Learnings from Los Angeles - Part 2

Hello, friends. I'm Amanda Barr. And I'm Rebecca Lou Brennan. And welcome to Dance Principals United, the podcast. Together, we are passionate about helping studio owners with the business of running their studio. Join us as we talk everything from marketing systems, studio culture, motherhood, life and everything in between. This is the Dance Principles United podcast.

Hello and welcome back to the Dance Principles United Podcast. We are doing part with Nath about his learnings from VCON conference that he just got back from in la. I'm excited.

Yes, yes. Like, we were, as we always do, right. We like got on last week thinking, oh, yeah, that might be a quick podcast and had way too much to keep going through, so broke it up into part two, but excited to get here and chat through it.

Now, if you haven't listened to part one, make sure you jump back into the podcast before in Spotify, Apple, wherever. You listen to your podcast and have a little bit of a listen because Nathan shares some incredible takeaways he had from that conference. But do you want to just give us, for anyone that's just joining us and miss last week's episode, a bit of a rundown of the event that you're at?

Yeah, so it's called Vacon, run by Gary Vaynerchuk, who I'm a massive fanboy of, and boy. So it's evolved from what like, it started as like a sort of like a web3 and NFT type conference, but he's really evolved it into more of a marketing and media and pop culture sort of very business entrepreneur driven event. And so like, incredible, incredible lineup of speakers. It was in the LA alive, their precinct where they like hold the Grammys and things like that was, which is where the main sessions and things like that were. But like, everybody from like, you know, Nick Cannon, Will I am, who we'll talk about a bit, Flavor Flav was there, we had T Pain performing on the Sunday night and like just all sorts of other incredible entrepreneurs and business owners, not just on stage but also like just out sort of out taking in the sessions as well. And this is probably something that, you know, as much as I love your wife and we always enjoy going to events together, I think sometimes when you go to these events by yourself as well, what it really made me do, and it was the same when I went to the first VCon, is that every room I was in, I would always turn to the person next to me and introduce myself, is that sometimes when we go to those events together and with Beck and things like that, we do sort of like you know, as everybody does, you sort of like, you know, just hang with your peeps.

And what, stay with you stay with your posse?

Yeah, absolutely. And so like, because I knew that there were so many people, incredible people in there, like I said, every session I sat at, every room I went into, I made sure that I was out there networking and introducing myself to people which, you know, I've picked up a load of contacts from the weekend and look, let's be honest, I presume most of which I might not ever contact again. But you'll never know. Like you never sort of know the contacts you make, where you're going to run into those people again and when you might, your past might, might cross again and where you might be able to, to help each other out or start, start a new business venture or any sort of thing. It's just. Yeah. Amazing connections.

It's interesting conversations. Right. You were talking, you said you spoke to some guy that was like, had a really interesting business in. Was it in India?

Yes, like one of the biggest solar producers, solar panel producers in India. Just because I.

That's going to be a huge company.

Really big company.

Very big company. Yeah.

Yeah. And then, and the person that introduced me to, to that guy was worked at a marketing firm in LA that takes care of all the socials for Lorna Jane and so like just like really, like really impressive people all around the conference that. Yeah, like I said, just making sure. And that's what we're so big on with when we work with dance studio owners. Like making sure you're getting out and improving yourself and getting to events and connecting with. Yeah, just other dance studio owners especially like you never know where developing any relationship as a business owner is going to take you, right?

Absolutely. And how those relationships might, you know, improve your quality of business in the future. I think it's so, so important. But let's get down to some of the learnings. Who do you want to share? Which other sessions did you love that you had some great takeaways that you want to share with us today?

Yeah, look, obviously like Will I am is always like a pretty cool cat, right? Always, always super interesting hearing from them but hearing about like those people that he's obviously started out as a musician and producer and all those things but obviously has super, super mad business brain as well. But he. And I think like there's articles about it all this week as well. I saw. But he was sharing his new like he's calling it an interactive AI radio driven app, but it's Called like FYI or Radio. FYI. Really interesting app. He was sort of on stage talking about that and giving basically a live demo and things like that. So you know, think about basically like you're sitting there and you're listening to the radio or listening to songs through this app now, but you're hearing some sort of pop culture reference in the song and you're like, oh, hey, hang on, like I want to learn more about that. And you can just interrupt, interrupt the radio mid sentence and get the full background on that important piece of pop culture that the song is referring to. And then just a really interactive and you know, the, I guess the, the language model that, that he's feeding into that's been sort of trained really well as, as well and was sort of like picking up on certain like. Yeah, sort of language conventions and things like that was. Yeah, look, it was super cool. I think as with a lot of this AI stuff, it's so in its infancy. But yeah, as you would imagine for something from Will I am, it looked pretty cool, right?

Absolutely. I was looking at it as well. And you know, it's about that personal experience and he, him talking about how he wants to personalize radio so that it's to the listener and isn't that interesting? Right? Like that's what people want now. They want a personal experience. They don't want to be one of the masses. They want to have what they want when they want. We want on demand. We want, you know, great customer service. We want people to get us and you know, know us. Yeah, I think that's an such an interesting thing. He must have been an interesting person to hear speak.

Yes, super, super interesting. And like I said, like anybody that's done as much as he's done and like, you know, he rattled off like some of the investments, business investments that he made along the way as well was just, yeah, he's obviously got a clever, pretty switched on business brain. And so yeah, be super interested to.

I want to know what other businesses did he invest in?

Look, I knew you were going to like that like and I can't remember.

Now I've thrown, now you've thrown me.

But like they'll be like Twitter early on and like, like be like he was. I know Twitter was one of them and potentially I think he may have said Uber but I don't want to like say that for sure. But like big, big, big, big players.

That would have open AI. Google tells me live. Google tells me Tesla beats OpenAI.

There you go.

Yeah, yeah. That was pretty well for interesting.

Yeah.

Yes. But he's obviously a very smart business person as well. Yeah. Been able to do that? Oh yeah, I'm doing a live Google and it's very interesting, but not so.

Interesting for a podcast.

No, absolutely. So who else did you feel like was incredible? What else did you take away? What other sessions?

Yeah, look, Nick Cannon again, another person that's just super, super interesting. And I think I talked a little bit about him last week, but something that I was thinking about as well as I was really looking back over my notes, just a couple of like, like little one liners that he sort of said. I loved when he said something like an idea without a plan is a hallucination and that's like so important for what we do in business. Right? Like, and don't get us wrong, like, we're not the type of people that have like big detailed like, you know, 20 page business plan documents around stuff that we do. But when we want to put something together, when we wanted to put Dance Teacher Expo together, we got together, we came up with a rough plan of what we wanted to do and then we got into the execution. But having that, that plan is super, super important. And something that I thought, like he was coming at it from a completely different way. He was talking about he got cancelled a little while ago, basically. I don't even remember and I didn't really Google it to be honest, but I do remember reading about it. He. He said something and essentially got. It blew up online and he got canceled for it in inverted commas. But he was talking about like as he's sat and reflected on that about, you know, that he thinks there should be council culture, not cancel culture. So council. So when somebody says like, you know, we can all make mistakes, right? Like, you know, you and I have the benefit of being able to edit this podcast but like, yeah, we could say something silly on this podcast that we'd be like, oh, and we would go and edit it out.

We've all said silly shit.

Exactly. Like social media these days is, you know, especially like I feel for, you know, like I sound like such a boomer for the younger generation, like around that they're putting so much stuff out there that sort of goes up on the Internet forever. But I thought that was like, what made me think about it from a dance studio perspective is, you know, we do always see on lots of the Facebook groups and things like that people out there, they're complaining about, you know, this parent said this or this parent didn't do this or this parent did, like, instead of like always blaming him or like canceling and inverted commas, like, what are we doing to educate them? What are we doing? Because that was his big thing around, like when somebody does something that you don't want or that's a bit silly, instead of just like tossing them aside and saying you're never going to speak to them again or unfollow them, like, why don't you open up a dialogue with them? Why don't you try and like, educate both them and you, like, why did they do that? What, like, what could you do to improve? So I think, like, relating that a lot of the times to how we're dealing with our parents, that, yeah, we can all get a little bit frustrated, that's okay. But it's also super important to reflect how can we help our parents? And when we. When we get those frustrations with our clients, what can we do to help ensure that that's not happening to the next client or the things like that? So helping, like counsel them. Them rather than just sort of canceling them, I thought was something that I just sort of sat and reflected on as I was listening to that.

Yeah, I love that so much. Now we have little children and our little girls as most kids, as a lot of adults obsessed with Bluey. Right. Pretty great show. You had the producer, was it? The producer?

Yeah, one of the producers of Louis. And look, full disclosure, this is one that I completely ended up at by accident because one of the rooms, one of the sessions, you know, as you do when you go to these events, like, I know that our peeps do a dance teacher expo. You go in and you like highlight the. The session, you know, the speaker from each session that you want to go to. And I looked at the line for the speaker I was going to go to. I'm like, oh, gosh, this is super long. 50, 50 if I'll get in here. And so I just jumped across to another session and I didn't know because it just showed the names. It didn't show. Producer of Bluey. And so, you know, I went and it happened to be not only a producer of Bluey, but another couple of really impressive content creators as well. Guys that were like, you, one of the biggest guys on YouTube shorts as well as just another, like really big. Started out in podcasting and then sort of is also releasing a lot of YouTube content based on that as well. So that was super interesting. There was like, you know, about four Aussies, we were sitting together, gave him a big cheer when he started talking about the abc and he was pretty shocked that there was anybody in the room that knew what ABC was. So we got together and had a selfie and a quick chat with him about that afterwards. But just like, yes, super, super interesting. What the whole panel was talking about there was that when we do our videos and this was sort of like relating it back to how we're doing our both organic socials and paid socials, is that any video that we're running or any image that we're running on our social media feeds has a really low barrier to exit. Now, the way he explained it was that if you buy, you know, we're just looking at buying Hamilton tickets, right, to go and see Hamilton in Sydney. Now, we're going to obviously drop a fair bit of money on that. We're going to book a restaurant to go. We've got a very high barrier to exit for seeing that show. We're basically going to go. Unless something extreme happens because we've invested so much money into it. We've got the restaurant booking, we've made sure.

Yeah. And you're not going to work out after 10 minutes.

Exactly.

Not that we would ever not love Hamilton because we are big Hamilton fans, but if you go to a musical, if you go to a theater, if you go to a show, even a movie, even if it's crap after five minutes, you're not going to walk out, right?

Exactly.

Like, that's not what's going to happen because you've paid a lot of money. There's a high barrier to, like entry.

Exactly. There is a high. Yeah. And there's a high barrier to exit is what they were talking about. Now the problem with, with the social media landscape at the moment is that when you're, you know, we all know how quickly we scroll our feeds. If you see something doing these ones. Yep. Like, again, doesn't work so much on a podcast, but man, does there?

Oh, yeah, that's right. It didn't work.

How we scroll quickly. But yeah, you know how quickly you scroll past something if it doesn't grab your attention immediately, it's got such a low barrier to exit that you're gone really quickly. And it's one thing that again, like, because obviously I'm a bit of a bit of a nuffy when I sit there and I think about, always think about how these things relate to dance studio owners. And it's something that I see over and over again when I'm having like our one on ones and Things like that. Helping our members in Studio Growth Club in particular with their Facebook ads and stuff like that. That they get incredible videos shot. Like they might have invested in a professional videographer coming out who give them this awesome, awesome content to use. But that first, like one to two seconds of your video is so important to grab people's attention and to make sure that because that barrier to exit so low that you've got to engage them and stop their scroll. So if you have an epic video and you have your studio logo animated for the first two seconds, you've lost it.

People get bored. Right. Like a logo is not exciting.

It is not exciting. What is what will draw in people that may be interested in your service? If they're a parent of a preschool person, if they see a video of a happy, happy, smiling preschool kid, that's going to get their attention much more than your logo. Even if with the best logo animation in the universe. Yeah, you need to make sure that. Because like I said, that barrier to exit is so low. If you want to stop their swiping and stop their scrolling, you've got to do something that speaks to them, that grabs their attention in that first one to two seconds before you can even get the point across of how awesome your classes are, about how wonderful your staff are. All those things you want to talk. If you don't grab them in the first one to two seconds, it's the rest of the message isn't getting to them.

Okay, so something super exciting and that. And I presume that this goes across to the COVID photo as well. Right? The COVID photo on images is so, so important because. Yeah, otherwise you just lose them. No one's gonna watch anything. Sorry. The COVID photo on videos. Not on images, but the COVID photo on videos.

Yeah, absolutely. It's just that that first 1 to 2 text, 1 to 2 seconds is just so, so important.

Absolutely. So that's what you learned from the bluey guy. He worked on that and done a very good job of short. Because that's what we were talking about. Right? Short form content. Yes, well, he was. And how that. It's the same regardless. Yeah, regardless. If it's a Bluey episode, a YouTube short, an Instagram video, a Tiktoker, it doesn't really matter. The concept's the same.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Cool.

Anyone else you want to share with us before we finish up?

Yeah, like one really interesting guy. His name was Inky Johnson and like, his story was that he was a college football star and had a. Had a really, very Realistic chance of being drafted into the NFL. So, you know, big payday, career set up. It's what he'd been working for, but, you know, his entire life. He was a college senior in his last year of college, which meant he was about 8. Eight games away from going into that NFL draft and potentially changing his life. Eight games before the end of the season copped, you know, a hit. And he'd taken, obviously thousands of tackles over his life, but this one ended up paralyzing half of his body and lost the use of his arm. And that was obviously his world as he knew it was gone in an instant.

Yeah.

And so obviously, like, he was a very, very good storyteller, but, like, he was just super interesting and was talking very much about personal development and growth and. Very inspiring. And he had, like, quite a couple of things that really sort of like, hit home and made me listen and thought, you know, oh, okay. Like, you know, and like, one of the things he talked about, he was very, like, very physical in how he spoke and things like that. And I think it's something that, you know, dance studio owners, sometimes we get caught up in the. In the day to day of the negatives. But, like, you know, one thing he said was, like, you know, if you are there doing, you know, if you're a business owner, whatever you're doing, like, act as if what you do makes a difference, because it does that. Was it like.

Like, what does he mean by that? Tell me what that means. Like, that means by that.

Well, so, like, for, like, you know, like all the incredible things that dance has brought you as a dancer, as a dance teacher, how different your life is because of dance. For those that are listening to this, and you're giving that gift to so many students on a daily basis. Yeah. What you do does make a difference. So make sure that you take time to sit and reflect in that. That.

Celebrate it.

Celebrate it and enjoy it, because. Yes. Look, we can't pretend like being a business owner. There's some shit things that go with it too, 100%. But if we reflect on the overwhelming majority of what we do makes a really big difference in so many people's lives. Make sure we sit and celebrate that and don't let. Don't let the other stuff outshine that or weigh that.

Yeah.

Okay, I love that.

So, so good.

And like, a couple of other things you said, like making sure. And this is something that can be so easily done that you don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the Seeds that you sow. And I think that's again something. Yeah, it's deep. Right. But I think sometimes as business owners, you know, you can get to the end of the day and you can. Yeah. Like we all have those days, right. You get to the end, you're like, what the hell did I do today? I swear I've worked. Like, I feel tired and I was at my computer all day, like, what did I actually get done? Like. And we again, like, we can get a bit down on ourselves, right. Because. But those that are working and we always talk about working on your business, not in your business, you might have. And that's why it's important to like make sure, like we talk about time blocking lots and things like that. But you might have not have like felt like you've harvested a lot that day. You might have not have felt like that what you've done that day's bought.

Money into your rewards, made you lots of money.

Made you lots of money there today. But have you done some tasks that are going to pay off next week, next month, next term, next year?

Like so good seeds.

Yeah. Have you put in long term work into your studio today? Like so making sure that again, it's all about sitting. Sometimes just sitting back and taking those couple of minutes to reflect on things like that can be, I think super, super important for us as dance studio owners that get sometimes too caught up in that, in that day to day stuff and always running and always feeling like we're always feel like we're chasing something rather than celebrating.

I so love that because, you know, we've been talking a lot. I know. Last week Beth did a session in tribe on connections with parents.

Yeah.

And a lot of people were talking about, you know, it was just a question like, I just don't have time to do that sort of thing. I don't have time. You know, unfortunately that's the thing that goes by the wayside. There's connections with the parents and I totally get it because we're all doing 4,000 things and making a connection with that parent and, you know, chatting to them for 20 minutes about how school's going for Susie and you know, like whatever that is. Right?

Yeah.

Chatting them to them for 20 minutes about the, you know, and that and just building relationships and connections. That's not making you any money today. You know, it's not helping your routine get on stage, you know, next week or anything like that. But is it sowing incredible seeds that this family is going to feel so special and so Part of your studio that they're going to stay with you for 15 years? Quite possibly, yeah. So you're sowing these incredible seeds rather than getting like that harvest or that, you know, that instant gratification that we've just made money or we've just done this or whatever that is. But it can be so, so valuable. I love that lesson.

And I was talking about that we like similar topic talking about with someone in one of our one on ones last week about how like, and it's something that you struggled with is that you know you went through that like you went through a bit of a stage where you're like, I just feel like I just get nothing done between like from about 3:00'. Clock. I just feel like at the studio especially that like 3 till 4. I just feel like I get nothing done. Until one day you realized, well, what were you getting done? Because you weren't doing any work in inverted commas. You weren't like sitting at your computer and like pumping out content or doing things like that. But what were, what did you then realize that you were doing that was sowing those long term seeds?

Absolutely. Making connections with your staff, making connections with your clients, all of those things which built an incredible business moving forward.

Because especially like, you know, because we like our staff loved working at DS and so for their 3:45 class, like they had to be there 10 minutes early. That's fair. But they would start rolling in from 3 o' clock and so absolutely Amanda would sit there and like the first person had come in and she'd have a chat about what they did on the weekend or their day. Yeah, how's the parents going? Like, and then the next person would roll in seven minutes later like and so, but having those like just those informal check ins with staff doesn't feel like work but it's just super important connection building because it makes your staff feel more invested, it makes them feel appreciated. And we know that keeping your staff is so much more beneficial and saves you so much money in the long run than having to hire new stuff all the time.

Absolutely. Tell us the quote again.

You don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but the seeds that you sow, I love that so much. And then the like the last. Oh, sorry, I was gonna say the last like the last thing that I really took from Inky Johnson as well was he challenged. He's challenging people to think like making sure that you like is your personal software updated was the question he asked. And yeah, again, just Coming back to what we're super passionate about is are you investing in bettering yourself? Whether that comes from, you know, making yourself a better business owner, investing in your own personal health and well being, whatever that is looking like for you.

Going for a walk, eating better, whatever that is.

Is your personal software updated and like. And he was, he made the, the direct link between software updates on your phone, right? Because whenever, sometimes we see that software update on your phone and it feels like a pain in the ass, right? Or like you open Instagram one day and they've done an update, you're like, oh, just like, this is so hard to use. Like, we've all had those feelings, right? But at the end of the day, if our iPhones were still running on iOS 2 from when iPhone came out back in 2007, like, it'd be a shit product and nobody could use it, right? So sometimes we just got to push through and after that first like day or two, let's be honest, it's not that long quite often, but after those first couple of days of getting used to the new operating system, we do actually realize that it's 10 times better.

That putting in that everything's performing better. The Facebook ads, the Facebook apps working better, the mail apps working better, all of those things. Which does that mean your business is running better because you're putting the work into yourself personally?

Absolutely. That's why it stuck with me.

Right. I love that. I love that so much. So, so good. Any last things that you want to share with us? Great experience. Did you love it?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It was very, very different to the first one I went on. I think I've just sort of chatted about that with you, but like I said, I think it's just again, super important. Just getting outside for me personally, getting outside my comfort zone. And like I said, like, heading to an event without you and Beck, which forced me and don't know, I sound like a bit of a Globetrot, but I'm going to another event. It's only. It's in the Gold coast this time on Thursday, in a couple of days here. But just putting yourself in those rooms where you've got to, we don't know anybody and so you've got to just, you just got to turn to the person next to you and have a chat and make those connections and because like I said, you never know what's going to come of them. So I think like, yeah, the biggest thing to take from it is make sure that you're putting yourself in those situations and go and make sure that you're working on making yourself and investing in yourself because it's just super, super important and gets you back into your business. Feeling inspired, right?

Yeah, I love that. Updating your personal software.

Yep. 100%.

So, so good. Thanks for joining us, friends, on the Dance Principles United podcast. It would mean the absolute world to us if you took a second and you wrote a review. If you like our podcast, you know, we really need reviews on our podcast. We're feeling a bit lonely. We haven't had some for, for a while. So, like, it would mean the world to us if you jumped on your Apple or your Spotify app and wrote a review. And if you would be ever so thankful.

We absolutely wouldn't. If have any ideas. We had somebody reach out a couple of weeks ago with a couple of things that they would have loved to hear that they're going to love to hear on the podcast. And we will be absolutely recording some episodes around those as well because they were great ideas. And the reason we do this podcast, guys, is to help dance studio owners out. And so if you're giving us feedback as to what would help you out, then we would love to record an episode on it.

Thanks, guys. Bye.

Thanks. Bye.

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