Fancy Footwork

October 5, 2006

   Trade shows are the stuff of war stories for industry vendors and journalists, as something in life to be endured. I really can’t count how many I’ve seen since I drove across the deserts of the West in a sickly Chevette to my first event in Las Vegas a quarter-century ago, and it seems like the well of memories is bottomless.
   Consider:
   • The very first day of my inaugural trade show, I drove up to a convenience store and had to avoid a crowd in the parking lot. When I asked about it, an onlooker said a man had just been shot dead and everyone – including the shooter – was waiting for the police.
   • At another trade show in Orlando, one of the employees of a company I worked for disappeared during the middle of the event. We found him a day later when he turned up under arrest in Charlotte, N.C.; he’d taken a cab there from Florida, gotten into a pool-hall fight, and slept under one of the tables until police arrived. (I don’t know if he tried to expense the cab ride or the bail.)
   • In San Francisco, I went by the booth of a rival trade magazine (this wasn’t in the stone industry) and made a good-natured offer to buy the editor some coffee. He took me up on it; I arrived back at the booth 15 minutes later with a cup o’ Joe and found the stand deserted. In the interim, the publisher showed up to tell the staff that the publication’s parent company had sold the magazine, and everyone was fired.
   • At an Atlantic City event at the Trump Regency Hotel, the Donald himself arrived on the show floor, leading a pack of Wall Street bankers on a tour to pry money out of them to keep the property. He’d entered the floor through a side door and, for some reason, walked out the main show entrance and then decided to walk in again.
   A security guard didn’t look at Trump’s face; he just saw someone who didn’t have a badge, and denied Trump entry. Trump immediately grabbed the man’s hand and told him he was the first person he’d found that day who was doing his job. (I took over at the show entrance for the next few minutes after Trump left, so the guard could run to the bathroom and throw up. And Trump lost the hotel anyway.)
   You can’t make up stuff like this. Things can get wacky as you pack a floor with a crowd of competitors; it becomes, for several days, its own universe, where there’s nothing to note the passage of time or the condition of the world outside. And, yes, I’ve walked into a convention hall on a sunny morning and walked out in the afternoon into the aftermath of a tornado.
   So why do I keep going to these crazy things? Because they work.
   For all the griping that you may hear about trade shows, and all the crazy stories that get passed around, a good event can offer plenty to an industry. In the stone trade, trade shows provide some of the strongest support available for vendors and attendees.
   Exhibitors tend to grumble if there’s one show a year or a dozen, but they get plenty out of an event. You can’t sell a $200,000 machine over the phone, and it’s tough to identify a likely customer through a mail-in or Web-based response. The one-to-one contact at a trade show gives vendors a chance to size up potential customers and start (or maintain) good business relationships.
   Competitors also get a good, open look at what rivals are selling, and how they’re selling the goods. And, they can build business-to-business contacts with other exhibitors for materials, tools and services that ultimately benefit their customers as well.
   Show attendees often complain about sore feet, but tender tootsies are a small price to pay for the stupendous amount of information available. Good shows offer a full and formal slate of seminars and workshops; and, there are plenty of opportunities for education throughout the show floor.
   Stop by a booth and start asking questions, especially about specific applications and need from your shop’s perspective. Vendors hold a wealth of information and, in almost all cases, they’re willing to share what they know. There’s the occasional sour apple who won’t offer anything of value, but most will have answers and solutions that, collectively, are worth the time and cost of getting to a show.
   Attending a trade show isn’t the easiest task nowadays; sometimes it’s tough to break away from the shop. Travel isn’t exactly fun in today’s world either, whether it’s getting on a plane to go across the country or halfway across the planet.
   It’s worth the effort. That crazy little compact world of a trade event is your world, where you can concentrate solely on what matters most in building and growing your business.
   So direct your feet to a trade show soon. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you can step on mine for a change.