BTA 90th celebration and national conference - What's Happenin'

By Andy Slawetsky – BTA held a national conference in Kansas City, coupled with a celebration dinner honoring the association’s 90th birthday.

Event’s like this conference have become the norm and while many of you have been to these over the years, this one was just a bit more special.

Click here to see all my event photos!

The expo included all kinds of sponsors like GreatAmerica and others for leasing, Polek & Polek, Katun and Clover for aftermarket products, managed print companies like Print Audit and no shortage of hardware companies like Xerox, OKI Data, Muratec, Brother, Panasonic, Samsung, Lexmark and others.

There was a wide range of companies attending to present their products and services to imaging dealers; MWAi was showcasing their ERP solution for imaging dealers, Larry Coco had a table for his sales training program and a dozen more companies were spread throughout the room surrounding the stage such as ACDI with their PaperCut and PrinterOn solutions. Compass and DocuWare were there too. There was no shortage of vendors at this event.

I arrived in time to catch a good portion of a software panel hosted by industry guru Frank Cannata. Frank has been doing panels since I can remember and they’re always loaded with interesting and important people.

This panel was a nice mix of solutions companies such as Quentin Gribble of Umango and Mark Hart from ACDI. Gribble told listeners “keep solutions simple if you want reps to sell them.”

Hart followed up by saying “you’re going to see the best traction from down-the-street sales.” He went on to say that imaging dealers need to compensate sales reps if they want them to sell software and solutions.

Chris Glover of Ricoh spoke after, discussing Buyer 2.0 and how modern buyers operate. Selling today isn’t exactly the same as it was when I did it back in the day and Ricoh has a plan to help dealers sell to today’s clients more effectively.

That evening entertainment was a sponsored event held at the World War I museum. A great networking cocktail party held at a fascinating place, I ran into Matt and Aaron from Digitek, Eric from Ringdale, my old DSM Bill from HP and dozens of others.

Click here to see all my event photos!

Day two began with more sessions. Mid morning, Larry Levine and Darrel Amy of Dealer Marketing talked social media, LinkedIn, managed services, managed print and everything in-between. They took the opportunity to announce future LinkedIn Copier Training road shows, building on the successful ones they recently completed.

The day ended with a session from Harry Hecht but before that, Bob Palmer of IDC hosted a serious power panel made up of Konica Minolta President and CEO Rick Taylor, Samsung VP Matt Smith, Sharp President Doug Albregts and Xerox President Darren Cassidy.

The executives discussed their own companies, dealer strategy, where they thought the industry is going and how dealers can prepare. They fielded questions on MPS, peripheral industries and the importance of production print.

The session seemingly got almost contentious at one point with Albregts holding up his arms, jokingly separating Smith and Taylor.

And then there was the party. What an amazing celebration of 90 years service to independent office equipment dealers.

Founded in 1926, BTA started as a typewriter association. In 1955 the association began including other office equipment.

The late 90s saw the slow demise of BTA as vendors started hosting their own dealer shows. Enter Brent Hoskins, their director who joined BTA in 1986 and became executive director in 2006.

Brent made the association relevant again, creating new programs and gaining support from manufacturers that had walked away.

To his surprise, Brent was inducted into the BTA Legacy Award during the evening – a great moment during the dinner.

The banquet, co-sponsored by Konica Minolta and MWAi was hosted by BTA legal council Bob Goldberg. Bob may have been even funnier than the entertainment. The dinner was full of speeches and recognition.

Dealers won awards, vendors such as Clover Imaging, Muratec and Kyocera took home major awards and all of the previous BTA presidents were recognized. In fact, at one point we had 14 past presidents on the stage at one time.

The room was full of senior executives from nearly every manufacturer.

For those of you who got on the buses too soon, you missed Rick Taylor, Doug Albregts and Larry White (Toshiba) singing with the guitar player. See below.