Thursday, February 19, 2009

Last Round of Boat Shows

This is the height of boat show season for us. For us midwesterners, they typically start right after the New Year, and run until about the beginning of March, just in time to salivate for another month and change before it's warm enough to be on the water. Being in the boating industry means that for the last 8 weeks, our jobs are all about creating incentives to buy, laying out floor space, cleaning boats, moving in to shows, frantically setting up, long hours on our feet talking to potential customers for 12 hours or more a day, tearing everything down in one 8 hour time period, and getting ready for the next show. I've been to 4 shows so far this season, each lasting 3-5 days a piece. This weekend is the last of the shows - I can't wait for it all to be over for another year!

We decided to go big at this last Kansas City store, and practically emptied my store of its inventory to set up in our 5,000 square foot show space. It's a good thing store traffic is still slow, as I have had next to nothing to show customers this week! We started setting up for this particular show last Tuesday, and the show opened for last Friday-Sunday. I got to work at the store, catching up, this week, and tomorrow starts the last weekend. We had some really good traffic last weekend, with a few customers expressing very promising interest. I'm cautiously optimistic that we may sell a big boat or two at the show this weekend, or in the week immediately following the close of the show.

In other news, it looks like the lawsuit we have been involved in for the last year and a half is going to be settled in the next week.

Things are really starting to come together! I'd love to say we can relax and de-stress, but Joe's busier than ever for business this Spring, and I'll be the same in another couple of weeks. Hopefully things will continue to work out for us this year, despite all of the economic doom and gloom out there :)

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