You’ve heard it from Carol, Judy, and Giuseppe.
Now I hope you’ll take it from me…
Yesterday I celebrated my fifth anniversary with The Partner Channel.
I can’t believe it’s been five years. “Time flies” would be an understatement.
I joined the team (well duo, really, consisting of Spider and Norm) and my first project was to create an event for Partners.
I made some calls and selected October 25-27, 2004, as the dates of our inaugural edition of The Partner Event.
(Only it wasn’t called “The Partner Event” yet. We toyed around with fluffy words, action words, abstract phrases – like “The Big” – until we came up with the most logical choice.)
Delivering a brand new event 60 days or so from starting a new job was a pretty good challenge.
Trying to market to Partners who were unfamiliar with both the event and The Partner Channel itself wasn’t in the “easy” category either (the first magazine had just been shipped and prior to that The Partner Channel had been working with a small yet awesome Member base).
We were also pretty new in our relationship with Microsoft. I think it might be pretty safe to say that they weren’t totally onboard with sending Partners our way for much of anything.
Our event budget was the big old goose egg, so getting two Sponsors (Rockton Software and Diamond Municipal Solutions) and having many of our vendors donate their time/services was a huge blessing.
And then something wonderful happened.
Come October, 36 wonderful people showed up at the Radisson Hotel for The Partner Event.
New job, marketing, political, and financial worries went out the door and we had a great time hosting people while they soaked in sales, marketing, and leadership-based content from our speakers, a small yet incredibly talented group of channel experts (back in the day we had one speaker per track, so our speakers were busy for those couple of days!).
The next spring brought 38 people and eight Sponsors. This was our only spring event. It was April and it snowed, so we took it as a sign.
Fall 2005 brought 74 people (we doubled!!!) and 18 Sponsors (holy smokes!). Doug Burgum was a surprise keynote and we partied at an air museum.
We changed it up in 2006, partnering with Microsoft to host The Partner Event – BBC and bring 640 attendees and 57 Sponsors to town. Can you say ramp up?
Fall 2007 was another joint effort, with 517 attendees and 72 Sponsors. Still big, but this was the phantom year (if you were there, you know what I mean. It was weird.).
We chose to go back to our roots and a smaller audience for the 2008 event. It was a gamble, but it just felt right with 238 people and 35 Sponsors.
And now we’re getting ready to do it again. Our goal is 250 and I am so very happy to say we’re getting there. We have 20 fantastic Sponsors (and still have available spots, if you’re so inclined).
Through the years we’ve made it a point to listen to Partners, implement their ideas, and ditch the bad stuff.
We’re committed to providing the best possible learning and networking experience for Partners, and would love to see you there. (Mosey on over to The Partner Event to get registered.)
I invite you to contact me at Jenny (at) thepartnerchannel (dot) com if you have any questions or if you’d like to hear more about climbing uphilll both ways, like we did “back in the day.”
To our veterans, thanks for the memories. To our new friends, I look forward to meeting you soon.
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