As the 2016 NAAA Convention and National Remarketing Conference comes to fruition, I would like to reflect on some historical perspectives regarding industry conferences.

Over the past 25 years, our conferences proliferated in the early years — NAAA National, NAAA Zone, CARS, NRC, IARA, NIADA, NADA and many other alphabet soup designations.

Of course, the issue became too much traveling, costs and duplication of content, and the industry began to take a tougher stance on the value proposition of each event.

I remember when I was NAAA president, that when I adjusted the association's conference to end with the annual president's event on Friday instead of Saturday — to accommodate members who wanted to be home for personal and religious reasons — I was told that I had changed history and not in a good way.

Now, it completes that event on Thursday night, to allow attendees to be home by Friday to be with their families — and that, again, is a good thing.

We pushed for consolidation as a positive agenda, watching events like CAR and IARA successfully co-exist and reduce costs and pick venues that were centrally located to their attendees.

Finally, after a decade, we have CARS/IARA/NAAA in the first quarter and NRC/NAAA in the last quarter, bringing all aspects of the industry together.

Did we leave a piece out of the equation when we consolidated? I think we did when we simultaneously reduced the number of events and reduced the number of attendees.

Clearly, that decision was made by all the auctions that are members and our partners in the industry, but I think we lost a lot in the transition with regard to intra-company and interpersonal relationships.

I truly believe that at least once a year, that all auction general managers — both chain and independent — and their significant others should convene at the fall event and start developing those old relationships that we had with each other in the past.

I think the next generation of managers will be denied the class of the final event and the camaraderie driven so seamlessly in the Mike Richardson and Darryl Ceccoli days.

That might sound old school, but not everything old school is a bad thing.

Once again, just one man's opinion, and my thanks to Frank Hackett and Bill Zadeits for making this event the success we all knew it could be.