Final Thoughts

September 2, 2015

We had a great conference! Don’t take my word for it, go out and talk to the hundreds of people who attended this year and ask their opinion. We are well on the way to making this conference THE Steel Summit Conference of the year for those who are actively involved in the steel industry. We will do it again next year here in Atlanta. Mark your calendars (and budgets) now. Most likely the dates will be August 30-31, 2016.

One of the differences between our conference and that of others is we understand that a speaker wants to know the audience to which they are speaking and that the topic is relevant to the group. I thought a comment I received from Port of Houston Senior Director for Trade Development, John Moseley was noteworthy, “I was impressed with the speaker line up and even more impressed with the high level of industry attending.”

While at the same time the attendees were providing me comments of their own, “John, great conference, congratulations on a fine performance. You know you’ve hit it when even DiMicco isn’t the highlight….” Andre Marshall, Crunchrisk, LLC

“Congrats on a great conference John. It was awesome.” Tony Bonavita, NB Handy Company (Photo to the left is of John Packard in the orange shirt, Ron Beck of NLMK USA and Tony Bonavita of NB Handy Company). That was the only beer I had during the entire conference…

“Great conference John. Better than last year!!!” Christopher Shipp, Priefert Steel

A job well done!! Steve Arlo, Hartree Partners

I was in the exhibition area during the afternoon of the first day and I ran into the one of the directors of supply chain for Honda Automotive USA who told me that he had already contacted his bosses telling them that our conference was well worth attending. Maybe we will see more automotive people here in Atlanta next year…

By the way, if you were at the conference and took some good photos either of the speakers, networking, facilities, etc. and you don’t mind sharing we would love to have a copy. You can send them to: info@SteelMarketUpdate.com

When Ray Culley brought me the idea of having an App for our conference I was both excited and skeptical. Excited because I knew it was a step forward for steel conferences like ours and skeptical because SMU struggles to get people to even go to our website for the free stuff (never mind having to log into the website). So, I didn’t know how it would go. As we went through the quoting process we found a great company who builds easy to use Apps and we decided to give it a try.

Now, this was a learning year for us as well as our attendees. Even so we managed to get almost 90 percent of the attendees to download the App. I received many compliments from those attending including one from a professional conference designer who thought our App was better than one they have been using.

A reminder to those of you who attended our conference, all of the conference presentations are available through the App. We sent out instructions earlier today to everyone. If you do not have a iPhone or Android phone (Windows or Blackberry are a problem) you can contact Brett@SteelMarketUpdate.com and he will get you taken care of.

We will use the App, which can be found in your Smart Phone’s app store under Steel Market Update Events, in future conferences and hopefully in some of our workshops.

Another reminder to those of you who attended our Steel Summit Conference – your company has access to a special offer on our Steel 101 and Managing Price Risk II workshops in October and November respectively. Dates on the Steel 101 workshop are October 6-7 and the location is Davenport, Iowa. A tour of SSAB will be included. The Managing Price Risk II workshop will be in New York City on November 11-12. We will have a half day “refresher” class on the morning of the 11th for those who are uncomfortable with the terminology or need more work in understanding the concepts. If you have any questions please contact either myself or Andre Marshall of Crunch Risk, LLC who is our main instructor for the workshop. Send questions to: info@SteelMarketUpdate.com. We are also available to take registrations at the special rate by calling 800-432-3475.

Monday is a holiday in the United States and SMU will not publish our newsletter on Sunday evening (yea! a break for me…). We will return to our normal schedule on Tuesday.

As always your business is truly appreciated by all of us here at Steel Market Update.

John Packard, Publisher