A roadshow is a schedule with no slack in it, driven by people who cannot afford to be lost. Eight meetings across three cities in three days will survive one thing going wrong and rarely two, which is why the ground transport is either invisible or the reason the whole thing unravels. There is very little middle ground.
This page explains what the arrangement looks like from the inside: what happens when you send the itinerary over, what the chauffeur does before the first morning, how the plan is adjusted while you are in a meeting, and where the legal limits on consecutive driving days sit. It is written as much for the assistant organising it as for the person travelling.
Handing over the itinerary
Send the schedule in whatever form it exists, including the messy version. A spreadsheet with half the addresses missing is more useful than a tidy summary, because it shows where the uncertainty actually is. What we then work out is which appointments are fixed, which have flexibility, and where the day has no recovery time at all. That last category is the one we will come back to you about.
The other early question is who is travelling on each leg. Roadshows rarely carry the same people all day: a local colleague joins for two meetings, someone flies out after lunch, a second party arrives on day two. Knowing that decides the vehicle, and it decides whether one car covers the programme or whether a second is needed for part of it.
- The full schedule, including the entries that are still uncertain
- Building names as well as postcodes, which frequently disagree
- Which appointments are immovable and which have flexibility
- Who travels on each leg, and where people join or leave
- Any material or equipment that must stay with the party
- Hotels for each night, since they shape the first and last runs
- Who else should sit in the messaging thread
Preparation before the first morning
Ahead of day one the chauffeur reads the whole itinerary rather than the first entry. He works out where each building's entrance actually is, which of them have loading restrictions, where a car can legally stand outside each one, and which of the transitions between meetings is the tightest. On a city programme that is often the difference between arriving at the door and arriving in the vicinity.
Where a programme covers several cities, the route between them is planned around the hour rather than the map. Manchester to Leeds at half past four is a very different proposition from the same run at eleven in the morning, and a schedule that assumes otherwise fails on the first afternoon. Where the timings do not work, we will say so before the programme starts rather than demonstrate it on the day.
How a day actually runs
The car is assigned to your party for the whole programme, which changes the texture of the day more than anything else. Materials, coats, cases and equipment stay in the boot from the first morning to the last evening. Nobody carries a sample case into a reception, and nobody has to think about where anything is. It sounds like a small thing and it is not.
Between appointments the chauffeur holds nearby rather than returning to a base. When a meeting finishes he is at the door within a few minutes of a message, and if you come out twenty minutes early that works exactly as well as coming out twenty minutes late. He takes his own breaks while you are inside buildings, which is the only sensible way to run a day of this shape.
You will not be asked to explain an address twice. The fifth appointment is already known before you reach the second, which sounds minor until you have spent a day repeating postcodes into a phone between meetings. On a three-city programme it saves an hour of small, tiring attention that would be far better spent on the meetings themselves.
Managing overruns while they happen
Meetings run over. The useful thing is not preventing it but knowing immediately what it costs. Your chauffeur knows where the slack sits in the rest of the day, so when a session runs fifteen minutes long he can tell you straight away whether the next appointment still works, whether the one after that is now at risk, and what the options are.
Where the day genuinely cannot recover, we would rather raise it at eleven in the morning than at four in the afternoon. Usually there are two or three real options rather than one, and presenting those is more useful than reporting the problem. Sometimes the answer is reordering two stops; sometimes it is a message to the last appointment of the day.
- A running assessment of which appointments still work after each overrun
- Reordering nearby stops where the geography allows it
- Advance warning to the next host, if you want it sent
- Honest notice when the last appointment of the day is no longer realistic
- Alternative routes when an incident closes a motorway between cities
- A note of where the day recovered, so tomorrow's plan is more accurate
Evenings, rest and the chauffeur rota
Consecutive long days are governed by driving-hours rules, and on a demanding programme those rules will bite. Where they do, we plan a rota openly and tell you exactly where the handover falls rather than quietly stretching one person to the edge of what is legal. Continuity is genuinely valuable on a roadshow, so we protect it where we can and are honest when we cannot.
Evening work is part of the programme rather than an extra. Dinners, drinks and a late return to a hotel are normal, and the plan accounts for them from the start. Where the programme includes an overnight away from the chauffeur's base, accommodation for him is arranged and set out plainly in the quotation rather than appearing later. It is an ordinary part of a multi-day programme rather than an extra.
One thread, and who sits in it
Everything runs through a single conversation that can include the traveller, the assistant, the organiser and the chauffeur. That structure matters more than it sounds. A message about a room running late reaches the car directly instead of travelling through two offices, and everybody sees the same version of the schedule at the same moment. Version control on a moving itinerary is worth considerably more than it sounds.
It also means that when the itinerary changes, which it does on almost every programme, the change is made once and seen by everyone. On a schedule with eight meetings across three cities, that single detail is frequently the difference between a day that absorbs a problem and one that spends the afternoon recovering from it. Most programmes contain at least one such moment.
