Crossroads

Our business is at a crossroads, either we bring on new business or we will fade away.  Our preference is to bring on new business and to do that we attended an industry conference in Tampa, Fl last week.  We have had success in landing a new client at this conference in the past and it was one of the first offered this year.  The conference organizer also allowed us to present one of the concurrent sessions as long a we had a client co-presenter.  This was not a problem as we had a contact in FL who was more than willing to be the co-presenter.  As time for the show drew nearer, our co-presenter was forced to dropout due to the last minute scheduling of a corporate retreat at his company.  Defiantly not good news, but the conference organizer still allowed us to do the session, however; the week before the conference date we get an email from him that said he needed to change both the time and the meeting room that we were scheduled for and asked "please tell me this is not a problem".  We agreed, after all Gene didn't have to keep us on the schedule at all.  Now, we had already done and email & postcard campaign to all of the scheduled attendees requesting that they attend our session at the original time.  We did ask that he mention the change in the keynote address and post signage about the change and Gene agreed.  Unfortunately, we have seen this movie before.  Several years ago we attended a conference in New Orleans where our presentation session was left off the schedule entirely and was not discovered until we arrived.  Even with posting signage we had a total of 3 people, including me, its very hard to generate leads when virtually no-one sees your presentation.  It ended up being a colossal waste of money.  All I could think of was that this was New Orleans all over again except now we really did not have money to waste.  The night before we left was our weekly church group on covenant and at the end we asked Dr. Rod to pray for us and our business.  We arrived about 10:30 the night before and got our booth set-up and checked into our room.  That night we prayed, we asked that God bless our business, our presentation and that he lead people to our new location and time slot.  The morning of we prayed for God's favor again before we went down to the exhibit hall.  About a half hour before our presentation, we headed down to the meeting room to get everything set-up.  It was a nice room, set-up to set about 80 people, although hard to find and set on the opposite end of the conference facility from the other, larger meeting rooms.  After making sure we were ready, Deborah went to the room entrance to try to draw attention to the fact that there was a presentation about to start.  When she went out there, I sat down in the front row and started praying and continued to pray until a gentleman asked me if the seat next to me was taken.  I told him that he was welcome to it and took the opportunity to look around the room and I was shocked, it was about 75% full!  I went back to praying and continued until it was just about time to get started.  Now the room was packed, every seat was taken, there were men in business suits sitting on the floor at the front of the room and 30+ people standing in the back of the room!  I've never been to one of these where it was standing room only and the people actually stayed once they came in and saw how packed it was.  This was in spite of the fact the the two other sessions going on at the the same time, in far larger rooms, were being given by IBM and YAHOO!  This was just the beginning of God's answer to my prayers. 

The presentation itself had not been finalized until that morning and she was a little nervous about how it was going to go.  In short it was amazing, I have never seen her do a better job.  The presentation flowed smoothly and she was able to keep it within the allotted time (I was to serve as her timekeeper but I gave up my chair so that an attendee could sit down.  I ended off to the side and behind her).  She came to the last slide just inside the time limit.  I of course told her what a great job she did but she did not really buy it as I'm a little biased.  However, several people came up after the presentation to tell her how much they enjoyed it and what a great job she did.  The rest of the day and all of the next we had people who saw her presentation stop by our exhibt booth to tell her what a great job she did the presentation, and some of them where from our competition!  We made many contacts and several good leads at this conference and we are working on turning them into clients as I write this.

I prayed to the LORD, and he answered me.  He freed me from all my fears.  Those who look to him for help will be radiant with joy; no shadow of shame will darken their faces.  In my desperation I prayed, and the LORD listened; he saved me from all my troubles.