My First RIMS: Expectations vs Reality
Carly Romeo, Director of Marketing
Last week, LineSlip attended the first RIMS national conference since the start of the pandemic. Seven of our team members, including myself, traveled to San Francisco for three days of conversation, learning, and networking. It was my first insurance industry conference and I went into the event with excitement and curiosity. We had meticulously designed and planned for our marketplace booth and the experience we wanted visitors to have there; we set up appointments with dozens of clients and future clients; we were ready for just about anything. We had no idea how much that readiness would be tested.
What I was expecting
My teammates who were RIMS veterans warned me that the event could get chaotic, so I was ready for several long days on my feet at the booth, talking until I lost my voice, without much down time.
I had left myself what I thought was an easy checklist of final tasks. When I landed at SFO, I planned to:
Pick up swag we mailed ahead of time from a friend’s front porch
Head to the conference center to oversee finishing touches of Booth setup, including set decorating for the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure game we created
Relax until Sunday evening’s client appreciation dinner with the team and subsequent RIMS kickoff reception.
None of those things happened.
What actually happened
Despite the challenges to air travel that have become commonplace, the first snafu wasn’t related to my flight — I landed at SFO and got an Uber with no problems. However, when I arrived to pick up the booth supplies and branded swag that we’d ordered in advance, the packages were gone. After a thorough search, we reluctantly concluded that they had been stolen. Ouch. A setback, but not a disaster for a team that is scrappy and resilient. I fired off some quick slacks to the team and got to work reordering what I could.
When I arrived to the marketplace floor, I was confident that the biggest plot twist was behind me. I could not have been more mistaken, because:
Our booth was lost.
Not “lost” in the hubbub of on-site booth construction, but “lost” somewhere in northern California. I struggled to fully absorb what the show staff were telling me because it seemed so absurd. Thousands of pounds of booth materials, lost? Yes, lost. Its last known location was Sacramento; it wasn’t at the conference center, and nobody knew when (if?) it would be.
Risk management professionals know what to do when a plan goes sideways: activate the backup plan. In this case, that meant huddling up with the team, taking some collective deep breaths, and spending the following 48 hours working with the event management company to create a stand-in version of our booth by piecing together a booth from their rental inventory. By Monday morning, we were all set up to plug into the excitement and energy of the show — and that’s exactly what we did!
From the moment the marketplace floor opened, we were visited by attendees who had heard about LineSlip but wanted to see what we're all about. We did hours of product tours and demos (including previewing our upcoming TCOR offering) and had dozens of people try their luck on our interactive choose-your-own-adventure game. My personal favorite part of the show was when current clients stopped by to share their recent LineSlip-enabled wins – sometimes even illuminating use cases we hadn’t considered before.
What we learned
There were so many takeaways from our RIMS (mis)adventures, but the biggest ones are:
Expect the Unexpected. This is the lesson we keep learning over and over again, and one that risk managers know well!
There’s no substitute for a strong team that has your back. While the bumps we hit were frustrating, it was a relief to rely on such a great group of people.
Seeing is believing! Showing attendees our dashboards and watching them have “aha!” moments when they realized how much LineSlip can help in their day-to-day lives was priceless.