Working the Show

Hunting expos and shows have always been popular with hunters and I am no exception. I have been going to gun shows and outdoor expos since I was old enough to know what they were. The night before one of these shows was almost like waiting on Christmas morning. I would be unable to sleep and kept visions of hunting stuff dancing around my head. As I got older, my love for these events just kept growing stronger. There is nothing like walking in the doors of a show and seeing those booths, exhibits and displays just waiting for you to plunder through. You struggle with where to start and just know you will never have time to see everything.

That has changed now. My love for the shows is still there and I still catch myself acting like a 5 year old on Christmas morning but because of my position at TalkHunting, there is now a job involved with these shows and that takes a little of the fun out of it. Don’t get me wrong, I still love to go but when you lose the freedom of just running around like an excited kid, just going wherever a whim takes you, it loses a little of the luster.

The first booth I ever manned at one of these shows was at the BuckMasters Expo in 2008. TalkHunting had a booth there and with a few TalkHunting volunteers, we worked that booth for the 3 days of the show. I was so excited to be behind the scenes of an event I loved going to that I could hardly contain myself. By day three, I was so exhausted I could hardly stand… That’s when I started seeing that there was a huge difference between going to a show and working a show.

A little time has passed since then and I have learned how to better work these shows and to pace myself but it is still hard work. On the outside, I looked at these guys as living the dream. They got to work in these shows and do what they love to do, talk about hunting and work in the hunting industry. Now that I am one of the ones that have made it, in a small way, to the inside, I see what a tremendous amount of work is involved, and if you’re not careful, it can turn into just another job. It can be easy to lose that kid like excitement if you are not very careful.

When Denny, our Pro Staff Director, and myself attended the Deer Expo in Birmingham, Alabama this past weekend, we worked the show. We did not have a booth at this event but we sure had a plan and an agenda. We concentrated on speaking with a lot of vendors and did what we could to advance the name of TalkHunting up another notch. We looked for potential sponsors, partners and others we could help or be helped by. We also gathered materials for future blogs, articles and product reviews for the magazine, We made new contacts and strengthened old ones. Working a show like this is hard work and while that does take some of the fun out of it, we still allowed time for ourselves to visit booths just because we wanted to see what they had. In other words, even though we were there on business, we took some time to play. And of course there are a few perks, like getting meet Chris Brackett...

The show was great, we met some great people and made some good contacts to further our cause. We will be putting a full article together about the show in general in a future issue of the magazine as well as some product reviews but I just wanted to give you, the reader, a little inside view of what it is like working a show. It is a lot harder than what I had always thought it would be but it can still be fun if you plan it that way.

So next time you attend one of these shows, take a closer look at the people working there and realize they are working, not just playing. And if they are just a little hurried, rude or busy, just remember their job is a hard one with all of the same stresses, worries and pressures of your job.