You Learn More When Things Don't Go Right.

Last week I had the opportunity to help plan for and set-up an event for one of Mesh Marketing's client's- Nespresso. They were going to run their own training booth at the first official Good Guys Expo. This expo involved key store members from all Good Guys stores coming to the Rendezvous Hotel Perth Scarborough and in a round-robin format they would move in their groups from booth to booth learning about different products that they have to sell in store.

Now, don't get me wrong, this event did have many positives but I found the things that didn't go right the most useful to learn from.

The main element that didn't go quite to plan was communication- internal communication within The Good Guys organisation and then external communication between The Good Guys and participating organisations like Nespresso.

As this was the first-ever event of its kind for The Good Guys, I don't think the participating stores knew how official the event was and hence didn't show up. I am unsure if this was due to confirmation issues between the organisers and the stores or if it was just not clear enough to the stores the nature of the event. Once the store managers heard how professional this event was the were all deeply regretful for not allowing their staff to attend. Many stores had just not wanted their staff to attend due to not wanting their staff to be out of the store for too long. This really reiterated to me in a real-life example of how important it is to look after your staff and put them first because they are your most important stakeholders.

After chatting to Western Australian Nespresso Sales Promoter Tim Williams, I learnt that when he was trying to organise the details of the event, communication between the event organisers and him was non-existent. They were not efficient at all in responding to him up until the day before. To me, this is unacceptable. Working on the day it was very clear that communication had been poor as everyone was quite unsure of what was happening.

I did learn that events management can be quite stressful if not planned within an inch of its life and it does incorporate A LOT of hard manual labour!


Below are some photos of the Nespresso booth at The Good Guys Expo at the Rendezvous Hotel Perth Scarborough (note how deserted it looks due to lack of attendance):