Home and Garden Show

My brother just signed up for a home and garden show at the end of this month. Any of you guys ever tried this? We are hoping on getting some good leads to potential residential jobs. We picked a booth next to a sunroom company. We are also renting a display from our 3M rep specifically designed for these shows. We were thinking of getting some balloons made up with company name and number with 3M on it so when kids go by we'll give them a balloon and people will see our name throughout the building and stop by to see us . Might work. Anyhow we're hoping it to be a good flatglass strategy, the show organizer is expecting a turnout of 5,000 people for the 2 day show. I'll let you guys know how it goes and if we get some projected leads....

im doing one at the end of this month also...you may want to check to see if the balloons are ok to do...the one here ..they dont let you do those..and i just found out that our show is going to bring in 35,000 attendees

35,000 . Where you at TG?

we do the home and garden show every year

Jacksonville Florida ..this show has been around for almost 60 years they say...and its my first one ..so im really excited..

The one in Jax is pretty good TG. I worked a show there a couple of years ago and I was surprised at the turnout, it rained all weekend. I've been spoiled by doing the big shows in Ft. Lauderdale, West Palm and Miami. The last show I did in Miami we brought in over 600 leads and probably got a two-three hundered calls from. That show was SEVEN days though, it was rough. Home shows are an excellent way of getting your name out there though, it's great exposure.

the home and garden shows work great for us every year. if you can, get the white glossy bags with the 3m logo on the side. people carry them all around the show. high visibility.

I know a guy here who does the H&G show every year he does really well...

I have been doing them for over 15 years

I guess my question is, why are you just promoting a brand and not yourself?

They will not allow balloons. They end up caught in the ceiling and A/C system

You might wanna check on the balloons, cause I know they allow 'em down here.

we have a home show comming up as well at the end of march. We're setting up next to the local glass shop. Since my shop does home theater and car audio as well I'm going to use some tinted glass to show glare reduction and we get to do a safety glass demonstration. I'm using a sledge hamme woohooo and I'm using the 15mil stuff.

big bowl of candy fer the kids better than balloons. don't just sit or stand behind the table. get out in the aisle and talk to people. If you have a good demo, direct them toward it. do this all day every day and you will like the results! a lead box for a tint giveaway is very important,too! have fun and a few beers to keep the mouth goin!

Just watch the size of the candy! we once were beside a booth that was givin out candy to the kids and one kid musta sucked the candy back good because he ended up choking, even turned blue! I had to give him the hymlick manouver (sp). Scared the outa me so needless to say...ive never given out candies at my booth.

The balloon idea is no more, we are planning on handing out bags now. Also thinking about raffling off a free tint job up to 100 sq ft. We've also ordered a heat lamp to show the results when you put film in front of it. Show is next weekend, i'll let everyone know how it goes.

Our home show costs $1650 for a 10x10 booth area. I wanted to but decided to pass. I may try one in early spring or summer though.

We're doing one this weekend. We're having raffles and looks like I'm going to be doing some demo-installs. I might end up grabbing a watcher to have him/her give the install a try for giggles.

Tommorrow and Sunday is the big day. Our 10x10 booth was $600. Scheduled another show for next weekend down by the beach. Wish us luck, wish we had a security film demo, didn't think about it, maybe the next show we'll have that.

tis the season for home shows i guess! good luck this weekend for all who are participating

Knock 'em dead guys (and gal)! Don't forget to get away for a minute and check everything out! My personal favorite is the massage chairs, a half hour in one of those and you'll forget all about that home show!

I have done a few shows with my old boss. Have a lot of brochures and a lot of cards ready. No Tshits, only button down shirts with your comapny name on it. Make sure, and I repeat make sure, you booth is eye catching. As those people walk around that show, they are glancing back and forth. Give them a reason to give your booth a double take.

If they have small children with them, try to talk sort of fast. What I mean is get out as much imoprtant info as soon as possible. Because you dont want to be half way thru it when the kids gets cranky, and wants to leave. Try and figure out a good sales pitch that will land them in under 5 mins. If they dont have kids, then you have more time to sell them!

Have something huge that says HURRICANE GUARD, hell it's florida. that alone may make you $25.000 this year

Good luck with it

Well the home show went great!!! We got a ton of leads, even the guys that build the sunrooms came and were very impressed with the product. The biggest seller was having the heat lamp http://www.44tools.com/merchant2/merchant....gory_Code=meter to show customers how the film was actually performing. We had samples of the new prestige 40% and the lamp would show like 180 btu's transfering through the glass and when you put the prestige in front of the glass it would drop down to 7 and people's eyes were like . Definatley need to have many pictures to show, and people don't want to see anything that looks dark, they like to feel that they aren't loosing any light at all. We also kept the red lamp on alot of the time, it seemed to catch people's eyes as they were passing by and we would ask them if they would like a quick demonstration of how the film would perform. We also had the 3M bags which worked good, but we were not at the front entrance so countrywide beat us to most of the people who needed bags so being at the f. entrance would have helped some also. Mainly need to try to talk to everyone who passes by, the candy worked good, the tint job giveaway worked good also. I enjoyed it, i think we have a potential $30-$40k off of this one show alone. Have another one at the beach this weekend. On a bad note i may be breaking up with my girlfriend over this show because i missed her daughters b'day party yesterday and i've caught hell all last night and this morning over it . I do believe the home show has been the best means of advertising to date though....

glad to hear the show went well, as far as the girlfriend gotta make $$$ to have one

good to hear the show worked out for ya! too bad about the g/f...but there are lots of fish in the sea!

The g/f has been ridin my azz lately to spend more time with her. She has 2 kids that aren't mine and i basically work 7 days a week this time of the year, gotta make that money . Told her if she can't deal with how i am then we shouldn't be together.... There were many home builders at the show that said they may get us to tint windows in the home b4 they sell it and charge extra for it, same as with the sunroom guys. We definately got are name out to some important ppl. this past weekend . One guy has 1500sqft of glass facing the water he wants us to do and several other ppl said they had 3500 to 4000 sq ft homes full of glass they wanted estimates on so we're excited.

That's awesome, bro! I'm glad you did good, it always helps to have a busy show. I've only been to 2 slow ones and it absolutley blows to be slow
( a poet and didn't know it). Seriously though, congrats homie g. BTW, sorry to hear about the g/f, it sucks bad when they just don't seem to get it.

What was the avg attendance? There are three shows in my area.. kindof sorta. All are just weekend shows.. The largest claims to draw in 35k, the next is 11k, and the third is 4k.

i've set up for a home show but I didnt have to do the show...our film supplier pays for half the booth costs...that heat lamp display is great

The one we did was supposed to be between 3-5k people. I think it went well for no more than that. If it were 15k ppl i think we would have more work than we could stand.

mine is coming up this thurs-sun....

here are a few posters i made and just picked up for the display


glad to here your shows went good guys

i hope my show goes just as well.

Those look good bro.

Good luck TG

Welp, I did my first show. w00t!!

Unfortunately, my booth location wasn't the best... so I didn't have as much traffic as I thought I would.

There were two other tinters... The one shop seemed nice, but I later had a woman tell me that she was told by them that there wasn't any other window tinting company at the show. Needless to say after I heard that I didn't chat with them..

The other guy was like me - small shop. Just him and a helper. They do flat, cars, audio, etc. Very cool guy. He sent some people to my booth who live in my area, and I sent a couple people to him who were towards his area.

The whole thing was very interesting. I spoke with probably 20-25 people who seemed very interested.. got a couple est. and hopefully more people who will call to set something up. All it really takes is one... who then refers me to their neighbor and so forth down the line.

Lots of things I would do different in terms of my booth and whatnot. I'm glad I did this show cause if I do the one I'd like to do next year, I would not have been ready for it..... so this was a good "evaluation show."

Not 100% sure I'll do one again, but I'm leaning towards giving it another shot.


-R

Cool beans, bro!

Even if not much comes of it, it got me into the mood again.... which during the winter since I'm not very busy I tend to get down about work and the biz...

Now I just need some consistently warm weather.

feel you roach......I picked up a bunch of work the first week in march...March has always been our tuning point..if its good now it will be a productive year!
HOPEFULLY

Well we did our third show this weekend, had the biggest turnout of all 3 shows and got alot of good leads. This show we had our competition 4 booths down from us, he's a vista dealer. From what ppl were telling us he was talking total trash about us to everyone that came to his booth. Telling ppl we were not insured (false) and we didn't have a store front (true) and how his vista blows 3m away (definately false) and many other things that i don't need to go into. Anyhow right at the end of the show im talking to a customer and this guy sends one of his monkeys over to challenge our prestige against his vista . He's like here's my vista 70, get your prestige 70 and we'll see who's is best. We didn't have a 70 anymore only a 60 and he thinks we are scared to pull out a 70 so we said look dude go get your darkest vista and we'll use our 60 and blow you away, so he comes back with 40 and we put it on the heat lamp and it goes from 400 down to 120, we laugh and put our 60 down and it goes from 400 down to 20 . Dude swears up and down we are doing something to make the meter read low so we get his vista 40 and our nv35 and put them together and it still only reads like 24 and our prestige 60 reads 20. After that the monkey went back to his booth and we didn't hear another peep out of them . Sorry for all the jabboring, you guys probably don't care anyway.

That really burns me up... I don't see the need to bad mouth people... doesn't make sense.

I dunno... I think things like that will bite you in the butt. Maybe not all the time, but enough.

One person came up and said he was talking bad about us and he was like i know 3M and i know they make good products and him talking that way about you guys just turned me off from even thinking about letting him tint my house. Goes to show talking bad about your competitors can bit you in the arse, just makes yourself look bad...