As the Marketing Specialist I am always looking for ways to promote the business and get our name out there. With our one year anniversary coming around the corner, I began thinking about ways to put our name out there and have a good time doing it. What better way than a community event, right? I began thinking about different types of events we could have. Car show was my second thought right after fall festival. With all the guys at Precise Detail Pros being huge car fans, the idea was very welcomed. So we decided to kick i into over drive because we had 48 days to plan a car show.
We opened on October 10th, 2019 which was very convenient because October 10th fell on a saturday this year. So the first thing I did was set the date. Next I got in touch with our local car clubs to figure out if that date was good with them. They told me that it would be the day right after Cruising the Coast but that we would still be able to get quite a few cars to come out. So I went ahead with it.
The next step was to get a food vendor, because what is a car show without food. So we sat down and talked about good food in the area and believe it or not we couldn't decide on who we wanted to order from. After about three days of deliberation we decided on a vendor. We then moved into plans of meeting with this vendor and agreed upon space and a menu.
Then we decided the next priority should probably be getting the people. So I started with places I knew. My local gym, church, and telling my friends to tell their friends. My next move was to put it on the internet. I made a lightbox on our website, and put up both google and facebook events. I took the flyers I created and started dispersing them all over town, into local barbershops, local gyms, and a digital flyer began circulating. I flooded the instagram and facebook pages with details about the event and kept the community updated as we went along. Everything we did I posted it onto the page. We decided to custom build trophies so I posted those as we built them. We also started reaching out to car people. We reached out to Car Supplies Warehouse, Autozone, Xpel, Tri-State Auto Glass, and to our local State Farm agent Fred Leornard. Some of these people came and set up tints and some sent us hundreds of dollars worth of door prizes to give away. But they all helped get the word out.
So with the date set and the word finally out, call came raining in. As well did Hurricane Delta. The biggest mistake that I had made was not setting a rain date. So we had over 40 cars and 6 bikes scheduled for the weekend and had to cancel everything. We posted to the internet that we would move the date to the next weekend because it was the only weekend that at least half of our employees were available through November. With no rain date set and limited time to get the word out we went straight to planning. We called all our vendors and made sure they could make it on the new date and called our car entries and the local car club. We had a lot of people that told us they had cleared the weekend before and were busy for th new weekend, which is understandable. But we went ahead with the new plans. With more time we organized more games and a fun way to vote. We had done it all.
Well the day came and I woke up bright eyed and bushy tailed. I got to the shop super early and set everything up. Then when registration opened up our first car pulled in. That was when I discovered my fatal mistake, I had not checked for other events. I was informed that on the same weekend that there was a car show with over 300 cars going on not even 10 minutes away and that that is where most of our crowd would be.
The show here still went well and the food was amazing! I would like to give a huge shoutout to C's&D's catering and a big thank you to everyone that came out to look and participate in our show. I have learned many lessons for next year; we need waivers for everyone to sign incase anything happens, we need to check other events for our date and our rain out date, and make sure to give a rain out date on the front end. All in all we still had a good time but I hope that next year we can make it bigger and better!
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