2014 SOHO Show
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on May 2, 2014
Last year I wrote about the SOHO Show (Small Office/Home Office) at the Oncenter and I decided to write about it again this year, though it probably won’t be as much as I wrote last year, and I consider last year’s post one of my short ones.
This year I not only went with my wife, but I was representing my consultant’s group, the Professional Consultant’s Association of Central New York. I manned the booth for about an hour, which felt a little strange for two reasons. One, I’ve never manned a booth at something like this, and two, I hadn’t seen any of these guys since October, as I’ve been out of town most of the time, so I felt like I was getting reacquainted with people as well as meeting some new people.
I’m certain not shy when it comes to meeting people in a business situation but I was hampered by a bad back, which I know had me swaying back and forth. Near the end I got a lesson on how the greeting process should go, which I could have used earlier, and it’s an interesting lesson for everyone to learn for their businesses.
People would ask me about the group and I’d tell them, along with giving them information and encouraging them to check us out and to come to a free meeting. The guy I was with, pretty much a master salesman, said that the better way to go would have been to state the name of the group, give a short preamble, and then ask them what it was they did. His take was that pretty much anything they responded to would lead you back into talking more about the organization, and possibly get them more engaged and get them to fill out the form for a free membership. Hey, I did get some people to fill it out, so I wasn’t all that bad, but he got more; lesson learned.
After my hour was up I decided to walk around with my wife to check out the booths which, like last year, went really fast. Well, because of my back hurting that was kind of a misnomer, but I only spent time at one booth, even bypassing my normal stops at the Dinosaur booth and the Chocolate Pizza booth. I stopped at what turned out to be the Business Journal News Network, which most of us just call the Business Journal, and got a massage in one of those comfortable cushy chairs from Gustav Hoffmann, who’s not only an account manager for them but the son of former politician Nancy Larriane Hoffmann; cool right? I met her only once in my life, at a fundraiser for another politician, and she was nice as could be.
I barely made it around in an hour, which means I was at the event for 2 hours, and that was all my back could handle. Because I was manning the booth from 11 to 12, I missed a presentation by a lawyer friend of mine, Todd Engel from Engel Law Offices; maybe next time. I missed all presentations; maybe next year I’ll be able to plan better, since being home was a fluke.
In any case I’m glad I got to go, and probably the only downsides were the weather and it would have been nice to have more people. On that second issue… parking! And look, this is longer than last year’s article; yay!