From hand-drawn maps to selling campsites

High Lifter Products runs an outdoor event that has drawn upwards of 15,000 people for a week at a time, and which Tracie Engi believes is the largest of its kind anywhere. The crowd is genuinely broad: she lists gas workers, lawyers, doctors and a judge among the regulars.

It is also, in the planning, close to a one-person operation. Engi handles it end to end, from laying out the vendor area at the start to counting the money at the end. Her assistant is part time and works on the physical build. The company's main business is selling parts; the event, as she puts it, happened by accident.

For years the vendor area was laid out entirely by hand. Engi drew the map herself in Photoshop or Excel, then sold the spaces by phone: emailing a contract out, waiting for it to come back, printing it, filing it.

She did not need a whole event management platform, and did not pretend otherwise. She came to Map D with one specific problem and asked whether it could be solved. It could. She hands over a drawing, it comes back built, and the hours she used to spend on it are hers again.

A few years later Engi extended the same approach to a campground, and now sells campsites through the floor plan alongside vendor space, a use she suspects makes her the only Map D customer doing it.

It is a good illustration of what an interactive floor plan actually is: a map of sellable space, whatever that space happens to be. Choosing a spot, seeing what is left and paying for it do not change because the thing being sold is a pitch rather than a booth.

The clearest change has been the phone. Vendors can see the map while they choose, see who is beside them and decide accordingly, instead of describing what they want down a phone line and waiting for confirmation.

That takes a lot of time off her, she says, because she is not on the phone with vendors nearly as much as she used to be, and they are not waiting for her to pick up. On value she is direct: what she spends on Map D she would otherwise spend in her own time, and probably more.