I feel a pang of longing as I consider my March calendar. For the past 25 years, I’ve lived my life to the rhythm of major tradeshows for the medical device industry. March without the annual meeting for the American Association of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) is like a March that doesn’t include the first day of spring. It’s the geeky, middle-aged spring break I look forward to every year.

For the last decade, I’ve averaged one to two weeks of travel each month from January through October. If not a major convention, it’s been client visits, ASTM meetings, or speaking engagements. However, October 2019 was the last time I got on an airplane. Once COVID hit, I was grounded with the rest of the world. This was one of many major pandemic adjustments, yet another that directly affected my companies. 

For small businesses like mine, trade shows are a critical part of developing new business as well as maintaining contacts. I’ve always taken a large group of team members who help manage my time and our booth so we can get in front of as many people as possible to gauge the strength of existing client relationships and forge new ones. We count on face-to-face meetings to manage connections that keep us in business.

Moti Altarac, president of Neurostructures, also relies on three major spine-related tradeshows to build relationships and sales.

“For us, it’s probably the only opportunity for in-person, face-to-face meetings with our customers and or vendors,” he said. “Not having tradeshows limits [us] significantly. It’s an opportunity to see everyone in one place.”

While I still believe there’s no replacement for a hand shake and direct eye contact, we’re part of a global community that’s finding ways around that. Here at the Empirical family of companies, that means many, many more phone calls and Zoom meetings with the camera on. We’re finding it creates a new kind of intimacy and has shifted the tone of our conversations.

“Even though it’s remote communication, we try to make that communication as personal as possible,” said Karen Nease, sales manager for Empirical. “I think everybody has become a little more familiar with each other even though we’ve been further apart. You see me sitting in my office and my dog jumps on my lap, or you hear my two teenagers screaming at each other through the door no matter what. You hear a newborn crying [and you say] ‘How’s the baby? I remember those days.’ We’ve been distant, but I also think we’ve learned more about our clients than we would in a normal year.”

I always look forward to seeing Michael Collins, chief operating officer of Cor Medical Ventures, on the tradeshow floor. Like me, my team, and everyone else in the industry, he’s getting to know clients, investors, and other key players in ways he didn’t expect. And with him, his wife, and his three kids trying to use Zoom at the same time he can easily relate to background noise, casual garb, and internet crashes.

“I did find that there became a lot more informality and greater personalization through the pandemic because everybody was working from home,” Collins said. “Everybody has become more accepting of the work-life balance. I’ve found that really refreshing…We’re all in these same situations. This has allowed people to create stronger connections which leads to better working relationships.”

It’s a strange sense of familiarity born of shared experience during unprecedented times. In some instances, it created new business for us.

“When you’re more connected with [the client], I think that helps,” Nease said. “We thought it was going to be a very big struggle through 2020 when everything started to close down. When we started calling out to clients to say, ‘I know everybody’s struggling, how can I help?’ They leaned on us more. It helped us share more of our services that maybe they were unaware of, different avenues of how we can help.”

But with no major shows, new leads were down, Altarac said.

“Overall, we dropped in our lead generation,” he said. We were able to maintain business with existing customers, but it was more difficult to find new customers. It was very difficult to find the volume we’d find in tradeshows—people who’d stop [at a tradeshow booth] and look at our product line. There was no way to reach them without having that presence.”

During a year we could not travel to make new contacts, it’s deepened the appreciation for our established connections.

“In my business development role working with startup teams, I am constantly talking to surgeons, investors, and our partners—we’re all relying on our current network to build from that,” Collins said. “You have to use your current network a lot stronger than before. The successes I’ve seen during these challenging times are the people who already had strong networks they can leverage.”

This is a serious challenge for new businesses and recent graduates looking for jobs. You can’t coincidentally run into an ideal contact on Zoom. Collins said tradeshows were good environments for catching a company’s major players for a pitch in the same place at the same time. Now that requires more diligent planning and tighter agendas.

“It requires better organization. It requires a more focused approach. At AAOS or NASS, a lot of people would go into those meetings with a bit more of a shotgun approach,” he said. “Networking time is no longer available and impromptu meetings are not as frequent,” he continued. “Now everything has to be set up in advance. Networking now requires greater focus and planning than ever before.”

At this point, major tradeshows are scheduled for the fall. Which is great—I’ve missed them. But they’re also all stacked on top of each other. I’m not sure how I’m going to manage what basically amounts to a year’s worth of travel in two months. Collins is considering the same dilemma.

“We’re looking at this because we can’t do them all in that compressed amount of time. We have our own work that has to be done besides going to those [shows],” he said. “In the past, everybody would go to AAOS. Not everybody’s going to want to be on the road for two months. So we’re taking a more strategic approach.”

That may mean fewer shows with a smaller team and no booth—which isn’t inherently bad if it enables us to spend less and make better use of time. It seems to be the recurring theme of business in the pandemic to ask ourselves “Do we really need that?”

Collins said it’s “the silver lining” of the COVID-19 crisis.

“It has forced us to focus our efforts on the most impactful meetings,” he said. “That’s probably what we should’ve been doing anyway. We spend a lot of time in the busyness of those [excess meetings] instead of focusing on meetings that were most impactful and who really needs to be at them from your company.”

I will consider Collins’ words as I try to make sense of my fall travel schedule. I look forward to meeting friends and colleagues in person for those two crazy months. Until then, I’ll enjoy the barking dogs and screaming kids on Zoom.

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Dawn Lissy is a biomedical engineer, entrepreneur, and innovator. Since 1998, the Empirical family of companies (Empirical Testing Corp., Empirical Consulting LLC, and Empirical Machine LLC) has operated under Lissy’s direction. Empirical offers the full range of regulatory and quality systems consulting, testing, small batch and prototype manufacturing, and validations services to bring a medical device to market. Empirical is very active within standards development organization ASTM International and has one of the widest scopes of test methods of any accredited independent lab in the United States. Because Lissy was a member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Entrepreneur-in-Residence program, she has first-hand, in-depth knowledge of the regulatory landscape. Lissy holds an inventor patent for the Stackable Cage System for corpectomy and vertebrectomy. Her M.S. in biomedical engineering is from The University of Akron, Ohio.

For more information about Empirical Technologies Corp. visit www.EmpiricalTech.com