When hosting a conference, it's natural to do some proactive troubleshooting. However, no amount crisis-avoidance planning prepared me for the moment my CEO, Jason Blessing, told me eight days before we were set to host our most important conference of the year that I needed to pivot from an in-person event to online.

Model N Inc., where I'm director of events and field marketing, was scheduled to host its Rainmaker20 user conference at the JW Marriott in Orlando, FL, beginning March 11. For nine months I'd been coordinating speakers, arranging dinners, and contacting sponsors all in preparation to train more than 500 attendees on our revenue-management software. By the start of 2020, everything was shaping up for a great conference and a fantastic year.

And then the coronavirus reared its spiky microscopic head. In February, overseas customers started asking how we were preparing for a possible outbreak. By the end of the month, the trickle of inquiries became a flash flood of emails about health precautions and corporate travel restrictions. I didn't exactly have a pandemic-preparation manual handy, so I started rowing with the oars I had.

I devoured CDC and WHO information and started prepping their recommended protocols. We began sourcing hand sanitizer in previously unimaginable quantities and working with the venue about ways to conduct the conference in the safest way possible. Our team blasted our attendees a survey inquiring whether they'd been to impacted areas, had close contact with anyone who had traveled to one, or planned to visit those regions prior to the conference. Those that answered yes to any of the questions were refunded their money immediately and wished good health.

Then on March 3, eight days prior to the conference, Jason informed me that we were cancelling the in-person event and I needed to pivot to virtual. It was clearly the correct call, but to say I was stunned would be an understatement. Jason immediately let our customers know Model N had made the decision to move the event to a virtual conference, but he didn't put a time frame on when that would take place. That decision fell to me.

Some team members suggested postponing the event a couple months to give us more time to prepare, but I recognized that our speakers had already blocked out time for Rainmaker and that achieving the same slate of presenters in the future could be a monumental challenge. So if this conference was going to happen, it was going to happen in eight days.

Losing no time, we whipped up a list of action items that needed to happen in tandem: cancel contracts with vendors, reconfirm commitments from our speakers, rework the conference agenda, and find an event platform capable of meeting our needs. Essentially we needed to cram nine months of work into a mere week.

I started delegating tasks like I was handing out candy on Halloween. And once everybody's buckets were full, I just kept shoveling. Fortunately my team was already in full-throttle mode for the conference, meaning I didn't have to get the ball rolling – I just needed to push it in a new direction. We contacted all our presenters and let them know that we were moving ahead. As it was, several of the speakers backed out because they weren't comfortable presenting online. (This was new for them too.) Even so, I thankfully managed to secure commitments from the majority of our presenters.

The next step was to come up with a schedule benefitting virtual attendees that were now going to be scattered around the globe instead of all gathered in the same time zone. While the new schedule was getting cobbled together, we scrambled to figure out an event platform. We ended up partnering with GlobalMeet for a lot of reasons, but chief among them was that it was one of the few firms capable of pulling off the conference within our time crunch and budget. By Friday, six days before our launch, we had a final schedule for the event, and on Monday the registration page was up and running.

Our presenters were flung far and wide – another challenge. Model N session leaders were at our headquarters in San Mateo, CA, where we converted several conference rooms into presentation spaces. Our guest speakers would deliver from their home locations, so we had to navigate audio, video, and bandwidth issues. We decided to forego live video because of the time frame and possible production-quality issues, so "live" demos had to be prerecorded and uploaded to the platform.

Of course, we also had to get our speakers familiar with the software. Even though GlobalMeet conducted trainings and run-throughs with every presenter, we knew that session leaders weren't going to be platform experts, but we needed them comfortable enough with the technology's features to deliver quality sessions.

Finally, due to the rapid switch from session rooms to screens, I wanted to make sure any hiccups got resolved as quickly as possible. So I arranged for at least one producer from GlobalMeet, one of our own on-site technicians, and one of our off-site producers to be available for each session. In other words, I had primary, secondary, and tertiary support ready to virtually swoop in if needed and save the day.

Before I even thought to take a breath, eight days had flown by. Our team had made a mad sprint just to arrive at the starting line on time. And we still had the race to run, so we just kept sprinting. On Wednesday, we held advisory meetings and conducted a training academy. Thursday morning kicked off with former astronaut Mike Massimino presenting the keynote address with our CEO, and for the next two days we rolled through our conference sessions. Rainmaker wrapped up Friday evening, our company closed its office, and we've been working from home ever since.

The conference wasn't perfect, but there were several silver linings. One, our attendance was 27-percent higher, in part because of the at-home convenience and in part because it was free this year. (We refunded all in-person registrations.) Two, we'd never recorded the presentations from the in-person events, so now the marketing team is repurposing that content in ways we've never done before. That's something I anticipate us continuing. And three, I got to see what an adaptable team we have. It's still hard to believe we managed it all. I'm just happy we had eight days to pull it off because seven would have been a bit of a challenge.