The Conference Coach™

In 2001, I owned another conferencing company, InterAct Conferencing which was headquartered in Atlanta.  My partner, Marlene Waehner and I decided to go to a ladies event at her church on a Tuesday.  Being respectful church people, we turned off our cell phones.  However, a whole lot of people left theirs on and those damned phones kept ringing.  The pastor got up and announced that the World Trade Center had been attacked.  We turned on our phones and bolted out of there.

Believe it or not, even in Atlanta, we had a lot of connections to New York that day.  Marlene’s daughter Heather had her long-time boyfriend on his second day in his first job at Morgan Stanley report into work on the 65th floor of one of the towers.  We couldn’t reach him as we saw the tower fall.  Our key vendor, Raindance had all their executives in New York AND Washington, DC.  It was unbelievable.

Heather’s boyfriend made it out just in time and the Raindance people made it back to Denver intact.  9/11 changed the way our company saw the relevance of our conferencing business and the conferencing industry forever.  People who had never conferenced, called up and asked for accounts.  They stayed home.  They found new ways to engage with each other without jumping on an airplane.

Why did this come to the front of my mind?  No matter what the catalyst is that keeps us at home, we’ve got to think about how to do business without jumping on an airplane.  I already said I was going to travel less.  I really mean it.  I’m really good at meeting over a conference call and I’m going to make sure other people get way better at it.

When I look people up on Twitter, I’ll see them talk about how much they HATE being on a conference call.  Come on people, it’s not that hard and we all need to get way better at doing it.

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