- 1Broker Fair launched in NYC on May 14, 2018 and sold out 45 days early
- 2CONNECT MIAMI began in January 2018 and is now the organizer's biggest event
- 3Next Broker Fair is June 1, 2026; CONNECT MIAMI projects more than 1,000 attendees
This is a first-person account by the organizer of Broker Fair and the CONNECT events, explaining how the two brands relate.
Broker Fair almost had a different name. In mid-2017 it sat on a whiteboard next to Broker Fest. Fair won because it sounded more professional, like a job fair, while Fest sounded like Spring Break. The organizer set the first date, May 14, 2018, and chose New York City because most of the audience was in the New York tri-state area and could avoid flights and hotels.
Rivals and a counteroffensive
The biggest early problem, the organizer says, was being front-run. An outsider announced a conference tailored to the same audience for January 2018 in New York, five months earlier, and called on advertisers to sponsor it instead. January in New York struck the organizer as a bad time to invite people, which prompted a counteroffensive.
Reader data showed Miami had the next-highest concentration after New York, followed by Southern California and Toronto. By October 2017 the idea was a smaller networking event, not necessarily broker-branded: CONNECT MIAMI, held on a South Beach rooftop bar in January 2018. It succeeded, so much so that a new rival rented the ground-floor bar to divert attendees. That did not work, and the New York competitor never held a second conference.
A sell-out and a ripple effect
The organizer says NACLB head Kris Roglieri took offense when Broker Fair billed itself as the largest gathering of MCA and business loan brokers in the country, and NACLB's email marketing began taking shots. The organizer thinks it may have helped. By March 30, 2018, 45 days out, Broker Fair had sold more tickets than the venue's legal capacity allowed.
Broker conferences were not supposed to sell out. Within two weeks, the National Association of Equipment Leasing Brokers renamed itself the American Association of Commercial Finance Brokers, citing the need to be more inclusive of all commercial finance brokers.
The brands blur
After Broker Fair 2018, the organizer kept smaller networking events and added content and speakers. CONNECT San Diego 2018 drew 344 and CONNECT MIAMI 2019 drew 461, more than expected. Attendees began calling it Broker Fair Miami, and Americans at CONNECT Toronto called it Broker Fair Canada. Even deCashed, a crypto-focused event held in May 2022, was taken by some small business lending attendees to be Broker Fair Bitcoin.
Today the only event actually named Broker Fair is the annual New York show, next set for June 1, 2026. CONNECT MIAMI is now the biggest event of the year and is projected to top 1,000 attendees this week. CONNECT Toronto was canceled because of Covid, and CONNECT San Diego was replaced by B2B Finance Expo in Las Vegas, a collaboration with a major trade association.
Source reporting: deBanked.
