrong on the road
• Snag list raised, closed and then re-walked. A snag list that is raised and hoped about is a snag list that travels with the truck
• Panel sizes checked against the hall's door and lift dimensions, because a wall that cannot get in is not a wall

Phase 5 — the build-up sequence

Guard the technical run the way you would guard the show itself. Rigging inspections, power availability and the hall's own crew all sit outside your control, so build the load-in with slack ahead of the rehearsal rather than after it. A simple show that has been run once beats an ambitious one that has only been described.

Everything in the table below is an ordering decision rather than a quality decision. Each row is finished before the next one starts, and the cost of getting the order wrong is in the final column. None of those costs are theoretical; they are the standard way a build-up goes late.

Phase 6 — keeping the stand working

The hard part of show days is not effort but repetition. The same few checks every morning, by one named person, is what keeps a stand looking like its first day for the whole run.

Work the roster from the area: one person per 9 sq.m, never fewer than two. That is about 4 on a 36 sq.m stand and 8 on a 72 sq.m one. Too few and ready buyers walk away unserved; too many and a browser will not step in at all.

• Food and water arranged off the stand, because eating on the stand ends more conversations than it starts
• A named person responsible for the stand at every moment, including lunch, the organiser's awards and the final hour of the last day
• Two or three agreed qualifying questions, so a thirty-second conversation separates a buyer from a bag collector without anybody being rude
• A headline message legible from the aisle. If a passing visitor cannot tell what you sell in three seconds, the stand is not working however good the joinery is
• A spare of everything that can fail in public: lamp, remote, cable, demo unit, printed brochure
• Phones charged and out of hands. Staff looking at phones is the most reliable way to make a busy stand look empty
• The stand cleaned and reset every morning — fingerprints on an acrylic panel are visible from the aisle and read as neglect
• A staff roster with real breaks written into it. A tired team on day three is the actual reason conversion falls away, not the design

Phase 7 — taking it down, and cashing it in

Dismantle is agreed before build-up or it is not really agreed at all. Organisers run a hard clearance deadline and charge for overstay, venues withhold deposits, and the crew who built your stand are by then building somebody else's in another hall. Decide in advance what is coming back, what is being scrapped, who is driving it and where it is going.

Everything before this phase was spent buying conversations. This is the phase that turns them into anything at all. Leads left untouched for a fortnight are indistinguishable from leads you never collected, and the whole cost of the show sits behind them.

• Reusable elements — frames, graphics, counters, furniture, screens — inventoried and labelled as they come out, because unlabelled stock is stock you will rebuild next time
• A written list of what returns to storage, what is scrapped, and what is couriered to whom
• A short post-show note on what to change: where visitors stopped, what they asked for that you did not have, and which element earned its cost
• Dismantle slot, crew and vehicle booked before build-up begins, not negotiated during the last hour of the show
• Graphics kept flat and dry if the artwork will be reused, and scrapped deliberately if it will not
• Photographs taken on the first morning before the crowd arrives — an empty, lit, clean stand is the only usable image you are going to get all week
• Waste removed rather than left in the aisle, because clearance charges are billed to whoever the organiser can identify
• Products and samples packed by the people who own them, before a crew starts dismantling around them

The ways this goes wrong anyway

Three failure modes, in order of damage: no owner, two copies, and ticks given for intention rather than evidence. The last one is the one that gets all the way to the venue before anybody notices.

Under-specified equipment that looks dull in a bright hall. No rehearsal or technical run before doors open. Both are procurement questions rather than design ones, and both are answered the same way: ask who physically does the work, in which workshop, with which crew, before you compare any prices.

• No rehearsal or technical run before doors open
• Missing backup power or spare units
• Content not built for the actual screen or surface size
• Under-specified equipment that looks dull in a bright hall
• Two copies of the checklist, one with the exhibitor and one with the vendor, quietly diverging from about week three onward
• A checklist reviewed only after something has gone wrong, which makes it a post-mortem rather than a plan
• Items ticked on intention rather than evidence — ask for a photograph, a certificate or a signed list instead of a reassurance
• Progress measured by how much has been done rather than by what is now unblocked
• Optimism about transit time, which is the one variable nobody controls and everybody underestimates

Get the list, and one person to run it

Send the show, the city, the dates, the area, the open sides and a couple of references. We come back with a concept, an itemised scope for AV & LED wall support and this checklist carrying your actual deadlines, normally inside two days.

We design free with every confirmed fabrication order, fabricate in our own workshops, prepare the organiser drawings and approvals, and put one project manager on the job from brief through to dismantle — which is the only reliable way a list like this gets closed rather than filed.