How to Vet an Event Vendor in Lagos

A vendor applied to our founding cohort and could not show us a single photograph of their own work.

Not a thin portfolio. Not a weak one. Nothing that was verifiably theirs. Every image traced back to someone else's event, someone else's plating, someone else's room. When we asked for one job they had personally delivered, with a client we could call, the conversation ended.

We rejected them. Not because they lacked talent, since we never got far enough to find out, but because a platform built on trust cannot carry a vendor who cannot prove their own work.

That rejection gave us our framework. If you are planning a wedding, a milestone birthday, or a company dinner in Lagos, you are running this same vetting alone, usually over WhatsApp, usually under time pressure, usually while doing your actual job. HHere is what we check, cheapest checks first.

Start with identity, because it is nearly free to verify

Before anything about taste, establish that the business exists.

Ask for the registered name and CAC number. Ask for the account name you would be paying into. If the business is called one thing and the account belongs to a person with an unrelated name, stop and ask why. There are honest explanations. There are also dishonest ones, and you want to hear which you are getting before money moves.

Check that the handle you are speaking to is the handle with the history. A page created four months ago with two thousand followers and eight years of claimed experience is telling you something.

This whole step takes about ten minutes and eliminates more bad candidates than anything else on this list.

Then credibility, which means references and not reviews

Comments under a post are not references. Ask for two clients from the last six months, and call one.

You are not asking whether they were happy. Everyone says they were happy. Ask what went wrong, and what the vendor did about it. Something goes wrong at every event. A vendor worth booking has a story about the generator, the traffic, the guest count that moved on Thursday, and what they did when it happened. A vendor with no such story either has not worked enough or is not telling you the truth.

Ask one more thing: did the final price match the quote. That single question predicts more of your experience than the portfolio does.

Prove the work is actually theirs

Pick one job from their portfolio and go deep on it.

Ask for the date, the venue, and the guest count. Ask for three photographs from that single event, including one wide shot of the room. Ask who took the photographs.

Borrowed portfolios are collections of highlights, and highlights do not survive depth. Someone who has actually worked an event can talk about it for ten minutes without effort. Someone who has not will move you back to the gallery.

The wide shot matters more than people expect. Close-ups can be staged anywhere. A room shows you scale, setup, and whether the vendor has really worked at the size you need.

Match the experience to your sector, not just to your budget

A caterer with thirty weddings behind them has not necessarily done a corporate lunch, and that gap is about constraint rather than skill.

A wedding runs late and everyone accepts it. A corporate lunch ends when the room goes back into a meeting at two, and a caterer who has never worked to that clock will find out in front of your colleagues. The same applies in reverse. A vendor who is excellent at controlled office catering may be unprepared for four hundred guests and a schedule that moves all evening.

Ask a specific question. How many events like mine, at roughly this size, have you done in the last twelve months. Not ever. In the last twelve months.

Last, check readiness, because this is where most failures actually happen

Talent is rarely the problem in Lagos. Logistics are.

Ask what else is in their calendar the week of your event. Ask how many staff they will bring and whether those staff are their own or hired in. Ask how equipment gets to the venue, and what the plan is if it does not. Ask for the deposit structure in writing, and what happens to your money if the date moves.

Then notice how long they took to answer. A vendor who needs three days to respond to five questions, while actively trying to win your business, is showing you their communication at its very best.

The number

We say no to seven out of ten vendors who apply to VendaHQ.

Almost none of those rejections are about taste. They fail on identity, on unverifiable work, or on readiness. The people who can genuinely cook, shoot, plan, and host are more common than you would think. The people who can prove it and deliver it on a Saturday in Lagos are not.

That should tell you where to spend your evening.

What to do this week

Take your shortlist, however long it is, and send every vendor on it the same message. Four questions, one paragraph, no preamble.

Your registered business name and the account name for payment. Two clients from the last six months I can call. One job in detail, with the date, venue, guest count, and three photographs including a wide shot. What else is in your calendar the week of my event.

Send it to all of them at once. Give it forty eight hours. The replies will sort your list for you, and the vendors who do not reply have saved you a decision.

A note on how we do this

Every vendor in the VendaHQ cohort has been through the five checks above before they appear on the platform. Identity confirmed, references called, work verified as their own, sector experience matched, readiness questioned.

We did not build it that way to be difficult. We built it that way because of one applicant who could not show us their own work, and because the alternative is asking a host to run this process alone, in the week they can least afford it.