Before the Games arrive, look at how your business actually runs
In summer 2028, Los Angeles hosts the Olympic and Paralympic Games, and extra demand will land on whatever operating system a business has today. Here is how to find the seams before the surge does.
Every small business in Los Angeles knows what its busy season feels like from the inside. The phone rings more, the inbox fills, and the week stops being planned and starts being survived. An operation that worked at a normal pace shows its seams: the order that lives in one person's head, the schedule kept on a group text, the price list that exists in three versions.
In the summer of 2028, Los Angeles hosts the Olympic and Paralympic Games, and for a few weeks the whole region will run at a pace it rarely sees. Some businesses will feel it directly, like a restaurant near a venue or a shop along a route. Others will feel it a step removed, through suppliers, through staff who need different hours, through customers arriving from places they've never been. Either way, the extra demand will land on whatever system the business has today, and volume doesn't create operating problems, it shows you the ones you already have.
Think of a kitchen during the dinner rush. A kitchen that runs well on a Tuesday can come apart on a Saturday, and the reason is rarely the cooks. Orders that move from the front to the line by a shout across the room work fine at twenty covers and fail at ninety. The handoff was always informal, and it only held because nobody had tested it.
Small businesses carry these informal handoffs everywhere. Knowing how long a job really takes often sits with one experienced employee, and whether a rush order can be accepted is a call the owner makes from memory. A temporary hire can't work out who approves a refund, so they ask, and the owner, who is also serving customers, answers each time. All of it works because the same few people are in the same room, and a surge takes that away.
There is a second door as well. LA28 has published a procurement plan that aims to send 75 percent of its addressable spending to businesses in the Greater Los Angeles region and 25 percent to small businesses, with opportunities listed through the city's RAMP marketplace. Los Angeles County is running free Path to 2028 workshops on vendor registration, certification, and bid readiness. Nothing here is guaranteed, and some city officials have already questioned whether the local promises will hold, but a business that wants a share of that spending has to look ready on paper. Being contract-ready is an operations question too: records in order, capacity known, delivery that repeats without the owner in the middle.
The useful work is smaller than it sounds, and it fits in the next twelve months. Pick the workflow customers touch most and write down how it actually runs, including the parts nobody wrote down. Find every place it depends on one person, decide who owns each handoff, and then try it under a deliberately busy week, well before the real one.
This is the work we do at Revuity Systems. We look at how a business operates, find where a surge would strain it, and design what should be there instead. For owners who want a starting point, our Environment System is $500 and begins with a guided interview about how your business works, so the AI is built around it. The Games will be over in a couple of weeks, and the operation you build for them stays.
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