Everyone in One Place: Gearing Up For Fall Industry Events

My first job in this industry was at Tamesis, a communications firm in London that handled MIPIM. Every March we went down to Cannes along with most of the UK property industry – twenty thousand people on a single stretch of French coastline, several thousand of them British. My boss used to say more champagne was drunk in four days at MIPIM than in the entire two weeks of the film festival. I never checked.

It was a trial by fire: a program that changed hourly and ranged from morning croissants to talks in the “bunker” (what we called the Palais des Festivals, for its bulky concrete shape) to late-night bands playing at villas overlooking the sea. I was a twenty-three-year-old American, walking Terry Venables down the Croisette from one event to the next, asking him to explain the offside rule. My other formative memory from MIPIM was talking my way into a reception I had not been invited to, turning a corner, and finding my boss. I was certain I was about to be fired. Instead she said, “Now, you’re a true PR.”

That was my introduction to this business, and I have liked these events ever since. I know that is not everyone’s view, and the case against them gets stronger as you get older. Time out of the office is time “real” work does not get done. Time away from family is harder to justify at forty-something. Living out of a suitcase stops being an adventure and becomes a logistics problem. The cost is easier to see than the value, so it is worth saying what the value is.

What Summer Takes Away

Our industry does not stop between the Fourth of July and Labor Day. Projects run, budgets move, contractors bid. What stops is proximity. The people who decide on capital projects are scattered across time zones, half-days and out-until-the-twentieth. The work continues; the room empties. Then the school year starts and the room fills up again.

That’s the real change in September – not that everyone becomes serious, but that everyone is in the same place at the same time. Information moves at a speed it cannot reach when we are dispersed.  It is the same thing that made MIPIM work: for one week, nobody was anywhere else. Some of that pull has gone since we all learned to do this on video, which is rather the point.

When the industry is together, you hear about a project six months before there is an RFP, from someone wondering aloud whether the board will approve it. You get an honest read on where costs sit from a person who bid there in July. You learn which contractors are stretched and which have capacity.

None of that arrives in a report. It arrives in conversation with someone who has no reason to write it down.

Where We Will Be

Our team was in Austin last week for the Data Center Anti-Conference. What they brought back was not the agenda. It was the volume of hallway conversation at ACL Live – the kind that takes a month of scheduled calls to arrange.

Next is the Convention, Sports & Entertainment Facilities Conference in Kansas City, September 8 to 10. Our venues work has been busy this year – stadiums, training facilities, arena programs, projects where a season calendar sets the schedule rather than construction logic. CSEF reports two-thirds of its attendees come to network rather than for the programming.

After that the calendar fills quickly. The CoreNet REmmys and the golf outings that run through the New York autumn. The Lodging Conference in Phoenix in early October, where much of next year's hotel development conversation gets set. Conferences across Florida, Texas and California, panels in Chicago, roundtables in Boston. Every market has its own version of the list, and G&T will be at many of them – so don’t be surprised if you hear from a member of our team looking to set up a time to connect while you’re there.

A Bit of Planning, and an Open Mind

The fall is shorter than it looks. September to mid-November is about seven working weeks before the holidays absorb everything, and decisions not made by Thanksgiving tend to get made in February. So it is worth deciding now who you want to see, and then leaving room for the conversation you did not plan.

So as we enter the busy season, if you are working on capital projects for next year, the early conversation is the useful one – before the design is fixed and the budget has hardened around a number nobody has tested.

And if you are programming a panel or roundtable this fall and still need a speaker on construction costs, project risk, or what we are seeing across venues, hospitality and data centers, email me! We have people who price and manage this work, and they are happy to travel.

Kat Seaborn is Director of Strategy at Gardiner & Theobald, an independent project and cost management consultancy with fourteen offices across the United States.