PES Step Away from the Royal Cornwall Show

In something of a shock announcement Exeter based PES (Plant & Engineering Services) have announced that this year will be their last appearance at the Royal Cornwall Show.

In its prime location on one of the major routes through the showground, the PES stand has been a focal point for visits to the Royal Cornwall Show for the past 20 years. It’s a stand that I have always made a point of visiting to meet up with the team, and to check out the machines from the likes of Volvo, Thwaites, Epiroc and Augertorque. In this post I am adding some images from the PES stand over the years.

However, people’s attitudes to the big shows are definitely changing, the costs involved are substantial, moving equipment to a plot of grass that you have to pay for, accommodation costs for staff, the cost of providing the obligatory hats, pens and other such freebies that visitors go on a mission to collect just doesn’t make viable business sense. Personally, I think we will start to see a rise in events hosted at dealers yard's for instance, Molson's hugely succesfull event that they hosted last year. The concept has worked very well for over 20 years in Finland with the Mansen Mörinät event that I attend on a regular basis. 

This is the gist of the announcement from the PES website….

The show was always different from all the other county shows which have turned into a family day out kind of show. The Royal Cornwall was always a ‘mini construction equipment show’ within a county show with most construction equipment dealers in the south west attending but post-Covid we have noticed a decline in the effectiveness and worth of attending.

When we look at the age demographics of people who come on the show stand it tends to be ‘older’ customers, in fact we still get customers who have retired or semi-retired coming for a chat but crucially their sons/daughters who have taken over the business don’t come. Anybody who is under the age of 40 tends to have embraced the digital and social media age and if I reflect on our sales operation, 20 years ago Mike, Laura and Geoff before her used to drive around with car boot’s full of leaflets and were distributors and purveyors of information.

These days manufacturers don’t print leaflets, it’s all on-line and sometimes, because of the wealth of information/websites/forums etc available via the internet, the customers know more about the products than we do!!

With all this in mind it means the effectiveness of parking a few machines on a piece of grass on the outskirts of Wadebridge is questionable. As much as we like the social aspect of meeting everybody, if we are brutally honest with the cost, not just financial but manpower, of moving machinery and everything else down to that piece of grass it can’t really be justified anymore.

We have never kidded ourselves like other dealers do that they’ve sold 50 million mini-diggers on the show stand, we all know the reality is they were all sold beforehand but they announce it at the show to justify their marketing budgets. Let’s face it, nobody comes to the show and thinks ‘bloody hell, I’ve always wanted to buy a new digger and never knew where to buy it from, I’ll buy it here and now on the stand.’

We’ve done our analysis and looked at it from a reverse point of view inasmuch as how many bits of equipment are we not going to sell if we don’t do it.

So, it’s with a degree of sadness that 2024 will be the last year that PES exhibit at the show as we move more to an on-line and digital marketing strategy rather than a ‘park it on the grass’ one. We would like to thank all our past and present customers who have come and visited us on our stand and thank all the staff at the RCS for putting on a brilliant event. It’s nothing they have done that’s making us stop doing it, it’s just times have evolved and moved on.

Come and see us in June at our normal spot for the last time and get all nostalgic and we’ll talk about the ‘good ole days’ at the show. End.

I will be attending the show this year on the Saturday and I will without a doubt be stopping by the PES stand to bid them farewell.