Pictured in his element: Paul Howard, the Managing Director of Nebrak and Chair of AVEX 2013
However you’re involved in it, getting your act together and preparing for a trade show as important as AVEX is a stress magnet.
Whether your job is to handle the logistics, the pick-ups and the ‘drop-offs’; the booking of hotel rooms, the printing of leaflets, the writing of press releases, it doesn’t matter: you can guarantee that your contribution will get more complicated and more frustrating and more nerve shredding than you ever thought possible.
So spare a thought for Paul Howard and his troops at Nebrak. If you’ve had an uphill struggle to make it to AVEX, then this guy and his team have had a mountain to climb.
‘We made twelve of the stands’, Paul told PV when we met up at AVEX. He pointed out the ones within our view. ‘It’s been a massive amount of work. My team and I have lived and breathed AVEX for the past four months.’
Managing that process – liaising between designers and clients, waiting for contributions from third parties; managing customer’s expectations, and so on – must be draining enough; but added to that burden, this time around, was Paul’s Chairmanship of the AVEX committee. It must be a hell of a strain, but here he is, on the stand with his team, looking as fit as a fiddle, brimming with enthusiasm and eager to share how well the show is going for Nebrak.
‘The response to our new coffee tower has been unbelievable’, Paul said. He walks us around the stand and he presents each product as proudly as though he were a sculptor and we were visitors to his gallery.
‘Attention to detail’ just about sums up the Nebrak ethos.
‘Attention to detail’ just about sums up the Nebrak ethos: there are signs that the company’s concentration on ‘detail’ borders on the obsessive, but Paul is an absolutely passionate believer that his range of coffee tower products puts the competition’s to shame.
To prove his point, he demonstrates a feature that allows an engineer to work on a machine without first having to slide it out. Next, a storage area that is positioned at a height within reach of the people who need to reach it. Then, a set of doors that can be partially closed to ‘encase’ a machine… With every detail discussed – and there seems to be an endless list of candidates for Paul’s enthusiasm – its clear that here’s a man who’s proud of what he’s offering and that he’s desperately keen that customers don’t accept anything less.
‘We build them all out of wood, to begin with’, Paul said. ‘People have said that we’re slow to get to the market but that’s because we make sure that the products we produce are ‘fit for purpose’, and some. Hand on heart, I’m not sure that every manufacturer can say that.’
For all the long days and nights of hard work, though, an unexpected reward: when we’d spoken about it before the event, Paul admitted that he thought Siemens was ‘nailed on’ to win the category of ‘Best Ancillary Service To The Industry.
But the winner was… Nebrak.
‘To have overcome the challenge of a wonderful firm like Siemens is amazing, it really is’, Paul said. ‘I’m really, really pleased for every member of our team. We’ve all been though it recently, but it’s great to be appreciated and we’re all very, very pleased.’
At least now, with AVEX done and dusted, maybe Paul can take a little time out to kick back and relax. We wonder if he’s a fan of mountain climbing?
IR-Y
