Today was the final day of the NHF annual conference & exhibition at the ICC in Birmingham. It was all rather spur of the moment but we decided to take an exhibition stand after being invited along by a client. We had no idea what to expect but did expect a reasonably busy exhibition hall for such a long running event. That couldn’t have been further from the truth. I believe that exhibitors are generally paying around Ā£3-4k for floor space and yet bizarrely there is simply no tie in between the conference and the exhibition. Delegates only come to the exhibition hall to eat and drink and very few of them are interested or even encouraged by the organisers to visit exhibitors stands. There is barely enough footfall to make exhibiting a worthwhile proposition for any business, which is a shame because when you attend these sorts of events, you attend on the basis that you see a return on your investment and I doubt very much that many exhibitors will see that. On the upside, we met some great people on the other stands and did enjoy the event at a social level but possibly that is the wrong reason for enjoying such events.