This past Saturday we held our eight annual SQLSaturday. I’ll write some notes about the event and post today or tomorrow. The final registration count after marking 20-30 people as cancelled (things got hectic, was hard to track) was 640 (vs 344 last year) and our best effort on attendance count is 450 (and was slightly higher than that because we ended up with some students dual registered). Our Student to IT Pro Seminar had about 70 attendees (and some of those were dual registered). We had more people pay for lunch than registered last year. We’ll try to get the final drop percentage refined, but it looks like the expected 30% or so. I surpassed both my goals for this year, 450 attendees against the goal of 350, and 640+ registered against the goal of 500. Definitely satisfying to hit the goals after months of work.

I still have some work to do that I’m planning to have wrapped up by Oct 17th:

• Send out the remaining sponsor email blasts
• Related to the event, market the upcoming joint oPASS/MagicPASS meeting starring (featuring hardly seems to be the right word) my friend Mark Souza
• Write up a core set of lessons learned
• Write up a plan that can be repeated next year (and by other events)

It’s been a long road and I’m definitely tired. Not unexpected, but a reminder that I need to find ways to make it less intense next year. We haven’t met yet to discuss roles for next year, but I’m leaning towards a different role and a new challenge while I coach whoever takes on marketing. It’ll be interesting setting a growth goal for next year, I know I’ll want to think hard about whether 20% is doable after the kind of growth we had this year!