Knowing the right partners in the right countries is a must for international exhibiting. However, when you're on a tight timeline, sometimes you have to work with untested suppliers. That's how I wound up in a questionable "workshop" the size of a one-room apartment in Quito, Ecuador.

About a decade ago, I was a sales manager for Sistemas de Exposición (Sistexpo), based in Mexico. A German partner asked us to manage the construction of a booth for one of its Swiss clients exhibiting at the Latin American Iron and Steel Institute Conference (ILAFA) in Quito.

Key elements of the booth were high-end aluminum panels with a Pantone-specific shade of orange lighting. Ideally, we'd build the critical components in Mexico and ship them via boat to the venue. The kicker was that by the time we got involved, there were just six weeks until the show opened. And because of Latin American bureaucracy, customs corruption, and a shipping container's worth of paperwork, fabricating the exhibit in Mexico just wasn't possible.

I reached out to a partner agency in Colombia and asked it to fabricate and ship the exhibit. We were about to strike a deal when it slammed on the brakes after landing a whale of a client that required its full attention. None of my other regional contacts had the capacity to pull off the booth, so we needed to find a third-party builder in short order. It was time to make some new amigos.

I started making phone calls, and within a couple days I landed a new connection down in Chile. After ensuring the company could handle the precise fabrication, I handed off the project and monitored the progress from Mexico. Based on the regular updates sent over the next few weeks, everything seemed to be on track.

A week before the show, I flew to Quito to meet the Chilean contingent and oversee installation. When I arrived at the hotel, I was shocked to learn the Chilean firm wasn't coming, as it had outsourced the project to the very same Colombian exhibit house that told me it was too busy!

This game of transnational telephone made me nervous, so I told the Colombians that I needed to inspect the aluminum panels muy rápido. They told me they didn't have those components yet because they in turn had outsourced them to a woodshop in Quito. Cut to me standing in a pint-size workshop where I'm not sure the owner knew the difference between an extrusion and a dowel.

Much to my surprise, he trotted out the components, which were exactly what the Swiss exhibitor needed. I asked the owner how he pulled this off. Well, it turns out that he didn't. After he took on the project, he outsourced it to another local. I decided to stop asking questions, grabbed the panels, and went on my way.

If just one thing went wrong in that long chain of partners, the entire project could have been a disaster. But after the show a Swiss, a German, a Mexican, a Chilean, a Columbian, and an Ecuadorian all raised a glass to our model United Nations.