Frustrated with Events: Is It Time to Run Your Own Show?

John W Hayes
The Startup
Published in
4 min readAug 16, 2019

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Photo by Teemu Paananen on Unsplash

I have a love/hate relationship with trade shows and business conferences. I love having the opportunity to break free from my desk for a couple of days and network with my industry peers, but I hate the cost and struggle to justify any spending where it can be difficult to attribute a direct ROI.

If time is money, I’ve wasted millions of dollars at trade shows.

When you consider that time is the one business resource you can never claw back, wasting it at poorly targeted events is beyond foolish, and yet, as entrepreneurs, marketers and sales professionals, we constantly find ourselves trawling around exhibition halls and conference centres looking for that next great business relationship, or that piece of inspiration or advice that will give us the competitive edge.

What Do You Do?

As attendees, it’s not just the hours we’ve wasted walking from one booth to the next, trying to figure out what each exhibitor is attempting to sell us through their highly convoluted elevator pitches and brand statements.

It’s the “educational” seminars that are nothing more than sales pitches, it’s the overpriced coffee, the terrible Wi-Fi (resulting in you missing an opportunity to connect with the one person who would have made the trip worth it) and…

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John W Hayes
The Startup

Marketing Strategist, Author of #BecomingTHEExpert, Content Marketing Trainer, and Cyclist. Check out my author profile: https://amzn.to/2OO5DR5