Local Businesses can only grow with Quality over Quantity

Some may know that the whole Connect WM ethos is trying to find the right businesses for each other to be able to work together which in turn provides either a positive midterm result or long term working relationship.

We set up our first Connect WM business exhibition solely with this in mind and did not allow any cross over’s of exhibitor main service trading areas.

Also we promoted 3 seminars taking place throughout the day for industry bespoke products / services (Energy Saving – Business Advice – Finance) to help local businesses as opposed to what is seen as the normal way of promoting seminars which is that of individuals, as we believe it’s the actual product / service that local businesses require and not the necessarily the individual whose looking to heighten their own awareness. 

Weeks of setting up a booking system correctly, sending email notifications give ample time and opportunity for people who’ve registered to de-register so that we could establish the actual attendance figure to attend on the day.

We purposely steered away from promoting what the proposed attendance figure was, because our view being that people that were serious, and we mean really serious about business would not need to be swayed by possible manipulated attendance figures something which we all know goes on, but for some reason either choose to ignore the fact they maybe manipulated or even worse still accept the fact they are.

We never promoted the event on the back of free tea, coffees, biscuits, lunches or anything like that…!

We wanted people to attend the event for the right business reason, not for just something to do, not to have a look and see what was happening, not to even do the matey, matey thing so as to makes things look bigger and better - but to try and get down to brass tacks which of course is nothing more and nothing less than that of – BUSINESS.

So to the day itself, the connect business exhibition took place yesterday with over 270 attendee’s booked on prior to the day - not a bad result for its first exhibition, some would say.

It would be fair to say that the footfall was not as expected, proving the point that something is seriously wrong with business, in how its seemingly okay for a business to book on to something and not give a care in the world to actually having the decency of advising that they cannot now make it instead opting to simply choosing to ignore it the fact they booked on.

That said for the vast majority of exhibitors it proved that those attendees that turned up were for the day itself of the right business calibre.

We can only go on the word of the exhibitors themselves saying that although the footfall was not as excepted the quality of those attending and exhibiting more than made up for it in a majority of cases, and they’d far better prefer that - than having a room full of people and having no chance of speaking to them all or worst still not even the right people.

One exhibitor which was a firm called CreditSafe actually made a sale on the day, something which apparently is very rarely ever heard of.

Just goes to prove it is a matter of Quality over Quantity.

We will take action so as not to be caught again by people who have no regard for other businesses.