230: Thrive not just Survive at IMEX America: Sleep, Movement, Nutrition, #Fit4events Challenge

David, I was thinking about this.

I think the scale of IMEX is pretty difficult to explain to someone that has never attended it until they actually experience it.

In your opinion, what do first time attendees tend to underestimate about the physical, mental, and social demands of the few days, especially if you're someone that has a booth on the trade show and you're one of the suppliers, you might be there the whole week really.

So what do you think it's something that they underestimate if this is their first time?

I think that the biggest thing that first timers don't do is have a plan.

Mm-hmm.

There's a lot of things going on, and if they don't think about what they want to accomplish, what they want to leave with, what they want their outcome to be, and set that before getting into booking their meetings...

There's so many things that are happening.

My advice is always set your objective before anything else.

Block time in your calendar before anything else, because then if you have your non-negotiables protected, then everything else will fall in line.

I think the other thing is you can't do it all.

It is designed to be essentially a festival type atmosphere.

There's going to be FOMO, but you have to mentally turn that into JOMO, the joy of missing out, because you can't do everything because different people have different appointments at different times.

And what's interesting is the way IMEX rolls out the calendar of what they offer.

So you register, and then the agenda comes out with the educational sessions.

That comes out a month before you can book meetings because they want you to ensure that you go add sessions to your agenda so that you can get education from the event.

So the timing of the agenda with the timing of downloading the app could be done a little better because you're right, I got the agenda a month ago, but I just yesterday, I think, got the email about downloading the app.

So if I am to save things to my personal agenda in the app, it would be nice for those two to come together.

I hope they hear that and, because they do listen to feedback.

This show evolves every year because they believe in that we have two ears and one mouth for a reason.

Yeah.

I wanna finish the thought real quick.

You register, you block your non-negotiables, then you get educational sessions.

You add your educational sessions, then you backfill with your appointments.

Yeah.