Any exhibit or program manager worth her salt knows you need to have a playbook of Plan Bs at the ready to ensure your trade show endeavor continues moving forward. In this day and age, however, you also need to know when it's time to toss in the towel. So in addition to mitigation strategies, I've learned one also better have a pretty solid exit plan.

Do you remember the end of 2021? (Really, who can forget?) The trade show world was just beginning to reopen after almost two years of being almost entirely locked down. A new year brings fresh hope, and I was praying that CES in January 2022 would be the chance for HP Inc. to revive its in-person marketing program. I don't often say this, but I was looking forward to long days of meetings and presentations.

HP's setup is a little different than what people usually envision when they think about CES. Even though HP is a huge company, we don't have a massive footprint in one of the main exhibit halls full of glitzy LED walls screaming, "Look at us!" Heck, HP doesn't even list itself in the show directory because we're not interested in attracting a bunch of tire kickers. Rather, we book a number of meeting rooms in the Aria, where everything is accessible by invitation only, so we know exactly who we're meeting with before we even leave the office. That said, we also do buildouts at Aria to showcase future products for a few of our business units, so we still ship nearly 500 boxes of product to the event. However, because of our CES approach, a lot of our work gets done on the front end – we had prescheduled well over 200 meetings with customers and partners who would be coming to Las Vegas from all over the world. I had meticulously planned every detail, and a few weeks before the show all our freight had shipped out to Vegas to be ready for our team when boots hit the ground. We were in fantastic shape!

Then red flags began popping up. The Omicron variant was surging across the country, and soon our overseas clients began cancelling travel plans and appointments. Then domestic partners started doing the same, which prompted us to have serious discussions about whether or not we should attend the show. About three weeks before the event, HP's management, alongside some other hallmark exhibitors, made the tough decision to pull the plug. HP put the safety of its employees first, and I applaud that difficult choice.

I can't say that everything came to a screeching halt. For a CES operation as large as ours, calling it quits was more like trying get a fully loaded train to safely jump tracks on the fly. A lot of careful maneuvering would be necessary to pull this stunt off. Plus the company didn't want to miss out on all the meetings we'd planned, so we decided to pull together a postponed (and virtual) event in February.

Thankfully we'd been paying attention when COVID was doling out some hard lessons early in the pandemic, so we had an exit strategy prepped. Of course, having a plan on paper is one thing – putting it through a live-action stress test is something else entirely. And we knew it wasn't going to be without some pain. For instance, CES already had our money, and we weren't going to recoup those dollars once we let organizers know we weren't coming.

However, we'd learned to negotiate clauses into other contracts that would help us minimize losses elsewhere. So when I cancelled our room block at the Aria, we kept most of our money. Plus, HP wasn't on the hook for food and beverage or AV minimums (something we negotiated), so we cancelled those orders without any penalty. And once the alert went out, our travel agency was able to cancel everyone's flights. Finally, I let our exhibit house know that we wouldn't need their services for CES. Since our partner was based in Vegas, we didn't have any shipping charges we were responsible for.

That left two pretty massive tasks to manage: rescheduling appointments and redirecting all our freight. We were already set up to handle the rescheduling. HP has Customer Welcome Centers spread about the country in places such as Fort Collins, Palo Alto, Houston, etc. These were originally set up so that regional partners and prospects could swing by and check out our portfolio of offerings. COVID had prompted the company to also build out its virtual showrooms so sales reps at those locations could still connect with prospects during the shutdown. Those showrooms were about to prove their worth once again! We turned over the contact information for our 200-plus meetings to the welcome center teams, which handled the heavy lifting. They got to work rescheduling those get-togethers for February when we'd be able to deliver a digital experience in lieu of CES. (In the end, we rescheduled close to 70 percent of the postponed meetings. It may not have been as desirable as a face-to-face gathering, but considering the alternative of not meeting with them at all, it was an enormous win.)

The second task involved getting all the freight we'd shipped to the show moving toward its next destination. This required me to be on site, so I packed a bag and headed to Vegas. I am based in Colorado, so I decided to road trip the 14-hour drive since I could better control my environment and limit the number of people I encountered. Once there, I got to work.

HP again minimized losses – and I avoided additional headaches – because of our deliberate logistical planning. Instead of working through the show's general service contractor, we prestaged our gear with our shipping partner, Legacy TSI. Legacy has an advance warehouse, so 400-plus boxes and 25-plus pallets were all in one accessible location. Some of the equipment needed to be forwarded to multiple locations because it was required for upcoming events, while other crates had to be rerouted to various HP offices. It took me and some much-needed labor help from Nth Degree a couple days to sift through everything, but in a relatively short amount of time everything was relabeled and rescheduled. (It helps having trusted partners!)

Pulling out of CES was a tough call, even though it was the best decision we could have made at the time. But I was happy that we'd learned our COVID lesson early so that we were able to withdraw with minimal pain. It was a whirlwind for a couple of weeks, and I needed to recharge. So on the way back home, I decided to take a little personal wellness time – another lesson from the COVID crisis. Rather than drive straight back to Colorado, I looped through Utah to check out the views a couple of the state's most beautiful national parks were exhibiting.