Most events that go wrong did not go wrong on the day. They went wrong in week three, when a decision got deferred and never came back. This checklist is ordered the way the work actually arrives, not the way it looks tidy on paper.
Twelve weeks out: decide what this is
Write one sentence describing who the event is for and what they get. If you cannot write it, you cannot brief a designer, a sponsor or a vendor, and every later decision will wobble.
Set the budget ceiling now, before you fall in love with a venue. Work backwards: the number of tickets you can genuinely sell, times the price your audience will genuinely pay, minus a twenty percent margin for the things you have not thought of yet.
Ten weeks out: venue and date
Check your date against the Lagos calendar before you commit. A clash with a major concert, a public holiday weekend or a fixture people care about will cost you more attendance than any marketing spend can recover.
Visit the venue in person, at the same time of day your event will run. Traffic at 4pm on a Friday tells you something the site plan never will. Confirm power, generator capacity and what happens when the grid drops mid set.
What to get in writing
Load-in and load-out times, the deposit and refund terms, the noise curfew, and exactly which staff the venue provides versus which you must bring. Verbal agreements about "our guys will help" evaporate on the night.
Eight weeks out: permits and paperwork
Depending on the venue and the size of the crowd you may need clearance from the local government, the police for crowd control, and a licence if you are playing recorded music publicly. Start early. These offices do not move at your pace.
Six weeks out: open ticket sales
Do not wait until everything is finalised. Sales tell you whether your pricing and your positioning are right while you still have time to change them. Open with an early bird tier and a real closing date.
Four weeks out: vendors locked
Sound, lighting, catering, security, cleaning. Get a named contact and a phone number for each, and put every one of them in a single group chat a week before the event so nobody is meeting for the first time at load-in.
One week out: the run of show
Write a minute-by-minute document from doors to close. Who opens the gate, who briefs the scanners, when the sound check ends, when the first act walks on, who makes the call if a slot overruns. Share it with everyone who has a job on the day.
On the day
Arrive before your earliest vendor. Test the scanning on the real network at the real door. Walk the queue route yourself. Then hand the run of show to someone else and let them run it, so you are free to handle the thing that goes wrong instead of the ten things that do not.