New-Crew Snafu

Switching to a new exhibit house often causes a few stumbles out of the gate. But when your new installation-and-dismantle crew has to assemble your old booth, those minor stumbles can turn in to a face-down splat.

As my company’s trade show specialist, I found myself in a sea of change leading up to the National Hemophilia Foundation annual meeting in Denver last November. We had just hired a new exhibit house and planned to build a new booth, so the NHF show would serve as our old booth’s last hurrah — and my I&D crew’s first and only time to prep, ship, and install the past-its-prime property. This fact alone made me nervous, but on top of that, my new boss was making her first trip to a show to watch me in action. So no matter how many first-timer fumbles we encountered, our exhibit had to be flawless.

Everything went as planned prior to the show, and once on site, setup was purring along smoothly — until we began assembling the final 4 feet of our exhibit’s central tower. That’s when we realized we only had about half of the pieces required to finish the top of the 16-foot-tall, 7-foot-wide structure. If we continued installation without the missing pieces, we’d end up with a big hole in our tower, something I’m sure my new boss would not appreciate.

I called my exhibit house and discovered that since the new crew was unfamiliar with our old property, it didn’t ship all of the necessary pieces. So with the show starting the next day and my boss on her way, I pulled together my staff and begged for ideas.

The logical option was to ask our exhibit house to ship the missing pieces via next-day delivery. But since there were so many missing parts, I decided that the less we asked of the pull-and-prep crew, the greater our chances of success. So we brainstormed for other improvisational options.

After we took a closer look at the plans, we decided to construct the exhibit using only two of the six missing 3-by-4-foot panels comprising the top of the tower. We figured we could rebuild the top 4 feet to be about 3 feet across instead of 7 feet across. The top of the column would be tapered instead of the same width as the base of the column, but it wouldn’t affect the logo, and no one would notice the difference.

After giving an initial explanation to my exhibit-house rep, I decided a few extra visual aids certainly couldn’t hurt. So I took out my cell phone and shot a short video and several photos of the unfinished exhibit so the rep could clearly understand our situation — as well as which pieces I’d need to remedy it. I then sent the video and the images to my rep, and phoned him to talk through each image.

Back at the warehouse, my rep pulled the pieces, described them to me, and read off the part numbers, which I checked against our master list. Then he shipped them overnight via FedEx to me in Denver. The next morning, two crew members and I picked up the missing pieces and quickly put the final panels on the booth just in time for the show.

In the end, my boss never discovered our last-minute improv act, and, honestly, I kind of liked the new tapered look atop our old exhibit, even if it was the last time I’d see it.

— Janice Breuer, CTSM, trade show specialist, FFF Enterprises, Temecula, CA