The turnkey trade show life is quite a life!

Getting it done is what we’re all about.

Recently, I went to Las Vegas to support Entourage X's efforts at a pair of massive trade shows there, and what an adventure that turned out to be.

After almost a year in this business, I have come to figure out that life in the world of the trade-show business is hectic, exciting, unpredictable and really, really fun. It forces you to be on your toes at all times, forces you to be flexible and demands that you be able to pivot on a moment’s notice for any, and all reasons.

On my most recent business trip to Las Vegas, Murphy’s Law was fully in evidence and very much in play.

Murphy’s Law, for the uninitiated, is the law that dictates ‘whatever can go wrong, will go wrong,’ and no matter how often we put a project together, something will inevitably not go the way we planned.

No problem! That’s the motto we have to live by, because the trade-show business – wherein Entourage X has been a leader in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and the United States for more than a quarter-century – is fraught with unpredictability and uncertainty.

The only absolute certainty I am aware of when I travel to a show where our clients are displaying is that something, sometime, somewhere will not go according to plan and that we will have to pivot.

There is ALWAYS a pivot.

The most recent pivot came about courtesy of a massive snowstorm that wreaked havoc on the American northeast, stretching all the way to the Midwest part of the country. How might that affect me, a Montreal exhibition consultant travelling to Las Vegas, might you ask?

Great question!

One of our clients at the show had a beautiful 20 x 20 island booth featuring a number of cool features, not the least of which was the incredible circular hanging sign with logos printed on the bottom, which created a unique and dynamic branding opportunity for the client.

Frequently, hanging signs are apparent and attract attention from far away on a crowded and busy trade-show floor. In this instance, the logos also offer a close-up branding that allows people who are close by to understand the company’s marketing message without ever having spoken to a rep at the booth.

The graphics for the booth structure and the hanging sign, however, had a circuitous and winding road to Las Vegas. They were printed and shipped from Montreal to a FedEx office in Cincinnati.

Where they stayed. And stayed. And stayed and stayed and stayed.

The snowstorm that shut down ground and air transport in that part of the United States stranded our graphics in Cincinnati, and no matter how many WKRP in Cincinnati jokes we made, we just couldn’t get them to Las Vegas in time for the show.

So, there we were, with less than 24 hours to go before the show opened and the only thing ready on the booth was the metal structure that would provide the skeleton for the booth.

The final product! It was a crazy few days in Las Vegas, but we managed to build something amazing for our client

Eight monitors, eight counters, the hanging sign and all the furniture for the booth still had to be installed, but until we had graphics for the structure, we couldn’t really do much of anything.

To top it all off, this was Tuesday.

Let’s just rewind 72 hours for more context

Rewind to Sunday: I had arrived in Vegas late Saturday night and spent the first day working on another booth where we had to build some towers for a client, who was also dealing with

a last-minute delivery.

There were, in fact, TWO massive shows going on at the Las Vegas Convention Centre and we had clients at both.

So, I spend a few hours at that booth, then when it was discovered some screws were missing, I made a run to Home Depot, got the screws, brought them back to the grateful client, which took up the better part of the day.

Later that night, I went for supper on Fremont Street in old Las Vegas and did some souvenir shopping for my loved ones.

What I didn’t anticipate was being felled by food poisoning that night and waking up Monday morning unable to keep food down. With a fever and a stomach that felt like I had eaten a slot machine without chewing, I made my way over to the show and started looking after the clients we had there. By lunchtime, I had drank some water but was unable to keep it down, so I just kept throwing up. Good times!

I spent the rest of Monday looking after the three clients we had at one show and prospecting as best I could – being personable and dispensing exhibition advice is a hard enough challenge when you’re feeling great, let alone suffering from food poisoning, however.

I got back to the hotel at around 4:30 p.m. armed with Gatorade and ginger ale to help keep me hydrated and to help settle my stomach. Sleep helped and I basically slept on and off from 5 p.m. until Tuesday morning.

When I awoke Tuesday morning, one show was up and running and with the second set to begin Wednesday morning, I was still dealing with the problem of the missing graphics, which meant the beautiful 20x20 booth for the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) was still a husk of metal frames, unopened boxes of furniture, counters, and monitors – and it all had to be done by the end of the day Tuesday.

End of day comes and we still have a problem.

The problem? Still no graphics. So, back at Entourage X offices 3,000 miles and two time zones away, our incredible operations team got to ordering a second set of graphics at the last minute through a partner in Atlanta who had an office in Las Vegas.

Those graphics would only be available at 8 p.m. local time – 11 p.m. back in Montreal – and the entire booth had to be built that night.

So, what did we do? We pivoted. First, I reached out to our install-and-dismantle team to advise them I would have to take a cab to pick up the graphics in a Las Vegas suburb at 8 p.m. and that I would be back at the convention centre by around 8:35. When I rolled in with the – beautifully done, by the way – silicone edge graphics (SEG) in hand, we got to work. The team got the graphics onto the structure and after a few false starts – at one point, the graphics map appeared backwards, so the graphics initially were on the wrong structures – we got it mostly done.

While they worked on that, I unboxed and put together the furniture for the booth – easy chairs, coffee tables, bar stools and bistro tables – and around midnight, they took a break and when they did that, I ordered some pizza to the convention centre to feed our overtaxed and underfed team.

Mind you, I still hadn’t had ANY solid food since Sunday night because of the food poisoning, and I wanted so badly to have a slice of pizza.

I ended up caving – and immediately regretted it. I won't elaborate further, for very good reasons.

My first visit to Las Vegas was definitely memorable

We finished the booth for the night around 2:30 a.m. and I walked back to my hotel, which was about a mile from the convention centre. The fresh air helped and I tumbled into bed around 3:15 a.m. One small problem still was left to look after – that amazing hanging sign still wasn’t in the rafters because the rigging team for the show – who look after raising those signs to the rafters – had gone home at 5 p.m. on Tuesday.

They were scheduled to get the sign up at 7:30 a.m. on the Wednesday, so I was there at 7:30 as well. The sign went up without a hitch or any issues whatsoever, and was in the rafters when the clients showed up to set up their workstations at 8 – because the show was set to open officially at 10 a.m.

One more small problem. The monitors we shipped could only be connected to the client’s team’s computers via an HDMI cable – you know, the ones that connect your streaming devices to your TVs – and instead of HDMI cables, the boxes contained screen-to-screen cables, which look like HDMI cables at first glance, but obviously, they are not. So now, I’m missing three of those cables, and the show is set to open in less than an hour.

So, another pivot!

I hop in a cab and go to a nearby Walgreens, where I see they only have one such cable. That’s no good, so I go to a second nearby Walgreens, where they have two. Fine, I say. I buy their two last cables, go back to the first one and buy their only cable, giving me three in my possession. We zipped back to the convention centre, where the client is waiting with about 35 minutes until the show starts. Once their cables were in hand, they could finish their setup and managed to be ready for when the show opened at 10 a.m.

I, on the other hand, still had a whole day of prospecting on the show floor to get out of the way, so off I went to prowl both show floors and see what other companies had going.

I did that until about 4 p.m., by which point I was exhausted, spent emotionally and physically and still had a nine-hour redeye flight back to Montreal. I grabbed my luggage from the hotel, got to the airport and had a power nap while waiting for the flight to board at 7 p.m.

It was, in my estimation, about par for the course for trade shows. Things rarely go seamlessly and those of us who make it our business know by now that almost nothing ever goes completely according to plan.

That’s when good companies pivot and that ability to think, move and change on the fly speaks volumes about Entourage X’s ability to satisfy clients’ needs, no matter what it takes.

We pivot so our clients don’t have to worry about anything. We take the stress of trade shows and we put it on our shoulders, so our clients can show up to a great booth and not want for anything.

Got a question about trade shows? Maybe you have questions about exhibiting? Want to hear some more great trade-show stories?

No problem. We got you.

Questions?

Feel free to send them to mlalonde@entouragex.com or just reach out by phone at 514-742-5465.