October 27, 2026
Today is National Black Cat Day! As the daddy of a black cat, whom I rescued from a kill shelter nearly 13 years ago, I consider this a wonderful annual event. But people who work at shelters have said that black cats are hard to adopt. Although they don’t behave any differently from other cats, over the centuries there has been some mystery attached to them. People associate black cats with bringing bad luck. Mine has brought nothing of the sort. But the notion of black cats and bad luck leads me into this post. The post is actually about trade shows.
POV: I’ve been doing trade shows of nearly every size and shape for 35 years. Even with my background and the meticulous planning that goes into every show, sometimes things can go wrong. Here are just a few…
Skyline forgot the carpet! I inherited a relationship with the event company Skyline. Although I had worked with one office of the company and had a very good experience, this group was organizationally and geographically different. The relationship got off to a rocky start when they forgot to bring the carpet squares for the company’s 40 x 40 booth to the Las Vegas Convention Center. So there I was in the middle of the night, trying to find an open-all-night carpet store in Las Vegas..
Yikes! Skyline set up the booth in the wrong space! Not to pile on about Skyline, but this one took place just about 5 months after the carpet disaster. The company I was working for used the 40x40 booth twice a year, at a show in March and another in August. The August show was in a different city each year. APCO 2004 was scheduled to be in Montreal. I shared the booth number, layout, and Montreal contact information with the team at Skyline. Unfortunately, they chose to disregard everything I sent them. So instead of setting us up in booth #740, they dredged up the APCO 2001 instructions and set us up in booth #1420. Not only were we in the wrong end of the building, but that aisle was not meant for a 40x40 booth. Half a dozen other exhibitors were unable to set up until this was fixed. When I called Skyline’s foreman to inform him of the mistake, he barked that I was interrupting lunch. Skyline couldn’t understand why I was furious.
People went to the wrong hotel! The same company hired a lot of sales and operations people from the dominant player in the industry. That player would take over the Las Vegas Hilton for the industry’s biggest event. We never stayed there; in fact, I chose to put us up at Bally’s because of the ready access to the monorail. I was quite clear in all written and verbal communication that we were staying at Bally’s. Never a word about anywhere else. But anyone we hired from the dominant player always headed to the Hilton first, only to complain to me that there wasn’t a room for them. Had they bothered to listen…
People went to the wrong city. But it gets worse. A trade show was in the same city every year for about 20 years, then relocated for a year due to issues with the venue. The company I worked for always secured hotel rooms for their top resellers, using the same hotel for years. Until that one year when the event was in Orlando, not Vegas. We secured hotel rooms across the street from the convention center. The day before the big event, our top reseller called me to complain the hotel didn’t have a room for him. I asked enough probing questions to learn that instead of being in Orlando where the show was, he was at the old hotel in Las Vegas! Don’t bother reading Kevin’s emails or listening to Kevin’s conference calls.
Spoon Man – play it again! I wrote about this in a blog post many years ago. He was truly a curse. A former employer held a product launch party at an industry trade show in Seattle. We hired Artis the Spoonman (a local performance artist and the subject of the Grammy-winning song by Soundgarden) as the evening’s entertainment. Big mistake. Neither Spoonman nor his handlers showed up for any of my pre-event phone calls. We became concerned that he would be a no-show. at the event. He showed up - 30 minutes late - and left the audience waiting. When I outstretched my hand for a handshake, he held his arms behind his back and coldly replied, “Spoonman does not shake hands.” OK, I get it. Beware of people who refer to themselves in the third person. That was the highlight of his performance. He seemed to not want to be there and left the second his performance ended
These are just a few examples of things going bad at trade shows. Like the black cat, trade shows are fine in themselves. Trade shows are not inherently bad. A lot of moving parts, many things that can and should go right, and a lot of communication that somehow gets lost.
Hug your black cat today!
