It's 8 a.m. at the Los Angeles Convention Center, and Fabien Hyon is on an adrenaline high. He has been up since 5:30 getting ready for opening day. Standing in front of the $6,000, 20-by-30-foot black steel booth he built himself, the 25-year-old, Paris-born entrepreneur nervously scans the vast exhibition hall -- row upon row of hungry entrepreneurs ready to compete with him for business. He jockeyed hard for this location. It's close to the large, well-appointed booths of the industry leaders he hopes will strike a deal with his 1 1/2-year-old San Francisco startup, Abvent Inc., a maker of architectural design software.

Hyon rallies his little sales army -- seven staffers even younger than he is, all dressed in dark pants and button-down beige-and-brown shirts emblazoned with the company's logo. "We need lots of energy from everybody. You've all got to be on your toes," he says. They can all see the boss is tense. As he unpacks the boxes of black company T-shirts and CD-ROM samples for giveaways, he worries that he'll never recoup the $55,000 he has sunk into this show.

Just a few aisles away, Jas Dhillon is also preparing for the 10 a.m. floor opening. The only difference is, he's flanked by 15 staff members and $80,000 worth of wooden faux-Roman columns and built-in demo screens all displaying the new logo of his Web-based software company, Blueline Online Inc., founded in 1997. With a lightning-quick startup, the 51-employee company has recently secured financing to fuel its exhibition budget and the launch of its hot new Internet supply-chain management system software, ProjectNet 3.0.

Welcome to A/E/C SYSTEMS '99, the Super Bowl of trade shows for technology companies serving the architecture, engineering, and construction industries. Like the other 347 exhibitors who are camped out for three days to pitch business to 12,000 Information Technology professionals, Hyon and Dhillon need to see and be seen if they want to be taken seriously. For three days, they will pitch their products, schmooze prospective customers, and pass out free goodies. If they're lucky, they'll get some serious sales leads, and if they're really lucky, they'll close some deals on the spot.

While Hyon is a relative newcomer (he was all but invisible in his first, shared booth last year), Dhillon knows the routine well. In fact, he so hated trade shows, he sat most of them out last year. But Blueline's absence provoked a competitor's gossip that the company was in trouble. This year, Dhillon, who emigrated 19 years ago from India's Punjab state, is back with a vengeance. Over the next three days, Blueline will host a press conference, sponsor four educational sessions, and serve on two industry panels. Dhillon has invested close to $250,000 in this show, in the hopes of snaring $3 million in new business over the next year. "You've got to do it right or you can use your money better in other ways," he cautions.

As a rule, small companies have to work harder to compete with the giants, who have far greater resources and more staffers to do the niggling work of trade-show publicity, preparation, setup, and scheduling. Their sales forces fly in for the first show day, fresh and ready to make deals. "We have to be fresh and ready to go, too," Hyon says, "even though we've done 10 times more work behind the scenes than they have."

Across the aisle from Abvent, a performance artist shrouded in a bedsheet undulates to New Age music on a stage sponsored by one of the big exhibitors. He morphs from a fetal position to an upright stance with arms and legs outstretched. Curious passers-by pause to figure out what on earth is going on. Hyon couldn't afford any such glitz. His entire budget went for promotion, travel, space rental, hotel, and marketing materials.

At 11 a.m., Hyon gets a nibble: A couple of execs drop by from one of the companies he hopes will "hot bundle," or co-package, his software with their own computer-aided design software. They want to meet him for a drink later -- the same execs who ignored him last year.

Meanwhile, over at Blueline's booth, crowds of white-shirted engineers stand three deep to watch a slick videotape demo. "We spent $10,000 on the self-running introductory screen alone," says Bill Allison, Blueline's vice-president for operations and administration. Dhillon winced at the cost. But so far, it's paying off. The project director of Universal Studios' hot new 3-D thrill ride, Terminator 2, watched the ProjectNet demo and wants to discuss new construction projects. This is one of the best trade-show leads Blueline has gotten since the company was hired in 1997 to manage construction of the $2.1 billion Venetian Hotel, Casino & Convention Center in Las Vegas. Dhillon grins widely at the thought of this potential windfall.

Several weeks later, Hyon and Dhillon can just begin to assess their trade-show experience. Dhillon can see the gamble clearly paid off this time. He figures he got 1,000 qualified sales leads, at about a quarter of the typical $8,500 it costs him to drum up a sales lead outside of a show environment. Even better, Dhillon signed up 100 new projects at the show itself, bringing in $2.5 million to $3 million -- right on target. Dhillon plans to do half a dozen shows this year, maybe eight next year. As for Terminator2, Dhillon has exchanged more information with the representative from Universal and expects to discuss specifics in the next few weeks. Deals like this can take months to nurse along, Dhillon knows.

Hyon didn't fare nearly as well. Direct sales at the show, and follow-ups on 450 leads in the month after the show, brought his company about $45,000 -- still leaving him $10,000 in the red. And those promising meetings with potential partners? Not a single company signed on with Art*lantis, Abvent's software. But the advice he received was invaluable. His main problem, those prospective customers told him, was that his product wasn't commercially viable. So Hyon, who acknowledges that a fancier booth wouldn't have helped, is going back to the drawing board and plans to assign four or five developers to the project.

Is he ready to give up on trade shows? Not a chance. He's already making plans for A/E/C 2000.

Get more tips on successful trade shows. Click Online Extras at smallbiz.businessweek.com.

Second in a two-part series

By Karen E. Klein

This article was originally published in the August 16, 1999 print edition of Business Week's Frontier. To subscribe, please see our subscription policy.

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