It was the week from hell but the Tour de Cloud launched Monday in Irvine California and finished Stage 3 in Sacramento on Friday. Heck we were following the Tour of California route but we’re not a bike race. We are an independent workshop for MSPs, VARs, resellers, IT Pros and GEEKS! As you know from prior posts, we are focused on the technology message first followed by the bizdev side. It’s a great fit as we feel we fulfill an important need in the roadshow space.
Challenges
Doing three cities in one week is a logistical challenge my friends. You essentially count on everything going according to plan. If one “thing” in the supply chain goes wrong, it impacts the tour and takes us to CODE RED. Fortunately our intrepid instructor Grant Thompson and the amazing Jenny Hallmark, president of SMB Nation created magic. The audience received the content promised – and it’s the back story that’s interesting.
First – Grant had a high fever and severe cold. He stood and delivered. Then we found we were actually competing inadvertently with Microsoft and IAMCP events being held the same week. Microsoft had its quarterly partner briefings and the IAMCP had its SoCal golf tournament and monthly meeting. No offense intended by these remarks – rather we played the hand dealt us. Our dates were locked because of venue availability. Then it became a story of planes and automobiles (but no trains LOL). Long stretches of driving in SoCal taking far longer than anticipated. Plane flight delays had Jenny musing that driving from San Diego to Sacramento would have been frickin’ faster! Throw in a late pizza delivery and a fire alarm drill (true story) and it was the week from hell from an event logistics point of view.
Gratitude. Needless to say I’m super proud of the team digging deep to pull it off. Fortunately, we are a 17-year old technology media integration and events company and have “seen it all.” But this week even showed us a few things we hadn’t seen in the past.
Next Up
I share these war room secrets with you because we are community and we’re right there with you on the rodeo ride. We’re real people putting on workshops with real content and we hope you’ll join us on the Tour de Cloud for one of the stages. Next up is Fort Lauderdale on October 13th. Hopefully this next week will be a breeze on the tails of Hurricane Matthew. BTW – add one more thing to hell week: while producing three events in California, we were making contingency plans for Hurricane Matthew and our Fort Lauderdale event; fortunately, the storm veered east off-shore. The Fort Lauderdale event is ON and you can sign-up here .
PS – I put this in the Start Over category as much of the audience are IT professionals retraining themselves for the future with Azure and Office 365. This is not as much of a start-up crowd.