If you have ever attended an event, whether it’s an industry conference or hosted seminars, they are often paid for by the vendors in the solutions pavilions. These organizations pay a small fortune to attend events, and for many, the events budget is probably only second to their labor budgets. They are a huge investment and require a high ROI. There’s months of planning involved, booths to be designed, chachkies to be ordered, travel, apparel, you name it. For many of us, we have entire teams of road warriors going from one event to the next with their traveling roadshow.
There is a lot of logistics involved, and since the pandemic, my basement became a storage facility for all the ITBD paraphanelia. There were booths, gifts, clothes, backpacks, pull up banners – everything from any event would be stored there since I had the space. Why pay for it, right? Well, we recently decided to move all these items to a third-party facility to store. We are back to normal, and attending more events, so, there is now regular usage. We were packing up all the items (four whole pallets) and were shipping them out.
One pallet was meant to go to an event in Dallas next week, and the other 3 were supposed to go to storage. We printed out 5 labels for each pallet, taped a label on each side and on top of the pallet, and had a copy for the driver to sign off. They got picked up and shipped. Texas and Massachusetts here we come – or so we thought. When our team landed in Dallas for the event on Monday, the moment they walked up to the pallet, they noticed something was wrong. It had the wrong shipping labels on the pallet. This was one of the ones that was supposed to be in storage. The booth, and all our giveaways were now in Boston. OMG!
This was a huge event for us, a 10×20 backlit booth, multiple (very) expensive giveaways, all sitting in Boston. What do we do?
First things first, the team calls me to tell me what has happened. They set my expectations – it seems that the driver mislabeled the pallets when he picked them up. But the good news was that we had enough giveaways and tablecloths on the pallet, so at least there was that. Bad news, no backdrops or demo TV. OK, manage the leader first – check.
Second, the team started thinking of solutions immediately. We had two team members living in Dallas. They picked up a TV from one of their homes, and called the other leader to see who he knew in the area. Lucky enough, he had a friend who owned a printing company. Graphics were quickly updated, and two 10×10 backdrops were printed in a few hours and picked up that same day. A few pull ups were added to the bunch, and all of a sudden, we were back in business.
Was it the optimal situation? Absolutely not. But why I am sharing this with you is because our events team all came together to make solutions happen. They had a checklist to solve their problem:
- Manage the leader, make sure they are informed, so expectations are set early
- See what we can salvage and make it work
- Determine the minimums we needed to function
- Figure out what resources we had that can help us in finding solutions
- Have other teams working on alternatives while you are finding vendors
- Most importantly, make sure you all work as a team
Tiffani worked with Natalie to get the TV. Dave called Vikram to get the signage, Himanshu recreated graphics, the rest of the team worked to salvage what was on the original pallet—everyone was helping one another.
There are always times for the ‘coulda woulda shoulda’ mentality, but in this situation, our team took what could have been a huge pothole in the road and made it into a small bump instead. You see, we each have the ability to come together and fix any problem that come before us, we just need to have a willingness to adapt, and a collaborative mindset of teamwork.
I was so proud of my team, and as I sit on this flight headed to Dallas, getting ready to support our friends at N-able, only our team, and my loyal readers, would know that the booth is not perfect. The team brought it all together, in a matter of hours, and proved their resilience in the face of adversity. That’s what makes great teams, and yes, I am a proud Mama Bear! ????
Previous Candid Kam: Looks Can Be Deceiving
