Back in August, we featured the National Association of Landscape Professionals’ (NALP) Elevate conference on our cover. In this space, I wondered aloud if Elevate’s year two would be as good as year one. I compared it to music or movies — the sophomore effort is rarely as good as the first album or film.
Now we’re back from Elevate and I can report that, yes, Elevate year two was just as good, if not better, than the inaugural conference. Editor Christina Herrick and I have a complete report on the event and the post-conference tour. We also have several videos of booth tours to view here. But beyond those “official” stories I thought I’d write here in this space a little bit about what a show like Elevate does for me on a more personal level.
It was a great show for many reasons, but I have to thank all the folks who had kind words for our magazine at the show. That really gets me motivated. And I’ll say this about the people who attend Elevate: it seems like they’re avid readers of our publication, and that is just awesome for this editor-in-chief’s ego.
In that August column, I asked readers to be sure and say hello if they saw us. A quick story related to that: My friend, who is also the magazine’s CEO, Kevin Stoltman, attended the show and was browsing the aisles while wearing an LM golf shirt. A reader spotted the logo and stopped this stranger to ask if he worked for the magazine. What he doesn’t know is this stranger actually owns the magazine. He then proceeded to tell Stoltman how grateful he was for the publication and what it has meant to him and his business over the years.
Whoever you are, thank you — it never hurts when the boss gets positive feedback from an unbiased source, and what a great story to be told over a nice dinner in Dallas.
There were many feel-good moments like that … being invited to jump in an Uber last second by my friends at Aspire … grabbing dinners with pals from Turfco, John Deere and Greene County Fertilizer … ending a long day with a cold beer in the Quali-Pro booth … sharing a laugh at Gilley’s with our friends from Sun Valley Landscaping … toasting the end of the show in the resort sports bar with our friends from NALP … and so much more.
Now it’s time for Equip Expo!
That show is now in the rearview and we’re moving full steam ahead in our preparations for Equip Exposition this month. We’ll all be in person again, about 25,000 of us, in Louisville, Ky.
It’s important to make the most out of your time at such a big show — the Greatest Show on Turf, as we dubbed it on the cover — so we did our best to share with you 40-plus “showstopper” products you’ll want to consider demoing at Equip. We’ve also shared our entire slate of educational sessions we’ll host at the event. Lastly, in regards to Equip, we share all the companies who will unveil new products in Equip’s New Product Showcase section.
If you are not attending Equip, we’ll do our best in the following months to share what we saw and learned at the show. And if you are at the show, I’ll again invite you to stop by the booth and say hello. We have many of our columnists conducting office hours at our booth, including Marty Grunder and Jeffrey Scott (Jeff is signing and giving away 50 free copies of his book Destination Company at the LM booth — check our social media to see the day/time.)
And if you don’t make it by the booth but see our logo passing by on a golf shirt, please say hello. The only thing better than having a stranger rave about our magazine to the CEO is if you’re there with all of us Thursday night at the KFC Yum! Center, singing along to the dark, dark lyrics of Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life.”
Doo doo doo, doo doo-doo doo…