November 12th, 2015 by Mary Kay Hyde-Bohn

I had the chance to go to my first trade show in the ‘disaster’ industry last month, out of town, and did not know if any local ACP chapter members attending. Ever Onward!

One has to consider the cost of attending one of these events – both financially and time-wise.

• Will the education from speakers add to my mental and physical libraries?
• Will my cousin be available to host me (offset the hotel bill)?
• Can I get a good airfare?
• Will I find interesting exhibitors?
• Will I see anyone I know from other industries?

I did a quick review with my CPA on what would be deductible or not (and some items that are only 50% deductible), so I had the start of a budgeting process.

• Entrance fee
• Airfare
• Meals not covered at event
• COFFEE
• Transportation back/forth to event
• Trinkets to bring home

What to pack:

• Appropriate layers for outside the event.
• More layers for inside the ‘refrigerator’ convention center that will fit in my tote
• PC, new travel surge protector, several thumb drives
• All the charger cables for phone, PC and tablet
• Comfortable shoes (2 pair) to switch each day
• Materials to share (business cards, BCPWest rack cards and more business cards)
• Folder with agenda, map/list of exhibitors and pre-event postcards and solitations

The trip report:

I registered during the first ½ day – out of 4, and while organizing my tote ran into several folks from the local ACP chapter! We had similar list of classes so we compared our ‘2nd choices’ and agreed to divide and conquer, sharing notes later so we had better coverage of the 4 days – yeah!

Several of the seminars provided handouts or links to grab the handout later – wise choice. The event also had links to several of the main speakers, but not full coverage. The fellow attendees were always checking their phones for ‘hot situations’ back home, so were interrupting with questions covered in previous minutes — really irritating. I made a practice of checking email only on breaks so I could get the ‘full message’ while in session.

Exhibitor Hall was full of enterprise level products, so I challenged those companies to consider the smaller companies or the suppliers/vendors/contractors to the big companies – it takes all of them to keep production rolling. I had a list of vendors that I wished to ask about scaling for the small/medium business and found them to be interested in the conversation.

I have been listening to many webinars provided by several of the exhibitors and made sure to thank them for the continuing education – I have been able to forward several presentations to appropriate customers. The SWAG was normal stuff and I would load up on the last afternoon, so I would not have to carry the weight around and the exhibitors are willing to share so they don’t have to take home!

We are going to add a new tab to the web site called ‘Community Resources’ that will have listings, links and descriptions of products or service companies that I have found over the years. These are NOT endorsements, merely information for you and your team to consider.