Where we work
In shortWe ship nationwide with freight inside the price. These are the markets with a full research pass on venues, labor rules, load-in and calendar.
We ship race simulators anywhere in the continental United States and staff them. Freight is inside the quoted price, so the city does not change the number.
What the city does change is everything about the build. These are the markets where we have done the work to know how.
The comparison nobody publishes
Every one of these cities has a different answer to the same four questions, and three of the five are in right-to-work states. If you take one thing from this page, take this table.
| City | Can your crew plug in the rig? | Can your crew use wheels? | Who owns the power? | The thing that surprises people |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chicago | Yes. Plugging into the delivered drop, interconnecting and operating is exhibitor work | Yes. Your own non-motorised hand trucks and dollies are allowed | Electricians run the drop, you plug into it | An exhibitor employee needs six or more months of full-time tenure, so freelance day hires do not qualify |
| Dallas | No. Only electricians may plug it in, even with cords you supplied | No. Hand-carry only, and no hand carts or dollies | Up to 100 amp at any floor pocket. Outside generators prohibited | On this one question Dallas is stricter than Chicago, which is the opposite of what people assume |
| Houston | Not for anything powered. Contracted labor covers work on anything using electricity as a power source | No. One person, one trip, no material handling equipment | Exclusive to a single provider. No self-install path for temporary power | A stale rigging document naming the wrong contractor is still hosted on the city's own tourism infrastructure |
| Orlando | Yes, once power has been delivered to the booth | Your own hands plus a personal two-wheel cart. No dollies or flat trucks, even rented | Venue exclusive. Inverters and battery-to-120V converters are explicitly prohibited | You may not run your own Wi-Fi, which is a hard constraint on a networked leaderboard |
| New York City | Capped by wattage, and the cap itself is published inconsistently across live documents | A personal luggage or office dolly only. Hand carts are prohibited | Electricians. Above 20 amps or ceiling-hung, the official contractor must staff it | Mounting a display requires labor at any booth size, with no small-booth exception |
Look at Dallas and Orlando. Both are right-to-work states. In Orlando you may plug in your own equipment once the drop is in. In Dallas only an electrician may plug it in, even using cords you supplied. That is the opposite of what almost everyone assumes, and a racing simulator is a plug-in device, so it changes the labor line on the quote.
Now look at the wheels column. Chicago allows your own non-motorised hand trucks and dollies. Orlando allows your hands and a two-wheel cart. Dallas and Houston allow no wheels at all. New York allows a personal dolly but prohibits hand carts. A crew that brings the same moving plan to all five gets stopped in four of them.
Right-to-work bars compelled union membership. It does not remove jurisdiction, which comes from the contractor's own agreements rather than from state law. This is why we pull the labor document for your specific show instead of working from a national template.
The markets with a full research pass
Houston
Home base. Our office, our crew and our fleet are here. Three exclusives decide a convention center budget, NRG Center has no floor pockets, and Thursday is the worst load-in day of the week.
New York City
Hardest market in the country. There is no single set of Javits labor rules, the freight elevator is the specification that decides the job, and three widely repeated New York facts are currently wrong.
Orlando
Second-largest convention center in the US. Two buildings across a six-lane road, the venue does not accept freight, it owns your power, and you may not run your own Wi-Fi. There is also a 21-day rigging cliff.
Chicago
Published labor rates, which is rare. The Exhibitor Bill of Rights is real and so is its tenure requirement. Free self-unload exists but runs on a 20-minute window. The street race is gone and the demand moved.
Dallas and Fort Worth
Both convention centers under construction at once. Stricter than Chicago on plugging in your own equipment, which surprises people. Generators are prohibited. The racing hook is a street race through a corporate district.
Las Vegas
The highest-volume trade show market. Drayage is charged by weight, so our published crated weights let you estimate it before the invoice arrives. A deeper research pass on this one is in progress.
What a city page has to earn here
We do not publish a page per city to cover a map. A thin page that swaps a city name into a template is worse than no page: it is useless to a planner and it is the pattern search engines were built to catch.
So a city gets a page when we can answer the operational questions for it from primary sources, and the page says what we could not confirm as plainly as what we could. Each one carries the venue rules, the labor jurisdictions, the load-in constraints, the calendar and its worst booking window, the hotels with their real connection status, and the honest version of what else a client could do instead, including when the honest answer is a competitor.
Where sources contradict each other, and in some cities they constantly do, we publish the contradiction rather than the number that suits us. New York has five live documents disagreeing on the same venue's rules. Houston publishes four different figures for its own convention center's size. Saying so is more useful than resolving it quietly in our favor.
If your city is not here
Tell us the venue and the dates anyway. We ship nationwide, freight is in the price, and the absence of a page means we have not written up that market yet, not that we do not work there.
What we will do is the same research for your specific job that these pages do for a whole city: pull your show's labor document, confirm the dock and freight elevator, check the rigging deadline, and tell you what it means for the build before anything is signed. That part is not a page. That part is the job.
Questions about coverage
Do you only work in the cities listed here?
No. We ship anywhere in the continental United States and freight is inside the quoted price, so a build in a city without a page here costs the same as one in a city with it.
What a page means is that we have done a full research pass on that market: the venues, the load-in rules, the labor jurisdictions, the calendar and the things that catch people out. We publish a page when we have something worth reading, not to cover a map.
Why do these pages read like operations manuals rather than sales pages?
Because the questions that decide whether an activation works are operational, and almost nobody answers them. Whether you can plug in your own equipment. Whether your crew can put the rig on a dolly. Whether the freight elevator will take it. What the rigging deadline is. Who owns the power.
Those answers differ by city, sometimes in ways that contradict what a planner reasonably assumes, and getting one wrong costs real money on move-in day. We would rather be the page that told you than the page that read nicely.
Is it true the rules are basically the same in right-to-work states?
No, and this is the most expensive assumption in the comparison table above. Texas and Florida are both right-to-work. In Orlando you may plug in your own equipment once power is delivered. In Dallas only an electrician may plug it in. Same legal regime, opposite answers on the question that matters most to a plug-in device.
Right-to-work bars compelled union membership as a condition of employment. It does not remove jurisdictions, which flow from the general service contractor's own agreements rather than from state law. A vendor who prices your Dallas job off a Houston template is guessing.
Do you have a case study in my city?
Ask us, and we will give you a straight answer rather than a slide. Where we have delivered in a market, we will name the client, the venue and the number they were measured on. Where we have not, we will say so and show you the closest comparable build instead.
None of these city pages claims local work we have not done. If you find one that reads as though it does, tell us, because that is a mistake rather than a tactic.
How far ahead should we book?
It depends far more on the city and the week than on us. The binding constraint is usually a venue deadline rather than our calendar: a 21-day rigging plot cliff in Orlando, a two-month contractor credentialing deadline in New York, a 30-day island booth plan in Dallas.
Then there are the weeks where the whole market tightens at once, and each city page names its worst window. If your date sits in one of those, earlier is better by months rather than weeks.
What if our venue is a hotel ballroom rather than a convention center?
Then the freight elevator is the specification that decides the job, and you should expect us to ask for its car and door dimensions in writing before we quote. This matters most in older buildings and in any upper-floor room.
It is an unglamorous question and it is the single most important one in a tower venue. Almost no hotel publishes the answer, which is exactly why it has to be asked rather than assumed.
Get a quote
Tell us about your event.
Tell us the city, the venue and the dates. If we have a page for it you have already read what we know, and if we do not, we will go and find out before we quote you.
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