Do you ever attend your industry’s small business conferences? Do you find them valuable?
A couple of weeks ago, our owner Steve Jones and director of sales and marketing Tim Ward attended the Express Carriers Association Marketplace. They found it to be a valuable, business expanding experience.
The ECA Marketplace gives On Time Logistics a chance to meet with both existing and potential customers all in one location. This helps eliminate the expense and time involved with scheduling individual meetings across the country.
The conference provides carriers, shippers and suppliers within the expedited transportation industry an opportunity to meet and learn about each other in a ‘speed-dating’ format. Each pre-scheduled meeting lasts 15 minutes and when the bell rings you move to your next appointment. This two-day experience provided us with 47 meetings with some tremendous business opportunities both in the short and long term.
By attending this two-day event, we were exposed to more than 200 companies represented by a total of more than 400 people. The only state that wasn’t represented was Alaska and we even had representatives from Canada and Mexico.
We learned from organizers that the number of shippers available provided the carrier members many more interviews compared to previous years. They also made the vendor hall and interviews in the same space so there was a stronger sense of networking throughout the event.
We believe that attending conferences like these makes us better logistics providers. How have you seen attending industry conferences improve your business?