Trade show season is back, and with it comes the annual question every salon owner asks before booking a flight or loading up the van: Is this worth my time?

It’s a fair question. Attending an event requires a big commitment of your time and your money. But the right show, attended with the right mindset, can do more for a salon’s bottom line in three days than months of trial and error on its own. The trick is knowing what to look for, and what to actually do once you’re there.

That’s a lesson the indoor tanning industry learned, in large part, from Smart Tan itself.

How Smart Tan Built the Standard

Long before “networking” was a buzzword on a conference brochure, Smart Tan was building events around a simple idea: salon owners learn best from other salon owners, and the relationships built in a hotel ballroom or a hallway between sessions are often worth more than anything printed in a course manual. Since launching its first convention in Orlando in September 1996, Smart Tan built what became, for a generation, the largest and most dynamic gathering point in the history of the professional indoor tanning industry — events that didn’t just sell booth space, but actively shaped how the entire market trained staff, evaluated equipment, and grew their businesses.

The formula wasn’t complicated, but it was deliberate. Smart Tan events combined real, substantive education — delivered not by outside consultants with generic slide decks, but by salon operators who had actually solved the problems in front of them — with structured opportunities for owners to connect with peers running similar businesses in different, non-competing markets. Add in a vetted floor of equipment and product vendors, built-in time for owners to treat the trip as a legitimate business expense and a much-needed break, and a culture that celebrated and rewarded the staff members who made salons run, and you had an event that did far more than fill a few days on the calendar. It helped define what a healthy, professional tanning business actually looked like.

Smart Tan CEO Matt Russell, who has been immersed in the tanning industry since 1980, says that peer-to-peer exposure was always the point.

“One of the key reasons salons became more successful over the years was the networking that was created at the events. Smart Tan would vet out salons who were successful in specific areas and work with them to help produce our educational classes,” Russell says. “I’d look at what made them unique, which business practices they excelled at, and share that information with the salons who attended. One person might be really good at leasing. Somebody else was really good at sales, and another might be really good at something else. You can bring in so much knowledge that way.”

That principle — that a roomful of operators almost always knows more collectively than any single speaker on a stage — became the backbone of how Smart Tan approached every event it built. And Russell argues it’s still the single biggest reason for a salon owner to get on a plane or in a car and show up.

“Our businesses are primarily local,” he says. “How many business owners are you meeting, or visiting, or talking to? Finding small, like-minded business owners that are similar in size — whether you’re a franchisee or an independent owner — talking to anyone playing the same game, that’s where the real value is.”

Click here to read the entire article in the latest issue of Smart Tan Magazine online.