Last year’s conference, as you all know, was a raging success. We were given a rating of 4.5/5. The success of this conference only made us want to do more for the next one and push the limits further.
We promptly fixed the conference well in advance for 11th September 2019. This time, we planned to do things differently. We planned to limit the number of speakers to just 3, excluding one keynote speaker, which is in concurrence with the general feedback given to us for our previous conference. Also, we wanted to have a different flow of events which was as follows: First, the keynote speaker takes the stage, followed by one speaker talking about a topic he/she specializes in, followed by round table discussions related to the topic just covered. This cycle repeats with each of our 3 speakers. Lastly, there shall be an open floor session where we give out a few topics, and each table discusses these topics based on their perspectives and returns to us with their summaries.
We were partly piggybacking on the ALPSP conference since that was happening in the same venue that we had booked. Now, we surely expected a very good attendance considering our last year’s success and the proximity of our conference hall to that of the ALPSP conference. We went about writing to various potential attendees as early as June, but no one replied since it was a bit too early for them to commit (we were a bit over proactive may be :-). Nonetheless, we kept the registration window open for a generously long time. We had an ambitious target of 50 registrations, with a minimum target of 30.
But none of this actually worked in our favor. By the end of July, we were shocked to have had just 3 registrations! We figured that there were quite a few reasons for us to be in this spot. For one, a particular publisher had a customer review which happens only once in 3 years, and this contributed to a loss of at least 5 registrations. Apart from this, a major conference was coinciding with ours, and several publishers had committed their attendance there. To add to this, our loyal attendees& connections since a good 7 years too did not respond for various other reasons. So at this point, we had basically put ourselves in a big soup full of speakers but only garnished with a few attendees. We feared that our venue would look empty and create a poor impression on our attendees and speakers. Well, the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph !! No looking back, I’ve got to do this, is all I had in mind.
Went straight into damage control mode, reached out to Andrea, who is the designated round table moderator, and requested for her active participation in promoting our event. But she too had her hands tied with her new occupation after being elected the Chancellor for her locality. She however helped us out by arranging for the keynote speaker for our conference. We then decided to make this a public event. With almost a month’s brainstorming with Mr. Jignesh, I finally put together a compelling agenda for the event & we personally followed up and chased several people, pulled in a few favours too. The BD teamthen wrote more than 300 emails, several follow ups, created a micro site which stated the agenda of the conference (https://krishna270.wixsite.com/roundtable2019 | my first attempt at it, along with Sunil )&most importantly we struck a cross-promotion deal with ALPSP, where ALPSP promotes our conference as a pre-event to theirs, and in exchange, we incorporate their branding in our event and promote this in our list serve of 8000+ publishers. We finally saw some traction by mid-august with about 20 registrations. We still needed at least 10 or 15 more registrations at any cost. Luckily, as the event date neared we reached our target with 35 registrations. Had this been a paid registration event and/or a private event as planned before, it would have been much harder to get these many registrations. On a lighter note, people turn up, when breakfast is free: -P 
Packed our bags, boarded our flights, and I reached the venue on 10th Sept at 7 pm after some daylong customer meetings in the city. I was welcomed with a good number of hurdles right away. The venue of our conference had been allocated to some other event & this was not informed to us until we arrived at the De Vere Beaumont Estate Hotel.
Our event starts at 7 am the next day and we are in this position! To add to our misery, the hotel was understaffed, mismanaged and overbooked with over 15 large scale events going on in parallel in various halls, and had no staff in-charge for our supposed hall. Turns out that the facilities management is outsourced to third party contractors. So the person responsible for booking the hall and the person on ground are two unrelated people altogether. The person on the ground just follows the checklist on the contract in a mechanical fashion without applying any common sense whatsoever. Now, with 15 large scale events going on simultaneously, the hotel had just 3 on-ground persons hired on contract. They were literally all over the place trying to do as much as they could to support all the events. I had to have our hall ready by that night at any cost. After a while, I was shown a new conference hall. This was a big 200 seater hall, which was unused for a very long time, but at this point of time, it was the only hall available. Now I had to make this hall look a lot fuller since we had just a 50 seater requirement. I did try a lot of on-the-spot improvisation to fill up the hall – arranged the tables wide apart in a zig-zag manner and whatnot. I asked for a partition to divide the hall into 2 parts, where one is the main conference area and the other becomes breakfast/networking area. We now required a PA system with microphones, a podium, and many such additional properties that would not have been needed for the hall we originally booked. I am now forced to pay up for these as additional expenses for no fault of ours but were promised that the properties will be delivered only the next morning since these have to be sourced from outside the hotel. With the help of the technician, I started to set up whatever little we could, to avoid hurrying things the next morning.
It was now 10 pm, and we turn on the in-house projector. And Voila! It does not work!
The hall has not been used for so long that they’ve forgotten to even maintain this space. The wiring was all gone. With no assistance from the hotel staff, we spent the rest of the night pulling down the false ceiling and replacing the wiring. We tried all sorts of combinations with our limited knowledge of the wiring in this hall and finally managed to get the projector to work at 11.20 pm. We swept, dusted and vacuum cleaned the entire place all by ourselves. I think we deserved at least a day’s wage to be paid to us by the hotel for putting us through this…but never mind!! We then placed all the conference material which was packed for us with great precision by Sunil and Poornima. Had it not been for them, I would have had absolutely no time to deal with this mess of a hall. I went about doing some more last-minute work like making table holders with MC branding, making signboards, etc. which were all originally supposed to be provided by the hotel.
We finished all this at half-past 1 in the morning. Take no chances, I made a checklist of all that is pending from the hotel including the podium, microphones, PA system, seat covers, etc. and handed it over to the hall in charge/technician, who in turn hands it over to the person replacing him after his shift ends at 3 am.
With very little sleep marred with restlessness, I returned to the conference hall next morning at 5.45 am, as I was informed that work would be resumed by the hotel staff at the same. I wasn’t too surprised to find the hall locked, no work done, no sight of the podium or PA system or anything we had asked for. The hall in-charge had not handed over the checklist to the person in the next shift. I somehow managed to pull in 3 random hotel staff and took matters into my own hands. The equipment reached the hotel at 7 am. I rushed and fixed up the PA system myself and got it working. The sound technician who arrived later took over that part. It was 7.30 am when the operations manager walks in to tell us that they couldn’t arrange the rest of the properties since it was too ‘last-minute’. I had to sternly remind them that it was because of their mismanagement and wrongly allocated hall that we had to request for these properties in the ‘last-minute’. Soon, Vidya and Lokanath arrived at the hall looking sharp and fully suited up – but then I had to ask them to get off the coats, roll up their sleeves and cover all the chairs with seat covers! Gentleman, thank you and I would have had a stress attack if I continued to stay alone in that room until 8 am. Your support at that time meant a lot.
“You sure can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending”.We were finally ready exactly at 8 am when our attendees started arriving. The event went off very well with a few negligible hiccups here and there and……
We did it! We received a rating of 4.7 on 5… that’s better than last time! IN THE END, THIS IS ALL THAT MATTERED (Testimonial: ( http://www.molecularconnections.com/RTC_2019/)
Highlights of the Round Table
We always dream of traveling far and wide on work, driven by the misconception that it is luxurious and fancy. The truth is, business travel is extremely expensive and so we try to optimize the trip to the absolute maximum. We pack our schedule with at least 10 or 20 meetings per day, starting early in the morning and closing real late at night, every single day of our travel (our record on marathon meetings was set at the Frankfurt book fair last year. Between Mr. Jignesh our CEO and myself, we covered a total of 53 meetings in two days (without food/coffee, not even a loo break 
). Every city we travel to throws at us different logistical problems, so most of the time we end up walking for kilometers together tugging our luggage, jumping in and out of trams, subways, buses, and trains, just to ensure we make it on time for our next meeting. We have to think twice before we pick our meal because the food is very expensive. We end up dealing with harsh weather. Several times we end up almost freezing in the snow while we wait for our next meeting or trains or bus, but we still have to look tip-top and present ourselves in our best manner and make MC proud.
The inference we can draw from our experience described so far is, Things can and will always go wrong because of several external factors which are not in our control. But we just can’t let such problems get in our way. We have to make adjustments, compromise, make smart strategic decisions and put up a great show in such a way that all the problems we face are invisible to all, but us.
But then, lucky for us, we are blessed to have a truly reliable workforce in MC!
