I did it! I survived my fourth NATE UNITE tradeshow. As usual, it was a loooong week, but it was a good week too.
This year brought us to Las Vegas, Nevada. I’ve only been to Las Vegas once before and it was just a weekend trip. This week gave me the opportunity to explore a little more. It was fun, but Vegas also gets a little crazy. I’ve had my fill for a while. 🙂
It was a full week of meetings, educational sessions, luncheons and of course, our annual golf tournament. Each day was go, go, go and I’m definitely exhausted. But it was great to see everyone in person again and see all our hard work come to fruition.
We’ve had a lot of staffing changes over the last year, and I’ve picked up a few extra job duties as a result. I’ve started working more directly with the events team and the Tradeshow committee, so that was one of the meetings I attended this year.
Every year, the Tradeshow committee always takes a super fun photo and I’ve always thought how fun it would be to be a part of this group. I’m glad I could be a part of it this year! They are definitely the people you want planning your event.
And of course, we have our only in-person Wireless Industry Network (WIN) meeting at the NATE UNITE show each year as well. This group has about 60 people in it total, coming from all over the country – and some are even from other countries. I totally understand it’s difficult for all of them to make the trip each year, but I’m always happy to see as many of them as I can.
One thing we did differently this year, was we held a PAC (Political Action Committee) fundraiser on Monday night of the show. We started the NATE Tower PAC about a year ago, so we are just starting to see the effects take place. We had a fantastic turn out at the event and raised quite a bit of money. I can’t wait to see where it takes us this year and what we can do for the industry.
On Tuesday, we had the Women of NATE 5K and I once again won overall female – so I of course need to brag about it a little bit! 😉 It was a TOUGH course. It was along the strip in Las Vegas and it was an out and back. We had to go up and down 3 or 4 sets of stairs on the way out and then did it again on the way back. My calves were killing me the rest of the week.
I know a lot more people now that I’ve been doing this for a few years, so for the rest of the week, I was having people come up to me and tell me they saw I won again and that I was “super speedy” – not going to lie, it was pretty fun to get a lot of kudos! It made my week.
We finished the show with our annual Golf Tournament to raise money for the Tower Family Foundation. If you remember, last year we had to cancel the golf tournament due to a snowstorm, so I’m really glad we were able to have it this year. And we got lucky – it was 80 degrees and beautiful. It was a wonderful, crazy day, but it was totally worth it. We raised over $144,000 for the Tower Family Foundation and I’m so thankful to have such a wonderful committee to help make it possible.
Now that the show is over, I feel like I can take a breath and relax for a little bit. It’s a lot of work leading up to the show, and it’s great to have another successful event behind us. I’ll take a three-day weekend to recover and catch up on my sleep, and I’ll be ready to start all over again on Tuesday – I can’t wait!
Until next time! 🙂
Megan Nelson