Last weekend, both members of the firm traveled to Washington, D.C. for the Southeastern Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition Conference. It was a much larger event than I’d anticipated, perhaps 500 people or more in attendance across the two days. This was our third conference of the year so far, and our most targeted and important. Events like this one are the only times when we ever get to see our clients and referral partners in person. They are a chance to demonstrate our expertise in front of a large number of people. They are also completely exhausting for me. That is not the case for my business partner, but I write the newsletter.

Through our sponsorship, we were the only attorneys who were part of a substantive panel discussion during the event. Other attorneys acted as moderators, but unexpectedly our firm received top billing out of the law firms on the sponsor placard. I assume that we paid more for that privilege, but we wanted to present and that’s what we were able to do. There was probably a time when I would have been rather nervous sitting on a stage in front of an audience of hundreds of people, but that wasn’t the case on Saturday. My strongest recollection was a dislike for how my voice sounded through the sound system in the auditorium, a result of sounding different to myself than to anyone else and something that isn’t unique to me. Legal diligence is hardly the most exciting topic, but I tried to keep things light by playing off college basketball preferences during the introductions since there were MBA students from four main schools at the conference.

By the time the closing reception started on Saturday in the late afternoon, I was finished. During almost every conversation I had during the weekend, I was pouring out energy and answers to whomever I spoke. It was little use for me to try to mingle with people by the end, so I spent most of the hour and a half sitting on a bench inside with a lite version of a thousand yard stare. I still had multiple people come up to me to talk about either the information I’d discussed during the diligence panel or about how they’d enjoyed our ongoing webinar series we’re doing around legal issues in small business M&A. I had only positive interactions the whole weekend, but it was not a weekend filled with rest.