Hey Keith,
I hate to bear the bad news but changing the order of events in this way would actually require a pretty intensive amount of code customization, which we don’t offer support for outright; but even worse than “code customization” in general is the fact that this specific related code is deep in the core functionality of The Events Calendar and its add-ons directly. Making these changes, in other words, would mean that you’d have to manually re-make the changes for each plugin update so that the update doesn’t overwrite your customizations, and then manually test your changes for each update because the related code touches so many things in the plugin.
We unfortunately cannot help with code customization of this level. If you decide to hire someone to make these changes for you, make sure they know what they’re doing!
Let me know what your thoughts are on all of this and if there are any other things I can help with today 🙂
George