20 Years of SEMA: A Journey from Enthusiast to Industry Insider

It’s late June 2021 as I write this. Let’s hope that the rumors I’ve heard about a second round of lockdowns due to delta, don’t come true. Cause that’ll make this whole rant just a little more worthless than usual. Let’s talk a little bit about the SEMA Show.

So, the first week of November this year the SEMA Show returns to Vegas, after a year hiatus. Twenty years ago, I attended my first SEMA Show. Oh man things have changed for me since then.

The first year at SEMA I was 18 and had just recently started working at a little truck shop in Southern California. For a truck guy and general auto enthusiast who lived for custom automobiles, the job was a dream come true, going to SEMA on top of that new job, it really was indescribable experience. My job at the show was to find new things for us to offer at the shop. 18- year old me, massive car guy, well kid, and it’s my job to wonder the halls of the largest automotive aftermarket show on the planet looking for cool stuff, how’s that not pure heaven?? I remember stepping out of the car, in the parking lot that is now a new convention center hall, and quietly freaking out inside at all the cool cars in the parking lot. The parking lot!! I wasn’t even in the show yet. I remember crossing the street and seeing everything outside the show. That alone was the biggest custom car show I’d ever seen, by far. And that wasn’t even scratching the surface. Once inside we walked the halls, mainly in the south hall as that was where all the truck parts were. Every booth had something I wanted to check out. The vehicles were all heavily modified, industry celebrities were all over the place, it was pure sensory overload. I knew then that I’d never leave this industry.

Flash forward to 2011. After a bunch of years turning wrenches, I started a new gig in the magazine world. I was the new Editor in Chief of RV Magazine. I liked RV’s, but I was still a truck guy first. So, I hired people who knew the RV side and I kept with what I knew, trucks. Walking into SEMA as “Media” was a whole new experience. SEMA had a bunch of things that only media could partake in. Our own little “VIP” center, we got access to the halls before the public did, it was a whole new SEMA Show for me and I was loving it. Walking the show in my new role was different from the past, I now had meetings scheduled, several a day and these meetings weren’t about pricing, or how to sell the parts, they were about how to show our readers all this cool new stuff.

Flash forward again another 5-years and I’m now working Sales for Pacific Performance Engineering. I was still on RV Magazine, but that wasn’t a full time job, so PPE it was, 8 to 5. This was a whole new experience for me at the SEMA Show. I was now on the other side, the manufacturer side. I’d be the one talking to retailers, wholesaler’s and the media. While I never really realized it, or felt this way, I was sorta on the outside looking in as a wrench or as media. Being a manufacturer rep meant I had to know the ins and the outs of how the industry really worked. It was a learning process for sure, but of course I loved it. Another thing that was new, seeing the show being put together was something I had never seen before. Driving our show vehicle into an empty but quickly filling up Las Vegas Convention Center, that’s something most will never get to experience. Seeing the halls start from nothing and end up being the show I had become so used to, amazing experience.

Flash forward one more time and I’m now running Diesel World Mag. We have our own booth (along with all our other brands). The experience is sort of a mix of all my past experiences. I still have to find all the cool stuff. I still get to see the show being built up from an empty concrete convention center. And I still have a sort of sales side with showing manufacturers what it is we do at Diesel World.

It’s been a fun 20-years. It’s been a stressful 20-years, but I wouldn’t change much at all. And I’m looking forward to this next SEMA Show. I’ll get to see tons of people I haven’t seen for a 2-years due to the Rona. A little reunion of sorts. And yet again I’ll get some new experiences. For Diesel World specifically, we’re doing things a bit differently this year. My life stays somewhat the same, I’ll just have our camera crew with me. Just about everything we do at SEMA (minus all the boring stuff) will be streamed on our Facebook page. Check it out, there will be hours of content. See inside the SEMA Show via our FB page, and stick around for the weekend after where we collect our favorite trucks and head out to the desert to get them dirty! Stay tuned. It’s gonna be a blast.