SMB Summit Postponed, but Why?

You’ve probably heard the news that the conference has been postponed from elsewhere by now and rather than yet another post announcing the postponement, I was hoping to have some news to post on the postponement as to when the postponed conference would be rescheduled. But alas nothing yet.

It’s disappointing, for sure. We worked hard to gather up the best topics and speakers for the technical track that the conference has ever seen. But it is understandable. SMBTN, the organizer of the event, has to put out $250,000 before a single attendee shows up at the door. That’s a lot of risk for a group of volunteers. So when the attendance doesn’t look strong, events get cancelled. 

Why wasn’t attendance strong? That’s the real question here. Is it the economy? Well, that’s a good excuse but business owners need to continue to invest in their business even (or maybe especially) when it’s down. Or maybe it’s because there were so many events scheduled around the same time.

[Note: The following is Amy’s personal opinion.]

Where did these other events come from? Seismic, ConnectWise, AutoTask, TechData, and don’t forget the ever prolific Everything Channel, MS TechEd, MS WWPC…they are all having conferences. I know I’ve not named them all either. What’s different about these, is that they aren’t community led. They are vendor events. Not that they aren’t valuable but in our market space we have been blessed to have community led events like: SMB Nation, SMB Summit, MSPSN and HTG. IT Pros in the enterprise don’t have community events, they only have vendor led events. When you have the choice to attend a vendor event or a community event the choice should be clear. Choose community and the community gets stronger. A strong community means you as an IT Pro in this market space have a stronger peer group from which to pull. It’s all win-win. But if we don’t support community driven events, they will go away and vendors will win. I don’t want to work where my only source of information comes from vendors; I want to be better than that. So please support community events.