It can pay off for all sides to book Polish event technicians and stagehands via a crewing company. How do your company and your people benefit?
You already know from talking to us or from our website that crewing can make your work easier.
Still you’re wondering why you shouldn’t use a local crewing company and instead hire a crew from Poland that has to travel hundreds of kilometres to get to you.
The answer: Booking a Polish crew pays off for you and your employees in many ways – Read on to find out the three most important benefits!
1.Quality & reliability: Get a crew that has proven themselves all over
Many of our clients have had bad experiences with local stagehands or personnel service providers, especially after the pandemic. While they tell us about great loyal freelancers they work with for years, we also hear that additional hands often show up with too little experience to get the job done, need to be held by the hand, or lack motivation and ‘take more breaks for smoking than they actually work’. This can put your project at risk and strains your nerves. Add to this that your employees feel let down by the crew you hired to support them, and you have a reason to look for someone more reliable – look east!
If you hire a crewing company like BWS from Poland, you can be sure that you will get specialists who have proven themselves all over on Polish ground and that we guarantee you can be counted on. Our guys are the ones who started years ago in the event industry, putting fences together in the mud and carrying cases for more than 12 hours per day for very little money. They stayed with the job because they love the grind and the industry and became better and better at what they do.
Many of these industry veterans are our most trusted technicians and crew chiefs now, and they have been to many jobs in the west, working at fair grounds and other events all over Germany, and Austria. While they stuck with the job because of their passion and getting-sh*t-done attitude, today, they stick with us because we value their persistence and the skills they have acquired – and because the conditions are much better for them now: They can develop their skills at BWS, get good working conditions, and feel well-rewarded through our wage system that we built to ensure our guys get paid fairly for the work they do and their skillset – especially working abroad (see part II).
So if you get a crew from BWS, you won’t just get a random guy from the street. For each crew member, we go through an evaluation process to decide if we allow them to sign up in our system for jobs outside of Poland or not. Only our most trusted and skilled specialists can sign up for work abroad, so that we can guarantee our clients that the crew they ordered will not let them down. The feedback we receive from our partners in Germany or Austria proves that this approach works well for them, that our guys do an outstanding job, and that their own teams are relieved to finally get support that they can rely on.
2.Value for money: Get a smaller crew that gets more done
Our crews consist of trusted specialists that we have picked as per your requirements, who travel to you from Kraków. This means that we are not always the cheapest option, as our guys always earn good money (as specialists with a strong skillset much more), get paid half a wage for travel and rest days, have to travel several hundred kilometres and also have to be accommodated.
However, as you read in point 1 above, you can count on our crews and their skillsets – up until the point that our clients started to order less people, because they found out that a handful of BWS workers can get more done than a larger number of random guys. If, for example, our riggers in Stuttgart are ‘under the ceiling just two minutes after the shift starts’ (as one of our main partners told us), and get the job done in less time than planned, that leads to our partners ordering smaller crews – e.g. 4 instead of 6 riggers – and save costs while still getting the job done.
In this way, our clients have less daily wages to cover, which pays off for them in the long-run. And there are also other approaches we use to make the side costs melt away: When our crews travel together in a minibus from our fleet or in a BWS car, the travel costs are spread over 4-8 people. That is usually cheaper than having various freelancers travel within your country and you save time, because you only need to make one order and don’t have to talk to a number of people and settle the details with every single one of them – more on that in point 3!
3.Additional capacities: Save time and worries and expand your business through crewing
Are you worried about taking on additional projects because you fear that a freelancer might not show up or call in sick and you don’t have a replacement? Maybe you want to expand your business but you are not sure if you have the capacities for that in your current setup?
When you get a crew from us, you can be sure that our guys will be there and ready for the job. In 2023, only 35 times one of our guys didn’t show up for his shift – out of almost 10,000 shifts! That is less than 0.4% of guys not showing up at the meeting point, and the number drops even lower for jobs abroad.
Not showing up at a job is a rare thing at BWS, because it impacts the worker’s rating and there is a fine to be paid. In addition, we won’t clear anybody in the system who is not reliable for jobs abroad, and might not clear them at all for any jobs if there was no good reason not showing up – Hire slow, fire fast!
But what about someone getting sick? Thanks to our onSinch database, we get instantly notified if somebody signs out of a shift. Also, the spot will become available for other guys in the system. With around 1000 active BWS’ers, often the right guy signs up without us having to move a finger.
What does that mean for you? That it’s not on you anymore to find replacements for your crew. You don’t have to worry about it, because we take pride in sorting these issues out for you before the job. There is a good chance you won’t even notice.
Knowing that you are covered and you will get the crew you need no matter what, you can focus on your business and give your own team new challenges. Now your employees can concentrate on their core responsibilities and on getting better at their jobs, while they also have more time available for new projects. This should be a boost to their motivation, and for the growth of your business – From our own experience over the last years we can say that nothing makes it easier to expand your business than having happy employees who are excited to get to work.
So if you have a new project coming up but you are still wondering if you should accept it or not, then give us a call, get a crew you can trust, and take on new challenges for your business!
Now that you know what you can gain from working with a Polish crewing company like BWS, you might be curious what our side of the deal looks like. Why do we and our crews want to work with you? Find out in a few days’ time in part II of this article. If you don’t want to wait that long, just reach out and ask us yourself!
