Before striving to get a bigger piece of the action, the general service contractor should step back and take a good look at the present situation. Are current customers being serviced to maximize their needs, or are they looked at solely for revenue extraction and often left behind as the GSC reaches upstream.

Instead of trying to be everything to everyone – a branding company, an ad agency, a direct marketing provider, a social media maven, we need to find new and innovative ways to serve our clients better and focus like a laser on executing on that vision. Service is about talking to your customers, learning and understanding what their needs are and then building a solution for them. It’s about building a community that creates a class of exhibitors or customers that want to expand, rather than repeat.

Now is the time to really listen and respond to what our customers want – transparent pricing models that won’t leave them frustrated about hidden fees, hassle-free ways to interact directly with providers to answer their questions and solve problems in real time. Or maybe pricing isn’t their pain point and they want something entirely different from their exhibiting or meeting experience…but it’s up to us to ask them and find out. Every single exchange and conversation with our exhibitors and customers is an important part of the event or show process. We as contractors should not work to simply meet our customer’s expectations, but we should aspire to surpass them by providing fresh ideas that will maximize the return on their show investment.

We as GSCs need to reevaluate how tradeshows and corporate events are done at the ground level. We can save our customers a lot of money and headaches by perfecting the basics before trying to sell them higher level strategy or packaging options.