Five Bump-In Mistakes We See Exhibitors Make Over and Over

We're usually the first crew on the floor at any given show, and by mid-afternoon on bump-in day we've walked past every other stand and seen the same five problems on repeat. None of them are dramatic, but any one of them can turn an otherwise good show day into three hours of sweating under fluorescent lights with a tool kit that doesn't have the right bit. Here's what keeps going wrong and what we do about it. First is arriving without a stand plan that matches reality. Exhibitors often get a pretty render from their designer and assume that's the plan. It isn't. A render is a picture. The build plan is the document that shows every panel, its number, where it attaches and in what order. Every Bonustrellis stand leaves the workshop with a numbered crate diagram and a punch list. Without that, four people stand around a pile of aluminium waiting for someone to guess which way the first frame goes. Second mistake is power. Nobody ever orders enough circuits. A booth with a coffee machine, three screens and a light rig can easily draw more than the organiser's standard single 10-amp supply allows, and once the venue's electrical team has closed off their service room you're stuck running extensions across an aisle, which is both illegal and a trip hazard. We spec circuits against the actual appliance list, not against a rough guess. Third is printing panels too close to the show. Printers say five days. They mean five days if nothing goes wrong and nobody else has a deadline the same week. We build in ten days buffer and it's saved us four times in two years. The fourth mistake is assuming the venue will have an Allen key. They won't, or they'll have one that's the wrong size and it's on the other side of the hall. Every case we ship has a full tool roll taped inside the lid, and we photograph it on the bench before the case closes. The fifth one is subtler. Exhibitors forget that bump-out time is often shorter than bump-in. You might get eight hours to set up and three hours to tear down, and if you've screwed panels to a frame with thirty bolts each, that's a problem. Design for dismantling as fast as you built it. We use cam locks and quarter-turn fasteners on any panel that has to come off in the heat of a bump-out. It's a cheap addition, and it means our clients are usually in the car park with a coffee while everyone else is still up a ladder.