Coronavirus Can’t Stop America’s Largest Construction Conference

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- The longest line at ConExpo, the largest construction convention in North America, is the line to grab beer. As the bottles of Budweiser and Bud Light fly over the counter, the cashier at the beer station says she needs to run to the bathroom. “I’m getting a little terrified,” she says. “I didn’t see any hand sanitizer the whole time I was handing out beers.”

The beer seller, like the vast majority of attendees at the conference, which takes up 2.7 million square feet of space, was concerned about the transmission of coronavirus as about 130,000 attendees converged on Las Vegas on March 10 for this once-every-three-years event. But for her—and planners of many trade shows and events that are going forward despite the pandemic—the show must go on.

Even as college campuses are shifting classes online, sports teams are competing before empty arenas, and governments from Italy to Washington state are restricting mass gatherings, many American industries—including construction—are trying to go about business as usual. In the case of the huge ConExpo show, plans were just too far along when virus fears began to take hold in the U.S.

Moreover, given the three-year gap between confabs, this joint exhibition of construction and mining equipment couldn’t be easily postponed. So clients, potential new customers, and dealers for everything from backhoes and cement mixers to cranes and road-pavement gear trekked to Vegas to do deals and get a pulse on the market amid an unprecedented public-health crisis.

• Why would anyone go to a trade show with 130,000 attendees during a burgeoning pandemic?

“It’s a good chance to know the new technology and figure out what works better for our company,” says Jeff Herington, a project manager estimator at InRoads Paving LLC in Des Moines. “You can talk on the phone and email, but it’s just different to speak face to face, and when you have the company here you can get better answers.”

It’s easy to see why construction folks are eager to keep meeting and greeting. Demand is smoking. The industry added 42,000 jobs in February, helping push the overall U.S. unemployment rate down to 3.5%, a 50-year low. The convention is also a massive showcase for Caterpillar, John Deere, Komatsu, Volvo Group, and other global companies to display their latest products and technologies to buyers from around the world.

Still, soldiering on during a pandemic requires some accommodations. Hand sanitizer stations are prominent, as are exhortations to be careful with coughs. And the show’s organizers have instituted a no-handshake policy, complete with buttons that show a slash mark over a drawing of clasped palms. That’s a big change for an industry where handshaking and backslapping is still very much in vogue, but alternatives like fist bumps and foot shakes are catching on among attendees. Industry bigwigs are getting into the act: Chief Executive Officer Jim Umpleby of Caterpillar Inc., one of the world’s largest machinery producers, greets people by bumping elbows, while Mike Ballweber, president ofBobcat North America, prefers “shoulder shimmies.”

That doesn’t mean the virus isn’t on people’s minds. “We haven’t seen anything slowing down or the need to do anything different, but we have this black swan out there, and we’re trying to look at it and understand what to do,” says Ballweber, whose farm and construction equipment company is part of South Korea’s Doosan Group. “Just this morning I was with dealers to talk to them, and that’s the conversation I’ve had with every one of them. They’re not oblivious to the news.”

Volvo, though, is one major manufacturer that decided days before the show’s start that it wasn’t coming. Instead, it sent a skeleton crew of local employees to exhibit its gear, which had already been delivered to the venue. Although Caterpillar chose to attend, it allowed employees to choose to stay home. But it says a lot of analysts and shareholders—who come to hear presentations, see new products, and schmooze with company executives—didn’t show up because of the virus.

“A lot of investors didn’t come, that would be the one thing that’s probably different this year,” says Chief Financial Officer Andrew Bonfield. He says that if investors could instead arrange meetings with managers at Cat’s headquarters outside Chicago, “they would probably take that rather than come to a very large event where they may need to self-quarantine afterwards.”

A group called Women of Asphalt, which promotes female participation in the construction trades, held a networking mixer for 250 on the night of March 10. Half of the 20 volunteers expected to help at the event couldn’t make it after their employers restricted travel, says Michelle Kirk, a spokesperson for the group. The ones who came were taking precautions, including frequent hand-washing. “We’re glad we could be here to spread the word, and we don’t want to bring anything back home,” Kirk says.

Dana Wuesthoff, vice president for exhibitions and events services at ConExpo, is working hard to make sure that doesn’t happen. Wuesthoff, who works for the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, which puts on the convention, says the organizers rented large sanitizing stations to be placed throughout the show, especially in outdoor areas that display cranes and other large equipment, which don’t have an obvious table where containers of hand sanitizer could be placed. She also increased the frequency of scheduled cleaning services and replaced cleaning chemicals with more appropriate germ-killing options. The AEM is also handing out the no-handshake buttons, which say “No Offense, Just Makes Sense.”

Some attendees are stoic about the danger. Roland Karbaum, who owns a gravel pit in Maryland, was one of the few attendees who wore a mask during the show’s first day—though he kept it hanging off his show badge rather than on his face. “If I’m looking at a machine and somebody gets in close, I might put it on,” he says.

ConExpo organizers say exhibitors representing less than 3% of the show’s 2.7 million square feet of space canceled, and one-fifth of those booths were resold to other attendees. By midweek, attendance was trending above the 2017 show, they say.

On the exhibition floor, though, Henry Boschen, a sales manager at VMI Inc., says the number of attendees appears to be down, pointing out that most of his major parts suppliers canceled. He pulls out his phone to show vacant hotel rooms going for $65 to $85 a night on booking sites that normally have nothing to offer during the huge event. “It’s nothing to laugh or sneer at,” Boschen says about coronavirus, and he admits that he’s unsure how it will play out in the U.S. “But you can get a room at Golden Nugget for $87, which tells you they got a whole lot of vacancies.”

But business is still taking place. Caterpillar’s Umpleby says he has dinners scheduled for all five nights of the expo, and he expects they’ll commence as normal. He’ll take precautions—elbow-bumping, washing his hands frequently, and not touching his face—but he’s not going to sit farther away from clients at restaurants. After ConExpo, he says he’s not going to self-quarantine. “I’m going on to the next thing,” Umpleby says. “I have a couple daughters at home, and they’re in high school. And I’m going to go home.”

Bobcat’s Ballweber says he and his staff had a discussion about whether to self-quarantine after the event. “We haven’t made that decision yet, but it is something we have absolutely talked about,” he says. “When I got this job no one gave me the playbook on how to handle a potential pandemic.”
 
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To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Ellis at jellis27@bloomberg.net

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