5 Load-In Mistakes That Cost You an Extra Hour (and How to Fix Them)
A late load-in doesn't just mean your crew works longer. It compresses sound check, shortens programming time, pushes back doors, and puts the entire show timeline under pressure. On a one-off event, that's stressful. On a tour, it's a pattern that accumulates across weeks of shows into real costs — overtime, missed cues, and a tired crew making mistakes.
Most load-ins don't run late because of one catastrophic problem. They run late because of five or six small inefficiencies that each eat 10 to 15 minutes. Add those up and you've blown an hour before anyone realized it was happening.
Here are the five most common ones we see — both on our own shows and when we're observing other crews work — along with what to do about them.
1. The Truck Is Packed in the Wrong Order
This is the most common and most preventable problem in live production logistics.
If audio needs to be the first system operational (which it usually does — you need PA before anything else moves forward), then audio needs to come off the truck first. If rigging steel and motors need to go up before anything hangs from the truss, those need to be accessible before lighting and video cases.
Sounds obvious. But how many times have you watched a crew unload 20 cases of lighting to get to the motor chain bags buried at the back of the truck?
The fix: Pack the truck in reverse order of need. Rigging steel and motors go in last (come out first). Audio goes on top of or in front of lighting. Cases that aren't needed until late in the load-in — effects, accessories, spares — go deepest.
Create a truck pack diagram and stick to it. Once the pack order is established and documented, every load-out should rebuild the truck the same way. Consistency removes decision-making from the load-out process, which is when your crew is most tired and most likely to just throw cases in wherever they fit.
2. Nobody Labeled Anything
Walk into a load-in and watch how much time gets spent opening cases to find out what's inside. Now multiply that by 30 cases. Now add the time spent walking back to a case you already opened because you forgot which one had the wing nuts.
Unlabeled or poorly labeled cases create a scavenger hunt in the middle of what should be a systematic process. A stagehand should be able to look at a case, know exactly what's inside, know where it goes, and move it there without opening the lid first.
The fix: Label everything. Cases, cables, fixtures, rack drawers. Use consistent labels with large text readable from 10 feet away. Include both the contents and the destination (e.g., "SL TRUSS — Movers 1-8").
For lighting fixtures, label each unit with its position reference. When a stagehand pulls fixture #7 off the cart, the label should tell them it goes on stage-left truss position 7. No guessing, no referencing a paper plot, no walking back to the tech table to ask the LD where it goes.
This takes time up front. It saves multiples of that time on every single show.
3. Empty Cases Are Blocking the Work Zone
You've got 40 road cases unloaded and unpacked. The gear is on stage getting set. Where are the empties?
If the answer is "stacked along the upstage wall," "in the hallway between the loading dock and the stage," or "piled in the corner where audio is trying to set up their mix position," then your empty cases are actively slowing down your load-in.
Empty case management is an invisible time sink. Crews navigate around case walls, trip over lids left on the floor, and waste steps routing around obstacles that shouldn't be there.
The fix: Designate an empty case storage location before the first case comes off the truck. Ideally, this is back on the truck, a separate storage room, or an area well away from the active work zone. Assign one or two crew members specifically to case management — their job is to move empties out of the workspace as soon as gear is unpacked.
Better yet, consider whether all those cases need to exist at all. Cart-based transport systems like the ShowShuttle™ eliminate the empty case problem entirely because the gear never leaves the cart. There are no empties to store because the cart IS the storage. Roll it in, pull the gear, and the cart stays out of the way in a fraction of the footprint of stacked road cases.
4. Departments Aren't Sequenced
Lighting can't hang until truss is in the air. Truss can't fly until rigging steel is up. Video can't build their wall until the ground support structure is set. Audio can't tune until the room is quiet.
Every load-in has a natural sequence, and when departments try to work out of sequence, they end up waiting — standing around with tools in hand while the upstream department finishes their task.
The less obvious version of this problem is when departments that could work in parallel are instead competing for the same physical space. If lighting is hanging on stage-left truss and audio is trying to stack subs directly below, one department is going to stop and wait while the other finishes.
The fix: Write a load-in schedule that shows the sequence of operations by department. Not a rough timeline — an actual sequence chart showing when rigging starts, when truss flies, when lighting begins hanging, when audio can start stacking, when video starts building.
Share this with every department lead before load-in day. When everyone knows the sequence, they can plan their work around it instead of arriving on site and figuring it out in real time. The 10-minute walkthrough with department leads at the start of load-in is the cheapest efficiency gain available.
5. Pre-Rigging Isn't Happening at the Shop
If your crew is assembling fixtures onto clamps, running power and data cable through truss, and building cable looms at the venue, you're doing shop work at show prices.
Everything that can be assembled in advance should be assembled in advance. Fixtures should be clamped, cabled, and labeled before they leave the warehouse. Cable looms should be built, tested, and bundled. Truss should be pre-rigged with as many fixtures and cables as possible so it flies as a complete assembly rather than an empty stick that needs 45 minutes of work after it's in the air.
The fix: Build pre-rig time into your prep schedule. Every hour of pre-rig at the shop saves more than an hour at the venue because shop work happens at a comfortable pace with access to tools, inventory, and no time pressure. Venue work happens on a deadline with limited access and a crew that's simultaneously trying to do 15 other things.
For truss pre-rigging specifically, the bottleneck has historically been transport — pre-rigged truss on a standard cart doesn't protect the fixtures during transit. This is exactly the problem the ShowShuttle™'s shock-mounted pipe module and the TrussShuttle™ solve. When you can pre-rig at the shop and transport safely, you shift hours of venue labor back to the shop where it's faster, cheaper, and more accurate.
The Compound Effect
None of these are individually catastrophic. A poorly packed truck costs 15 minutes. Unlabeled cases cost 10. Bad case management costs 10. Sequencing gaps cost 15. Skipping pre-rig costs 20 or more.
Add them up: that's over an hour on a single show. On a 40-date tour, that's 40 hours — a full work week of productivity lost to friction that's completely solvable.
The solutions aren't complicated. Label things. Pack trucks systematically. Plan the sequence. Pre-rig at the shop. Manage your empties. These aren't revolutionary ideas — they're operational discipline applied to a process that too many teams treat as improvisation.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should a concert load-in take?
It depends on scale. Small club shows with minimal production: 1 to 2 hours. Mid-sized touring productions in theaters or arenas: 2 to 4 hours. Large festival stages or arena shows with extensive rigging: 4 to 6 hours or more. Better transport systems, clearer documentation, and organized truck packing can reduce these times by 20 to 30 percent.
How can I speed up a concert load-in?
Pack the truck in reverse order of need. Use cart-based transport instead of road cases to eliminate unpacking and case storage. Label every fixture, case, and cable with contents and destination. Pre-rig as much as possible at the shop. Separate empty case storage from the active work zone. Sequence departments so no one is waiting on another team to finish before they can start.
ELS Nashville provides full-service touring production and fabricates the ShowShuttle™ and TrussShuttle™ cart systems. View our products → or contact us → to discuss your next show or tour.
