Huge thank you to everyone that came out last night and made our event last night our best attended and best event downtown ever!
Not that it wasn’t without a hiccup here and there, and now that we’ve survived the chaos, let’s do a little recap…
As you know, we’ve had this booked for months now.
Unfortunately, when we did our usual pre-event check in…it appears that there were some staffing changes made at DBC and nobody had any record of our event being booked taking over the second floor.
So, they scrambled to work with us, and agreed to let us take over the third floor. Which actually worked out pretty well, I think. Sure, “heat rises” and so it got a little warm up there, but it was nice to have the view outside and all things being considered, it was a pretty solid space. Definitely wish we would’ve had a full beer selection available…but, again, in the grand scheme of things that’s a relatively minor annoyance and everyone seemed happy with the drink selections available.
Which again, more than anything else, speaks to us about you. We’ve pulled together a really great group of people. Smart. Flexible. Willing to go along with things and have a little faith in us.
Couldn’t ask for anything more than that.
Well, we could, but we’d be pushing our luck.
And we had the whole gamut of people in the industry last night: people looking for gigs, a good number of recruiters, folks who are starting their own company, peeps from some of the start ups in the downtown area, and people just looking to make some connections. Had some great conversations with each of those demographic slices, and I was genuinely surprised at how over the top some of them were in thanking us for doing our events in general, and mostly for coming downtown. Nice feeling.
Again…can’t really ask for anything more than that.
We bounce our events around to get different demographics and new blood in the mix, and that definitely held true last night. While there were maybe a dozen or so “familiar” faces from our other events, the vast majority of the crowd was making their first appearance at one of our events, or perhaps coming to an event after not having been to one for a while. So we had a lot of “welcome!” and “welcome back!” moments last night.
Which always led to the question: “Why don’t you guys do moreevents downtown?”
Well, it’s a pretty straight-forward answer: “Historically, every time we do an event downtown, they are always our worst-attended events of the year, and it’s hard to justify the effort”.
But we havekept trying…and it looks like the tide might finally be turning and it’s worth it for us to try and do downtown events more often. Instead of the usual 10 or 20 people that show up when we’ve done events in the past downtown, we had 70 to 80 funnel through last night over the course of the evening. That probably even got cut short a bit due to the way the room got booked and us needing to clear out at 8pm instead of our usual 9pm or later…but, again, “minor annoyance”. Most of the party just moved downstairs and kept going…but that “break” effectively ended the night. I ran into a few people down in the bar area later on in the evening who had showed up looking for us, but were told the event was over…oh well.
The moral of the story here though is that we’re going to do more events downtown in 2013. We’re already booked out through the end of this year, and we’ve already started plans for 2013…this just modifies them a bit. We’re looking at doing two Pink Slip Party events…and maybe we’ll even take a look at doing one of those downtown. We’ll see how things shake out and shape up as we start talking with venues…but definitely expect to see more events downtown next year.
Guess that means we’ll see a little less of Suburbanite Kryptonite – http://www.ITinTheD.com/1263/dont-be-that-guy-suburban-kryptonite/ – next year…but is that really a bad thing? I don’t think so. They’ll either get over it or they won’t. Just like our events in general can only provide the platform and opportunity for networking and it’s still on you to actually show up and do it, we can only move our events around to venues and cities where it seems to make sense for us to be…but then it’s on you as to whether or not you’re showing up.
In the meantime, we look forward to seeing you at our upcoming events – http://www.ITinTheD.com/meet/ – through the rest of the year in Royal Oak, Warren and Rochester Hills.
That’s about all for this time. Thanks again to everyone that made it out last night…we really appreciate it and hope you enjoyed yourselves as much as we did!