Trade Show Spending

Part of my job is to organize my company’s participation in trade shows. We exhibit in a small handful of these each year; they vary (for us) in costs from the low four figures to the high five figures. Larger companies would routinely spend far more than we do on shows large and small, but one of the things we try to do properly is manage our show costs.

That can be a difficult balance, though. Our show contingent is not large enough to make things like hotel accommodations nightmarishly expensive, but we are perhaps too much in-between on certain issues. For example, we have few enough workers at a given show that it’s not cost-effective to have the venue cater lunch. On the other hand, we have few enough workers that it makes a lot of sense to bring in food for them so we don’t get caught without just the right person being available to meet with a prospect or customer.

It’s a balancing act, just like everything else. Here’s another example: We have a hanging sign (maybe I’ll post again later about that) that we use at the largest show we attend. The year we got it, we also ordered it lit. It looked absolutely awesome, but that added thousands of dollars to the cost. I haven’t lit it since. It serves its purpose.

Because there are so many out-of-control costs that we have no control over, it’s difficult to achieve the right balance between just throwing up your hands and spending money like water, or going the other direction and ratcheting down any spending over which you have any control.

I suspect that there is a parallel dilemma in personal finance as well. Credit card and equity line spending creates a false economy that’s difficult to avoid, even if you intellectually know better. In the case of a trade show, though, the point is to make more money, and you’re spending to that end. By that standard, it would be difficult to justify some of what we do with personal finances.

In any event, if I were managing a person managing tradeshows, instead of being that person, I think I would assign metrics by pursuable leads (not total leads), by business (either new or repeat) initiated, furthered, or closed at a show, and by budget. We’d grant a bonus based on performance against those metrics, but to be perfectly honest, our software and services are expensive enough that I’d rather break the budget and get a bunch of business.

This brew of measuring and guessing, of spending and saving, fascinates me and drives me crazy. So this time of year, which brings the biggest show of our industry, is always an interesting time to try to figure it all out. And then throw up one’s hands and go to sleep in a hotel bed that clearly cost too much per night.