Orlando or Bust…Building A Case!

Last week Tuesday I published the first post (Orlando or Bust…Why You Need To Be There!) in a series of posts that I will be doing on how to get your company to send you to SolidWorks WORLD 2009 in Orlando, Florida.  This week I am go to hopefully help you with the first step in building a proposal to give to the upper management at your place of employment.  This post is going to be more of an outline for upcoming posts where I will break down these steps in more detail.

Where do I start?  That is usually the first question that I ask myself when I begin compiling information for a proposal such as this.  There are so many reasons why you need to attend SolidWorks WORLD as I outlined in the first post in this series, but what are the key things that will make your management realize that sending you is not an option but a necessity.  Last year I put together a proposal without any idea of what all of the buzz was about, but this year I have a better understanding of what happens there.

Here is a list of items to begin thinking about when compiling your information:

1. What is the largest underlying cause for your company not wanting to send you?  Money?  Don’t see the value?  No time?
2. What route of asking them to help you do you want to base your proposal around?  Pay for everything (Conference Pass, Hotel, Travel, Time Away From Work) or any other combination of these 4 things?
3. What would be the biggest benefit of SolidWorks WORLD for your company?  Over 150 Training Sessions?  Networking?  Partner Pavilion?  Direct contact with SolidWorks employees?

Once you come up with some of the answers to the above 3 questions you can begin thinking about your “plan of attack”.  There are different things you can do for your proposal and I will list some of them here.

• Use the Early Bird Savings as a leveraging tool.
• Create a Productivity Gains vs. Savings spreadsheet that will display your hourly rate and what the yearly savings will amount to based on productivity gains.
• Break down the different networking opportunities that you will have like the birds of the feather luncheons, the off site events and all of the other free time that you will have to network with other users.
• Break down all of the types of technical sessions that will be available and that you would like to attend.  And then explain how those will benefit the company.
• Talk to other users (myself and others) about their feelings on why you should attend this event.  Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email for a 1on1 conversation.
• Use the SolidWorks supplied Boss’ Justification Letter’s.
• Use the personal testimonial written by Bob Jordan that I received last year (also the podcast that he did later on) during my series of posts.

As I said before I will break down all of these bullet points more in depth in my upcoming posts so stay tuned.  This is a big event and it will probably involve some of your personal time to put together a stunning presentation for your bosses.  I found last year that lunch time is a perfect time to do some work on this.  It is worth every second if they make the decision to send you as my company did last year.  That is why I feel it is so important to share some of my steps from last year with you and hopefully I will see YOU there this year!

Check out this highlight video from SolidWorks WORLD 2008.

Stay tuned for the next post in this series of how to convince you management to send you to SolidWorks World 2009 at the Swan & Dolphin Hotel in Orlando, Florida.

Important dates to remember:

• September 15, 2008 – All presentation proposals must be submitted for consideration (All presenters will receive free admission into the conference).
• October 10, 2008 – Early Bird Special #1 ends.
• January 9, 2009 – Early Bird Special #2 end.