Trade Show Math

Written by Tom Nugent on Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

Dave and I are at Photonics West this week, our first time at the show. (Jordin has attended many times in the past, but couldn’t make it this year.) While the number of booths visited at a trade show is certainly not the best way of measuring “success” when visiting exhibitors (i.e., potential vendors or partners), it’s an easy way to count. So, here’s a bit of trade show math about our progress through the exhibits. There are roughly 40 ‘rows’ of booths (with up to 40 booths per row; those rows with extra large booths reduce that number), spread across two halls at the Moscone Center. We will have at most ~19 hours (spread across three days) to visit the exhibits. That translates to visiting ~2.1 rows per hour if we wanted to see every single booth, however briefly.

On our first day, we did roughly 7 rows in 7 hours, i.e., 1 row/hour. This rate was much below the required average. Why so slow? Dave describes it as the “kid in a candy store” effect — there was so much to see and so many people to talk to, we spent a lot of time talking with vendors at lots of booths.

Today (day 2), we were more aggressive, and wound up covering 17 rows in 7 hours, or ~2.4 rows/hour (even with taking time to say hello to many of the sponsors of Team LaserMotive). That’s a little better than the ‘required’ average, but leaves 16 rows for the last day, a day when we will also be leaving early to catch a plane. In order to cover everything, we will need to average 3.2 rows/hour. Certain categories of product are represented by LOTS of businesses, so now that we’ve seen some of them we can breeze by others. But I suspect we’ll be sprinting down the last few rows before we head to the airport Thursday….