By Chuck Bailey, Ethics Council Chair

Each year, the International Association of Movers (IAM) stages the industry’s largest business development and networking event. Instead of visiting all of your partners face-to-face at their offices or trying expand your business through in-person visits, IAM brings the world together in one place to make connecting with your partners and growing your network as efficient as possible. Roughly 2,000 of our industry colleagues pay for this privilege annually.

For many years though, it has been fairly common to see IAM Members “attend” the event without registering by setting up in the bar or camping out in suites. Perhaps more alarmingly, the use of “badge-swapping” has increased as well. Badge-swapping is where one person will purchase a full registration or exhibitor-only pass to the IAM Annual Meeting & Expo and share it with another person who did not purchase a badge in order to give that person access to the conference and expo.

To express it more clearly, some of your fellow members are taking advantage of people like us who pay our hard-earned money to fully register properly for the conference.

The IAM Annual Meeting & Expo exists as a forum for all of us to meet, network, learn, and see friends. If some continue to “attend without registering,” or “badge-swap,” everyone must realize that these individuals may make the meeting more expensive for all of the people who are playing by the rules.

I want to challenge my fellow members to recognize the importance of the IAM Annual Meeting to their business and register in order to support this valuable event. Not only will you have unfettered access to all IAM events and registrants, you will also learn more about the big trends and new products revolutionizing our business. Most importantly, I want to highlight the ethics of benefiting from investments other have made. If you are a fully-paid registrant for the IAM Annual Meeting, please ask those who are “registering without attending” or “badge-swapping” why they are taking advantage of the investment you have made and how they can justify this behavior.

While we all compete to provide the best service at the lowest price possible to our client, there are some areas where cooperation makes sense. Supporting IAM and its Annual Meeting is one such place. If you are going to be in Las Vegas this year, register for the conference and ensure that this tremendous business development and networking event remains viable and benefits from your full participation.