Costa Mesa company scheduled to provide Ms. America sets dissolves, leaving pageant in a pinch

A Costa Mesa production company hired by the Ms. America pageant to provide a stage and lighting for Saturday’s event in Brea began liquidating its assets Tuesday, leaving the fate of the pageant uncertain.

Susan Jeske, chief executive of the Ms. America pageant, said she was notified by email Tuesday morning about the liquidation of BTB Event Productions Inc.

She said a contractor who works with the company told her that BTB would not deliver the equipment she had paid for eight days before.

BTB had put in a bid to provide sets for the pageant, as it had last year, and Jeske said she had no reason to suspect anything was wrong.

Jeske, who won the inaugural Ms. America pageant in 1997 and bought the organization two years later, said BTB requested cash payment about a week ago, and she paid $3,877.45 with the pageant’s debit card for the equipment to be delivered to Brea’s Curtis Theatre on Sept. 1.

“They said if I paid in cash they’d give me a $500 discount,” Jeske said. “They gave me no indication that they were liquidating.”

BTB’s owner, Chris Chapan, could not be reached for comment Wednesday. The front door of the company’s office on Toronto Way was locked, and the reception desk was curtained off. A receptionist who answered the phone could not provide details of what was going on.

Jeske said that when she drove to BTB’s office on Tuesday to see what was happening with the set pieces she had ordered, “there were trucks everywhere.”

“They were lined up like ants, packing everything away into the trucks,” she said. “At first I thought they were preparing for the pageant, but I was told that they were just selling everything off.”

Gavelhost, a company that provides live webcast and timed online auction services, was hired to auction equipment owned by BTB, according to Jeske, who said she spoke to Gavelhost’s chief executive, Jeff Johnstonbaugh, on Tuesday outside the BTB office.

Johnstonbaugh could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

It’s unclear how many clients BTB had accepted orders from. But Robert Bates, a former sales manager who worked for BTB for six years, said he wasn’t surprised to hear that the company was being liquidated.

“We were a $3.5-million-a-year business, but we started losing that,” Bates said.

Bates said BTB owes him thousands of dollars in commission and that most employees had a similar problem.

Bates said that when he left the company in May, BTB was conducting business as usual despite decreasing staff.

Forty-three contestants are coming from all over the country to compete in the Ms. America pageant.

“I’m looking for other production companies that can fill such a last-minute order,” Jeske said Wednesday. “It’s Labor Day weekend — everyone is booked. But the show must go on.”