President of West Coast Exhibit. He runs the company from the floor it builds on — a fabrication shop in Anaheim, California, with a pre-stage and logistics hub in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Design, engineering, CNC, millwork, metal, graphics and logistics all live inside West Coast Exhibit's own buildings and on its own payroll. There is a reason for that. Trade shows do not move, and every handoff to an outside vendor is one more place a fixed date can slip.
Four decades of immovable deadlines is what taught this company to own every one of those handoffs itself. It is why Toyota, Pixar, Mattel and more than two hundred other brands keep coming back.
Michael sits closest to the parts of the job where things actually go wrong: pre-staging island programs in Las Vegas before they ever reach a show floor, the structural and engineering questions on larger builds, and the freight and drayage that decide whether a booth is standing on Tuesday morning or sitting in a marshalling yard.
He still writes the company's job postings himself, which tells you roughly how far the president sits from the shop floor here.
In 2020 the trade show industry did not slow down. It stopped. Every show on the calendar cancelled inside a fortnight, and an exhibit house with a full fabrication shop, a payroll and nothing to build for was a business with a very short runway.
West Coast Exhibit pointed the same machines, the same benches and the same crew at other work until the show floors reopened. Nobody enjoyed it. It kept the doors open and it kept the crew together, which is the only part that mattered.
The lesson stuck. A shop that can retool under that kind of pressure is a shop that can absorb a client changing the design on the Thursday before a Monday install.
Michael is on LinkedIn, where he posts the company's hiring and the occasional finished build.
For project enquiries the fastest route is the contact form or the team in Anaheim.
Tell us the date and the space. We will tell you what is realistic.