Candy Adams, CTSM, CME, CEM, CMP, CMM, “The Booth Mom,” is an independent exhibit-management consultant, trainer, speaker, writer, and an Exhibitor conference faculty member. CandyAdams @BoothMom.com

t’s sitting there in a dark corner of a warehouse, collecting dust and cobwebs and slowly draining your trade show budget: your unused, unwanted exhibit.

Most of us have exhibit properties in storage that fit at least one of the following criteria:

The exhibit’s form, size, or layout no longer meets the functional or aesthetic needs of the exhibit program.

The company’s image, brand, logo, or colors have changed, and the old exhibit doesn’t match the new look.

The exhibit has become a dinosaur — big, heavy, cumbersome to set up, and extinct based on rising shipping, installation-and-dismantle, and material-handling costs.

If you have obsolete exhibit properties running up hefty storage bills, it’s time to think seriously about getting rid of them, whether you can sell them to recoup a portion of the original build costs, donate them to charity for a tax write-off, give them away to an exhibit house or another exhibitor, recycle them, or take them to the landfill.

Cost Analysis

Before getting rid of any major exhibit properties, check with your accounting department to ascertain its value on your company’s books. As capital assets, a majority of exhibit properties are placed on either a three- or five-year depreciation schedule, and may have already been fully depreciated and written off the books as having no value to your company. If your exhibit property has not reached a zero-asset value, your departmental budget may be hit with a one-time expense for the current value of the property if you dispose of it or sell it.

To decide whether it’s time to dispose of the property, calculate the costs of each of the following options:

1. Keep it. Hold on to the exhibit until it depreciates completely. The accounting department should be able to give you current figures on your ongoing expenses to maintain unused properties, such as exhibit-house storage and insurance. Compare this to the total current value of the exhibit. If you spend more to maintain it than its current value, it’s time to get rid of it. If not, you may be better off to wait until it fully depreciates.

2. Sell it. Calculate the cost of advertising fees and possibly paying outbound material handling and transportation, then subtract the amount you expect to make from the sale. If you think you can make a profit or at least break even, this is a good option for you.

But before you spend the money you hope to make from selling your booth, ask the accounting department if your trade show program will get the revenue from an exhibit sale or if the money will go into a generic company fund for resold corporate assets. The latter scenario almost happened to me when I was selling a small, custom, modular exhibit. To sidestep this policy, my boss had me turn it over to our exhibit house, which sold it for us in return for a new pop-up display.

3. Throw it away. Consider the costs of material handling and transportation to a landfill and landfill fees, including hazardous-waste fees if your exhibit contains toxic chemicals such as glue or paint and has to be disposed of at a dumping site approved by the Environmental Protection Agency.

One manager of an exhibit house, who spoke to me based on maintaining her anonymity, candidly told me that her company often just uses its own dumpsters for disposing of smaller exhibits and crates and charge its standard hourly warehousing rate for outbound loading plus a disposal fee, say, $250 to $500. If it’s a larger exhibit that will require renting a trailer to transport it to the dump site, disposal fees can range from $1,500 to $3,000 per load. But, she warned, some exhibit houses add a “misery fee,” marking up the cost to whatever fee they think the client will tolerate if they are losing that client’s future business and storage anyhow; this could increase the cost of a trailer-load up to $5,000. As she bluntly stated, “It’s a little bit of a license to steal. What are the exhibitors going to do if they are charged up the whazzoo? Pick up the exhibits and load them themselves?” Her advice is to ask an exhibit supplier up front during preliminary negotiations for a quote in writing of what it would charge to dispose of a full trailer load, since there is no standard.

4. Recycle it. A variety of materials or components of your exhibit — such as aluminum, polyethylene, and cardboard — may be recyclable, actually generating a positive cash flow that can offset the cost of your overall disposal fees. Some exhibit manufacturers, such as Nimlok Display and Exhibit Solutions Worldwide, specifically design exhibit properties to maximize recyclable materials and will even recycle them for you at no additional cost.

Selling an Exhibit

Depending on the age, style, and condition of an exhibit, it can be saleable in the active pre-owned exhibit market. To find out how hot the current market is for pre-owned exhibits, I called Ray C. Rogowicz at ExhibitTrader.com, an experienced reseller. He said that Web listings for solid, well-designed exhibit properties that are less than five years old have a 90-percent chance of selling. Even properties that are older than five years but are still in good condition have a 60- to 80-percent resale rate. Overall, considering the good, bad, and ugly properties, about 50 to 60 percent will eventually sell.

If you decide to sell your exhibit, you have some homework to do. According to Rogowicz, the key to a solid resale value and the ability to move the property is good documentation.

This documentation should include:

Digital photos. Take photos of your exhibit from several angles, empty if possible. Take pictures of unique elements of the booth, including towers, reception counters, kiosks, conference rooms, etc. Don’t forget a few crating shots if you can get them. If your exhibit can be set up in multiple configurations, take photos or include renderings of the various setup options. If possible, get a professional to take the photos to make your booth look more impressive.

Original design renderings, good detail prints, and CAD drawings.

A complete inventory of the exhibit elements, including the number and size of counters, stages, meeting rooms, and any other furnishings that will be sold as part of the exhibit.

Vital information such as the exhibit’s original manufacturer or builder, the age of the exhibit, number of times used, current condition and record of any past refurbishment, and the property’s current location.

An outline of typical costs, including handling/loading fees, transportation requirements, transportation costs, material handling, installation-and-dismantle charges, and storage costs.

According to Rogowicz, good documentation can as much as double the selling price of an exhibit.

Once you’ve got your documentation together, you’ll need to set a price for the exhibit property. Depending on the style, age, condition, available documentation, and location of the exhibit, you may be able to recover anywhere from $.10 to $.25 on the dollar of the original cost.

When calculating the total you expect to net from the sale of your exhibit, remember that in addition to advertising or listing costs, you may incur expenses related to showing and shipping the exhibit. These costs can include pulling the exhibit from warehouse storage, partial or complete setup for viewing, preparation for shipping, and transportation to a new owner. The good news is that you may be able to negotiate splitting these costs with the buyer.

Where to Sell

You have many options for advertising your pre-owned exhibit. A number of companies specialize in selling pre-owned exhibits online, including ExhibitTrader.com, ExhibitAuction.com, M-DOC Exhibits, Impact Marketing Displays Inc., and World Exhibit Brokers Inc. Even eBay has a distinct exhibit-resale section under its Business and Industrial category called “trade show display.” There are also a number of trade show industry publications with classified-advertising sections that list pre-owned exhibits, such as EXHIBITOR magazine, Exhibit Builder, Exhibit City News, and Tradeshow Week. Check out your local business journals, business associations, and marketing and sales journals that have classified-advertising categories for used-exhibit sales.

To decide where to list your exhibit, interview several vendors to find out how many hits their Web sites get, their process for managing the sale of your exhibit, any upfront costs to list your exhibit, and whether they charge a percentage of the sale price.

Another option for selling your exhibit is to sell it to an exhibit house. Depending on your exhibit’s age, condition, eye appeal, and future rentability, the exhibit house that currently manages the property might be interested in acquiring your exhibit to add to its rental inventory. If your exhibit house doesn’t see your exhibit as a rental moneymaker, it may be willing to consign your property for a percentage of the sale.

Finally, don’t forget about word of mouth. At my first job as an exhibit manager, we had an unused exhibit languishing in storage. I mentioned it to my transportation broker, and within weeks he had a buyer for the property. (I gave him a 10-percent commission.) Spread the word to other exhibitors, show management, and all the vendors who are familiar with your property, such as installation-and-dismantle personnel, transportation brokers, and audiovisual vendors.

Donating Your Exhibit

Another way to find a new home for your exhibit property is to donate it to a local charity, nonprofit agency, or school for use at fundraisers and other events. In exchange, you can write off the charitable donation on your company’s taxes. To find nonprofits willing to take your properties, consider listing them with The Freecycle Network (www.freecycle.org) or Craigslist Inc. (www.craigslist.org), noting that you’re willing to donate the exhibit it to nonprofit organizations in exchange for the tax write-off.

You can also offer your unused exhibit properties at no cost to your exhibit house to use as rentals, but you won’t get the tax break. The upside is that even without the write-off, you’ll still be helping your program’s bottom line by getting rid of the property, since you’ll no longer have to pay to store it.

Disposing of Your Exhibit

If you’re stuck with a white elephant that nobody wants, you can dispose of it yourself, pay your exhibit house to do it, or use it one last time and pay the general-services contractor to dismantle it with sledgehammers and chainsaws and dispose of it for you after the show. This final option can be cost effective because you save the cost of transporting it back to storage after the show. No matter who disposes of the exhibit, costs will include shipping and handling to the disposal site, landfill fees, and hazardous-material fees.

Whether you sell, donate, or trash your unused exhibit properties, disposing of them might add some cash to your program’s piggy bank. So take a look at your exhibit properties and decide: trash or treasure? e