A Few Days Out

I've been trying to dig out from under the tons of emails that came in while I was at the trade show, start in on the orders I received, etc etc...but I have had a few minutes to rethink the trade show and I'm starting to realize that it went better then I initially thought.

I just ran the numbers and realized that I made more money off of this show (so far) then off of the one I went to in October. The problem I think is that I went into this show with higher expectations so I don't necessarily feel like I did as well as I had hoped. I think the biggest difference between this show and the one in October is that there is no "Christmas Holiday" bearing down on retailers that forced them to put in orders ASAP at the October show and over the past two days I've gotten additional orders via fax so I'm hoping that as people have time to go through all the stuff they accumulated from this show they'll send in some more orders. We actually ran out of all 115 brochures we brought to this show versus not even using all 100 I brought to the October show.

I left the show thinking that I wouldn't return next year because the cost-benefit tradeoff wasn't right, but now I'm taking a "let's see what the next six months bring in terms of ROI" before I make a final decision on the show. We haven't yet broken even on this show once you figure in all the marketing and travel costs, but we're getting closer and hopefully with a little hard work and a lot of luck one of those big leads will pan out into something really substantial.