I am glad to say that most of my
international exhibition experiences have been pretty good ones. Good
organisation. Great stand designs. Exceptional interpreters. Fabulous staff. Great
business. But there are some things that you simply can’t plan for, and this is
the story of the one that got away!
We had committed to taking several new
woodworking machines to the IWF show in Atlanta (International Woodworking
Fair), two of them weighing over a ton and each of them requiring setting up
for demonstration. We had booked a
reasonable sized stand, relatively close to two of the distributors’ stands,
and had contracted an exhibition specialist to set up the stand so that when my
colleague and I arrived we would need just to check the machines and get ready
to sell.
Kevin and I were originally just going to
get off the plane from Manchester and have a few drinks in preparation for the
following day, but something told us we had to go to the exhibition hall just
to see how the stand had been put together. We arrived in our hall at about 2pm
local time and finally had our ‘few drinks’ at 3am the following morning. We
were lucky enough to find a bar that sold cans of Boddingtons adjacent to the exhibition site!
On arrival at the exhibition hall we found
four crates located on an otherwise empty stand. Nothing at all had been set up
for us. We had no toolkit. We had not booked forklift drivers. We had no idea
where to store the crates when we finally prised them open. Our contractors
were nowhere to be seen, and to top it all it was 90+ degrees in the hall
because they only switched the air conditioning on for the show itself!
There was no point is wasting our breath
getting angry. Our choice was to find a way to set everything up ourselves, or
abandon the exhibition and sue the contractors for the wasted time, travel and
accommodation expenses. So we begged
enough tools from one of our distributors to take the crates apart and set up
these complex machines, for which we had to rob one of the technical guys from
another distributor who knew what he was doing.
We had to pay forklift drivers large
numbers of dollars to interrupt their tight schedules to remove the crates and
to help set the machinery into their demonstration positions. And we worked our socks off in sweltering,
airless conditions for the next 12 hours. The two of us took in a pint of water
every half hour just to stay hydrated and finally left the stand in good order
shortly after 2:30am the following morning. I think we may have had a couple of
sandwiches in all of that time.
Finding a bar had become essential by that
time, and finding one with Boddingtons, albeit in cans, was like having our
prayers answered. So we slipped quite a few of those down and then realised
that our cab ride back to the hotel would take 30 minutes, and that we would
have to leave the hotel again through Altanta’s morning rush hour by about 7am
to get back to the exhibition stand for an 08:30 start. We each had three hours
sleep but somehow got through the following day without either of us expiring.
We had an incredibly busy and successful
few days and were lucky that our distributors were prepared to take our
machinery into their showrooms rather than have to arrange for their shipment
back to the UK. We had averted near disaster by knowing enough incredibly
helpful people, and we got the show on the road. It goes without saying that we
sued the company who failed to do what they had been contracted to do.
The only thing that Kevin and I could have
done differently was to arrive a couple of days earlier. We thought that
everything had been planned out to the ‘nth’ degree and that we had done
everything possible to ensure that everything would be set up for us when we
arrived.
SO
THE LESSONS LEARNED?
- Make sure you know enough people to get you out of a scrape if you happen to inadvertently find yourself in one.
- We should have worked more closely with our distributors to use local set up companies rather than rely on someone we contracted back in the UK.
- Make sure there is a good bar open all hours close by any venue where you suspect this kind of thing is ever going to happen to you!
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