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So I am back…
A week in Copenhagen and I managed to see the airport, the hotel, the exhibition centre, the hotel again, and the exhibition centre, and back to the hotel… Actually, I did get to go to the city centre one night, but I was attending an informal reception at the City Hall (which is gorgeous) and didn’t see any of the city apart from the City Hall Square.
It was an interesting week. It started on Sunday night when Jon and I were in Malaga’s airport and our flight got delayed by more than two hours. We got home in Basingstoke at around 2:30am. I had to be in Heathrow for my flight to Copenhagen at 7:30am. Not good. But I managed… I had forgotten, though, what it feels like to only sleep for 4 hours and then go back to work… (not that I’ve done that many times in my life, but yes, I may have done it once or twice when I was younger)
We then had problems in the check in desk because both Graham’s and my suitcase were overweight and had to do a massive reshuffle from one case to the other and to the hand luggage. I thought it was ridiculous because we didn’t get rid of anything, so at the end of the day the airplane was carrying the same amount of weight… Really stupid.
We got to Copenhagen’s Terminal 3 and had a horrible sandwich for lunch in Starbucks (we made the mistake of going landside straight away, and we then realised that all the good restaurants/eateries were airside… doh!), and off we went to the Bella Centre to set up the stand. First of many taxi rides of the week.
The Bella Centre is quite big and the Hall where our expo was taking place was huge. Our stand was only a 12sqm one, which is not the smallest but it looked tiny next to our neighbours’. We did our best, though, to dress it up with some posters, the telly with a video on loop, and some other bits and pieces. It looked like the poor relative of all the other ones. One of our major competitors also had a stand in the Hall and theirs was massive. You could see it from the distance and they even had a coffee bar at the stand. Wow.
So we spent the whole week trying to get people interested in our stand, but it was so difficult because what we do wasn’t obvious at first sight and people would just walk by. Here’s when I accost them and try to get them interested. I hated doing that. I am not a naturally chatty person and talking to strangers like that was hard for me. But I managed, and I did get some people interested, which was good.
This has been my company’s first expo ever and you could tell. I used that “excuse” a lot when I got talking to people, I had to somehow excuse the really poor estate of the stand (compared to others). Still, having been the first one, I think we did pretty well. We talked to quite a few people and got good leads of decision makers of big projects, which is what we wanted.
Overall it was a good professional experience, but I was physically very tired all the time. Hopefully we will be allowed to go to another expo in the future and then I will have a lot of knowledge on what to do and what not to do. Nothing like a bit of first hand experience! (that’s if they let me go!)
