Several of the S4 staff attended the opening day of the National Facilities Management and Technologies (NFM&T) Baltimore show on March 22nd, 2016. As always, we came away with some great contacts from the booths in the Expo and will be following up with those contacts if we don’t hear from them first in the coming weeks. Making relevant contacts and opening doors for new relationships and new opportunities are always good so I must consider the investment in time and travel expenses well spent. We attended some great educational sessions where we were able to broaden our understanding about what building owners and operators are looking for any how they are making their buildings more efficient.
In the past I always considered the NFM&T show one of the best places for us to spend our trade show attendee budget. I must say that this year I feel like the “&T” portion of the show and expo were overshadowed by facilities services and suppliers. We were able to easily visit all of the building automation manufacturers, dealers, and integrators in our one day visit. Those who were in attendance were high end professional organizations who had a lot to offer and, as mentioned above, we were very happy with the results of visiting with these organizations. But, where were the rest of the building automation manufacturers and their dealers?
The NFM&T show provided a convenient place for us to pre-arrange meetings with some of our partners in the area. In at least one case, a partner was not planning on coming to the show until after we suggested getting together. Since we had already invested in the trip, we met with three additional S4 partners at their offices in Maryland and Pennsylvania. We probably could not have justified the expense of visiting any one of them without the NFM&T show acting as the catalyst to pull the entire trip together. We will be back next year.