NADA Convention

How many people does it take to successfully organize, register, and transport four Smails and assorted employees to the NADA convention?  

The answer is:  Don’t know.  It’s never been done! At least not easily and successfully, not the first try, anyway.

Every July, NADA (National Automobile Dealers’ Association) opens up its annual registration for their January convention in either San Francisco, New Orleans, or Las Vegas.  And every July, the very moment that I get to my desk on that all-important day, I start the registration process.  There’s plenty of time to register for the convention, but the choice hotels go lightening fast.  In order to get the hotel of choice (and that is an absolute requirement!) you must ACT fast!  We have yet to get all of our people the hotel of choice on the first try.

If that was the end of it, the whole thing wouldn’t be so bad.  But about September I start getting calls about adding spouses and guests to existing registrations.  About Thanksgiving I start getting requests for registering additional employees.  Then in January, people start changing their minds and need to cancel out or substitute another manager for their spot.  This year they added a person THREE DAYS before the actual event.  No one thought to mention to me that they told him we could go, back in December!

Then there are the workshops, manufacturer receptions, brunches, luncheons, and after-hours parties. Each event has separate registration processes and are by invitation only.  Take 10 events times 14 attendees and that equals chaos!  The one redeeming aspect of this whole thing is that I am not involved in the flight arrangements.

There are 14 packets of information to prepare, which include convention and hotel registrations, event verifications and information, local weather, hotel assignments, a list of cell phone numbers, and meeting schedules.  Last year I included M&M’s but they got lost in the shuffle so this year, I ate them.

Once these 14 people are on the plane(s) tomorrow morning, I will have four glorious days of peace and quiet to get back to my regularly scheduled duties.  However, for some reason, I anticipate getting at least one phone call from someone who forgot something they needed to know or should have handled before they left.

Somehow, July doesn’t seem so very far away, after all….