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 veryone's familiar with the cliché, "If you want something done right, you've got to do it yourself." But for Cathie Hastings, CTSM, adopting a do-it-yourself approach was less about quality control than fiscal responsibility. In her case, a more appropriate motto would be, "If you want something done cheap, you've got to eliminate your exhibit house."
When Hastings became the manager of exhibits, displays, and events for 3M Canada in 1994, she worked very closely with an exhibit house to help deliver everything her internal clients needed for the 42 annual shows on the corporate calendar.
If a client needed a particular booth at a show, it submitted a request to Hastings, who then told the exhibit house, which then pulled the booth from its warehouse and shipped it to the show. Of course, the same process occurred if the client wanted to order a show service, such as carpet rental or electrical. The client submitted a request to Hastings, who told the agency, which then ordered the designated service from the appropriate show contractor.
But after about a year on the job, 3M Canada began adding additional shows to the corporate calendar - without adding any Canadian cash to her promotional piggybank. Within four years, the number of shows Hastings was responsible for managing would practically quadruple, from 42 shows in 1994, to 160 shows in 1998. It didn't take long for her to realize that accommodating the additional shows through the exhibit house was beyond her budget's reach.
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Not that her exhibit house was doing a bad job or charging unreasonable rates, Hastings says. Quite the contrary. If 3M Canada needed something - anything - it merely needed to ask, and the agency was there to deliver. The rub was that working with the agency meant paying the typical 10-percent exhibit-house markups on materials and services.
But Hastings was about to move mountains - well, build mountains - that would forever change her program, while keeping her trade show budget in check.
Twin Peaks
For Hastings, cost-cutting inspiration came in 1998 when one of her clients needed a fake mountain built for its exhibit. The exhibit house quoted her a price of $5,000 for the job. "The exhibit house was going to make a mold and use brown plastic," Hastings says. "After recovering from sticker shock, my client asked me why we couldn't just go to a supply store, get some foam, and spray it with rock paint."
Hastings knew that the agency's version of the mountain would look better. But for an item that would be used once and tossed after the show, the client didn't see the need to spend $5,000 on a molded, plastic mountain when the foam mountain would cost less than $1,000.
The more Hastings considered the makeshift solution, the more she saw how using her exhibit house meant adding costs to each and every project. The $5,000 for that plastic mountain wasn't just the cost of its construction. Part of that cost included a special crate for shipping the mountain, shipment in an air-ride trailer, and the storage and management of the property after the show - because at $5,000, it would not be thrown away.
The example of the mountain demonstrated an important truth: The more hands that touched a project, the more the project cost. Meanwhile, the client approved the $1,000 mountain, and Hastings had an epiphany. If she eliminated extra hands from other areas of her program, she could cut costs even more.
"We found a way to save money," Hastings says, "so we began applying the same principle to other things."
Simple Savings
The easiest savings, Hastings says, came from ordering services or rentals directly from show-service contractors rather than through the exhibit house. For example, if 3M Canada needed an item shipped to a particular show, and the exhibit house was quoting $8,000 for the job, the exhibit house stood to make about $800 - which is a standard 10-percent markup. "The same is true with other services," Hastings says. "Drayage, carpet, sign hanging. There's 10 points on that. Now we do it ourselves. I place the order using a 3M credit card, 3M charges the client, and we save the 10 points."
But simply ordering services yourself is more complex than picking up the phone and relaying a credit-card number. There are processes that must be in place every step of the way to make sure that mistakes aren't made, that items are shipped to the right place at the right time, and that the proper services are ordered.
According to Hastings, developing these processes would have been impossible had she not worked so closely with her agencies in the past, watching how they did business, and then developing her own model based on their strategies. With more than 150 shows on the calendar each year, "The only way you don't go crazy is to have solid processes in place," Hastings says.
Back in 1994, Hastings says the process was to call her exhibit house and ask for something. The exhibit house sent her forms to fill out, detailing what was needed and when. Hastings drew inspiration from those forms and the processes they created. She also used the knowledge she gained through her CTSM courses. The combination of work experience, CTSM sessions, and the inspiration from her exhibit house helped Hastings develop the right set of questions to interview her clients before each show, get the necessary information, and make her process work.
The goal of Hastings' process was to obtain the information needed to get each client the services and tools it needed to accomplish its goals at the show. She began her process by asking questions about the scope of the work to be done, objectives and goals for the show, and audience demographics. Over the years, she has refined her technique to take what had been a series of four one-hour meetings to determine her clients' needs down to one 30-minute information-gathering session. "We walk out of one meeting with the client with all the information we need," Hastings says.
Going It Alone
In 1999, Hastings began tending to her internal clients' needs - ordering services, helping them select the right booth for their spaces, and helping them define their goals for each show - rather than outsourcing each task to the exhibit house. To make her job easier, she hired a freelancer to help keep track of signage and booth properties using spare space in a 3M Canada warehouse. She also tasked that contract employee, who then hired his own helper, with odd jobs like building one-off booth additions for some of Hastings' clients.
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By 2000, 3M Canada had 180 shows on its corporate calendar, up from 42 in 1994. Of those, 47 were executed by the exhibit house, 42 were managed exclusively by Hastings and her helpers, and 91 by a combination of the two. And as Hastings' experience level and confidence increased, so did the results of an internal customer-satisfaction survey she conducted. In 2000, her clients reported they were 78-percent satisfied with the work done by the exhibit house - and 100-percent satisfied with Hastings' internal group.
Those survey results, combined with the company's desire to see even more savings, led her to stop using her exhibit house in 2001, bringing the whole trade show program in house, a move that made her bosses more than a little nervous. After all, the U.S. side of 3M - with its bigger budgets and vastly larger show volume - still uses agencies, and 3M Canada catches a little flak for acting like a rogue when it comes to trade shows.
The clincher for 3M Canada, Hastings says, was a side-by-side comparison she had of her team vs. the exhibit house with data from 1999 and 2000. Both years, the costs were lower for her internal group, while the satisfaction ratings were higher.
"I can remember saying, 'Trust me,' an awful lot," Hastings says. "But soon they were looking at the costs and seeing those costs go down."
Setting Standards
With all of 3M Canada running its shows through her office, Hastings decided to use the opportunity to build consistency into the program. Before, internal clients either used the corporate booth or their own pop-ups, which may or may not have reflected the overall corporate image. Following the company's corporate marketing plan was optional, so 3M Canada's customers and prospects were getting mixed messages at shows.
"If you didn't have $50,000 to spend, you couldn't use the corporate booth," Hastings says. "So when 3M Canada divisions attended shows, they may or may not have had a 3M brand identity. We were wasting an important opportunity to brand."
Her first task was to replace all the rogue booth and pop-up displays with a system that was interchangeable, scalable, and could be updated easily.
Having examples of many different manufacturers' booth products in her inventory, Hastings considered what would work best for 3M Canada, and picked one line for portable exhibits and another complementary line for her larger exhibiting needs - 10-by-20-foot booths up to 20-by-40-foot exhibits.
With standardized booths, Hastings was able to develop standardized graphics panels, get a better gauge on shipping costs, and better estimate her installation-and-dismantle needs for each project. "It was a critical time for us," Hastings says, "because we realized that standardization and economy of scale saves money."
The standardization also made Hastings' processes easier to manage. Today when clients come to her asking for help on a particular show, she can show them the exact options available for their booth space, and give cost estimates on labor and shipping based on past uses of those exact properties. Each booth comes with its own standard graphics options, all of which maintain a consistent look and feel, regardless of the show or exhibit size.
The Power of One
Since going solo in 2001, Hastings has run 3M Canada's trade show program with outside help only for the company's largest shows. In 2002, a small agency helped with nine shows. By 2004, only one show required outside help, and then just to order a rental property in Las Vegas.
The scope of Hastings' overwhelming accomplishments impressed the judges, one of whom said, "This entry took on the daunting challenge of coordinating all of the divisions' trade show calendars and booth properties into one consistent company presence. Her success was based on very sound principles of exhibit-marketing management."
Through it all, Hastings has kept her internal clients happy and her overall costs under control. In 1994, the 42 shows on 3M Canada's corporate calendar cost roughly $2 million. In 2007, however, Hastings' clients attended roughly 160 shows for a total cost of less than $1 million. That's a cost-per-show decrease of nearly 90 percent.
"I have to fight to keep this business model going," Hastings says. "But my executives understand it. They trust me because for 12 years I have delivered, and it just keeps working." e
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Brian Todd, staff writer;
btodd@exhibitormagazine.com
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