Sandi & I are here in our 29th floor room at the Encore in Las Vegas, relaxing after finishing our buying exercise for the year. It has been a fabulous show.
We’ve been coming to this show for since 2002, and it keeps getting better and better for us.
(You can find this twice-a-year show on line at www.asdonline.com. It’s free to “the trade”.)
But, this year, I was a bit more disorganized than in previous years.
Oh. I’ve learned from year to year what I need to do, and I made our BOLO lists (Be On the Look Out) and lists of various quantities of products from our regular vendors. I did that. Printed them out, and packed them in our luggage.
But, I left them behind on the first day.
YIKES!
We had to wing it at our regular vendors. I just hope we wung it good enough. (Wing, wang, wung…)
Ha! I checked, and we did pretty good.
We made some exclusive deals. We found some new vendors with new products for us. We found some promising new categories for us to research and check out.
We did pretty good. We got pretty tired. But, we had a great show.
Going to a trade show where there are hundreds or even thousands of vendors in various categories makes sense when you want to get into the wholesale buying business. The travel costs qualify as business expenses. The relationships you start and develop are almost worth the trip by themselves.
We have one vendor we’ve been visiting and buying from for 15 years. This year, we chatted with his wife, inquired about their children and grandchildren, gave some advice about retirement, and promised we’d visit them next time we were in their neck of the woods.
What a sweet relationship.
Oh, and the shear quantity of vendors and their booths and their thousands of products in each one.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the shiny lights, the masses of similar product lines, the sales guys and gals hawking their unique show specials. But, with perseverance and determination, you can find those gems waiting to be mined.
We found our gems.
We can’t wait to find out what else the Lord has in store for us.
John L