The Official Omedix Blog

Well, it’s been about one year, so it’s time to gear up for the annual BONES Conference! To the uninitiated, BONES is the national society for Orthopedic Practice Managers and is one of the major shows of the year for us. About 500 practice managers show up, and an army of vendors readies their booths, free pens, and most physically attractive employees to sell-sell-sell like they’ve never sold before.

I’ll be honest. I love what I do, and I really love meeting clients/attendees, but occasionally you run into the attendees who equate the word “vendor” with “scum of the earth” and treat you as good for nothing but supplying free candies and free contests. I understand that giving away fun free stuff is just plain part of the game, but when people approach you solely in the context of freeloading, it’s just demoralizing on some level.

My conference pet peeves aside, there are quite a few interesting realizations to be had about conferences and I’ve gone to enough now as the exhibitor that I feel at least somewhat authoritative writing this. So here goes!

Observation #1: Managing the “Surge” Effect
Unlike normal day-to-day operations where the Law of Large Numbers safely ensures that a relatively manageable stream of leads will come in, a conference is a three-day massive surge of exposure. Unless your company is going to conferences every week (we don’t…at least not yet), I would estimate that at BONES we will probably generate 10 times the normal demand we receive for our services. Ten times!

That sounds great when I tell that to my parents, but the problem is I get back to the office later that week and I have a stack of business cards so high the sun no longer shines in my office. I try to delegate some of the contacts but in the end it’s just…overwhelming. It’s a good problem to have, and maybe I should really do a better of job building in scalability to our processes, but, hey it’s challenging!

Observation #2: Fallacy of Composition
Of all the fallacies taught in a basic economics class, my most favorite of all is the much-adored Fallacy of Composition. It’s just a fancy way of saying that if you see a company do awesome at a single conference, it doesn’t say anything about that company overall, but that people often make the fallacy of making a lot of other conclusions anyway.

At last year’s conference, we had a pretty awesome booth location along with a pretty awesome booth. All in all, we may have had one of the best locations of the conference. Naturally, we had GREAT traffic while some of our competitors were tucked away, hidden in the tenements of the exhibitor hall where few attendees dared roam lest they be attacked by roving gangs of hungry wolves. Well, something like that at least.

But my point is that they saw us get this huge amount of traffic and suddenly it created this adversarial thing that wasn’t quite there before. It was weird, and I was thinking that the only new information they got about us was “Omedix do good at conference.” On the flipside, I saw gynormous companies like Canon have a total of two people stop by their booth the entire conference.

It’s not that there’s no correlation between heavy conference traffic and company success, but it just doesn’t really tell you much except, well, how the company did at that conference.

Observation #3: Forging Personal Relationships
Hands down the best thing you get at a conference is the opportunity to meet your clients in person and become a real person instead of some anonymous phone voice. I happen to really like people in general and I think it’s fun to talk to people, so I think I do well in this kind of setting.

Observation #4: Building Your Brand
We also recently exhibited at the AzMGMA Conference and one vendor admitted to me that his company once decided not to exhibit at a conference at which they’d exhibited for four years straight. He said everyone then thought they were going out of business, just because they didn’t show up. That got me really worried, actually. In a way, it almost makes it better to never exhibit than to exhibit just once. In either case, I guess the reality is we’re BONES Exhibitors for life now, or else people will wonder why we left!

Observation #5: Vendor Socializing
The other funny thing about conferences it the social dynamic among the vendors. Everyone there is basically in the same boat: away from home and nothing to do but the conference itself. There’s quite a bit of downtime as a vendor, particularly during non-exhibiting hours, and so you socialize and meet the other vendors. They’re usually sales people and therefore fairly outgoing and interesting. I actually kind of like this feature of conferences.

Summing Up
All in all, there’s no question it’s a total pain to drag the booth, organize the furniture and carpet, pay $500/day for Internet, print fliers, etc. But, once it’s all done, it’s actually kind of cool to rep your company on a national level and do some travelling you might not otherwise get to do. Check back here for some updates I’ll post either at the conference itself or when I get back. Wish us luck!

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