Events

The 53rd Annual CIADA convention was held in Savannah, GA this year and the theme was “Bookies and Bootleggers”. In years past, this convention has been held in Myrtle Beach, SC so Savannah was a nice change of scenery for those in attendance.

We received many complements on our booth set up this year. We upgraded all the way around by purchasing two booth spaces as well as a great display. We set up our new display across the back of our two booth spaces, while a lap top ran with our program highlights in the front center. We had tables on either side of this with our give away items and two small tables at either end to provide an area for one-on-one personal dealer training. This one-on-one demo area worked out great, as Joe was able to take time with individual dealers and run them through our AMAC Express, which resulted in several new leads as well as generating some excitement from previous dealers

In an effort to get our name in front of the dealers throughout the event we came up with the idea of a raffle for $1,000 visa card with all the proceeds going to the CIADA College Fund. Jim Edwards, Executive Director of the CIADA, was excited to assist us by announcing several times during the convention that AMAC had tickets for sale to benefit the CIADA College Fund. This got us some great exposure and sent lots of dealers to our booth to purchase tickets as well as talk about who we are! We were able to raise over $1,500 for the College Fund! This was the best advertising money that Ace has ever spent! It was coincidental that in 2009 the CIADA had planned on adding a third college scholarship, but were not sure where they were going to get the funds for it, so with our donation and Dave Bafumo’s donation (he won a raffle and gave all the money back to CIADA for the scholarship fund) that third scholarship has now been taken care of!

We gave away Ace golf towels and Ace golf shirts at the Golf Tournament on Saturday. Russ participated in the Tournament and was a member of the team that won! Russ and his teammates were acknowledged at the awards banquet on Saturday night. They won a cash prize, as well as, a great golf bag cover that has the CIADA logo embroidered on it.

We would also like to thank James Smith, Director of Collections, for the excellent t-shirts that we gave away during the event. James not only designed the shirts but also screen printed them for us. They were so great that we hung them up on the sides of the booth for decoration. Numerous dealers stopped to ask if they could get one of our great shirts! We had so many requests that we actually ran out of them! It was exciting to see all the people over the next couple of days wearing our t-shirts! This allowed our company name to be seen throughout the weekend. We will be doing t-shirts again next year as they were a big hit.

We all know AMAC is growing and we were able to display our growth at the CIADA convention. We were able to move to the next step by donating to the college fund and working the event to get to know our dealers better and show we are a key player and a respectable secondary financial source.

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