With more than 400 exhibitors and 8,000 attendees every year at their national conference, The National Fire Professionals Association plans years ahead, including going over budget requirements and assessing the right questions to ask the venue. Courtesy of Holly Roderick

Remember Murphy’s Law? Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. Expo planners, producers and participants, including those who design and install the exhibits, will testify to the veracity of Murphy’s observation.

Thankfully, not every outing features a calamity, but there are enough moving parts at every expo, trade show and convention to provide plenty of opportunities for something to go sideways. That’s what makes it so important to have preplanned strategies in place to deal with the unexpected.

Holly Roderick, CMP, CEM, senior director of member experience for the 65,000-member National Fire Professionals Association (NFPA), says that planning, planning and then planning some more is the key to managing unpredictability.

With 8,000 attendees and 400-plus exhibitors, there’s a lot to plan for and manage at NFPA’s annual conference. Although by nature of the profession, firefighters are forced to confront danger, survive and help shepherd others through every sort of crisis and emergency, thankfully, as a rule, no one’s life is on the line at an expo or conference. However, they are aware that anything can happen.

A few years ago, NFPA made an investment in radio communications for their event team, and it paid off when medical emergencies occurred at their last two conferences.

NFPA has contingency plans in place in the event of virtually every kind of catastrophe whether it’s a natural disaster, an active shooter or whatever else it might be.

“When you bring 8,000 people together, you need to have planned for every possibility,” Roderick emphasizes. “We have an extensive security plan put into place before we go onsite. Most people don’t think about those sorts of situations, but because we’re a safety organization, we do.”

She and her team believe so emphatically in preparation that they start planning next year’s conference before they execute this year’s. “Before we get to our show in June of 2025, we will already have our 2026 expo floor completely arranged and laid out. That’s because most of our exhibitors at the current show want to begin conceptualizing where they might want to be on the floor next year. We need to have all of those elements in place so exhibitors can immediately consider booking for the following year, which of course we want them to do,” says Roderick.

NFPA’s mission is to save lives and reduce injuries and economic loss caused by fires. In support of that goal, NFPA engages in ongoing research, advocates for safety codes and offers training and education online, in regional and local meetings and at their annual conference.

“Safety codes and standards are the core of what we do as an organization. Attendees can take advantage of the educational programs offered at our conference, but members have the privilege of participating in a vital technical meeting where they get to vote on codes,” she says.

Roderick believes that the best defense is a good offense. “In order to plan,” she says, “you have to already know the roadblocks and pitfalls you’re likely to face so you can get ahead of those things. If you’re organized ahead of time, you can avoid getting in the weeds. If you end up there early on, you’re probably going to get behind, which means you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing, and it’s hard to catch up.”

If you’ve planned well in advance, though, when disaster happens, Roderick says that you can usually manage it pretty well because the other pieces are already in place to deal with what’s happening. “That allows you to go with the flow when you need to because everything else is buttoned up. You’ve got that backup plan in your pocket, and you’re ready to move,” she says.

An important part of that is knowing what questions to ask. NFPA’s annual conference rotates among various locations: Las Vegas, Orlando and Dallas, to name recent places. Each venue has its own policies. Roderick advocates having a consistent list of questions to ask at every conference location, adding to it with each succeeding event.

“You learn from your experiences. If you get burned along the way, then you know the things you need to add to your list of questions so you don’t have that happen the next time. That obviously comes with experience, but the more organized you are, the more prepared you are to ask the right questions to avoid those same pitfalls in the future,” she adds.

When Roderick and her team arrived in Orlando to set up for their conference, they were shocked to discover that the venue was requiring them to pay for security personnel to guard everything that came in for them from the moment any of it was delivered. With a 50’ x 70’ booth, that’s a lot of crates, containers, material and equipment. Since delivery always takes place days before Roderick and her crew begin setup, it ended up being an “astronomical expense.” It was one more thing for her to add to her list of future questions.

That reminds her of another contingency that requires planning for in advance . . . money! It’s essential to have a line item in the budget in advance to pay for unexpected costs. “Anticipate that something will happen . . . because it will, and budget for it,” she suggests.

Trey Weaver, senior meetings manager of the 6,500-member American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS), agrees with Roderick that planning is the key to survival.

AAFS’s annual meeting takes place every February and is open to both members and non-members alike. The conference travels to different venues from year to year, attracting between 3,000 and 3,500 attendees and 100 exhibitors, although Weaver says that they’re still building back up post-pandemic. This year, they’ll be hosting in Baltimore; last year, it was held in Denver.

Like Roderick, he knows that, although the list of contingencies to be prepared for grows with experience, it’s just not possible to anticipate everything that could potentially go awry. At least 1,000 educational talks and seminars will be presented over the course of five days at AAFS’s conference, 600 of them in the last two days alone. That requires a huge amount of audiovisual equipment, which can be subject to glitches and malfunction. Being able to be creative on the run is essential, he says.

Recently, in a few instances, he and his staff have encountered an unusual predicament. Some of the discussion topics can be controversial, and in the past couple of years, there has been heckling from audience members who disagreed with content being presented. Even though these are scientific professionals, Weaver says that sometimes their passion gets the better of them.

“How do we address that in the room? How do we prepare our moderators who are running the sessions to deal with that in a way that doesn’t create a massive stir or distract even further?” he asks.

He knows it’s how he and his staff respond to whatever is happening that matters.

“Part of the equation is staying positive, being professional and always being truthful. The most important thing I want our staff to always remember is to maintain an attendee-first mentality in how we address problems so we minimize any type of impact on them. With experience, you learn how to diffuse difficult situations by making sure everybody has an opportunity to be heard and feels validated.”

Paul Bridson, owner of Media Management and Display and winner of 17 international design awards for exhibit design excellence, has designed, built and installed enough exhibits across the country to have experienced Murphy’s Law over and over again. With exhibits that can be 800 sf and larger, there are so many pieces and parts that the process is rife with opportunities for something to go break, go missing or not work.

“Assuming there are no mishaps in shipping, but I’ll get to that in a minute,” he says, “there’s much less potential for things going wrong with smaller, simpler exhibits like portable modulars; but with larger exhibits, it’s unusual not to have something go wrong; and custom exhibits definitely have custom problems.”

The glitches are sometimes relatively minor, although they can still require no small amount of scrambling. “We were installing a 20’ x 40’ exhibit for the Heartland Brick Association in Washington, D.C., when we discovered we were missing the fabric seat back for the exhibit’s folding chair. We had to find a fabric store so we could buy black canvas, then talk the hotel laundry department into sewing it into a seat back. We got it done, though,” he says.

Bridson remembers having to find hardware stores two different times in Philadelphia. At one of the Philly shows, he discovered the vendor hadn’t sent the corner pieces necessary for two large pieces of a hard panel system to slide together.

“The only way for me to fix it was to find a place where I could buy angle iron and fasteners, drill holes into the panels and jerry-rig a support for them, basically turning their modular system into a custom exhibit right there on the show floor,” he says.

Bridson has had to locate hardware stores in Minneapolis when special kinds of electrical connectors were missing, Atlanta when the manufacturer of a large section of truss for an island display didn’t send the carriage bolts needed to put it together and San Diego when once again a crucial part of the exhibit wasn’t included.

But the biggest problems, Bridson says, have always been with shippers and show labor.

“According to show rules at most halls, electrical has to be installed by a union electrician, even if it’s just plugging light cords into an outlet,” he says. “We also have to wait for the Teamsters and show labor to get the crates moved onto the show floor just to be able to crack them open, and sometimes, we aren’t even allowed to do that ourselves. For big island exhibits, we’d often be waiting for a scissor lift to be brought in to install a big hanging sign overhead, and we couldn’t move anything on the floor until it was hung.

“We’d be standing there with our crates, twiddling our thumbs, watching the minutes and hours tick away, knowing that we had an exhibit that took at least eight hours to assemble correctly, and watching the day slip away. One time, when we finally got an electrician, the first thing he did was drill a hole right through a panel. There was no fixing it. All we could do was camouflage it.”

The most dramatic rescue, he says, was spending all night chasing down a UPS driver. The exhibit was supposed to ship directly to the customer, who would drive it to his show in St. Louis and set it up.

“It was a simple pop-up display, so it didn’t need me, but we received a notification that the shipment wasn’t going to arrive until the second day of his show. We spent all afternoon calling UPS trying to find out where the exhibit was, but got nowhere. We tried going to a UPS station in person. Again nothing,” Bridson says.

“Finally, we drove to the huge UPS marshaling yard, many acres of it, and all of it completely fenced in with security guards. I went up to the guardhouse and explained the mess we were in. Amazingly, unbelievably, one of the two guards took pity on us, and said, ‘I think I know someone who can help you,’ took me into the facility where she found a guy who looked up what truck the exhibit was on and where it was headed . . . to a completely wrong place in northeast Iowa.

“By now the middle of the night, we jumped in the van and chased the driver down in rural Illinois, offloaded the exhibit and drove straight though the rest of the night to St. Louis. We made it there right as the show was about to open, and set up his booth just in time,” says Bridson.

He offers some advice for exhibitors: “Don’t let yourself get into a time crunch getting your booth designed, built and shipped. Set a deadline well in advance of the actual show, provide your builder with all the information they need to design it and get it approved, and make sure they stick to it.”

Learning to master logistics is key for any meeting planner. By looking at all the possibilities of what could go wrong ahead of time, last-minute challenges can be avoided. | AC&F |