A little more about the author below

From John Curry, September 12, 2010

The Dispatch letter below did not include the business link to the author. Here it is.........

http://www.davecaperton.com/clientcomments.php

From John Curry, September 12, 2010
Subject: Author backs boards' travel decisions

Business Travel Is Often a Savvy Investment

I read with dismay the Wednesday Dispatch front-page story “Pension officials traveled in style,” citing travel expenses incurred by officials of Ohio’s five embattled public-pension funds, but not because I was outraged by the money spent to send a handful of individuals to workshops and industry conclaves.

I was, instead, disgusted with The Dispatch’s portrayal of those costs as somehow out of line or even newsworthy.

The Geraldo-esque exposé succeeded in little more than proving that conferences are often held at nice hotels that charge a lot for food.

Apart from dining and lodging costs associated with the conference venue and fixed conference fees, the writer seemed hard-pressed to find any evidence of improper spending.

Indeed, five paragraphs into the breathless report that employed sneering word choices, including jetted and hobnob, over less-loaded verbs such as flew and meet, the writer slipped in a grudging concession that “for every $41 steak billed to a retirement system — and there were few of those — there were a dozen hamburgers, salads and pizzas at airport and hotel cafes.”

So why wasn’t the headline, “Most public-pension travelers eat cheaply”?

As a professional conference keynote speaker, I open and close these types of meetings for all kinds of industries, and I can verify that the conference hotels are often very nice places, but that doesn’t mean that the attendees are on vacation. These conferences are filled from morning to night with full schedules of industry leaders and panels and breakout sessions that bring a lot of people up to speed on trends and practices, in the span of a few days.

They also provide opportunities for attendees to make invaluable contacts and to compare notes with other professionals facing similar challenges, and those connections often lead to innovative problem-solving that is an enormous return on investment.

A recent Oxford Economics USA study concluded that U.S. businesses reaped an average of $12.50 of incremental value for every dollar of cost in business travel and realized an average of $3.80 in profit (www.meetingsmeanbusiness.com/value-meetingsness.com/value-meetings).

The cost of travel may seem high, but citing costs alone is meaningless unless the value received is also explored.

I recently jetted to Orlando to hobnob with other speakers for a day at the National Speakers Association’s annual conference. I spent several hundred dollars on travel and another several hundred to attend just one conference day.

With conference business down across the country, professional speakers are really feeling the pinch, and so it was a tough choice to spend that money, but the information, ideas and contacts I made in that one day provided more enlightenment, motivation and value than I could have gotten in any other way. It was one of the wisest investments I’ve ever made in my own business. Why would The Dispatch advocate for anything less for those responsible for the health of our public-pension systems?

DAVE CAPERTON
Columbus