When the Other Shoe Drops

Was there anything she could have done differently to avert the disaster? Not really. But did her organizational and crisis-management abilities make a difference? Definitely.

“You never know when you are going to be confronted with something and have to pull something out of your back pocket,” she says. “Make sure that you have a Yellow Pages or a list of bus companies handy so that, in case something like that happens, you can start calling. And you need to build relationships with various companies, because you never know when you may need them in a pinch.”

Shipping is another meeting planner nightmare because it’s out of direct control. If a delivery goes to San Diego instead of Boston, there’s nothing you can do to make it move any more quickly in the right direction.

Before Weinacht joined St. Jude Medical, she was a trade show specialist. She remembers one particularly horrible experience where she was managing exhibits for a software company at two back-to-back trade shows in Las Vegas.

“I had a timeline,” she says. “What I had to do was wrap everything up at the first show, then basically go across the street to the next hotel and supervise the setup on the booth for the second show. But at the second show, when I got to our booth space, I noticed that there was one crate that seemed to be missing. The kind of booth that we were using at the time was a modular display, so with a full crate being missing, we definitely could not set up the booth.”

Weinacht worked with the setup contractor to track down the missing crate. It was in Florida.

Thinking on her feet, Weinacht scurried back to the first exhibition and stopped the setup contractor from shipping the display home. Instead, she had them move it piece by piece in the back of a pickup truck to the other venue. Meanwhile, she had the useless incomplete booth put back into storage.

“It all turned out fine in the end, but I got quite a few gray hairs over the matter,” she says. “That was a situation where it wasn’t anything that I had done. It was just the nature of the beast. The show must go on, and it will go on at this time on this date.”

What would Weinacht have done if there hadn’t been a second booth nearby? “That actually happened to me once, when our booth was stuck in a snowstorm coming over the Rockies,” she says. “I knew it took 18 hours straight to set it up. I was talking with the setup contractor, saying, ‘If it comes 20 hours before the show, yes, I’ll pay whatever it takes to get people on to set up our booth.’ It finally came at the last minute, after a complete hell of waiting.”

If it had never come, she says, she had a contingency plan in place. She had used her networking skills to make last-minute arrangements with a local trade show company. A last-minute rental of a generic booth wouldn’t have been nearly as good as the real thing, but it would have been better than an empty 20-by-20 square of carpet.