Cutting Exhibit Costs Here, There, Anywhere

Tradeshow exhibiting is a costly endeavor even in the best of times. Toss in a rough economy, mix it with skyrocketing gas and travel prices, and it becomes even pricier.

Now, with companies taking an even harder look at their bottom lines and making decisions on whether they can afford to exhibit at a show or not, general service contractors know it's more important than ever to help their customers keep their costs in line.

The Expo Group recently hired consulting firm MAYA Design to document the tradeshow exhibitor experience. According to TEG, “(We) wanted to gauge what was, and what was not, working well in the exhibitor experience from a qualitative, rather than just a quantitative, perspective.”

MAYA spoke with more than 100 exhibitors: small and large, experienced and novice, those who attend multiple shows each year and those who attend only one or two. Some of the broad findings of the research were released in a white paper, “The Invisible Exhibitor: What Your Exhibitors Aren't Telling You (and Why That Matters for the Future of Your Show).”

Costs represented one hot-button subject.

“Exhibitors are aware that show organizers shift costs by passing some along to exhibitors in the form of markups,” MAYA's report stated. “They find it galling that it costs them as much to have an item rolled from the loading dock to their booth as it does to ship it across the country or more than purchasing the item new. They feel backed into a corner with costs because they have no way to control them aside from scaling down the size of their booth or not exhibiting at all.”

According to MAYA, one anchor exhibitor interviewed for the study said it felt “exploited, neglected and undervalued” because of what it considered price gouging. MAYA added, “The exhibitor said they were considering pulling their sponsorship of the show unless the situation changed in the future.”

MAYA concluded: “Organizers who cannot provide exhibitors with transparency and reasonable costs, with no hidden surprises, will find increasing pressure to do so, or risk losing exhibitors who leave the show or downsize their presence.”

Obviously, neither show organizers nor general service contractors want to lose exhibitors, so both are being tasked to lend a helping hand before the showfloors begin to shrink.

Tradeshow Week spoke to four of the larger GSCs in the industry, as well as the association representing them, to find out what's being done to help today's exhibitors.

According to Aaron Bludworth, president of the Exhibit Services Contractor Assn. and GES Exposition Services vice president of corporate events, it's not anything new that exhibitors should be looking to their contractors to help them with cutting costs, but what the GSCs have been doing for some time that exhibitors might not have been aware of.

Bludworth said GSCs have been working with labor unions in many cities on overtime and work rule issues, which directly affect costs to exhibitors. “There are full-time teams working with labor unions to get costs that are reasonable,” he added.

As an example, Bludworth pointed to negotiations during the past two years in Chicago, resulting in new contracts with carpenters, riggers, decorators and electricians that have impacted the exhibitor's total cost of doing business in several ways:

• reduced crew sizes
• reduced overtime charges, particularly on Saturdays
• no overtime charges at all during the first four hours after a show closes
• staggered start times
• a wider range of tasks exhibitors can do themselves
• customer service training for union workers

Dan Hoffend, Freeman's vice president of sales and corporate accounts, said, “We were very much at the table, along with GES, to make work rules consistent. If we can find work rules that match the tradeshow industry better, that helps everyone.”

TEG spokeswoman Dana Freker Doody said her company works hard to get the best possible labor deal for exhibitors. “If there are deals to be had, we will try and pass them on to exhibitors,” Doody said. “The culture of our company has never been fat.”

However, Champion Exposition Services CFO Jeff Hamon pointed out that there is no free lunch when it comes to this issue.

“Labor rates will continue to go up every year,” he said.

Hamon added that Champion looks to its own operations teams for more efficient ways of working in order to keep costs down for exhibitors.

While there are measures in place for long-term cost controls, with gas prices and airfares squeezing exhibitors from all sides, GSCs have had to step up to the plate and offer more advice on, and solutions to, more immediate problems.

“We established a separate entity to focus on corporate needs of companies because of the high cost of transportation,” Hoffend said.

Freeman has 26 facilities in the United States, and clients who exhibit at multiple shows each year can store their exhibits at just about any of them to avoid expensive shipping costs.

“A lot of (clients) want to store exhibits not where they go, but where they live,” Hoffend said. “Tradeshow activities aren't where people live. Let's say the majority of their big shows are in Las Vegas. We would store the exhibits there and cut down on transportation costs.”

Steve Moster, GES' executive vice president of products and services, said exhibitors also could save money by consolidating their vendors into a single fully integrated source to leverage their purchasing power. He added that GES offers a discount to exhibitors who purchase multiple non-exclusive services from GES.

“Consolidating vendors can save exhibitors 10 to 15 percent off their current vendors,” Moster said.

April Hurley, TEG's senior account executive, said exhibitors could cut costs by simply paying attention to the exhibitor manuals and watching out for hidden charges. “There are better choices they can make in saving money,” she added.

In addition, exhibitors could trim their budgets by placing their orders in time to receive discounts. Hurley said account executives at TEG “call, e-mail and call people again” to remind them of deadlines. “You can get up to 10 percent off of material handling and labor,” she added. “Other GSCs don't offer discounts on labor and drayage.”

Finally, it used to be that if a company wanted an eye-popping, one-of-a-kind exhibit, it would have to pay big bucks to get one custom designed.

Not any more.

Hamon said Champion offers its customers the opportunity to rent modular booths that look just as good as the pricier ones they could buy. “We have booth rental programs where they are custom designed, but are modular and can change every show for a turnkey price,” he added. “It reduces the overall costs, and there's less labor and shipping.”

To help out exhibitors in the short term, Hamon said, booth rental prices have been frozen at last year's rates.

Freeman's Hoffend said it's even possible to own a booth, but rent portions of it. As an example, he pointed out, an exhibitor might want a double-deck on its booth.

“In many cases, a customer will buy a deck and pay for material handling,” Hoffend said, “but instead they can rent it, and it could be one-fifth the cost.”