Things That Have Gone Wrong – a trip down the memory lane of my biggest nightmares and some of the things that have provided the steepest and sharpest learning curves!
I think one of the primary necessities for being an event promoter is a sense of humour. You simply have to be able to see the funny side of things, even if this is retrospectively. Over the 14 years of show promotion, we have had many crisis points and unexpected happenings to deal with.
We usually manage to keep a calm, unruffled surface so that neither visitors nor exhibitors have any idea of the panic going on behind the scenes. However, there has been more than one occasion where I have been searching for the nearest rafter to hang myself from!
Here are just some of the more memorable ones from the ‘casebook’ ………………………….
‘THE CASE OF THE SHRINKING TABLE STOCK’ –
On my very first show I learned a very important lesson – be specific or check for yourself! My first attempt as a promoter, was a one day show in a hotel in the market town of Sleaford, Lincolnshire. An acquaintance of my then partner wanted to help and be involved and as I was living on-board a boat in Scotland at the time and as she lived in Sleaford, she acted as go-between with the hotel. One of the things I asked her to check out, was the number of tables the hotel had to offer as I needed thirty-eight and wanted to be sure they had enough. Sure enough, she popped down and counted them for me, later announcing that there was no problem, they had forty.
We had been granted access at 8 p.m. on the evening before the show, following a conference during the day, so we eagerly arrived to lay up the room. It was at this point we discovered the forty tables were actually forty 3’ square tables, not forty 6’ trestles as I required. My forty tables had in a matter of seconds become twenty as two would be required for each stand!
That was my first experience of what I now call ‘brain-freeze’. You know you need to do something to prevent impending disaster, you need to start planning, you need action, but the brain simply freezes up and can’t see beyond the problem staring you in the face! It was my son Phill bless him, who melted the freeze this time – ‘Dad stores the rabbit club tables at his place – should I see if we can borrow them?’ That was all it took – just something to tip the brain out of freeze and into action.
We duly borrowed the rabbit club tables which were 8’ trestles, my son’s dining table, various coffee tables and occasional tables and anything else we could lay hands on. That was the first outing of the now established phrase ‘Floor plan, what floor plan?’ as my carefully, hand-drawn as it was back then, plan disintegrated. 8’ tables took up the carefully measured 2’ 6” gaps between the tables, the odd shapes jutted out in all the wrong places – oh boy!
Exhibitors arrived on the morrow after a very sleepless night and ‘What a shambles!’, ‘This will never work!’ and other such comments were rife as you might imagine. We fielded the moans and complaints to the best of our ability, making changes as we went and eventually fitted everyone in, in a fashion anyway, and opened the doors.
In the public flooded! On that first day we had just short of 700 people through this small hotel with odd shaped tables! It was wall to wall people – all the readers were doing back to back readings, the talks rooms were full with people standing and sitting on the floors to get in and traders couldn’t wrap goods fast enough!
From ‘This will never work!’ in the morning, we graduated to ‘When’s the next one’ by the end of the day, and learned my first two important lessons in the process -
Lesson one – be specific – don’t say tables, say 6’ trestle tables!
Lesson two – double check arrangements, dot I’s and cross t’s.
‘THE MYSTERY OF THE FLOATING CARPET’ -
In the early days of the Lincoln show, we used what will always be to us, ‘the cow shed’, now more grandly called ‘the exhibition hall’. Actually, I think that is what it was called back then – just not by us J
We arrived at the point after a few shows, where we thought it would be good to incorporate music. For this, we hired our first marquee to be erected on the hard standing at the front of the building, using one of the fire exits for entry from the show. I discussed the drilling of the hard standing with the venue, they advised what they required as repair following removal…………. all was going swimmingly! Swimming was nearly what we were doing! We had discussed carpeting the marquee to give a better ambience. We even got to choose the colour – a nice, deep blue I remember. I assumed that as we were having carpet, the marquee company would automatically realise we wanted a false floor laying……………. Not so! We didn’t even notice on set up day that the carpet had actually been laid direct onto the concrete hard standing area, rather than onto a built in raised floor. They had laid the ramp between the marquee and the hall, carpeted it and – it all looked wonderful.
Overnight we had torrential rain, so when we arrived on the Saturday and were going about the early morning jobs, I asked one of our helpers to go and open up the marquee and check the roof hadn’t leaked. She came back ashen faced – the roof was not the problem, the rain had washed down a nearby slope and flooded in under the marquee. This was when we discovered the missing floor, quite simply because the carpet was actually floating on a large puddle – well, more like a mini-lake!
Brain freeze! Fortunately not for long this time. Living on a boat meant pumping and sucking up water was something with which I was not unfamiliar! We need a commercial strength wet vac I announced! They all looked at me with blank expressions – 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning in Lincoln showground – where were we to get such an item?
These were the days of what was termed ‘bare bones hire’. They gave you a key to the facility and left you to it! No event’s manager, no site staff – we were on our own. We located an out of date yellow pages in the office of the ‘cow shed’, sorry, exhibition hall, and set to work phoning around the tool hire companies. Most didn’t open till 8 a.m., which did nothing for the nerves. My butterflies had somehow acquired hobnail boots and were dancing a jig somewhere in the pit of my stomach.
We eventually located one and someone was dispatched to fetch it. Forty-five minutes later we were taking turns to vac as much water and squelch out of the carpet as we could before opening at 10 a.m. We got rid of most of it, but the music had the additional accompaniment of ‘squelch’ to go with it for the rest of that day.
Lesson three – never assume anyone from whom you are acquiring equipment or services knows what you want or what you mean, or will even use common sense.
‘THE ROADSIDE SIGN ADVENTURE’ –
In the early days of building shows, one of the most effective forms of getting people through the door, was our signs campaign. We used to have anywhere up to fifty boards made, depending on show, and place them on grass verges, telegraph poles, lamp posts, fences and anywhere where traffic might slow down long enough to read them. In some cases we even had larger banners made that could be staked into the verge if there was space.
Without a doubt, this is what built up the attendance in the early days as visitor after visitor would tick ‘Roadside Sign’ as the reason that brought them to the show on our marketing survey.
It was a real blow therefore, when in around 2005/6 local authorities started enforcing Fly Posting law and issuing fines to those who flouted it! More on this in a later blog!
My first experience of this new drive to reduce fly-posting when it first became law was at Grimsby. At that point I knew nothing about it. I quickly learned after that day however!
At about noon on the Saturday, an officious little man appeared at reception asking for me. He was a council official and his new job was to enforce the fly posting laws that had suddenly become fashionable. He announced that he had counted twenty signs and could fine us up to £350 per sign. My mouth dropped open so much, it is a wonder my chin didn’t hit the desk! He was going to give us an hour to get them removed ………… in the middle of a busy Saturday show!
Brain-freeze! Not for long though, this was seriously going to hit my pocket – one of the quickest and surest reasons to melt brain-freeze! He was clearly the sort of chap that loved his work and would pursue it to the fullest extent, but aAfter some reasoning and sweet talk, I managed to melt him sufficiently to give us till 7 p.m. that evening – two hours to do it in after the show closed. The butterflies were past jigging, they were now into a full samba!
I was in no doubt that Saturday night or not at 7pm he would be inspecting to see if we had complied! Needless to say, the minute the venue was secured, we were all off in different directions to retrieve the signs! We actually had forty-five out, something I saw no reason to inform him of – he had only spotted twenty, but which twenty? We had no way of knowing, so down the lot had to come. I have known more entertaining ways of spending a Saturday evening than stumbling through wet grass verges, in the dark and cold, trying to cut down signs with one hand and hold a torch with the other! By the time we had finished, we were too late to get dinner anywhere, so it was a quick MacDonalds – ughh! Maybe not entertaining, but certainly memorable!
In the next instalment – More Things That Have Gone Wrong! Including, ‘The Strange Affair of the Delayed Monk’, ‘The Mystery of the Missing Market Licence’, ‘The case of the Mysteriously Shrinking Hall’ and ‘The Adventure of the Appearing Kitchen’!
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