BURN, BABY, BURN: One unique requirement for the Hearth, Patio & Barbecue Association’s (HPBA) HPBExpo—which Nashville is keeping top-of-mind as it builds the new Music City Center— is that its exhibitors be able to burn natural gas indoors.
ning process to get it right.” Johnson, who brought
C M P CERTIFICATION MADE POSSIBLE
the DFW Case Manage- ment Society to the Irving Convention Center, was even more proactive in fig- uring out new ways of using anewcenter—ways that even the facility staff hadn’t yet thought of. Ini- tially, Irving’s staff had slated the trade-show por-
tion of Johnson’s meeting to take place, naturally, in the exhibit hall, on the bottom level. But when Johnson got a little further into the process and began to lookat floor plans, she determined that the center’s third-floor ballroom would workbetter. “So I contacted themandsaid, ‘CanI have our exhibits in the big ball- room?’” Johnson said, “and they were like, ‘That really isn’t what it’s set to do.’AndI said, ‘Iknow, but it’ll fit.’ So…between
FIRST TO MEET: Micki Johnson, vice president of E&I Management, booked the Dallas/FortWorth Case Management Society of America into the new Irving Convention Center at Las Colinas just two months after it opened.
the elevator people, and the exhibit people, and the conven- tion center,wehad to sit there and figure out if it would work.” It turns out that the setup she proposed didwork—andnow
the Irving Convention Center even offers the ballroom space as a standard option for exhibits. “They were very willing to lis- ten tome,” Johnson said, “and toworkwithme hand-in-hand, to be able to make it fit the best way possible for our group.”
Don’t Forget: It’s New to Them, Too The flip side of Johnson’s experience is that, at least in the early days of a new facility’s opening, “the building is still learning the building,” as Evoniuk put it—mean- ing that the staff often will not be much more familiar with the ins and outs of the convention center than you are. “The staff is still learning…how to navigate from here to there, they’re judging how long it takes to get a table from the storage place in the original building over to the far- thest reaches of the new building,” said Evoniuk, referring to the existing and expanded portions of the Pennsylvania Convention Center. She added: “There’s a whole bunch of learning-curve stuff that can happen.” One example: “Where’s the shut-off for the escalators?
Does all the staff ... know where that is?” Or, prior to the building’s actual opening, during the planning process, rig- ging specifications or electrical mapping also could be as- yet-undetermined, or not yet put into a format that is easily shared with clients and contractors. “All of those sort of ramping-up things were issues for
us, and it had to do with the timing of when the building opened relative to when our meeting was,” Evoniuksaid. “It wasn’t about the booking cycle; it was just about the execution, going into a building where things aren’t yet totally in place.”