For two years, you’ve had reminders for social distancing and felt the sense of panic after realizing you had forgotten your mask as you approached the local grocery store. You’ve created tasks for sanitizing the counters, the steering wheels of your customer’s cars, and a range of other cleaning duties as you go about your day. You may have even mastered the control of your handy-dandy “grabber stick” for passing repair orders and clipboards to your customers, all through a slot below the plexiglass shield you created as a sneeze guard. And let’s not forget the two pen cups; one for “sanitized pens” and one for “used pens.”
People have established clean policies inside their business and adhered to the dozens of posters and signs, all while whispering to themselves, “When can we get back to normal?” We worked on normal, last year, with a few seminars and Powertrain Expo, but many people weren’t quite there.
But now, everybody’s ready to get out. They’ve been so ready for normal that they’ve gone beyond normal! It’s like third graders headed to recess after their teacher, Mrs. Johnson finished up a two-hour discussion on world history. They are ready to run and jump and have a good time.
It’s where our industry is right now, beyond normal. We’ve seen it in our seminars this year and people we’ve talked to on the phone. They are excited. And that passion and excitement is with the ATRA team too.
We’re in the Expo planning stage right now, and I haven’t seen this kind of excitement in awhile. We’re a bit late on the planning but here’s why. We’ve heard from shop owners and technicians about what they’d like to see for this year. Like them, we weren’t happy with the performance of Bally’s for 2021 so we went back to the table and renegotiated this year’s contract (and the comments from the attendees help us with that). In the end, we moved our show to the new Ceasar’s Forum in Las Vegas. It’s a beautiful facility connected to the newly renovated Harrah’s Resort. We’ve booked more space, so it’ll meet our plan of running concurrent tech seminars, including a Spanish track!
We’ve sought out a few new speakers to add to the industry favorites and putting together a broader program that’ll not only appeal to rebuilders but also your chassis techs and diagnostitions so you can receive training for your whole crew.
The new dates are August 31st through September 4th. It runs right into Labor Day weekend and it’s a great close of the summer. We have a terrific room rate, but here’s a secret you need to know: We can never predict what the host hotel will do. If they have a lot of vacancy they’ll offer super low rates (last year they went down to $35 on some nights). We can’t control that but you can. Look for the best rate, no matter who it’s from; the hotel, a travel site, it makes no difference. ATRA gets credit for the room no matter what. And that credit offers our group the negotiating power to make better deals for our attendees and exhibitors. So, book at Harrah’s (see more information in the Expo First Look article).
It’s great to be back to normal but it’s even better to go Beyond Normal. On behalf of the ATRA team, we look forward to seeing you at the show.
