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Great hard hitting question [USER=9]@kevinfrye[/USER] and thanks for starting the thread. Maybe it is different in some dealer groups but in mine, my dealer principle does expect a return on the expense of sending me to conferences. Whenever I get back from being out of town we meet to discuss what lessons I learned and strategies we can put in place. I have absolutely no problem with his expectations! I am personally skipping the Fall conferences this year because, quite frankly and hard to admit, I still have not been able to get lessons and strategies learned at the Spring conference put fully into place yet. So for me it sometimes boils down to "is our personal house in order already" before I try to put in any new systems, processes, or products that I could learn about at the next conference. And yes, I do see a lot of overlap in content being shared which plays into my decision to attend also. Besides conference travel, I'm fortunate enough to be on a couple of dealer advisory boards and councils with some of our vendor partners. For these meetings travel expenses are not the problem because they are usually comped, but time away from the store certainly can be. So for me, in order to stay active on those boards I may choose to skip a conference so that I can justify being away from the stores to serve on them. And yes, to your point about self promotion or personal branding, I do believe that some of our dealership peers are walking a fine line between giving back to the industry and personal future gain. Personally, I believe that we can "fly under the radar" and still exhibit leadership by sharing advice/experiences in our industry forums like this one rather than being front and center on a speaker podium at a conference. I could also justify being away a couple of years ago when both Fall conferences ran back to back of each other. Thats a bit harder now, for me anyway, to convince my dealer principle that travel expense to Vegas twice in one month is necessary. Thank you for the conference recap and I appreciate all that you do for our industry.