UP2022 was a Great Event Dampened by Lack of Organization and more Thoughtful Planning
Overall, the event itself was magnificent. The panels, lectures, presenters, Joel and yourself, and the rest of the REM staff were great and offered meaningful information to prospective and experienced investors alike. Likewise, the exhibitors were informative and helped clarify their potential role in many important areas. Secondly, the networking opportunity was absolutely one of the key benefits of this event and was a highlight for me. I personally was able to spend quality time in the evenings with at least two dozen experienced investors, many with sizable capital of their own to invest in projects. It was like hanging out with the crème de la crème in multi-family and commercial real estate. Also, the sense of family of everyone that attended made it easy to open up and integrate into the crowd. Even my daughter who is less outgoing than I felt a greater sense of ease in socializing with the quality people that attended. But our attendance at UP2022 had its major setbacks as well, which could have been easily avoided through better organization and planning on REM's part. It was a result of the lack of proper UP2022 tagging, which caused me a great deal of inconvenience that resulted in me sitting way back in the hall Friday morning and missing out on a large part of the VIP luncheon with Dave while I ate a salad downstairs in the lobby. It also prevented me from being able to seat myself in the VIP section on Saturday morning. I approached the RE Mentor booth in great frustration, and after much explanation, was finally able to get properly tagged. I informed the woman who told me she was in charge of the tags that my daughter, due to circumstances beyond her control, wouldn't be arrived for another hour or so from the airport. She assured me she would have her tag ready for her when she arrived. After wrapping up a photo shoot with Dave early that afternoon, my daughter finally arrived, and we immediately headed to the REM booth to acquire her UP2022 tag so she would miss as little of the remaining event as possible. However, when we got there, there was no staff present and we had to hunt down someone who could help obtain my daughter's tag. We eventually found someone, but they couldn't find her tag. I even helped look for it myself among the group of remaining tags, but it was nowhere to be found. Eventually, the woman responsible for tagging addressed our need but had some trouble finding the tag herself. She ended up fabricating a new one with the proper VIP and Mentor tagging as mine, which took more time, but we were then finally off to take part in the rest of the day's event. After getting all of the tagging issues resolved, we were both looking forward to finally sitting down and immediately jumping into an informative presentation, but shortly after arriving in the hall, we were then inundated with an hour-plus sales promo with a $20,000 price tag on a training event at Harvard. As one who spent even more than that less than two months earlier to get himself and his daughter on board with RE Mentor, not to mention another $2,000 to attend UP2022, I was taken aback and quite annoyed at that juncture. It left a negative impression on my daughter as well. What we anticipated would be a peak day of the overall event had quickly become very anti-climatic. I spoke with others who traveled to Phoenix to attend UP2022, and they too conveyed similar upset about trying to get the most out of every hour of their investment into RE Mentor and the UP event only to have prime learning time being used to upsell another REM product. Like them, I didn't come all the way to Phoenix to attend a sales presentation. To conclude, at my ripe old age of seventy, time comes at a premium, (as well as money), and I DON'T LIKE WASTING IT on unnecessary, superfluous nonsense. Between the cost of the event itself plus air travel, hotel, and ground transportation costs and my daughter's time off from her demanding job, Nina and I committed a lot toward making the most of this event, but unfortunately, we lost over a half day in counterproductive activity that dampened our momentum. Perhaps I should have shared this with Jeannie, our mentor, on Wednesday, but I didn't want to bother her with any of this and instead chose to use this forum for voicing these major concerns. The woman responsible for the UP2022 tags offered to provide a partial refund for all the problems the tags created, which was thoughtful of her, but I'm not sure if it was ever executed.