SARA is the biggest agricultural show in West Africa, and for three days in 2025 it was also our densest deployment of the year: eleven stands on one site, from a 9 m² seed-company corner to a 48 m² ministry pavilion, raised across two overlapping raise-days, with one storm warning thrown in by the lagoon weather for interest. These are the field notes, written up while the bruises were fresh.
The numbers, first
- 11 stands · 316 m² of floor combined · 9 clients (two took multiple stands)
- 2 raise-days, 41 crew on site at peak (our Abidjan bench plus surge hires)
- 1,900+ parts cut in the workshop over the preceding three weeks
- 10 of 11 stands signed off on schedule; one signed four hours late — the honest asterisk, explained below
What worked: the shared logistics spine
With eleven stands in one hall, we ran the site like one project with eleven rooms instead of eleven projects. One unloading window negotiated with the venue instead of eleven separate slots. One shared tool crib in a rented container at the hall's service entrance — no crew waiting on a drill that another crew had. One runner whose entire job was materials and coffee. The container cost us roughly the price of half a stand and paid for itself by the first afternoon; it is now standard for any show where we have four or more builds.
What did not: the four-hour stand
Stand nine — a 24 m² dairy brand — was signed off at 22:00 instead of 18:00. Root cause was not weather and not the venue: our own scheduling stacked its heavy joinery after the ministry pavilion's, on the same crane slot, and the pavilion ran long. The stand was perfect and the client was gracious, but the four hours were self-inflicted. The fix is now policy: no two stands above 30 m² share a lifting slot, even when the schedule says it fits.