It's Always Something

It’s Always Something …

It’s tough when you’ve been there at the beginning and now you are there at the end.

I’m spending most of this week at the National Auto Glass Conference in Orlando, Florida. A long time ago (20 years) in a different lifetime, I was involved in the creation of this event. I take a bit of pride in that. Twenty years ago, the auto glass industry was an active and vibrant one. Insurance company influence was limited to a phone call or two from the local agent. Networks were just beginning to pop up around the country. Groups such as AGRSS, IGA and NWRA had yet to form. No one knew what the Internet was.

This Conference has been held in many different cities and venues over the years, visiting Memphis, Tampa, Marco Island, Fl, Tuscon (four times), Phoenix and Minneapolis among others. It’s hosted a great variety of speakers from within and outside the industry. It didn’t have a trade show for the first decade, then it did, then it didn’t again for the last two years. At its height, the conference attracted more than 1,000 retailers.

But the best thing about the Auto Glass Conference has never been the seminars or the show; it’s always been the people you see there. Twenty years ago, it provided a way for the industry (which had always played second fiddle to the architectural glass industry) to converge around common issues at one location.

It’s always something.

Over the years, the conference has also been part of a number of watershed moments. The modern auto glass era was born at the 1991 Conference in Phoenix when network founder Joe Kellman admonished the group that they would have to “work a full day instead of half” to make a living. When he said that the industry had been ripping off insurance companies for years, you could hear an audible gasp and see a physical reaction in the room. I have always wondered if that speech was aimed more as an admonishment of the glass industry or a sales pitch to the insurance industry.

The event has also been square in the middle of tragedy as deaths by two attendees occurred—sadly, one of a heart attack and another a drowning. The conference has had to duck hurricane Isidore at Marco Island in 2002 and Ivan in Tampa in 2004. Two years ago, there was a bomb scare and, just today, a fire alarm emptied the hotel in the mid-afternoon.

It’s always something.

And, of course, the Auto Glass Conference had been scheduled for September 12-14, 2001 in Minneapolis—a conference that never happened in the wake of September 11 the day before. I’ll never forget that I was already in Minneapolis sitting in an AGRSS Council meeting when we got the first word of the plane crashes. I ended up driving all the way home to Virginia later than week.

Times change, industries change and economies tank. During last year’s conference, organizers announced that the 2009 Conference will be the last in its current form and so it will be. So I raise a glass to an end and a beginning.

It’s always something.