5 Lessons from MICE Savvy | Philippine MICE Academy

Friday, August 17, 2012

The First Batch of MICE Savvy Graduates



After two days, the Philippine MICE Academy’s first seminar offering ended. It is an event two years in the making. But the wait is worth it! The institution geared towards educating and providing continuous education to MICE professionals is set-up. The dream towards creating a vibrant MICE industry took a small step that will create a ripple – hopefully gain a momentum to be the next wave that our country desperately need in this high return economic area.
But what are the lessons I learned after listening for two days to our industry thought leaders. 

Here they are:

1.    You must have Passion

Being a MICE professional is a thankless job. It is never easy. Try for example having an exhibition that house 200 exhibitors and accept 40,000 visitors; if the exhibitors have a minimum of two personnel then you have 40,400 clients to serve – a daunting task.

So the key to overcome the herculean tasks is to have passion. This will give you the necessary push to hurdle all the obstacles.

2.    You must have System

Executing tradeshows and convention is a complicated endeavor. But with a system that evolves and answers all the necessary needs of the event then the job becomes easier and the implementation becomes fun.

MICE professionals must have a system like checklists and other process in place to ensure the highest delivery of service to the clients.
The system is the science that puts balance to the passion which purely resides in our emotions.

3.    You must have Humor

As always there will be loose ends that you will overlook. Sometimes there will be areas that is out of your control that will still be under your responsibility and when things go wrong even if you are not directly involved it will still be your fault.

The best weapon for these situations is your Humor. Laugh at your shortcomings then come back strong to correct these things. Life is about coming back not falling out. This is true as MICE Professionals, you must know how to be abundant with humor or else recovering your bearing will be too hard.

Participants create their own event



4.    You must be a Quick Thinker and Responsive

I heard in the two day event a lot of mission impossible scenarios solve on a fly to keep the event orderly. I heard a lot of misses because of inability to react quickly. Therefore, the valuable lesson here is to think quickly, act quickly because there are a lot of situations that come-out that we can never predict.

Me with Patrick Tan of Globallink and Joel Pascual of PEP Group -
the two titans of the exhibition industry

5.    Embrace Synergy

You can never have it all. You can never do it alone. Embrace community and divide the opportunities. There is always something for everyone. There is always a place waiting to be occupied by a MICE professional in this industry that is like Wide Ocean of opportunity.

The ripple started and I can see it slowly building up to achieve the reason it was created. 

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