Planning, Executing, and Selling Out Live Events

0:00And I think that's one of the most important things. if you're going to have an event, you need to be able to sum up very, very quickly, who is it for and why should they be there? You know, so this event is for this exact type of person, and this is what they're going to get from it. How much more successful would you be if you had lunch once a week with insanely successful entrepreneurs who share their biggest secrets on how they think and achieve success? Grab your seat at the table, because this is Business Lunch with Roland Frazier and Ryan Dice.

0:35Welcome to another episode of Business Lunch. And today's a snackable episode with Roland where he's going to get into some more tactical strategies that you can start using to live a rich and happy life. If this is the first snackable episode you're hearing, I'd encourage you to go back and listen to some of the other episodes that Roland has put out. And if you want to get notified every time we release a new episode, go to the new businesslunchpodcast.com website and we'll send you detailed notes along with every episode. That's businesslunchpodcast.com, www.businesslunchpodcast.com, and you can sign up for the free email newsletter where you'll be able to get all the highlights and resources from the episodes.

1:10Hey, everybody. Roland Frazier and Ryan Dice here with another episode of the Business Lunch Podcast. And today, we are going to talk about events. Ryan, we just had an event that seems like you and I were talking that it was about 1 ,000 years ago, but it was literally earlier this month. and um and less than four weeks ago let's talk a little bit about that you want to share a little bit about the event and like what what was it what was our goal and then we can kind of talk about why did we have it and that kind of stuff yeah and i think talking about why we have it is important because i just want to have this on the record i hate events yes yes you know this i am surprised to hear you say that because i always thought that you absolutely loved them I freaking hate events.

1:56I hate events. There's so much work. There's so much stress leading up to it. If things all go wrong and everything goes really, really, really bad, you know, like it's there. Like all the people are there. Like the number of things that can go wrong in an event, you haven't even thought about them until they happen. Like it's truly astounding. Like I've been in the middle of a keynote at one of our events and like just the hotel decided to do a fire alarm test and didn't really tell anybody. So you're just like in the middle of a thing in the middle of an event. It's like literally everybody has to just leave the room, go out for a bit and then come back in.

2:31Like I didn't even think that that could happen. Well, the whole thing can't. Thankfully, that didn't happen at this event. So I just I think we're doing this episode. It's good to talk about why events, even if you're not running a quote unquote event business, you know why more businesses should be doing events. I just, if you're thinking this episode is not for me because I hate events, just know you're in good company. So do I. We do them anyway. And I'm glad that we do. You also have an interesting recurring dream about events from time to time. You want to share that with everybody? Dude, I mean, that was the reason.

3:06So as I think many of our listeners would know, we started an event about 13, 14, 15 years ago called Traffic and Conversion Summit. and yeah, starting about like year eight. So it wasn't in the original. It just didn't happen until it got bigger. Yeah, once it got big and I realized, whoa, the stakes are really, really high. Yeah, I kept having, I would have a couple of different recurring nightmares. The first was coming out on stage and literally nobody's there, right? So you put on this event and literally nobody shows up, which that's terrifying. Thankfully, it's never happened. The other one is I'm running around back of house and I can't get to the stage.

3:49Like doors are locked. And the funny, that actually did happen to me one time at TNC. I was trying to find this back way through and I got locked in the stairwell, literally. And at that point, it was just comical. But yeah, I mean, just again, to show you the neuroses that I have around events. Yeah, recurring nightmares leading up to them. It's one of the reasons that I was like, can we please sell Traffic and Conversion Summit? And in fairness to me, we decided to sell in 2018, how to earn out in 2019. And in 2020, there was a pandemic. So I was going to say it turned out that that nightmare really saved us millions of dollars.

4:28Given enough time, all of your worst dreams will likely come true just because of entropy. It's not a great way to live your life, though. So anyway, I think it's good. I do think it's good to acknowledge that this is something that I think is incredibly important. It's something that I'm very glad that we do, but I don't love it. And I just want people to hear that because if you don't love it either, that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. Right. It could be a very good thing for your business. So maybe we should just talk about it's probably we're talking about the different types of events and why you would do certain events.

5:09Sure. So I don't know if you want to kind of riff on that. Like, what do you think some of them? Yeah. In terms of like in-person versus not in-person and that kind of stuff. No, I was more thinking. So when you think about why to do an event and I'd love to get your take on this. To me, it kind of falls into three categories, like three sort of broad categories of events. And the first is like we're doing this event where the event is the product. Yeah. You know, and we're doing this event and the goal is to make money from the event. And you're usually going to make money through ticket sales, sponsorships, exhibitors, things like that.

5:48And you and you want this event to be independently profitable. And that's one reason to do an event. It's hard, but it's one reason to do it. The other is kind of the the customer appreciation event. And that's we're doing this community style event. And these can sometimes be really small, like meetups, for example, would be this. And your goal isn't necessarily to monetize the event. Maybe it's to kind of help offset your costs, but it's really there to help increase the bonding with the people that you have. but it's more of a, this is something that we do. It's almost kind of a feature of your broader product offering.

6:30And then the third type really is the sales event. We are putting on this event because we want to put people into a room so that yes, we can deliver value, but ultimately we want to leverage this event to generate sales, ascension, renewals, those kinds of things. Yeah. The only one I would add to that would be fulfillment, that we also do fulfillment events that are either bonuses or parts of programs or something like that that we've already sold. And we're not really planning on selling and it's not really customer appreciation and we don't generally have sponsors and stuff. We're just basically at that event delivering the thing that we sold previously, whether it was online, offline or whatever.

7:13Yeah. Yeah. So that's, yeah. In my mind, I was kind of lumping that into the second or third one, but yeah, I could see how that's, you know, that's its own thing. So setting, I mean, so setting aside, we're doing this event because it's a fulfillment type, type mechanism, focusing on kind of the, the other three that I think would, you know, would apply, you know, to anyone. And I think the hardest one to do is the event that you run for the sake of the event making money by itself. So not the event making money as a channel to sell other products. That was the third type, the sales event. But we want this event itself to be kind of independently profitable.

7:54In my experience, and we've done this and we have that kind of event. That's what TNC was and still is. Those are hard events to do. And I think when a lot of people think about putting on an event, that's what they think about. And they're like, oh, that seems risky. Oh, that seems hard. And it is. Both of those things. Both of those things are true. Typically, you know, just to kind of break that business model down, typically you want either ticket sales or sponsorships to cover all of your costs and you're going to make your margin on the other one. Yeah. Right. Usually whichever one is less is kind of where you're going to, you know, sort of make your margin.

8:31And it's very typical to say, whatever we generate in ticket sales, we're going to put that right back into promotions. And for that model, usually you're two or three years of having to put all of the money back in. Like you might make nothing off that event until you get people to come back, you know, year after year. It's tough as you scale too, because just like with inventory, with an inventory business, It's one of the treadmills you get on is I have to buy inventory and then I have to buy media to sell the inventory. And then I need to scale up my team to be able to handle all of that so that I can now buy even more inventory.

9:10And so you're constantly churning your money ever bigger, but you don't really get the payday until you sell or stop growing. And it's the same thing with the event. As you start out and you have a couple hundred people and then 500 people and then 1 ,000 and then 5 ,000, your expenses grow at the same pace basically as all of the revenue that's coming in to sell. So it's kind of hard to make money while you're growing. Yeah, you get very few economies of scale in the event business. and certainly when you take the leap from you know you could go and do a small customer appreciation boardroom style event where you go and you know what rent that out for a couple hundred bucks yeah you know a local kind of deal when you get up into a ballroom oh well now you're talking to a hotel ballroom well now you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars yeah food beverage and room blocks yeah all this all this other stuff and and and then when you outgrow that and you get into convention space, now you find out things like, oh, you want us to turn the air conditioning on.

10:15Well, that's$20 ,000 a day. Oh, you'd like slivers of carpet. That's going to be 180 grand. And it just, at each level, it gets more and more and more expensive. So I'm not saying this to dissuade anybody from, you know, if you're interested in pursuing that, like, give you some details there, but, you know, that is a hard business, but that's not really what we're talking about either. And we say you should do an event. I think the more interesting kind of events to do are that kind of second type, that customer appreciation. Let's get our people in the same room. And you could do this as an aspect of fulfillment, but there's something magical that happens when you get your customers, when you get prospects in the same room, hanging out together.

11:03And I think it's underrated and I think it's become more valuable post COVID. But the one that we did was the third type, the sales event. And so I don't know if you think we should break that down. Yeah, let's do it. So our, and I can talk about kind of, you know, share some of the good, the bad, the ugly. So our goal was to put... Do you want to talk about the comparison of last year, which was pretty terrible, to this year also as we're doing this, I think might be helpful for folks? I do and I don't. So I might throw up a little bit in my mouth when we talk about this, but yeah, sure. No, we could do that.

11:42So the thing, I think most people, when they put on events, they underestimate how difficult it is to get people to buy a ticket, buy a ticket to the event, buy a plane ticket, get hotel space and show up. It's a big ask. It really is a big ask. And so, yeah, last year when we did it, we grossly underestimated the marketing lift. And I'm embarrassed to say this because, one, we're pretty good at marketing, and two, we've got a lot of experience in events. And yet still, we grossly underestimated the lift that it would take. And we just took too long to start promoting the event. It took too long to line up the celebrities.

12:21And I want to say we were hoping to get around 750 or 800. I think we only had like 250, 300 people. How long do you think it is necessary to market? How long in advance for, let's say an event of 200 or more people? Six months. Yeah. Yeah, I think six months out, you want to have a big push. Hey, this thing's coming in six months. And then there's a little, you can do like a super early bird kind of thing. And there's a little bit of a lull. And then when you begin to announce speakers or you begin to announce sessions, um one one nice thing um a well-known speaker a celebrity type person is going to cost you a good bit of money but what they buy you is scroll stopping yeah so when you're running ads for the event when you're sending out emails to the event the ability to use that person's name in the subject lines or in the ads that that can be helpful now we had celebrities last year but opted not to this year.

13:18So why? So last year we locked down all of our celebrities too late. And so we didn't get the benefit of the scroll stopping of the images and of the names. And, um, and so this year, same kind of thing, like we were trying to figure out what's like, what do we want to do? And, and just, we, we were at a point where we hadn't figured out who the celebrities were going to be. And so we, we decided that it wasn't going to be worth it. I think if, if you're not going to have celebrities at least 90 days out, you're not going to get the benefit of them. Yeah. And they're going to be part of it from a ticket sales perspective.

13:55I agree. Part of it too was that we knew some of the people we wanted because we, we have, I mean, there aren't that many people that we think are really going to move the needle that will be related to what we're going to talk about and, and be sales enabling for tickets, but not just for tickets, because this event, and this is important for people to think about, I think is it's not just selling the ticket. you also are selling at the event so do you want a bunch of people that want to show up to see kim kardashian or whoever um do you want that or like they're there just to see if you had taylor swift that'd be a good one for right now right if we have taylor swift we're gonna get a million tickets sold right but then none of those people are gonna buy anything because they're not they're not going to be coming because they want to hear what Taylor Swift has to say about business.

14:48They're going to be coming because she's Taylor Swift and they want to know, you know, is she still dating that guy or, you know, why is she doing this? Or when she's releasing her new song? So I think it's important to think about, is the person going to scroll stop, but also will they be sales enabling at the event for the thing that you're planning to sell? So I think, I think that's good to think about. And so that we had identified a couple of people, Shaq was one of them and we couldn't get because celebrities have commitments to the other things they're doing. And so he has like football, uh, uh, broadcasts and things like that, that he, uh, and basketball and all this sports, I guess I should say sports stuff that he has to be available for.

15:29And certain things happen on certain dates. And our event just happened to be around an uncertainty of the date. And they took forever to announce when the thing was going to be. And the same thing happened with, with movies that the, the film stars will have opt-out clauses. If you try to get them too soon and if you get them too late, you don't get the benefit because it also takes like Richard Branson. We tried to have Richard Branson last year at that event. And we got within, I think about a month, like we started six months out negotiating, maybe even longer. And because of the back and the forth to try to get all the stuff done to nail it down, we weren't able, we were approaching four weeks out and we still didn't have it nailed down.

16:14And we were just like, we'll do it next year. We told them, we'll do it next year. And we did end up booking them for Traffic and Conversion Summit. But those are things you guys have to think about too, is that if you're gonna get celebrities, there is a lot of negotiating and time investment that goes on there. And if you're smart, you don't just say, what's your rate? I want this much. Okay, you don't just do it that way because they will, they'll not let you sell recordings and they won't be available for things you want. And they won't pre-promote, they won't give you pre-authorized, uh, you know, ads and pre-approved and all of that kind of stuff.

16:45So you have to negotiate if you're going to get the most out of it, but it, that alone, I would start, you know, probably nine months out if you can. Oh yeah. I mean, the, the, at the absolute latest, it would be nice if you got, I always like kind of picking the low hanging fruit. We're doing this event and you get all your best people, you know, to come and sign up because it just gives you a sense of where do we stand right now? Because, you know, most of the time the ballroom is only going to hold a certain number of people. You're kind of, you've got a range that you're trying to hit. And so if you feel like you're going to get to capacity without having to go and invest as much, you know, in these different celebrities or marketing, then cool, let's go figure that out.

17:26But the absolute latest that I would want to, if you're going to pay big money for a celebrity 90 days out, or you're almost certainly not going to get the value. You would almost be better off if you have it in the budget, but you can't get it figured out before then. You'd almost be better off not mentioning anything about him being there, having him show up unannounced. And now the story is around why you want to come to this event because look at these amazing, cool people who show up. I think you want either the mistake that we made last year, so not the most recent event, but the one before then, when negotiations slowed down with Branson, And we're like, crap, well, we got to get a celebrity was what we told ourselves.

18:03We got to have some celebrities. And so who do we know? And thankfully, we got friends and Damon John and Marcus Limonis. And we're like, hey, can you guys come out and speak at our event? You know, they agreed. And they're busy people who get paid. I mean, we got a friends and family deal from them, but it still wasn't cheap. And at the end of the day, we didn't really have time to promote them. And so it like it probably wasn't it was worth doing it because they're both friends and they did a lot to help us. drive sales. From just a straight economic standpoint, I think we lost money. Yeah, I think so too.

18:35And so that was the other reason why this year we said, if we feel like we can fill the event without celebrities, then let's not do it because it keeps the focus on getting the right people in the room who want to be in the room for the content and for the value, not just to see that person. And so if it's an event designed to generate sales from the room, those are the folks you'd rather have. So compare and contrast, Last year, for a variety of reasons that were preventable, you know, didn't get as many people in. This year, we again got started a little bit late. And it's because we were struggling to figure out what is the hook of this event.

19:14And I think that's one of the most important things. If you're going to have an event, you need to be able to sum up very, very quickly, who is it for and why should they be there? Yeah. you know so this event is for this exact type of person and this is what they're going to get from it um and we just couldn't really nail that you know and tried a lot of things and it wasn't until we began running just some tests we're like what if we test it which is the simplest thing in the world we should have done it months and months before um and finally we said what if we let the people decide. And so we ran like a 30 way split test for headlines and hooks and stuff like that.

19:58Narrowed it down to the top three and then ran it. And what do you know, now we're able to advertise profitably. But that was about 60 days out when we really got that dialed in. Do you remember what you thought it was? And then what was the one that was the winner? So the one that was the winner was focusing an event on, you know, this is the event for bootstrapped was the term that wound up, you know, attracting the most folks. So bootstrapped, seven and eight figure entrepreneurs who want to scale and exit. Okay. So not that different from what we had done before. Do you remember what it was?

20:37it was basically like the premier small business of scale event. It was just more generic. Right. I liked that though. Cause I think it helps show people the importance of split testing because you were kind of there. It's just that there was a little tweak and the tweak made all the difference, right. As it very often does. And the tweet net, what the tweet, what we finally did was, um, we finally said, let's talk to our ideal client. And I think this is important. if you're doing a sales event, speak to the bullseye, speak to the ideal client. It's scary because you know, you need to sell tickets.

21:12It's scary because you're staring down the barrel of a big room block and you're staring down the barrel of a big, you know, F and B contract, food and beverage. And so you're like, boy, at some point I'll take any butt in a seat as long as they're buying a hotel room, because if we don't fill these hotel rooms, we eat them. And I'll talk about that in just a second. But it was the fear of we need to meet this large number contract that caused us to want to go broad. And in reality, it was when we narrowed down that sales went up. And I know this. It's so frustrating. I know this stuff. And yet, sometimes we got to relearn things painfully.

21:57So let's talk about that in terms of we had a pretty significant room block. And none of us remembers how that happened, but, uh, but it happened that we had, uh, a pretty significant number of room nights that we had to fill and we fell short. I think it was about a hundred grand, right. In terms of costs. Yeah, it was$89 ,000 in, um, in room nights that we just basically had to eat this year. So, um, but yet the event was successful, profitable. And, um, so do you want to talk about that a little bit? Cause I think that's good. I think that's good for people to hear and understand also. Yeah.

22:34So, so when you're doing an event, if you're doing it in a ballroom, the, any, just about any hotel is going to ask you to, um, is going to ask you to essentially guarantee a certain number of rooms and, and they're going to guarantee a room rate. And that's good because your people are usually going to get a better deal than they get if they just went direct. Right. That's kind of the, that's kind of the idea behind it. But the mistake that we made is that we really had back-to-back events. So we had a three-day event that was for anybody and everybody. And then immediately following that event, we had our Founders Board Mastermind meeting.

23:12Which is a fulfillment. And so, which is a fulfillment event. Exactly. And I guess when people run in the numbers, the idea was that, you know, we'd have the, all of the founders board members would also come to the three day event and then stay. But a lot of them were like, nah, I mean, that's, I've seen a lot of that stuff. I just want to come for my, you know, for my event. Some of them got confused about which was which. And so they booked, they booked room during the main event, not realizing that they needed to stay over. And so they wound up and then hotel room or room block had closed, which I'll talk about what happens there.

23:49And so they had to book somewhere else. And then because they had to book somewhere else, they went ahead and canceled their room nights here. So it was this whole giant, you know, again, very avoidable mess where we just didn't communicate effectively because of the because of those having those two events. And while we were pretty close to the goal that we had set in terms of attendees, what we're seeing is that more and more people are choosing to stay at non-event hotels. They're choosing to do AirBnBs. They're choosing to kind of bunk up. And so we really just overshot and overestimated, okay, if we've got this many people here, then surely each person on average will have this many nights.

24:37And it just wound up being less. Part of that too is that the hotels have not adjusted for that. They are clinging to the old model and that makes it hard. So you might find that you can't get a better deal from the hotel. And you can negotiate things like attrition. so attrition allows you to have maybe 80 of the total room nights that you're obligated to pay for and the goal is 100 but um ultimately if you fall short as we did you still can make it work but then i know that when we were going back in and it's gotten worse and worse and worse so it'll be interesting to see when this changes um but the hotels are demanding even more f &b and more room rates and I mean, it's crazier now than it was pre COVID.

25:28And a lot of this was because obviously during COVID no events could happen. And so a lot of events got pushed out. And so what you had with hotels is they were overbooked. And this was the case when we booked this event, we could not find any hotel space anywhere in the hotels knew it. And so the offer that we were given was one where we're like, wow, that's a lot. That's really aggressive. We were able to get 80 % attrition. Um, but it was still just a massive, massive, massive lift. Um, and, uh, and yeah, and the hotels just had us. And so I'm not like, again, I'm not rooting for a recession.

26:03I'm definitely not rooting for another pandemic, but it would be nice if these hotels were humbled just a little bit and they could just get back to what it was in 2018, 2019. I agree. Cause right now it's nuts, man. It is crazy. It is crazy what, what, what they're asking for in, in terms of room commits. And so you want to make sure that you can hit that you can hit those room blocks. That can be scary to the point though, when we shifted from, it'll be what it is in terms of room nights. Like we can't necessarily control where people stay. We can do our best to incentivize them. And we did, I mean, so some things that we did, our people called everybody who bought a ticket and they were trying like crazy, like, Hey, did you book your room yet?

26:42Did you book, did you book it at the event hotel? Did you book it at the event hotel? You know, they're hearing like, oh yeah, we started to, but we couldn't get all the nights. Um, and so we had, we just booked all of them somewhere else. And that was, you know, that was, that was, that was a bummer. Um, because, oh, here's the other fun thing that happens. Your room block will typically end 30 days out from the event. Yeah. Which is terrible. Which is terrible because most people, even if they buy a ticket, they'll not, they're not going to book their room until like a couple of weeks before.