In late January, a nor’easter dropped more than 17 inches of snow on Boston in under 24 hours — grounding flights, closing roads, and threatening to unravel a major corporate event that was set to open Wednesday morning.
It didn’t.
What happened between the initial forecast being released and opening doors is a case study in what contingency planning looks like when the stakes are real.
The load-in for a client’s event was scheduled for Monday, January 26th. By Wednesday the 21st, the storm was tracking bigger than expected. That’s when Cramer’s production team started its first daily emergency operations meeting; accounts, technical direction, production, and warehouse operations, all in the same room, every day — and sometimes several times a day — tracking the storm in real time.
By Thursday, logistic coordinators were already trying to move shift team travel from Sunday to Saturday. When that didn’t clear scheduling conflicts, the team shifted to a harder question: what happens if none of them make it?
“We outsource because we want the best of the best,” said Andrew Underwood, Senior Technical Director at Cramer. “But there was a very realistic point where we could not confirm that there was going to be qualified leads to operate the show.”
That question — faced honestly and early — is what made the difference.
Rather than hope the storm would cooperate, the team built a contingency around every department. A local LED tech was sourced through a vendor relationship. Another audio contact on-site in Connecticut was put on standby. Full time Cramer Technical Directors were positioned to step into lead video roles if needed. All vendor trucks — lighting, rigging, staging — were rerouted to a Saturday load-in so gear was inside the venue before the first flake fell.
“We came up with a plan for every single role,” Underwood said. “We knew walking in, we had a backup plan in every department.”
The strategy was simple in concept and complex in execution: get the equipment in early, push crew calls to later in the day once the roads had cleared and prioritize the safety of our people, rather than fight the harsh blizzard conditions.
By the time Sunday’s storm passed, the team had a clear picture: most of the traveling crew wouldn’t land until 8:00–11:00 PM at the earliest — too late to contribute to a full load-in day. One couldn’t get out at all.
The team adapted in real time. Roles were reassigned across video, audio, and LED, with Cramer personnel stepping into every open seat — a direct advantage of having deep technical and production talent under one roof. On another front, an audio lead based in nearby Connecticut was booked on standby to complete setup — not as a last resort, but as a trusted operator capable of running the show if it came to that. When the original audio lead finally landed at 2:00 AM, the groundwork was already done. No scrambling on cables and connections. Just straight to sound check. By the time Tuesday’s rehearsal started, every position was covered. Not per the original plan, but ready.
None of this was improvised. It was the result of years of building the kind of team where, as Underwood puts it, most people can “sit in most of the seats and operate fairly competently.”
That attention to detail matters precisely because it’s invisible until it isn’t.
“If we’ve done our job right, no one sees any of it,” he said. “Even folks at Cramer — unless you’re in the trenches building the event, coordinating logistics or working closely with client on it. The best part about these stories is if we’ve done our job correctly, you would have no way of knowing that anything out of the ordinary took place.”
That’s not luck. It’s organizational design. The best people at Cramer, in Underwood’s framing, aren’t defined by title or role — they’re defined by attitude: ego off, sleeves up, same goal.
“Give a damn, get it done. No questions asked.”
There’s a sign above Underwood’s workstation and on the road workbox: Failure is always an option. Not as a warning — as a reminder.
“It’s not pessimistic,” he said. “It’s reality. What we do, at the end of the day, is we’re really good at not letting things fail.”
That philosophy shows up in the small things too — redundant projection systems that rarely get used, backup operators who are always on hold, daily standups that happen whether the forecast is clear or catastrophic. The client didn’t expose a weakness in Cramer’s process. It confirmed one that was already there.
“It is just pure vindication for this is why we do what we do the way we do. Because when everything does go wrong — we’re ready for it.”
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