It was quite an experience
I learned a lot!
Thoroughly enjoyable - some hilarious moments (more about that later). The family were acting as rota volunteers so it was a terrific opportunity for them to see what I do in that office from early am to midnight most days
and to see the interest in my work from customers.
You are quite right Barry, the weather in N Ireland was not in our favour at times, but it was an excellent PR opportunity.
Friday was good up until about 3pm.
The skies opened - the visitors went home en masse.
Saturday was beautiful. The show was packed with people and it was a very busy day.
Sunday started off dry and fairly warm. Potential visitors had obviously seen the weather forecast and numbers were nothing like Saturday.
On cue, the rains came on quite heavy mid afternoon and numbers dwindled. In the last hour of the show I walked around and spoke to most of the exhibitors.
We had to dismantle our stand, gazebo etc in pouring rain.
Having seen how much effort I made to prepare the relatively tiny number (and size) of our plants for our booth, I have to say that those people work extremely hard and deserve every penny they can make from their sales. In many cases they said they did it because of their love for plants.
Give them your support next time you visit a show
One lady exhibitor I spoke to was absolutely drenched yet so upbeat. She is very interested in Ideas Genie Pro and its labelling features and we are doing a demo in drier conditions at time to be arranged.
I made a number of very good contacts and have been invited to speak and demo at a number of gardening clubs.
Also to do a demo at Antrim Castle (where the event was held) to a group who care for the gardens. The guy who I gave the demo to was overjoyed to find the label printing solution offered by Ideas Genie, and the labels we had produced (using our software) for the plants we had on sale at the stand.
Over the past 10 weeks I had been taking divisions of plants to sell there. The idea was to show the visitors how the plants would look when fully grown, in a garden (mine of course) using Ideas Genie.
We had two laptops, one for running a slide show of the plants on display, and one in the quieter area at the back of the booth for me to do demos.
Our first sale was a "double sale" - Ideas Genie Pro and Bank Genie Pro
The next sale was Bank Genie Pro
I was singing your praises Barry, for the time you spent as consultant and for the many features you requested to be included in Bank Genie, and your many hours of testing.
As a result, it was nice to be able to offer such contrasting software items to people who obviously came there to buy plants.
Now I'd better get on with tidying up the aftermath
