What should people know about Wyndham Jade?
We do corporate travel; we do meetings, incentives and events; and then we have a tradeshow and convention business. Primarily, we focus on housing, registration and lead retrieval, more of transactional than base businesses. When I joined Wyndham Jade, we were only in corporate travel and incentives. I started hearing more and more about the needs of the traditional tradeshow industry because one of our original accounts was the Dallas Market Center. Q: Dallas Market Center was your first tradeshow-related client? When was that? A: That was in 1994 and (with) no automation. Q: How long did that last? A: Well, I looked around and thought, “Oh, my goodness, they’re doing thousands of transactions with virtually no automation.” We found a guy who said he could build it in his garage. It would cost $50,000 and take about six months. Two years down the road and $3.5 million later, we had an automation system. Q: But even then, you still only had the one client? A: Right. The most surprisin
