You're amazed it's somehow already 10:45 in the morning, you’re munching on a second stale donut, and you wonder how your career took this unexpected turn.
You thought when you took this role at an exhibit house, you’d be harnessing the unrivaled power of trade show and event marketing to engage with prospects, buyers, and partners face-to-face, helping clients boost their company’s brand and driving sales.
You thought you’d be collaborating with vendors to easily meet production schedules, driving profits and having fruitful conversations with your ace designers.
You thought the prospects and clients would call on you as their in-house exhibit and event expert who could translate aspirational company goals into creative and effective activations and campaigns for their brands.
Instead, it’s not even lunch yet, and you’ve already sent 14 nagging emails, updated 4 different production spreadsheets, and even chased a graphic artist down the hall to find out how much time it took them to complete a simple logo swap.
This constant stress is keeping you up at night, turning you into a more negative person, and wearing you out.
Despite the challenges, you still know your company and team could do so much more. And so could you, if only given the chance.
The Surprising Hidden Logistical Burden of Building & Delivering Exhibits
What’s keeping you from becoming the exhibit house team member you want to be? The crushing burden of managing the logistical and administrative tasks to run production.
You spend so much time on repetitive administrative tasks that HAVE to be done, or else your company won’t have materials in time to build a booth, and management won’t know that you’re staying within the estimated budget.
And so, your days, weeks, and months are (frustratingly!) spent:
- Stressing whether the urgent task you are working on is actually less important than another urgent task that may have fallen through the cracks.
- Knowing if the tasks you’ve delegated are getting done.
- Manually updating multiple spending spreadsheets to ensure you haven’t blown the estimate and you’re in the negative on the job.
- Manually updating even more spreadsheets to create graphs that visually report to Finance and management your progress – sometimes one-off reports – at the drop of a hat.
- Following up with vendors to ensure they’ve received your orders and will have your materials ready in time.
- Creating and sending out the project details to prep labor supervisors for installation and dismantle (or permanent installs), vendors, and management.
- Following up with labor to see if they are available, have booked flights and hotels, and have reviewed the project details, not to mention change requests.
- Assigning the right account numbers as you pay every invoice that comes in or keeping track of purchase orders as they’re being processed.
- Printing Work Orders. Printing Change Orders. Printing Purchase Orders. So much printing!
- Following up again and again to get graphic files approved.
- Collecting the replies from multiple emails from clients and vendors asking for updates or requesting changes.
So you spend 50, 60, or even more hours every week, almost all on admin tasks and printing info to distribute to the team. Unless something changes, your team’s going to miss a change due to it not being printed and there’s simply not enough time for the actual project tasks that will boost your company’s sales or profits.
Guess what – there is a proven way to reclaim that tedious admin time, shift much of it into productive project-related activities. You can do it with ExhibitForce’s Enterprise.
Reduce Repetitive Admin Time With Enterprise
Enterprise is a project management system (full-blown ERP) made especially for the needs of exhibit houses and agencies. It uses workflows, automation, and centralized, accessible data to vastly reduce the time it takes to run production schedule. It even incorporates multiple trade show best practices, so you can also boost profits.
Enterprise saves you hours a day on repetitive, manual administrative tasks, combining all your project details into one program that includes:
- Measurement Dashboard with a variety of KPIs automatically updated from ongoing day-to-day operations and data.
- All tasks in one place by Project Groups, with email reminders with messaging, file sharing and time tracking.
- Access all project details including Work Orders, Change Orders and Purchase Orders online in real-time, without having to print.
- Real-time inventory for rental stock, client-owned assets and raw materials.
- Access all of your preferred vendors in one single hub and generate purchase orders.
- Assign labor by date, time and denote labor type and rates for downtime, overtime and supervision.
- Streamline and integrate the entire Sales/Finance process from point of an Estimate to Proposals to Work Orders through Invoicing and Job Costing.
- Integrate with QuickBooks or other Accounting Systems, CRM (such as Salesforce) or marketing automation systems (such as HubSpot).
- File approval process saves you time and prevents bottlenecks and late fees.
- Generate barcodes and use iOS devices to scan items with AssetTracker (shipping app).
Now You Can Get It All Done, With Enterprise
Taken all together, a graphic view of the changes to your weekly activities would look like this:
You spend less time on stressful, administrative tasks, and more time on design concepts and sales and marketing related tasks. And you can get it all done in fewer hours, too.
Project Activities You Can Finally Have Time For
With Enterprise drastically reducing the time required to manage administrative and logistical tasks, now you can expand the time you spend on more strategic activities, such as:
- Reaching out to prospects to promote how you’ll handle their trade show program with event-related technology to support them, giving you more opportunities to do more.
- Defining your production schedule and brainstorming strategies to achieve all of the deadlines.
- Creating pre-show, at-show, and post-show promotional marketing campaigns and activations that generate more client engagement.
- Designing exhibits and graphics at an easier rate.
- Implementing more technology into your booth activations for a more modern experience for rental properties.
- Measuring trade show results with your clients to ensure their budgets are able to increase by meeting their goals, which promotional tactics work best, which shows to expand and who are the lead supervisors for future events.
- Analyzing projects to further improve production time and quality of services.
- Increase your company’s exposure to attract top level sales reps and employees to hire, and then ramp-up immediately by having streamlined processes in place.
- All the other ideas you had but let them slide because you didn’t have time to do them.
Improve Your Brand Perception
When you expand the time you spend on productive, strategic activities away from repetitive, manual admin tasks, your entire brand perception will change – for the better:
- You’ll always be in control of all trade show and event details, tracking and managing tasks, orders, productions, and project statuses for all of your client accounts.
- You’ll improve your team's productivity, collaboration, and communication.
- You’ll avoid missed deadlines, late shipments, and cost overages.
- You’ll be calmer, have a more balanced life, and sleep better at night.
- You’ll be able to forecast with real-time, key info at your fingertips.
- You’ll gain significantly better measurement and reporting of project metrics that help improve and justify your spend.
- You’ll be able to make informed business decisions and improved processes.
- You’ll achieve greater opportunities to win new business and RFPs.
Take The Next Step Towards Becoming The Exhibit House Team You Want To Be
With Enterprise, you can significantly reduce time wasted on repetitive admin tasks, so you can reclaim the time needed to better execute on the creative and production side of the business. The only ERP system that offers a free trial with your data, see for yourself what’s possible – click here to request a free trial of Enterprise.