What Happens When You Take a Chance?

It's 3:30 am in Abu Dhabi, as my eyelids begin to get heavy and the world around me fades into sleep. I have spent the past 20 hours hustling through airports and crammed into too-small airplane seats, a routine I'm all too familiar with running my own international business consulting company. But this trip is different. I have come on behalf of a new client to attend a trade show, in the hopes that we can impress some investors and spread the word about our cooling technology.

I’m attending the World Future Energy Summit (WFES) as my client Enersion was one of 28 companies out of 300 applications that were accepted into CLIX, the part of the WFES that showcases the world’s latest innovative technologies. Thankfully getting accepted meant that we were given a free trip to the WFES to showcase our cooling technology. Exciting, right? For some reason, we still considered possibly not going. What? A free trip to Abu Dhabi to showcase our early stage cooling technology and a chance to meet investors and partners-- what could possibly be holding us back? Was it time? Was it family? Was it money? What excuse could we possibly come up with not to go? Fortunately, after a few days our cloudy minds became clear and we decided to accept the FREE trip-- and I was the one chosen to attend!

I’ve been doing business internationally for 15 years, in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. I have attended many conferences, and they all promise to be the “one you can’t miss”.  Would this hold true for the WFES?

The first day of the Summit arrives, and we are all standing by our booths at the incredibly designed CLIX Center. The first hour goes by and nothing is happening. I think to myself, “oh man here we go, I travelled 20 hours on a plane for nothing”, and then we hear from the conference organizer “everyone get ready -- the Minister is coming”. Two minutes later, I’m giving a presentation at my booth in front of the UAE’s Minister of Climate Change and Environment and a number of his colleagues about our cooling technology.  We connect right away – turning heat into cooling resonated with people.

For the next three days the trend of meeting high profile people from the UAE Government and Private Sector continued... I even got to meet a Crown Prince during the evening reception at the Louvre Abu Dhabi! The Louvre is a reason to travel to Abu Dhabi.  

What was most impressive to me was that the conversations I had were not just sharing pleasantries. These were all action-oriented discussions, all focused on bringing this early stage cooling technology to the UAE in a very collaborative fashion.

Five to ten years ago, people were not as interested in having discussions about ‘new technology’ because of the lack of a corporate resume. However, today I find that 100% transparency about being an early-stage company is fine, but you have to own it and be confident about it. Throughout the Summit, I told people that we are based at the University of Toronto laboratories, which piqued their interest even more and endeared them to us further. This was not a tactic, it was just the truth.

As I arrive back in Ottawa and see my wife and kids and enter back into the ‘real world’, I start to tell the stories from the trip and it feels like I’m making them up. Will this actually turn into anything tangible? Is this for real?

The next day, I write all my thank you emails to various government officials and business people that I met at the Summit. As I close up my laptop I think that maybe I’ll hear back in a week or two. The next morning I wake up to emails from everyone I emailed wanting to set up phone calls. Seems like these guys are for real!

Stay tuned for more about my client’s journey in the Middle East.

www.douglasmcneill.ca, [email protected]