You made it. You walked a bajillion miles on the trade show floor, attended enlightening education sessions, saw all (or most) of your industry friends, collected a stack of business cards and wrote your “That’s a wrap” post highlighting all of your adventures at this year’s amazing expo.
Now what do you do?
There is no doubt you learned something while at the expo. Maybe you learned about your own strengths and struggles, or a new social media hack, or how to engage your team or better ways to organize your training manuals… no matter what you learned, if you want your trip to be truly WORTH IT, you now have to apply it.
But now you’re back to your non-IAAPA life and you’re wondering how to keep that IAAPA feeling alive for 51 weeks until IAAPA Expo 2020! Here are some suggestions:
People you met:
- Organize your business cards based on contact types (vendor, potential employer/employee, client, etc) and get them entered into your contact system.
- Write a quick note about how much you enjoyed meeting them (if you did) and a little bit that will remind them of who you are and the time you spent together.
- DO NOT ask for anything at this point (unless that is a natural follow-up to your initial discussion). Build the relationship first.
Ideas to better yourself:
- Get a list going of all the things you thought of or learned throughout the week that YOU could do to be a better leader, salesperson, employee or human being.
- Prioritize that list based on need and importance to you and your business.
- Take the top 3 things and assign tactical action steps.
- Work the steps!!
- When you complete one, move on to the next.
Ideas to improve your business:
- Get a list going of all the things you thought of or learned throughout the week that could improve a critical area of your business.
- Involve your team to determine priorities.
- Assign top 3 items to smaller teams and ask them to come up with specific tactical action steps.
- Follow-up with them with support and guidance until complete.
- Repeat.
By the way, if delegating was one of the things you wanted to improve about yourself, please re-read the ideas to improve your business section.
In my session on revealing your superhero powers, we talked a lot about choices. Specifically, the choices you made that lead you to that moment in time, but also the choices you could make in the future. If there is something you don’t like about where you are, examine the choices that got you there. If you want to change your path, it might take making some different (and difficult) choices in the future.
As you venture off to put all of your ideas into action, I will leave you with this: don’t look for external solutions to internal problems. If your choices or attitudes are holding your team or business back, don’t look for your team, company or guests to fix it – that’s up to you. Accepting responsibility for where you are is the only way to put yourself in a position to determine where you are going to go.
If you need help with that last part, give me a call. It’s what I do.
Thanks for reading!
407-435-8084
Matt@performanceoptimist.com
Check out AttractionPros LIVE – a special edition of the AttractionPros podcast, recorded LIVE at the #IAAPAExpo! http://attractionpros.com/
Matt Heller - Performance Optimist 