Last Call: Time To Head Home

After an exceedingly long night, I woke up an hour early to begin my last day in Atlanta. While the show seemed to be winding down a bit, the day was packed from end to end with meetings and potential meetings. With little sleep the past three nights I was at the point of nearly staggering to our morning breakfast meeting. But sometimes you just have to suck it up and make it seem like you just slept for ten hours and you are fully awake and rearing to go for a new day.

I made it to the restaurant in the hotel lobby right on schedule and immediately found a couple of people to reconnect with from Monday. While I am sure they are pleasant individuals anyway, the editors were very friendly and greeted me more like a long lost friend than simply a PR person who set up a meeting earlier in the week. This is the kind of meeting that really motivates me to go back to their publication with great stories. You can be sure that I will be talking with them again in the near future.

The meeting was, to say the least, productive and could potentially lead to many more trips down to the Atlanta area over the next year. Not sure how my wife will feel about this but it is a darn good business opportunity and I am glad that I was able to be a part of the initial conversation. After breakfast, my colleague and I headed back to our rooms, packed our bags, and dropped them off at the front desk so that we could pick them up later in the afternoon when we were finally ready to begin the journey back home.

We got back to the show floor just as the doors were being opened and it didn’t take long before we were pulled aside to speak with a few more reporters and analysts that decided to stop by this morning. This was the final push that put the event over the top and what finally allowed me to check this off as a success in my own mind. The total finally got into the double digits and met he expectations that have been constantly been running like a banner in Times Square in the forefront of my mind. Even though we were only on the floor for a little over two hours, it was well worth putting that extra effort in to the morning.

While all of this is happening, Classroom Day was in full swing as multiple groups made their way around the convention center speaking to those booths that decided to participate, including ours. When these high school students come around you can't help but wonder if years from now they will be at this very same show working for one of the companies. If that is the case, I hope that their stop at our booth played some small role in their life trajectory. Who knows, if could happen.

From the show room floor we made our way back to the hotel and into another meeting. This time we were meeting with an existing client that, while keeping us a little extra busy as of late, she has been a great person to work with and one that completely understands what we do (not everyone understands PR). Being able to meet the client does add another dimension of motivation when it comes to the daily grind that can sometime try to get the best of us. Knowing the person behind the projects makes you push a little harder and a little longer.   

After the lunch meeting we retrieved our bags, got in a cab, and returned to the chaos of the airport. We arrived a little earlier than we both prefer but it allowed us to take our time and not rush for the first time all week. After a slight delay that left my yawning in the US Airways waiting area, we boarded the small plane and took off knowing that the turbulence upon arrival was going to make this an interesting flight. Surprisingly, the landing in the rain was uneventful as my stomach decided to relax for once and allowed me to feel human as we disembarked from the cabin.

By the time we got to baggage claim my wife was already well on her way to pick me up and it wasn’t long before my colleague and I officially concluded our productive trip in high spirits and I was in the car on my way back to the apartment. Today I woke up in Georgia and went to bed back home in Pennsylvania. Tomorrow things will return to normal as my routine resumes with an early wake up and commute to the office. The difference being that now is the time to follow up on everything from this week rather than the past two weeks which has been focused on prep.

Weeks like this may be the most tiring part of my job but it is also part of what I love about what I do for a living. It is a time when I work hard without working. While I am sure there is a definition or at least a more concise way of expressing this sentiment but what really defines it is the experience which can’t really be conveyed accurately in a way that would be universally understood. It’s just one of those things that you know when you are in the middle of it.

Modex Day Two: I’m Beat!

Day one at Modex was a success and, while exhausted and walking slightly above a stumble, I was looking forward to day two at the show. Today was ‘stop by’ day when I was looking forward to meeting the media members who were not able to set up a specific time during the week but assured me that they would stop by at some point during the show. Actually, there was also a scheduled video interview in the early afternoon that consisted of preapproved questions and some uncomfortable makeup.

By the time we departed the booth in the early evening we had added three more media interviews to the six from yesterday. Having spoken to nine publications in the past two show days, we all made our way up to sublevel three to partake of unique cocktails and relaxing conversations. This, of course, extended our day well into the evening and we were all ready to head off as a team and enjoy what has been a, so far, successful event.

It should also be noted that the attendance at the show today was much greater than that of day one and the constant waves of people reverberated back and forth across the hall with many of them stopping at our booth to find out more about the company and the technology. It is actually commonplace for the first day to be the lead up and the event to peak over the second and third days but something else coming into play was the fact that it wasn’t raining when the doors opened at 10:00 am. It may have been cold this morning but it wasn’t wet.

Sitting around the dinner table, at a restaurant right near the hotel and show location, it was the first time since we arrived on Sunday that I began to relax. I wasn’t, and still am not, at the lean back stage but we passed the point today of all the work previously put in starting to pay off. The interviews were happening, the coverage was beginning to come to fruition, and the client seemed satisfied with our efforts. It was time to breathe just a little bit.

Maybe the best part of this all is that this is already at a point that it has set the new standard for us to surpass next year and we still have a half day to go tomorrow. While I don’t expect a lot more, it would be nice to check one or two more media members off my list. Tomorrow will really determine if I will be able to lean back on the flight or if I will be wondering what could have been done differently in order to get one or two more people in the booth. I wonder which one it will be.

Cloudy With A Chance Of Modex!

I woke up this morning in Atlanta, Georgia and the sun is nowhere to be found. Honestly, I didn’t realize that fact until I made it down to the lobby and walked into the restaurant to have some breakfast to begin the day. Not having an extensive track record with trade shows, I was quite nervous about the day and also eager to get things going. Of course, that might have been the lack of nicotine as well.

After a breakfast that was actually pretty tasty, I ran back up to the room to grab my badge for the event and made my way back down to the ground floor to try and ease my nerves. With freshly washed hands and a mint tingling my tongue, we gathered in the lobby and braced ourselves for the dash to the convention center next door through the bitter rain which seemed to plan its fall to coincide with the beginning of the show.

We were right on time in our decent below ground to the showroom floor and the closer we got, with each successive escalator, the crowd seemed to become denser and denser. The local weather combined with the natural events in other parts of the country delaying and cancelling flights, it was a shadow of the 25,000 expected to attend but it was still a healthy flow. Finally on the floor, we turned left and headed to the booth arriving just as the first of many scheduled interviews was to begin.

Without a wasted second, the introductions began as soon as my foot hit the booth carpet. That first interview set the tone for the rest of the day as everyone was on time, the conversations we all productive, and it left us with a great relationship that we look forward to building in the future. The sum it up, the media thus far have all been fantastic and I am looking forward to speaking with each and every one of them again in the near future.

With meetings booked throughout the day, from the 10:00 am open to the 5:00 pm close, the day was over before we knew it and we were all walking out of the convention center wonder where the day had gone. We all went back to our rooms to recover for an hour before reconvening across the street for some wings, burgers, and libations. The evening was filled with relaxing conversation and was a great opportunity to get to know everyone a little better.

I enjoy these times when I am able to learn a little bit more about those I work with each week. After two hours of entertaining conversations where we were able to find both differences and commonalities with one another, we finally called it a day. Time to go back to the room, get some work done, and try to sleep as much as possible. Day one done and things couldn’t have gone any better. The fact that we didn’t have to deal with Philly snow again was just a bonus.