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KnowledgeFest Goes Nationwide

By bringing the premiere industry event to Orlando this coming May, KnowledgeFest has truly become nationwide, expanding its mission of education and empowerment to service the southeast.

WORDS BY ROSA SOPHIA

Having found a formula that best fulfills its mission—to educate, inform and empower—KnowledgeFest will be coming to Orlando, Florida, May 15 to 17, 2020 and is expected to draw at least over a thousand attendees. The show will likely attract a good crowd in part due to its location. Chris Cook, President of Mobile Electronics Association, expects a good turnout.

“I think people will come to escape the cold and kick off the first vacation of the year,” Cook said. “We’ve never launched an event that had this much interest from retailers and manufacturers, from the industry overall. I’ve had so many inquiries about it, and I think it’s because of the location.”

Those attending should be open to learning new things, according to Jayson Cook of Columbus Car Audio & Accessories. “If you go into it thinking you already know everything, then you won’t get anything out of it. But if you are open minded, and apply the things you learn, it can be a real game changer,” he said, adding that networking and building relationships are good reasons to attend.

Since the Dallas event began in 2010, KnowledgeFest has continued to grow exponentially and has become the premier industry event, according to Chris Cook. However, KnowledgeFest itself is far older. Each KnowledgeFest event offers over 60 manufacturer trainings, over 27 educational workshops and plenty of networking opportunities for mobile electronics professionals. Adding a new location will help transform KnowledgeFest into a nationwide event.

“We are going to be bringing what has been so successful in other cities to Orlando and to the southeast,” Cook added.

KnowledgeFest Heads to the Sunshine State

Aron Demers, vice president of VOXX Electronics Corporation, said he hopes to meet with dealers who no longer attend CES, and haven’t been able to make it to other KnowledgeFest events. “We feel that from Florida all the way up to Maine, we’ll have good representation of dealers wanting to get out and come down to the show,” he said, adding that VOXX will offer mobile video training and security and remote start certification and training sessions, as they do at other KnowledgeFest events.

Bryatt Fischer of JL Audio said the Orlando show has been a hope for some time. “There have been other events in Florida in years past that were successful,

run by other organizations that have since left the market,” Fischer said. “We felt an Orlando base would create a destination spot for some of the untapped regions.”

Fischer said one main observation led to the decision to bring a KnowledgeFest event to Florida. Despite Dallas and Indy being at midway points in the country, some people closer to the east coast

were still having difficulty attending. The Indianapolis event seemed to mainly draw from surrounding states, but less so from the east coast. When partners and sponsors got together to discuss options, Florida turned out to be a unanimous decision. “We all identified some of the shortcomings of the Indy location when it came to servicing the east coast,” Fischer said.

An Opportunity to Build Relationships

The strong connections that often begin at KnowledgeFest are priceless, according to Jayson Cook, who was named Sales Pro of the Year for 2019 at KnowledgeFest Dallas, and hopes to see more sales-oriented classes at Knowledge- Fest in the future. “You can really get in front of people at the show instead of just using social media from home,” he said, adding that meeting vendors face to face is very helpful.

Ethan Blau of Sound Wave Customs in Virginia Beach, Va. shared this sentiment, noting that the connections he’s made at any KnowledgeFest event have been important to him both professionally and personally. “I have grown closer with manufacturers, their reps and technicians, and other business owners like myself,” Blau said. “I have even hired employees from networking at KnowledgeFest.”

It was at KnowledgeFest that Blau met Ata Ehdaivand of Absolute Electronix, and the two became close friends. Because of KnowledgeFest, Blau said he and Ehdaivand started a competition to see who could make the bathroom in

each of their stores look the best. “It was meant to push one another to become better, and to offer a better store atmosphere and environment,” Blau said.

Because of KnowledgeFest, both Blau and Jayson Cook were able to forge essential connections in the industry. Blau added, “I have grown and made numerous changes to the way I do business.”

Blau, whose professional life and business grew in large part due to KnowledgeFest, said the event was an eye-opener that drove him to better himself. Sound Wave Customs was also awarded Retailer of the Year in 2018.

A Platform of Education

Because business owners are so busy throughout year, it can be difficult to connect with one another, Fischer said. KnowledgeFest, he added, is the perfect place to network “because it creates a captive audience. A large percentage of it is education and vendor trainings. It gives us an opportunity to have a captive audience of retailers.” And it gives 12-volt professionals a chance to catch up on information they might have missed while engaged in day-to-day business, he said.

JL Audio will be offering training as usual at all KnowledgeFest shows. Fischer said the company’s dedicated training team will be answering questions on the show floor, as well as participating in vendor training. “We also offer the School of Sound and education tracks,” he added.

“We’ll be doing that one again in Long Beach this February. It’s not geared toward JL Audio. It just teaches the fundamentals of our industry.”

Teaching the fundamentals, Fischer said, will always be essential. “We are seeing a younger audience begin to come into the industry, so we feel it’s really important for them to understand our industry as integration becomes more complex,” he explained. Demers said he expects the new Orlando show to bring the same wealth of information and training curriculum as other KnowledgeFest shows, but to a new audience of dealers who haven’t had the chance to attend yet, adding that he thinks this show in particular will draw 12-volt professionals along with their families to turn it into a mini-vacation.

“We think it’s going to bring a lot of traffic to the show and to the area,” he said. Manufacturers are in agreement that Orlando will likely be a great destination show.

KnowledgeFest will also be collaborating with Visit Orlando, according to Chris Cook, who stated there will be a concierge desk available at the front of the show so attendees can book family outings at reduced pricing.

There will always be some crossover between the classes offered at different KnowledgeFest events, but Fischer noted the focus is always to support categories that might need additional training at the time to be fully understood, and also to support new product launches. The show floor continues to be a popular place for companies to unveil new and exciting products for attendees, while the classroom offers training on those products for salespeople and installers.

To those who still might be undecided about attending, Jayson Cook advised, “Just go. It’s worth it.” He added, “It’s almost like advertising. You don’t necessarily know when the return on investment is going to come. But I promise you, you will get your return on investment with KnowledgeFest.”

Chris Cook of MEA said there will be vendors displaying at KnowledgeFest this year who’ve never done so before, increasing networking opportunities. He added, “They’re coming in because of Long Beach and Orlando,” the two most recently added events.

New for this year is an increased focus on classes presented in Spanish, with marketing outreach in Spanish to help increase attendance numbers. What’s ahead for 2020? Chris Cook added KnowledgeFest has found a formula that works well, and the plan is to build upon it. “I envision continuing to build off that education mission,” he said. “Because that’s really what we do.”

Gear Up for KnowledgeFest!

You can register for KnowledgeFest by visiting: knowledgefest.org/register Take note of this year’s show dates:

Long Beach, Calif. – February 7-9

Indianapolis, In. – March 27-29

Orlando, Fla. – May 15-17

Dallas, Texas – August 14-16