Roadshow Logistics Checklist

The instinct is to book meetings as counterparties offer them and then hope the day joins up. It rarely does. Lay the confirmed meetings on a map before you accept the times, and cluster them: the City in one block, the West End in another, Canary Wharf as its own half day rather than a stop between two others. A single badly placed meeting can cost ninety minutes.

The same logic applies across a multi-city week. Two cities in a day is workable if the meetings sit near the stations and the middle of the day is protected. Three is usually a fiction. Decide the geography first, then negotiate the times around it, rather than accepting every slot offered. Counterparties are far more flexible about time than they are about date.

Every roadshow schedule contains a lie about how long meetings take. An hour in the diary is seventy minutes in the room, plus five minutes of goodbyes at the lift, plus the security desk on the way out. Multiply that by six and the day has lost an hour it never had. Build the buffer where it will actually be used rather than spreading it evenly across the morning.

The useful rule is to protect the immovable points and let the flexible ones compress. If the last meeting is with the most important client and the train is at six, the slack belongs in the afternoon rather than the morning. And a genuine gap somewhere in the middle — twenty minutes with the car parked and nobody expecting anything — is worth more to the day than one extra meeting.

A chauffeur who knows only the next address is a taxi. A chauffeur who has the whole day in front of them can position the car, find the right entrance while you are still inside, and tell you honestly whether the next leg is twelve minutes or thirty. Send the full itinerary rather than releasing it one stop at a time. It changes what they are able to do for you.

Include the things that are not addresses. Which meetings might overrun. Who is joining and leaving during the day. Where the car can wait near each building. Whether anyone needs to make a confidential call between stops. A professional chauffeur uses all of it, and none of it needs to include what the meetings are actually about. Discretion is assumed in both directions.

Six meetings is a physically demanding day, and people perform worse at the end of it than at the beginning through nothing but fatigue and low blood sugar. Water in the car, a proper break somewhere in the middle and food that is not a sandwich eaten in traffic all pay for themselves in the last two meetings. It is the simplest performance improvement available to any schedule.

It matters more when the team includes people who have flown in that morning. Jet lag, an early start and an unfamiliar city are a poor combination, and the fix is a schedule that starts slightly later and a car quiet enough to close your eyes in. Ask the visiting team what time they actually landed before you finalise anything, rather than after the itinerary has gone out.

Assume it will. The question is whether the slip is noticed at meeting two or meeting five. Agree in advance who decides what gets cut, shortened or moved, and make sure that person is on the message thread with the chauffeur rather than sitting in the meeting that is overrunning. Decisions made forty minutes late are barely decisions. Someone outside the room has to be watching the clock.

Have the fallback ready rather than inventing it. Which meeting can become a call. Which can move to tomorrow morning. Which one you will simply arrive late for, having sent a message. And what the true last-possible departure is for the train or the flight, because that number is the one everything else has to respect. Written down beforehand, it takes seconds to act on.