A Conference Story: Broker Fair vs. deBanked CONNECT

Before Broker Fair was ever decided upon as a conference name it had been put up on a whiteboard next to another possibility, Broker Fest. This was in mid-2017 when there was no guarantee that we’d ever get the chance to do more than one conference. Fair was ultimately chosen over Fest because it sounded more professional, like a job fair. Fest sounded like Spring Break and not the image I wanted. We also picked a date for this Broker Fair—May 14, 2018—and a venue. We chose to have it in New York City because the overwhelming majority of deBanked readers were located in the New York Tri-State area. The thought process was that it would be just a walk, drive, or train away for most attendees and they would not need to concern themselves with the cost of flights or hotels.

Although this is not widely known, the biggest problem we immediately faced was that we had been front-run. A competitor, someone from outside the industry, tried to strike first, and announced a conference custom-tailored to our audience for January 2018 in New York City, five months before ours. Having nearly a year to market and plan our first ever conference suddenly became a huge liability. As our advertisers got called and solicited to sponsor that instead of Broker Fair, we had been advised that we had already lost the war before ever even firing a shot.

But having been a regular on the conference circuit myself, I couldn’t help but think that New York City was a terrible place to invite people to in January. That got us thinking about a counter-offensive. Our data indicated that after New York, the Miami area contained the next highest concentration of deBanked readers. After that was Southern California. And after that was Toronto, Canada. By October 2017, we came up with a concept to do something smaller than a conference, a networking event focused simply on connections that didn’t necessarily have to be broker-branded. We called it deBanked CONNECT MIAMI. I believed that executing something like that would also build confidence in the market that we could attract a big crowd, a proof-of-concept so to speak for anyone unsure if deBanked’s online audience would convert to an in-person one. And so we rented out a rooftop bar in South Beach and scheduled the first deBanked CONNECT MIAMI to take place January 2018 (a good time to be in Florida), the same month as that other conference in New York. Our networking event was a smashing success, so much so that we got front-run AGAIN. Since our event was known to be on the rooftop, yet another newly announced rival rented out the bar on the ground floor to try and divert people away from ours to theirs. Thankfully it didn’t work. Meanwhile, our competitor in New York never had a second conference.

With the path seemingly cleared for Broker Fair, we apparently then irked the ire of Kris Roglieri, the head of NACLB, by saying that our conference would be “the largest gathering of merchant cash advance and business loan brokers in the country.” Although our audience and theirs did not overlap at the time, their email marketing shifted to throwing shade at us for no reason. It seemed, however, that it inadvertently helped us, because by March 30, 2018 we ran into another problem I had not imagined, we were already sold out. Sold out in that if the venue found out how many tickets we had sold versus how many they were physically allowed to have in the space, we were going to get in very big trouble sold out. This was 45 days before the conference!

Being sold out only increased the hype and I didn’t know what to do. Broker conferences didn’t sell out. That wasn’t a thing. Now it had legitimately happened. People noticed and the world began to change. Within two weeks, the National Association of Equipment Leasing Brokers changed its named to the American Association of Commercial Finance Brokers. They said the time had come to be more inclusive of all commercial finance brokers. Others would eventually follow suit.

After we managed to pull off Broker Fair 2018, with a lot of hiccups along the way, we decided that we’d continue to do smaller networking events, including Miami. They’d be deBanked CONNECT MIAMI, deBanked CONNECT San Diego, and deBanked CONNECT Toronto. We decided to add content and speakers to the mix as well. deBanked CONNECT San Diego 2018 attracted 344 people while deBanked CONNECT MIAMI 2019 brought in 461, a number that shocked us because we had envisioned it as something small and the turnout was in fact very large. For a long time we underestimated registrations and we constantly had to contend with spaces that were too small and sold out signs on our website.

deBanked CONNECT MIAMI 2019 was also the first time we heard people refer to it as Broker Fair Miami. This I guess made sense, because that is what it was fast becoming, but to have every event mimic the New York format with a full day of speakers and pre-show party the night before seemed daunting so I hesitated to change the name of deBanked CONNECT MIAMI to Broker Fair Miami when the formats were slightly different. But we kept hearing it. Americans showing up to deBanked CONNECT Toronto said that they were excited to be at Broker Fair Canada. deBanked San Diego? it got referred to as Broker Fair San Diego.

The most striking moment of them all, however, happened after we moved all of our cryptocurrency content off into another brand, one we called deCashed instead of deBanked. deBanked’s wide variety of content had grown an entire following outside of just small business finance and resulted in the experiment of an entirely unrelated networking event in May 2022 called by the same name, deCashed. Although it had a large turnout from the crypto industry, and it was only about crypto, dozens of people from the MCA space assumed it was Broker Fair Bitcoin, with some attendees flying in from as far as Europe, Canada, and California to say they were excited to attend their first Broker Fair.

Alas, the only event truly called Broker Fair these days remains to be the annual show in New York City (next one is June 1, 2026). deBanked CONNECT MIAMI has now become the biggest of the year, however, surpassing every other event. deBanked CONNECT MIAMI is projected to have more than 1,000 attendees this week. Meanwhile, deBanked CONNECT Toronto got nixed due to Covid and deBanked CONNECT San Diego was replaced by B2B Finance Expo in Las Vegas. The latter one now being a collaboration with a major trade association.

Today, there’s a lot of new events popping up with the word Broker in the name. I’m not surprised. It’s a very important profession. And if you feel the urge to label deBanked CONNECT MIAMI as Broker Fair Miami, you’ll be forgiven. It just means that back in 2017 we did a really good job in picking a name that would stick. On the other hand, perhaps we goofed. Inside of deBanked CONNECT MIAMI is a little taste of Spring Break, something more sensational than a fair. If only there were a word for what it could have been…

See you there.

Sean Murray is the President and Chief Editor of deBanked and the founder of the Broker Fair Conference. Connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on twitter. You can view all future deBanked events here.