The Success of Elite Sports Perform Expo

The first annual Elite Sports Performance Show #ESP15, otherwise known as the Elite Sports Expo, took place in the Excel London, home of the world of conferences, last Wednesday and Thursday 10-11th June 2015. Organised by Lee Archer and Patrick Ward of PRYSM Group, the two-day event showcased products and services from over 75 Exhibitors and facilitated 30 insightful seminars.

To start I must commend Lee and Patrick on how they organised the event and qualified the show goers which resulted in a highly knowledgably audience with plenty of existing client relationships strengthened and new relationships and partnerships developed. I would like to share my perspective on what was a great show and hopefuly give you an insight into why we signed up to be back next year before we left the hall.

It all started for me about a year ago when Lee contacted me to discuss the show, his enthusiasm and concept to showcase the different professions and products working behind the scenes in sports performance struck accord with me. When I get involved in a project it is all or nothing for me, so I took up the opportunity to speak and exhibit at the show and also supported Lee as much as I could to make sure the show was a success, in a nutshell, I felt the more successful the show the more opportunities for us all investing in the show. Now on to show time, stand all prepared and ready to open the doors...

The show was taking place alongside the Elite Sports Therapy & Medical Rehabilation Expo, Neurological Rehabilation Therapy and Technololy Expo and COPA Physiotherapists, Chiropractors and Osteopaths Practice Growth show which complimented the already high pedigree of show goers and provided lots of opportunities for us to explore new ideas with like-minded collaborators from all over the globe and across a diverse range of disciplines.

The venue provided plenty of space and facilities and was easy accessible with plenty of hotels just a stone’s throw away, although not just as easy for myself and my colleagues, they foolishly entrusted me with the hotel arrangements, another story for another day. All I am willing to share at this stage is, the view from my hotel room was interesting to say the least, I can hear my colleagues chuckling as they read this. Easy access from airports and public transport ensured there were many diverse prospects with us, we were picking up prospects locally, from Sweden, America, Spain and many more countries around the globe, it truly was a global event.

Early in my planning I decided, other than trying to be seen as the market leader, my stand should be about showcasing the power of collaborative working. Many years working as a general manager in a very competitive motor trade taught me those perceiving themselves to be market leaders tend to focus on the competition and not enough time on what they are doing well and where they need to improve. This concept was the focus of my talk on Thursday in the ESP Main Hall 'Improve to Improve' How do you developing a ‘Kaizen’ culture? which in short is a Japanese term for continuous improvement.

You can find the slides in PDF format from my presentation by clicking the image above, I have added some notes to the slides to try and get over the points and set context of the presentation.

As a business underpinned by education and focused on networking we have developed some strong collaboration’s to meet many of the challenges applied practice very often throws at us. Our stand was one that represented the values and ethos of working in partnership with AnalysisPro, Realtrack Systems and Lear Training (my business) demonstrating some very affordable yet powerful interconnected processes supported by education.

Furthermore I decided to source two people to help me work the show from existing users. Arron, a performance analysis student at Cardiff Met and user of WIMU, one of the products and workflows we wanted to showcase agreed to come along and share his experiences with others, the first time I met Arron was Tuesday evening 10 hours before the show opened. Mark a student at St Mary’s University in Belfast travelled with me to share his experience as a previous student on one of our educational programmes and also working on a couple of grass roots analysis projects with myself. I spend much of my time developing performance management processes and systems to evaluate performance and can honestly say the two guys hit and exceeded all my expectations. They were a credit to themselves and the institutions where they are studying. Employers don’t miss the opportunity if either of these two come knocking at your door, I just hope I am in a position to employ them both when they conclude their studies. To not only find one but two abstract thinker’s provided those that visited us on our stand some interesting concepts to navigate the myriad of factors involved in evaluating products at such shows.

With lots of competitions to win prizes on the go, including our own, we had a bird’s eye view from the filming solution APCapture system on display by AnalysisPro. Teqball was by far the most interactive at the show and provided us with lots of opportunities to demonstrate some live capture and coding with Nacsport.

The first day we visually observed some of the 3-1-5 X-Force negative training gym equipment in action. A very interesting concept that works on a 3 sec concentric up – 1 sec hold – 5 sec eccentric down rep and seemed to produce some serious/painful results with those that dared to try it out. As Arron and Mark the abstract thinkers got to work Day 2 saw us fix a WIMU unit to one of the machines, focus the APCapture camera onto the users on our new found collaborators equipment and provide some detailed analysis feedback in the QUIKO software on whether they actually hit the 3-1-5 rep target.

It was great that the show enabled us to continue our theme of collaborative working and showcase our products in partnership with new like minded people exhibiting which seemed to be a refreshing attitude to the whole idea of exhibiting.

While I have the opportunity I would also like to make mention of Absolute Perform our neighbours at stand K32 who had some of the most impressive strength training equipment I have seen.

For me the Elite Sports Performance Expo was a unique event with lots of networking opportunities which provided us with a whirlwind of two days exhibiting, sharing and developing new partnerships. Looking forward to evolving the seeds sown of many interesting concepts over the coming weeks with a potential game changing development coming out of the show for us, will keep you posted.

On a personal note I would like to publicly thank Arron and Mark for the level of expertise, professionalism and fun they brought to the stand, get next year into your schedules guys. And to Jon and Josh it was an absolute pleasure to work together once again.

A final note to Lee and Patrick see you at ESP16!

Yours in Sport

Jason