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An Affair To Remember
How John Golicz and Unicomm set a new standard for unforgettable trade shows

 

Business New Haven 
February 21, 2005
Lisa Micali  
John Golicz will be the first to tell you it's not about branding his company, but about developing unique and individual brands for its products.

Golicz is not aiming for instant brand recognition, and neither does he particularly care if you remember him or his troupe of talented and energetic producers. What's important to him is that lots of people show up at his events, and that the event becomes the hottest marketplace in a specific industry to do business. His ambition, no less, is to unify industries and grow your business (and his, too).

A "serial entrepreneur" with four successful technology companies under his belt, Golicz, managing partner and CEO of Milford-based Unicomm, LLC, knows a thing or two about finding opportunities in disparate markets. A longtime veteran of the meetings, incentives and trade show industry, the 42-year-old Golicz admits that once you get involved in the trade show business, it kind of gets in your blood and is hard to shake off.

His latest venture, Unicomm, is what he calls a "tradeshow mentoring company." Fundamentally, it's a traveling tradeshow and/or conference that brings often fragmented components of an industry under one roof to establish a temporary marketplace.

Golicz and his staff of 28 are fond of catchy phrases and expressions such as "Life lives you, but when you go on vacation, it's your chance to live life" that neatly define their market as well as their product. "It's sales and marketing at its purest," he says of his industry. It could equally well be described as the fine art of bringing buyers and sellers together.

"Our goal is to identify nascent and underserved markets, launch and incubate new shows and grow them," he says. "Trade shows are natural marketplaces in which to conduct business. Our mission is to energize an industry by providing the most effective exhibition vehicle for that industry."

Golicz started his career with a high-technology business. "We did the engineering, manufacturing and distribution, the whole nine yards, soups to nuts" before selling it in the early 1990s.

He remained in the technology field, eventually funding an online company, b-there.com, that provided integrated software solutions to the meeting, convention and trade show industries. After he sold that business to Advanstar, he developed the first major professional Internet-focused trade show in the USA, Internet and Electronic Commerce, in the early 1990s. That's how he got hooked in the trade-show biz.

He later sold that, too, and then took some time off to travel. But the Madison resident says that within a year he became too restless to remain idle. It was time to move onto his next adventure - but what?

"The software business is a very capital-intensive business," he explains. "What I liked about trade shows is that it is pure sales and marketing. There aren't developmental issues or the people problems."

After researching several ideas, he formerly launched Unicomm in January 2001. Golicz and his team immediately found they enjoyed coming up with fresh concepts and creating (or corralling) a marketplace around them. An avid scuba diver, yachtsman, fisherman and golfer, he noticed a growing market for adventure travel, a booming industry pulling in some $115 billion a year and growing around 15 percent per year.

"The Internet hit the tourism industry hard in the 1990s," Golicz explains. "It reduced travel agents' ranks by up to 40 percent. Then September 11th occurred and [travel] really took a nosedive. Airlines cut back. It wasn't fun to travel anymore. Since September 11th," he adds, "people use time more wisely. When they go on vacation, they want an experience that's fun."

"Life is too short for a bad vacation," says Golicz. "You want to be immersed in a great activity, a location or a culture. It's something you tend to remember for a lifetime." That's how the idea for the adventure travel exposition emerged.

Initially, Golicz notes, there wasn't an established marketplace for this kind of travel. A strong believer in establishing partnerships with top industry players, he and his team started to develop key relationships with powerhouses like National Geographic Adventure and other heavyweights in the adventure travel industry.

To reach their target audience, they hooked up with major media players from print publications to television for a big pre-show media blitz. In less than two years, their Adventures in Travel Expo event grew from a humble production into being the No. 1 adventure travel exposition in North America - with more than 33,000 in attendance at the show's second year this January at the Jacob K. Javitz Convention Center in Manhattan. (The inaugural event in 2004, the show drew more than 25,000.)

Now in six cities (Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and New York), the show has become the must-attend event for the adventure travel industry. Boasts producer and executive director Jim Cohen on the show's coup: "It's all about execution. The people behind the scenes need to believe in what they're doing. We have the best and the brightest people in the business."

Following on the heels of Adventures in Travel Expo's success, Unicomm launched a Luxury & Travel Expo also at New York's Javits Center last month. The show was "co-located" with the Adventures expo, and both are the industry's only hybrid trade and consumer show serving both travel enthusiasts, business travelers and industry professionals.

"More and more people today are choosing this type of travel," explains Golicz. "And these expos provide a unique opportunity to assemble everyone under one roof."

At the moment Unicomm runs and brands several distinctive events: Adventure Travel, Luxury Travel & Lifestyle, Human Resource World, Research & Development Events (recently sold to the Society of Mechanical Engineers) and Corporate Governing & Solutions. A graduate of the University of Connecticut (and an avid Huskies basketball fan), Golicz says he and his employees are obsessively driven by sales and marketing.

"We have a lot of fun, though," he allows. "I tell people who we're trying to hire, 'I promise one thing: 'You'll laugh every day - even though we work hard around here.'"