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Date: May 25, 1994

Location: Wayne

Title: KGP Packs Computer Fans and Vendors In the Same Room to Sell, Sell, Sell

Author: Jay Romano

Subject: Shows are a cross between a flea market and a bazaar, but both sides like them

On a recent Sunday morning the president and vice-president of KGP Productions were lying on the beach near a country club community in Boca Raton, Fla. At about the same time, 1,200 miles away in Wayne several thousand people were standing in line waiting to pay $8 each to get inside KGP Productions” most recent computer show.

“I didn”t even have the cellular phone turned on,” says company president, Ken Gordon, tanned, relaxed and sitting in his comfortable but cluttered Kendall Park office after returning to New Jersey. “The show was being handled by my very competent and well-trained staff.”

Gordon and his wife Glenda, the vice president, have been promoting shows throughout the Northeast for the past 14 years. And from all indications–like their weekend jaunts to Florida and their consistently sold-out shows–the Gordons and KGP Productions are a smashing success.

“When I first started out, I wasn”t expecting to make a living doing computer shows,” said Gordon, who turns 50 in July. “But the business just grew and grew and grew.”

For those who haven”t been to one, a computer show is a kind of indoor, high-tech fleamarket where 400 or so computer and software vendors hawk their wares for as many as 15,000 glassy-eyed customers who have been stoked into a buying frenzy by the unquenchable desire to have the newest, fastest and most powerful computer system possible.

Gordon makes a tidy living putting all those people together in the same room, weekend after weekend, in convention halls from Philadelphia to Boston. “People get hooked on computer shows,” Gordon says. “They come back again and again and again.”

Although Gordon declines to discuss his balance sheet, he is not at all reticent to point out that every one of his shows is “sold out” weeks in advance, meaning that he typically has to turn away scores of vendors who are willing to pay him an average of $92 per table for selling space at a show. Most shows now have a minimum of 400 tables; the largest, which is held four times a year in the Raritan Center Exposition Hall in Edison, has over 1,300 tables.

“We usually book shows 18 to 24 months in advance,” Gordon says, adding that he already has firm dates for computer shows through 1995 in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts.

Then there are the customers.

“With the big shows we”ve pulled in as many as 15,000 people in a day,” Gordon says. “We did a three-day show in Edison over Washington”s Birthday weekend, and we had over 50,000 people. It was incredible. We had four shuttle buses running and eight people directing traffic and parking cars. Probably $25 or $30 million changed hands in computer products.”

KGP Productions averages about 5,000 customers per show. The company sponsors as many as 40 shows a year with an occasional disappointing turnout here and there, usually attributable to bad weather or, in one case, the stock market crash of 1987.

At a recent show at William Paterson College in Wayne, one with over 400 tables, customers started lining up more than an hour before the doors opened.

“I didn”t want to stand in a line a quarter of a mile long,” said Bob Martin, 50, of Pompton Lakes, explaining why he arrived an hour and 15 minutes early to be first in line.

Indeed, by 11:00 a.m., after customers had been steadily filing through the door for more than an hour, eagerly handing over their $8 entrance fee, the waiting line outside had actually grown. Some shows have become so crowded that local officials will order doors shut until the crowd inside has thinned out.

“I was closed down at the Meadowlands Hilton by the Fire Department,” Gordon says. “We brought in too much traffic.”

Things were not always so rosy, however.

Gordon, who once worked as comptroller at a non-profit organization in Manhattan, sponsored his first computer show in 1980, about a year after he attended the Trenton Computer Festival at Trenton State College in Ewing. The Trenton show, he says, was packed with people like himself, who were “entranced by this new computer thing.”

The next Computer Festival, however, wouldn”t be for another year. “I said, ”This is ridiculous. I”ve got to wait a whole year for another show?””

Rather than wait, he booked a Holiday Inn at Newark Airport, contacted the vendors listed on the program from the Trenton show, advertised in local newspapers, and went into business. “There were barely 1,000 people there,” he says, adding that at best he broke even on the show. “It”s like when you open a restaurant, you have no idea how many people are going to come to dinner. You hope for 100, and 10 show up.”

Despite the poor turnout, Gordon was hooked on promoting computer shows, if only to indulge his own compulsion to “buy everything new that came out.”

“But I didn”t know the right way to promote,” he says, explaining that for his early shows he placed expensive advertisements in national publications. “I later discovered that the best way to reach customers was by direct mail.”

Gordon began accumulating names of people who frequent shows and entered them, not surprisingly, into his increasingly sophisticated computer system. He now has over 100,000 names and adds new ones after every show.

Now, about two weeks before a show, KGP Productions sends out a mailing of between 25,000 and 50,000 postcards, depending on the location and size of the show. The mailing list is targeted by zip code, and the cards themselves are designed, printed and addressed in-house. “We have a machine that spits the cards through at about 8,000 pieces an hour,” he says, adding that the addresses are printed with zip-plus-four codes and bar codes to insure the lowest postal rates. “We pay 14¢ to mail a postcard that would otherwise cost 19¢,” he says.

As soon as he books an exposition hall, for which can pay as much as $20,000 a day, Gordon advises area computer vendors of the availability of tables. The vendors are kept up-to-date by a weekly newsletter written and mailed by Gordon from his 1,300- sq.-ft. office in a commercial complex in Kendall Park on Route 27. There, he and three full-time employees, including his wife, Glenda, schedule shows, lay out floor plans, design and place advertisements, invoice vendors, pay bills, hire part-time workers for weekend shows, and deal with an almost constant barrage of telephone calls.

Gordon is now working on an even more efficient way to keep vendors up to speed. “I”m developing a fax broadcast system that will allow me to fax the weekly newsletters directly to the vendors,” he says. “It will be quicker, and it will cost less money.”

In addition to his direct mail notices to customers and his constant contact with vendors, Gordon also advertises heavily to attract new business. “We do things such as billboards, radio, cable-TV, newspapers and computer bulletin boards,” he says, adding that it is difficult to measure which form of advertising yields the best results. What he has been able to determine, however, is that different kinds of advertising have different effects depending on locale.

In the Boston area, for example, billboard and radio advertising are ineffective. In Central New Jersey, however, billboard advertising works very well, he says, attributing that to the abundance of highways and traffic on the state”s roads. In addition, radio advertising, particularly on New Jersey 101.5 FM, is very effective. “I”ll spend $10,000 on that station for one show, and it”s worth it,” he says. “I”ll spend the same $10,000 in Boston and get an incredibly poor response.”

In fact, advertising is KGP Productions” single biggest expense. “We spend about $1 million a year on advertising,” Gordon says. That includes approximately $200,000 the company spends on postage.

Perhaps the key element in KGP”s success is the age-old magic of putting anxious and willing buyers and sellers in close proximity to one another and then standing back to watch the sparks fly. “You go into one of these shows and you”re overwhelmed when you can look 1,000 feet in each direction and see vendors selling and tables filled with products,” he says. “There”s a lot of hustle-bustle–it”s busy, it”s crowded –and then some kind of psyche takes over that makes people go nuts and start buying.” u