Fair Systems That Work

09/03/2026

Woohooo

09/02/2026

I had a consulting call yesterday with the president of an Ag Society.... he wants to quit. 💔
Read the comments...

08/21/2026

Sunday night, the grandstand's quiet, the banners are coming down, and the kids are still going.

Coiling ropes.
Folding signs.
Carrying stuff way too big for them with the kind of concentration only an eight-year-old can manage.

Tired. Giddy.

Already learning how the whole thing goes back together.

Sweet moment, right?

It is. It's also a test.

I call it the Handover Test.

Here's the problem.

What they're learning tonight is where things go.

What they're not learning is why, or what happens when something goes wrong.

That part never made it out of one person's head.

They carry the props. They don't get the playbook.

Then that volunteer steps back, and it's not just a pair of hands you lost. It's the memory of the whole operation.

I know what you're thinking. "They're just helping pack up, we'll teach them properly next year."

That's the sentence that turns into next year's paperwork avalanche.

The one where a tired board rebuilds the whole thing from scratch, in April, again.

The Complete Fair System Binder is what stops that. Roles, processes, checklists, handovers, all in one place, so the next generation doesn't just carry the ropes.

They learn the ropes.

It took my fair (and me) years to get this right. Until a new admin came in and finally wrote it all down.

Most boards don't have years, or that admin.

So I built what she built, for everyone else.

Head to my website for the links to my templates!

https://www.fairsystemsthatwork.com/templates

08/20/2026

Every fair ends the same way.
The truck's half-loaded, everyone's exhausted, and that's when the real talk happens.

"The radios died at gate three."
"We never did fix that signage."
"Did anyone actually pay that vendor?"

Then everyone goes home.
Nobody writes it down.
Next year, same thing breaks.

I built a Fair Audit Checklist for exactly this.
A start to looking, not to fault but to catch.

Grounds, staffing, communication, safety, vendors, finance, board debrief.

Not "clean the light fixtures." The stuff that actually goes sideways.

What's the one thing from this season everyone complained about but nobody wrote down?

08/17/2026

I was mortified when I heard this.

Not because it was rare. Because it wasn't.

I got hired for mediation at two different fairs this week.

Two separate boards.
Two separate messes.
Same root cause underneath both.

Here's what's been landing on my desk. No names. You don't need names. You've seen this exact same movie at your own fair.

One director walked away from the front gate mid-shift. Left the newbies standing there with a line forming and no idea what to do next.

Another director spent the better part of a season making another director's life hell. Not loud enough for everyone to notice. Just loud enough to wear one person down.

One director threw a coffee cup. In rage. Into a crowd of fairgoers.

I'm not writing this to shame anyone. Chances are you've seen worse. Chances are you've been closer to one of these moments than you'd admit out loud.

Thank god I've spent years studying human behavior. CBT training, NLP coaching, and thirty years inside ag societies watching this play out in real time.

Because when you actually sit in the middle of these things, the fight in front of you is almost never the real problem.

It's rarely the thing that blew up. It's the ten things nobody said before that.

It's ego getting in the way of saying "I don't actually know how to do this and I'm scared to admit it."

It's someone swallowing a complaint in September because it felt too small to raise, then swallowing another one in October, then November, until the pile has a name and the name is resentment.

It's people who were never taught how to say the hard thing out loud, so the hard thing comes out sideways instead.

A slammed door.
A cold shoulder.
A coffee cup.

Regulating your emotions in the moment is hard enough.

It's a lot harder when the moment is actually ten unsaid moments wearing a trench coat.

People don't have to get along.

They don't have to be friends.

They don't even have to respect each other's methods.

They have to aim at the same damn goal.

If your board is sitting on ten unsaid things right now, that's not a character flaw.

That's just what happens when nobody built a place for the small stuff to get said before it becomes the big stuff.

I do this work. If your board needs someone in the room who isn't you, DM me.

Anyone else got a story? Doesn't have to have a happy ending. I'd genuinely like to hear it.

08/16/2026

Here's a test for your next board meeting.

Ask one question.
Where is that written down?

Watch what happens.

If the answer is a name instead of a document,
you don't have a system.

You have a person.

And people move.
People get sick.
People age out.

Documents don't.

https://fair-systems-that-work.kit.com/emergency_repsonse

08/14/2026

For all the fairs who struggle at the gates….

I got off a call and got a cheeky thought! So I wrote a song about it 😂

FrontDoor+

Listen and make your own on Suno.

08/12/2026

A shy teen does not belong on the mic.

A retiree does not belong in the middle of the midway at nine at night.

I have watched both happen.

Not because anyone was careless.

Because the schedule had holes in it and somebody had to fill them, and whoever was standing closest got handed the clipboard.

Here is what that costs.

The teen goes home embarrassed and does not sign up next year.

The retiree goes home sore and quietly decides they are too old for this, which is not true.

It was never about age. It was about placement.

Nobody quits the fair. They quit the job that never fit them.

The quiet kid who gets put on entry tags will sort four hundred of them without a single mistake and come back next August asking for the same table.

That is not a small win.

That is a volunteer for the next ten years, found in one afternoon, because somebody asked what she was good at instead of what shift was open.

So write down what each role actually asks of a person.

Loud or quiet. Standing or sitting. Fast decisions or steady hands.

Then match to that, not to whoever answered the phone first.

Fit is not a nicety. It is retention.

What is the best job you ever got handed at your fair, and what made it fit?

08/10/2026

I'm heading to the BC Fairs Learning Exchange this fall. Twice, apparently.

Two sessions, and they happen to be the two topics I care most about.

Protect Your Legacy is a workshop about what happens when the person who knows everything walks away. Every fair has one. The volunteer with the whole operation in her head and none of it on paper. We're going to talk about how to get it out of her head before she retires, moves, or just gets tired.

Borrow My Genius is the other one. That session is not me talking at you for an hour. It's the room solving the room's problems. You bring the thing that's stuck at your fair. Somebody in that room has already fixed it. Might be you fixing it for somebody else.

Here's the thing about fair people. We show up to these events wrung out from the season we just survived, and we still sit there taking notes for next year. That's not normal. Most industries would kill for that.

So if you're coming, come find me. The hallway conversations are half the reason I go.

Who else is going to be in the room?



https://www.bcfairs.ca/2026-Learning-Exchange

08/08/2026

A kid asked me once if the brown cows made the chocolate milk.

She was nine. She was dead serious. And nobody had ever told her different.

That is not a kid problem. That is a gap problem.

In about two generations we went from most families having somebody on a farm to most families having nobody. The knowledge did not disappear.

It just stopped getting passed down at the kitchen table.

So where does it get passed down now?

The barn at your fair.

The 4-H kid who spends twenty minutes explaining feed rations to a total stranger.

The woman in the ag display who lets a toddler stick a whole hand into a bin of barley.

The grandpa who lifts his granddaughter onto a tractor seat so she can see what he used to drive at fourteen.

That is agricultural literacy. It does not look like a program. It looks like a Saturday.

And it matters more than we say out loud.

The people walking your grounds this summer are the same people voting on land use, buying groceries, and deciding what farming should look like in thirty years.

What they understand, they protect.

What they do not understand, they regulate from a distance.

Your fair might be the last place a person who has never touched a bale can stand close enough to ask a question.

That is not entertainment. That is survival.

What is the one moment at your fair where somebody's face changes because they finally get it?