Certification
FOCUS ON FORUM: Two Exhibit Companies Join Forces The two companies’ profiles look very similar on paper – they both design and build custom exhibits for the trade show industry. They both provide trade show management. They both do the construction, warehousing, large format printing and creation of exhibits, they both store customer exhibits and they’re both WBENC-Certified. On paper they may look like competitors, but Marlene Kelly from Exhibits South and Bev Gray from Exhibit Edge found a way to Join Forces this past June for the National Conference & Business Fair.
The two met for the first time in 2009 at the Summit and Salute where Kelly was recognized as a Star for the Greater Women’s Business Council. Gray watched her video along with the other award winners and wanted to meet her. “I caught her by the bar and I asked her ‘How do you become a star?’”
Kelly told her to just get involved at the local level, work a lot at the local level and that she would be recognized. Gray followed those words of wisdom and in 2013 she was recognized as the Star for Women Presidents’ Educational Organization - DC. They later started to connect through the Forum, Kelly joining in 2006 and Gray in 2013. They would say hello to each other in passing and eventually ended up serving on the same committee. At first they were worried about having such directly competing companies on the same committee, but as Kelly notes, “We realized that it’s a big old world out there, and we’re just two little pieces of it.”
The more they talked about it the more they realized they were not actually competitors. Marlene Kelly President and CEO Exhibits South
“A lot of people like to do business with who is closest because in the trade show industry people want to touch, and feel, and look, and review [the exhibits]” explains Kelly, “you’ve always got to look at the big picture of this and I think that is what Bev and I have been able to do.”
Knowing that Exhibits South’s clientele, were mainly larger corporations with headquarters in Atlanta, and Exhibit Edge’s clientele, were mainly federal government contractors, they realized they were not competing against each other and they started looking for possible ways they could work together. As the WBENC Conference approached an opportunity emerged. Since Exhibit Edge is based in the DC region, Gray maintains Union contracts because many of the convention centers and hotels in her region are unionized.