Satisfied Customers equal Successful Businesses

Monday 13^th  of July 2015

Excursion McCormick Place by Jost Hagedorn

Satisfied Customers equal Successful Businesses

Jessica Ken & me

After our Finance Course I was really looking forward to some activities and a day out. Our professor Valerie Beck joined the whole group and Rob and we took the bus to McCormick Place, which is the largest convention centre in North America. Arriving at the west building of the centre we were welcomed by Jessica William and Kenneth Schmidt. Jessica is the Infrastructure Service Manager and Ken the Technology Service Director of the convention centre.

They told us about their daily business and gave us a thorough insight into their working life. The costumers of the McCormick Place are national and international show managers and exhibitors with different requirements due to their exhibition spaces or conferences.

It was really interesting how important the Internet and Wi-Fi connection are for the customers. Thus, Jessica and Ken declared that the biggest challenges for their business are in fact IT operations. Other challenges mentioned are the education and expectation of customers that they have to manage. In some cases the customers cannot retrace the fees so they have to explain why fees increased in comparison to the year before.

We all agreed that the key to success is a satisfied customer. In addition to kindness, also knowing the needs of your costumers and solving problems quickly is very important to Jessica and Ken.

The McCormick Place can provide free Wi-Fi for every individual (max. 49,000 clients) in the building with standard Internet speed and special offers to paying clients with a higher speed (up to 24 Gig) depending on the customer’s needs. The biggest business fear of Jessica and Ken is that the Internet or Wi-Fi will go down at some point. But fear is a great motivator so hopefully this will never occur.

The four different buildings (north/east/south/west) are fitted with 870 access points and 250 switches. Ken explained that it is not easy to handle the huge amount of hardware, which is caused by technical innovation. They have to change the devices every couple of years. This increases the expenditures of the IT Department but it is necessary for them to stay in business. It is even a great logistical challenge for the employees. 

the construction sites

To enlarge the McCormick Place and the business, they started to build two new buildings. They will finish a 12,000-room hotel and a 10,000-seat arena in 2017. In the arena, the local women’s baseball team will play their home matches. So they can provide a better infrastructure to their customers.

During our tour it was very impressive to walk through McCormick Place, even if many of us know the big convention centres in Frankfurt and Hanover already, it is noteworthy how the McCormick Place handles the balance between being a classical convention centre and a modern work place for its 300 permanent employees and visitors. There is a roof garden on top of the building and a terrace with a breathtaking view over Lake Michigan. Satisfied employees are very important for McCormick Place.

Rooftop Garden

In conclusion, our excursion at McCormick Place gave us a good overview, as to how difficult it can be to manage the different needs of customers and how important it is to solve these problems to stay successful in this business. Overall, it was a nice experience that could even help us during our studies and the business plan for our start-ups.

Thanks to Jessica and Ken for having us.

Find sense in what you are doing

By Marvin Engel

Welcome to my blogpost for the excursion 

to Chicago's McCormick Place.

The big convention center in Chicago. 

The panoramic view from the rooftop.

You can visit here: 

HOMEPAGE OF MCCORMICKS PLACE

I thought somebody will write about the day agenda so I decided to write about the sense of this day-excursion. The question for me was: Why a master class in enterpreneurship and new business should go to a convention center? In germany we have some of the biggest conventions in the world like Frankfurter Buchmesse, the CeBit in Hannover, the Internationale Automobil Ausstellung (IAA) in Frankfurt, the Games Convention in Cologne and some more. At the beginning of the day I answered the question with "This make definitely no sense for me". This all sounded and looked like filling a day with stuff we don't need for our future life. Even the blogpost after this day made no sense for me. I am a child of Internet 2.0. I know why and how blogging works, also as a part of communication (in a company or private). 

BUT: After the day I can say "the excursion made definitely sense". Every reader is burning for the "why the change of mind?". 

First, what is a convention center? For an enterpreneur is it a place where he (or she) one day will have a place. A place where - one day - the networking (which everybody says is most important) takes place. A place where the work is presented and judged face-to-face. As an internet company you see your customers maybe only there face-to-face and maybe this is the only chance to learn from interactions with them in the real world. 

Secondly, I did not expect such a rabbit burrow. You walk from hall to hall and its getting bigger and wider all the time. The center is big from the outside, sure. But, it was a kind of surprising to see it from the inside. That can also be a metaphor for your new business model. First there is the idea, the outside, just the building. But when you go inside you will find surprising things and, if you are not watching out, you will get lost in the rabbit burrow. You must stay focussed or you need a guide, that can be for example a mentor for an enterpreneur. You will need a person who understands leadership not as a way to be the boss but as a person who defines the mission, every day of work. Somebody who pushes the Team forward with respect. 

Thirdly we talked with people who work there. To be honest, the topic of WiFi in a convention center was not new for me and that you need servers and many routers for such a big areal is for sure. We all know the difference between mega and gigabyte. Also terabyte is nothing new for us, it is our daily life. But much more interesting was the talking about the daily work-life at McCormick. That leads me to the conclusion, that no matter what kind of job you have or what work you are doing, if you are happy with it you can tell a story. That brings me to the last similar point to an enterpreneur. You definitely will need a story. Everytime. Everywhere. Without a story your ideas are empty shells, a concert-hall without music, a convention center without events. So most important for your business is a team behind your idea that respect each other. When Ken talked about Jessica and Jessica about Ken, they had respect and a connection as friends. Without this connection they could not be as successful as they are. Thank you for sharing this important thoughts and feelings with us. 



Now something for the eye. Find my photos attached. Thanks to everyone who made this possible. 

These are the nice employees, Ken & Jessica (at the left is Valerie) Thank you for sharing. 

The view from the rooftop - with garden on the roof. 

Want to have an event with sea-view? Chicago is your place. 

Elton John was already here.  What a nice theatre. Only New York Music Hall can compete with Chicago. 

Nice place to work, isnt it? Transformers where filmed here. 

High Five! 
Marvin (follow me on Twitter @mr_m_angel)