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A Higher Bounce
By Mitchell Beer | December 5, 2008
I really hate to admit it. But lately, I’ve begun to see a degree of wisdom in one of my all-time most hated phrases.
The phrase and I collided almost a decade ago, in a suburb of Dallas, TX. I was attending one of the annual chapter leaders’ conferences hosted by our professional association, Meeting Professionals International, in the period before its long-overdue leadership change in 2003/2004. The lobby outside our meeting room was festooned with oversized poster boards, each containing a witty saying that was supposed to motivate and inspire us through our year as local chapter volunteers. One of them, in particular, caught my eye.
“The harder you fall,” it said, “the higher you bounce.”
If you’ve just felt your lip curl downward in disgust, I feel your pain. I hate the notion that we do our best after hitting bottom and hitting hard. And I really resent being light and cheery about it when I’ve known so many smart, capable people who couldn’t bounce back, however hard they tried.
But I wouldn’t have reacted so strongly if the phrase hadn’t contained an unfortunate grain of truth. As I watch the global economy implode, it makes a new kind of sense to me.
I’ve begun to think of the economic crash as a particularly fast-acting glacier. It’s big, it’s on the move, and it’s flattening most everything in its path. There’s nothing personal about the mangled auto companies or gutted retirement savings it leaves in its wake—that’s just what glaciers do. The first impression is that there’s not much any of us can do to stay out of its way.
Time to start burrowing.
But when I tear myself away from the daily headlines and look at my own company’s prospects, I see a very different picture.
Call us crazy—we may eventually agree—but as we enter our new fiscal year, we’re projecting record sales and revenues.
We’ve shifted our strategies and adjusted our pricing to fit the economy. We’re acutely aware of the onsite projects that have been cancelled or postponed because of uncertain registration or declining sponsorship. We’re worried and deeply sad for a couple of long-term clients that seem unlikely to weather the storm.
But overall, we’re beginning to see the bounce, and it has one essential ingredient. It’s all about going back to fundamentals—some of which we may have forgotten, others that we may never have fully recognized.
In-house, the economic crash has forced us to focus on the proven content capture services and strategies that will work for our clients right now. We have no shortage of ideas for shiny, new products. Over the last couple of years, we haven’t been shy about talking about them, and some of our best new options have morphed nicely into established services. But in the new economy, our clients have less time and we have less inclination to stray very far from the content strategies we know best.
The good news—the really interesting, exciting news—is that clients still have lots of time and lots of inclination to talk about products and projects that are relevant, practical, reasonably affordable, and easy to implement.
In the wider meetings industry, our clients are learning or relearning the fundamental truth that every event, every program, every activity has to have a purpose. With travel budgets shrinking and sponsors taking an unscheduled, extended holiday, the meetings that can’t deliver real value are disappearing—and that’s not a bad thing. For years, many of us have talked, written, researched, debated about the need for a more coherent, strategic approach to meetings. Now, the glacier is forcing the issue.
The problem is that the happy talk works best at 30,000 feet. The glacier may be visible from high altitudes, but it’s most alarming up close and at ground level. Which is why we’ve been trying especially hard to listen to what our clients need, understand what their internal clients expect of them, and adjust as needed.
So far, it’s working. We’re perfectly capable of missing our very optimistic target for the year, but we know we’ll survive—with a bounce that will carry us to the other side of the glacier.
Topics: Virtual Meetings |