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Conference Trials and Tribulations
April 14, 2010 5:37 PM

As some of you may have already heard Lee Mikles, President and CEO of FutureFuel, suffered with some health complications last week. We are very relieved to learn that he will make a full recovery. The reason I am bringing up such personal information is because Lee was schedule to be the keynote speaker at the upcoming Informex Specialty Chemical Conference we are hosting in Houston, TX.

Of course, I feel incredibly sympathetic for such a terrible thing to happen to Lee, but I also began to worry for my own reasons. We went from having a fully pulled together conference to missing one of the central components overnight. I immediately had to pull the brochure mailing that was about to go out with Lee’s name, and just let it sit until we could figure something out. Many of the marketing plans for the conference went from an excited buzz to a silent halt.
 
The next morning the team and I all got on the phones and started calling people we knew. We thought of several people to speak, but in such a short time frame the responses tend to be “sorry, I’m already booked for that day” or “if you’d only told me sooner…” I even ended up interrupting Tony Bastock in the middle of buying a new kitchen!
 
It was a pretty quiet Friday in the office last week when Caitlin Devlin, our content specialist, got a phone call from David Dusl @ ICIS magazine. David said that he had heard what happened and that he had a recommendation that he thought would be just perfect for the Houston market, Wheeler Crawford.
 
Caitlin had contacted Stephen Burns and Al Greenwood from ICIS to see if they had any recommendations of people to ask to keynote, and they had spoken to David who ended up calling Caitlin about Wheeler. (Got that telephone chain straight?) Wheeler Crawford has been in specialty chemicals for about 40 years. He began his career with Texaco Chemical Company and stayed with them when they were acquired by Huntsman. Currently he works as a consultant and professor of chemistry. There are very few people who are more entrenched and knowledgeable about the Houston area chemical market than Wheeler Crawford. He was the perfect candidate to fill our keynote slot.
 
Both Caitlin and I were just blown away by the helpfulness of the ICIS team. For multiple people to go out of their way to help us out was so moving. There aren’t too many industries where people would be so ready to lend a hand.
 
That being said, if you have keynote ideas for any upcoming Informex events, whether for Latin America, Charlotte 2011, etc – please let me know. We are always on the lookout for a good speaker!
 
Thank you for reading!
 
JJ
By Expo Admin
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