And that's Maryland style crab cakes - just one of the thousands of details and special requests that go into a successful veterinarians' meeting at the Tampa Convention Center.
By BENITA D. NEWTON
Published April 4, 2004
[Times photos: Ken Helle]
Linda McAbee uses cat makeup to draw attention to Pfizer's hear worm preventative medicine for cats at March's American Animal Hospital Association convention in the Tampa Convention Center.
Dr. Kristi DeLeon, left, from Fairbanks, Alaska, holds her 18-month-old daughter, Kaleigh, so she can look at Rosie, a Boston terrier, at the SmartPractice booth.
TAMPA - Hundreds of veterinarians, vet techs and office staffers wandered through exhibits at the Tampa Convention Center, picking up samples of pet medicines and posing for pictures with Clifford the Big Red Dog.
Doubtless few of them knew about the forklifts that had rumbled through the huge exhibit hall days earlier, loaded down with hundreds of rolled carpets, crates, and furniture, each labeled with a three-digit number that told contractors exactly where to plop it down.
People attending the annual meeting of the American Animal Hospital Association last month sat down to meals unaware that an hour beforehand half a dozen stewards stood around a conveyor belt, arranging chicken, rice, carrots and garnish on warm plates. And the conventiongoers crossed the finish line at a Fun Run unaware that the day before there was a dash to the mall to buy prizes for the winners.
That's exactly how the hundreds of people who worked behind the scenes to pull off the convention wanted it.
About 2,100 of AAHA's nearly 30,000 members came from across the country to Tampa for the meeting, which ran March 20-24. They are among 41 groups the Tampa Bay Convention & Visitors Bureau has booked for the convention center this year, most of them AAHA's size or larger.
The group was only in town for five days, but thousands of hours of work over the course of nearly four years went into making their visit to Tampa a memorable one.
In interviews with the St. Petersburg Times over the last five months, those involved in putting together the vets' convention shared their accounts of all that goes into bringing such an event to Tampa.
"There's no whiteout that you can use," said Chuck Potter, annual meeting planner for AAHA, which represents vets and their staffs from its Denver office. "You only get one chance to do this right, so the tension is definitely there. It can get very . . . interesting."
Dec. 2000
Tampa veterinarian Link Welborn, vice president of AAHA, wants the organization to give his hometown a shot for a future annual meeting.
But Potter, the meeting planner, isn't impressed. The convention center looks too small. He says as much in a message when he first called Joe Planz, national sales manager for the Tampa Bay Convention & Visitors Bureau.
Phoning during a layover at the Atlanta airport, Planz assures Potter there will be room enough for the vets after a $5.9-million expansion of the convention center. He walks Potter through an online tour, asking him to visualize new walls and rooms.
May 2001
The gutted conference center is all exposed drywall and girders when Potter comes to visit, but he gets a feel for the expansion that will double the number of "breakout" rooms for convention seminars and meetings from 18 to 36.
The Tampa convention marketers make their pitch in earnest. It works. Potter likes the sunshine and the picture window views of the water. But the winning card played is that AAHA will be the only group downtown during the conference.
"Other cities can handle three or four groups our size," Potter said. "Here, we're not competing for hotel rooms and restaurant labor with a group that may be bigger than us or have more influence. We're the big dogs."
Summer 2001
Weighing proposals from two cities, the AAHA board chooses Tampa for its 2004 conference and Baltimore for 2005. After a flurry of conference calls, e-mails and visits, the contracts for the Tampa convention center and local hotels are signed.
Eighteen months to go
Over three days members of AAHA's annual meeting committee hammer out what they want to see on the agenda for the Tampa convention. They critique the previous year's conference (perhaps it was a bit too heavy on cat talk, too thin on gastrointestinal topics.) They whittle 200 topic proposals solicited from national speakers to about 50, then come up with speakers on 50 more topics they consider timely.
They also consider topics appropriate for a convention in Tampa that will draw a large contingent of Florida vets.
"We did a lot of reptiles and exotics," said Jeanette Moore, AAHA learning and development assistant.
Twelve months to go
At the 2003 AAHA convention in Phoenix, Welborn, who has become president of the group, makes a pitch for the next meeting in Tampa.
"I was able to extend a personal invitation to visit my hometown," said Welborn, a vet with the Animal & Bird Hospital and the Cat Doctors, both in Tampa. "It was a neat marketing opportunity for me."
Jane Han, services manager for the Tampa visitors bureau, goes to Phoenix, too. She passes out chocolates with wrappers bearing an image of Tampa Bay and talks up area attractions in the hope that conventioneers will lengthen their stay.
She also picks up useful tidbits about the conventiongoers. She notes that they are early risers and diligent attendees who stay at the convention center all day long. She informs the convention hotels in Tampa that they will need to be prepared for early morning room service requests but won't have to stagger housekeeping shifts because most attendees will stay at the convention center.
Ten months to go
Potter, the AAHA planner, flies down from Denver to iron out menus with Cynthia Williams, director of catering sales for Aramark, which provides food at the convention center. Low-fat and low-carb options are already on Aramark menus, but Potter wants to pay special attention to lighter fare because of his group's makeup: The majority of vet school graduates are now female.
"The whole industry is changing," Potter said. "They've told us they don't want to eat meat and potatoes all the time. They want something a little lighter."
Six months to go
AAHA chooses its convention sponsors, who will compete to come up with creative tie-ins.
Pfizer will send crates of bottled water labeled with ads for its tick and flea medication. Room keys at the Hyatt Regency Tampa will be imprinted with "Feline m/d," a cat food from Hill's Pet Nutrition. The dog sitting in the passenger seat (properly buckled, of course) of an 18-wheeler that houses a traveling exhibit will wear a bandanna emblazoned with the logo for Heartgard Plus.
Potter flies down to Tampa again and attends to thousands of details. He takes digital photos of important convention staff to keep all the names and faces straight.
He and convention services manager Janna Stephens are already on version six of the daily schedule, part of the 30-page event document listing who, what, when and where for each activity the group has planned. There will be at least four more versions, complete with 50 pages of floor plans, by conference time.
Stephens must be sure all of that information is communicated to the staff. Parking attendants need to know when to expect VIPs looking for spots. The housekeepers have to know when they can vacuum. The building crew needs to know when to switch between the night, show and day lighting.
Even the layout of rooms is important. Potter makes sure members heading to the breakfast buffet each morning walk by the Hot! Hot! Hot! area, a technologically slick setup designed to educate members on industry trends.
AAHA's reserved rooms at the downtown Marriott, Hyatt and Wyndham Harbour Island hotels are 52 percent sold out, which is promising. Instead of staying in the hotels the group has contracted for, convention attendees these days often book cheaper rates elsewhere over the Web. If the group cannot fill the room block by Feb. 16, the hotels will put those rooms back on the market. The group must pay a percentage of the profits lost on any rooms that are not sold by conference time.
Forty-five days to go
Food and beverage contracts are signed, and the "banquet event order" is put together. It details times and locations for each meal, replenishment orders (the breakfast buffet should be kept full at all times, but Potter must approve before the staff adds to other meals), even which sponsor's logos will appear on specialty napkins.
Thirty days to go
Potter uses last year's numbers and this year's schedule to determine the heaviest arrival times so hotels can have more staff at their front desks. The 1,629 rooms reserved at the downtown hotels have sold out, so the group and its travel contractor, Par Avion, must find rooms for late registrants.
A crisis management plan is drawn up, setting out how to handle worst-case scenarios - a tornado or hurricane, a terrorist attack or an airport shutdown.
Convention center chef Eric Higgins gets preliminary meal counts so he can begin ordering food and tweaking menus. For the closing celebration, Potter wants the crab cakes to be Maryland style, so Higgins must mesh his version with a recipe Potter gives him.
Potter's function book, now more than 300 pages, must be completed and sent to the appropriate parties in Tampa. The fat file includes attendance numbers, schedules, diagrams of the setup of each room in the center and how those arrangements must change with the next event.
Two weeks to go
The AAHA staff prepares 23,000 pounds of freight to be shipped from Colorado to Tampa: AAHA Press books to be sold, registration materials, giveaway goodies and more. All must be inventoried, shrinkwrapped, packed and labeled.
One week to go
Lengthy spreadsheets with the guaranteed attendance for each meal are sent to Aramark. Chef Higgins adds five percent to most of the figures to be sure there's enough.
Three days to go
It's almost kickoff time. The meeting committee arrives in Tampa for a series of preconvention meetings with the convention center staff, the hotels, suppliers, and outside contractors.
One day to go
At 8 a.m., the west exhibit hall is a maze of cords, sound equipment, and light rigging. Crews from AVHQ, the Dallas audiovisual contractors, set up giant screens for the general assemblies, hook up projectors in the breakout rooms and install computers at the registration desk, in the bookstore and in the cyber cafe, where attendees can check their e-mail.
Downstairs in the kitchen, pastries are laid out on serving trays and chopped fruit is arranged in carved melon bowls for the next day's opening breakfast that will serve more than 1,000 guests.
The stewards have nearly 200 tables to set for tomorrow's breakfast, and they're ready to get started. But the building crew hasn't had time to bring the tables so they won't be set until 5 p.m.
Sat., Mar. 20, opening day
By 5 a.m., the planners, banquet staff and part of the AAHA staff have arrived at the center. The air conditioning won't go on until an hour before the event, so there are sweaty brows as the crew sets out juice and pastries, fills water glasses and lights chafers underneath serving trays.
By 7 a.m. at least 70 percent of the food is cooked and ready to be wheeled out in hotboxes to the back of the banquet hall. Mops are hurriedly swished across last-minute spills, and missing chairs are replaced as the early attendees start strolling in.
"When it's all over, and you see that everyone's done a good job, it's all worth it," said Robert Boeckmann, executive sous chef at the center. "Then you can say, "Ahh!' "
The convention's opening session is marred by a wireless computer mouse that stalls a slide show, then sends it into rapid reverse. Workers on the audio-visual team stay behind after the session to fix the errant mouse.
The housekeepers are on their toes, too, dipping into each of 36 meeting rooms every few hours to clean up cookie crumbs and discarded soda cans before the next group comes in.
Meanwhile, conventions services manager Janna Stephens is putting some serious miles on her black pumps. Her cell phone and two walkie-talkies create a nonstop symphony of people trying to get her attention:
"Jana? There's something funny going on with the lights in the west exhibit hall. Can you come check it out?"
"Room 16 is too cold. Can we make it warmer?"
Wednesday, Mar. 24, closing day
While the attendees dine on black bean cakes and coconut chicken at their closing celebration, the convention crew is cleaning up and preparing to transform the building for 10,000 cheerleaders and their supporters who will arrive by Friday.
Potter and the AAHA staff return to Denver and wait for their truckload of boxes to arrive. Evaluations will be entered into databases and scrutinized, meetings will be held to discuss what went right and wrong and stacks of bills will be paid. It'll be June before they close the books on the Tampa convention, but Potter already has a good idea about its outcome.
"The attendees are happy. The exhibitors are happy," Potter said. "There are still a lot of numbers to look at, but, yes, I'd say it was a success."
