PortaPottyBossPro Blog — Event Rentals & Booking

County Fairs and Week-Long Shows: Porta Potty Bookings That Run All Week

A county fair is a festival that never seems to end. It runs for days or a full week, the crowd comes and goes from morning until the midway lights shut off, and the fairgrounds may host livestock shows, a rodeo, a demolition derby and a concert all in the same week. For a porta potty company, that means a large booking, daily service and a customer who expects you back next year.

A Fair Is a Long Festival

If you have read Races and Fun Runs: Booking Porta Potties for Start Lines, Finish Lines and Courses, you saw an event that is over by lunch. A fair is the opposite. It is closer to the festival work covered earlier in this series, stretched over more days. The planning questions are the same, but the service schedule and the billing matter more because they repeat every day.

Fairs also come with history. The fair board or the fairgrounds manager usually knows roughly what they used last year. Ask. Then compare it to your own records if you served them before.

What to Ask the Fair Board

• Every date, including setup days for vendors and exhibitors
• Daily gate hours and which nights run late
• Which areas need units: the midway, the barns, the grandstand, the vendor row, the camping area for exhibitors
• Whether the fairgrounds has permanent restrooms and whether they will be open
• The operations contact for each day, since it may change
• When your service truck can get in each morning without fighting traffic

Write the answers onto the client and the site record. Fairgrounds often have several gates, so put the service gate and any code or key arrangement in the access notes.

Banks Around the Grounds

A fair is several placements on one property. Write a placement note for each area so a driver who has never been to the fairgrounds can find every bank:

• Midway: standard units in a row behind the ticket booth, hand wash stations at each end
• Livestock barns: standard units and a hand wash station at each barn door, on the gravel, not in the wash rack area
• Grandstand: ADA accessible units on the paved path by the ramp
• Exhibitor camping: standard units by the water hookups

The unit types and quantities show on the job card on the driver's phone along with the notes. Hand wash stations near the barns are worth pushing for, since people are handling animals and then buying food.

Daily Service All Week

A fair needs service every day, often early in the morning before the gates open, and sometimes again in the evening on the busiest nights. Schedule each visit as its own job on the dispatch board, one per day. They show on the Waiting List until they go out, so nobody forgets Thursday's service because Wednesday ran long.

If the fair board calls on Saturday asking for an extra pump-out at the grandstand before the concert, add it as an extra service job. It lands on the Waiting List and you can assign it to whichever truck is closest.

The driver's phone shows each service visit with the bank locations, and the on-the-way text lets the operations contact know the truck is coming through the service gate.

Mid-Week Changes

Fairs change while they run. A bank gets moved because a vendor expanded. A barn needs another unit because a show drew more exhibitors than expected. Each change is either a note on the next service job or a small delivery job of its own. Put it on the job so the driver sees it, rather than counting on a phone call to the right driver at the right time.

For more on handling these mid-event requests, see Last-Minute Add-Ons: Handling Extra Event Porta Potties the Week of the Event.

Billing a Week-Long Event

A fair invoice has a lot of lines: units by type, hand wash stations, delivery, each daily service visit, extra pump-outs and pickup. Invoices in PortaPottyBossPro carry line items and the sales tax for the site, so the fair board sees exactly what they are paying for.

Some fair boards pay by card, some by check after a board meeting. If your fair is billed as an account, setting the client to Monthly billing puts every job for the month on one statement, with each line labeled by site address. If the same organization also rents units for other events at the fairgrounds through the year, those jobs end up on the same statement.

Rental tracking keeps the delivered and picked-up dates. If teardown runs long and the units stay an extra few days, those days bill automatically at your per-day rate.

Next Year Starts at Pickup

When the last unit comes back, close it out, thank the fair board and ask them to rate the service. Then make a note while it is fresh: which banks ran heavy, which barns needed more, which gate the truck should use next year. Put it on the client record. When the fair board calls next spring, you already have the answer they are looking for.

To see how fairs fit with the rest of your event bookings, visit the event porta potty rental software page.