Behind the Scenes of Hosting a Revenue-Generating Event For Your Business

And this is something I think that we forget about. People are busy, there's a lot moving, we're moving fast. So yeah, can you invite people to a live event or an experience with just a couple of weeks notice, 7 to 14 days notice? Yeah, you can. And there are some places where that makes a lot of sense. But because this was an event that I wanted to connect with people in, I wanted to show up for people in and I wanted people to show up in it because I knew that's how they were going to get results. And I knew it was going to be fun. Fun because we were bringing that entertainment factor. We invited people to this weeks in advance, like a month and we continued that practice. And this is one of the reasons I believe our engagement is high in the Plan A thon was in the very beginning and continues to be high 10 years later because we're giving people notice. People are busy, people have a lot going on. I'd say people might even be busier and more distracted now than 10 years ago. The pings, the demands on your time and attention are exponential. Off the chart. Hey. Hey. I am so happy to be here with you today. This is going to be a casual episode, a conversation where we chat about a little behind the scenes on setting up a revenue generating event for your business. And we are going to do this in a two part series with some behind the scenes from an event that I run every fall called the Plan A thon Fall Us. I should clarify. I'm rolling into spring and summer right now, but I still say fall. So I am excited to be here with you in this behind the scenes episode. Like I said, it is going to be casual, it is going to be informal, it is going to be real and I'm going to break down some things for you and share some behind the scenes so that you can do something like this in your business if you want or maybe you don't want. And you are going to learn from some of my mistakes. Now this is going to be in likely in two parts. I'm going to give you some of the behind the scenes in the background first and then in the next episode I'm going to share a little bit more about where we are going. I have been wanting to record this for a little while now and things have just kept coming up. Life is life and we're going through transition, school, life, business, work, volunteer work. There's just stuff coming up all over. I knew that I needed to record this and I wanted to sit down and have a Conversation with you. And I made my schedule last night. Like, I'm gonna get the kids out the door, say I love you, say I'm going to miss you while you're gone. They rolled their eyes, though, and it's actually a song. I didn't sing it, but they look back like, oh my gosh, have you heard the song? I'm going to miss you and I'm gone I'm gone, you're gone I'm going to miss you when I'm gone I'm going to miss you when I'm gone When you're gone, when you're gone Anyway, so, okay, maybe you just rolled your eyes too. Sorry about that. Wanted to give you the full behind the scenes. I told you it's going to be casual. And so they left. I grabbed some coffee, I did a couple of volunteer things, and here I am sitting down for our incredible conversation. Also, speaking of, like, just life, my husband has a day working from home, which was unexpected, and I did not weave into my schedule. So he may walk in the door any minute. We share an office space. I'm on this side. He is on the other side of the room to my right. So if you hear a door open, that's just him sitting down to do his work at his computer. So. But that didn't stop me. That did not stop me today. And I'm so grateful to be here with you. So for the last 10 years, we have hosted an annual planning event for entrepreneurs called the Plan A Thon. You may have participated, you may not have participated. If you have not participated in a Plan A Thon yet, I want you to go over to the planethon.com and RSVP for the plan A Thon. This year that's coming up, we are rolling into our 11th year of the planethon. So we've been doing this for a while. Every year end, we come together in the planning event of the year for entrepreneurs and business owners to help you get strategic, get focused, get intentional, and set yourself up for success in the year ahead. And this event in and of itself has generated millions in revenue. It has given us the opportunity to serve tens of thousands of business owners. And the feedback we receive about this event is so beautiful. And the momentum and the connection and the community that comes together in this event is one of the most beautiful intentional communities you will ever be a part of. It is not a community that is active all year, every year. It is a community that comes together to plan focused intentionally and get on track to get where we want to be going. And this idea came to life, like I said, over 11 years ago. We've hosted 10 Plan A thons this year will be our 11th. And this idea came to life over a decade ago when I was in communities watching people say, hey, what do you do to plan for the year ahead? Do you create a strategic plan? Do you right reset, reflect? What is your process for closing out a year and setting yourself up for a new year? And very new in the entrepreneurial space. At this time I was still consulting in corporate and I was seeing these, this feedback and these comments come in. I thought, man, I do this, I know how to do this. I have a process for this. So when I saw this feedback coming in in communities that I was in and this question being raised, I thought, okay, next year I'm going to have something ready to go. So I worked on it throughout the year. I put things up on my craft paper. I don't have a whiteboard. I have craft paper up and I write on it and I put post it notes on it. So it's multipurpose. I don't have a whiteboard because we move a lot and I didn't have a great space for that. I use white paper sheets sometimes as well. But at the time I had craft paper up, a roll of craft paper on my wal and notes up that I was making throughout the year. And I got to July and I thought, okay, now I'm going to write out my process. And the process that I wrote out became a workbook, a planning workbook and guide that you can check out atfresh start workbook.com and we'll be updating that for the 2024 edition later. And it also became a planning event. So what we did is we created with the workbook a planning event. And I wanted this event to be a bit like a challenge, if you've heard of a challenge. I look at a challenge as structured event where we work together and we move toward taking steps toward whatever the challenge purpose is on something specific and actionable. So specific, actionable, we're going to get a certain result by the end of the challenge or our time together. Some examples of challenges, five day planning challenge like the annual Plan a thon five day Clone Camp which we ran years back. I might bring that back in 2024 also. That was a ton of fun. But the five day clone camp was an event that was entirely themed around camping, but it was all about cloning yourself, team, your impact, your results, your time in your business. So that was actually experiential and so much fun. When we made it very experiential we had fireside chats. We said, you know this camp doesn't have mosquitoes, you don't need your bug spray. We really themed the language and the experience and the campers got into it. At the end of one night I called for lights out. As the camp director, I called for lights out and people went skinny dipping in Moolah Lake after. And I think some people even had a flask that they were hiding and that they busted out when they were skinny dipping. So this is obviously all fictitious but it actually happened. It was fictitious but it actually happened. And we did name things Moolah Lake profitability pond so you could see how in and a challenge you can bring in excitement experiential elements. Another example is the 14 day green smoothie challenge. Make one new green smoothie a day for 14 days, 30 day whole food cleanse, 7 day Instagram engagement challenge, etc. Etc. Etc. This could go on and on and on. I was really excited about the Plan A Thon challenge and when we started the Plan A Thon we knew we were going to run this over five days. I knew that I would be guiding people through strategic planning elements. We wouldn't be able to get it all done in the Plan A Thon because it's a micro event, it's a bit of a taster but I could get people pretty far in strategic planning. But also I knew that when we are doing strategic planning we're going to want to consult experts. We're going to want to hear, okay, but what should we do about this? What would so and so experts say about this? So we also brought in experts who at the time were colleagues and my clients because I was surrounded by experts that I was serving and I was surrounded by experts as colleagues in the communities I was in. So we hosted the five day Plan A Thon for the first time over a decade ago. And it was awesome to make this experiential because that was one of my key elements. You know, thinking in line with the clone camp scenario. I wanted the Plan A Thon to also be experiential. So what we did for the first, first maybe four or five Plan A Thons is we invited people to be creative and do something entertaining in their Plan A Thon videos. Yes, the Plan A Thon was ran live as in we were all doing it together at scheduled times. But the content was pre recorded. And I'll tell you why I did that in just a second. But we asked people inside these planning videos to do something entertaining like deliver your presentation while standing on your head. We had people, we really themed them. Like I did presentations from my car using the analogy you cannot get where you want to be going without a map. So I would get my car. I'm like, all right, let's go. Where are we going? I don't know. Let's go. Let's just go. Okay, but where do we go first? I don't know. Right. So we theme some of this in the car scenarios I did to be funny and to really play on the the idea to do a video standing on top of your head. I did do one in a yoga tripod move. I cannot fully stand on my head. Very well. Maybe up against a wall I could. But I did do one in a yoga pose or at least I kicked off a video that way. There is a video up our Plan A Thon group right now where my daughters Audrey and Harper are singing a song. They made up a song. It goes like this. Goals, goals, goals. Do your goals with Amber. Yes, it sounds like that. You gotta go check it out. RSVP for the plan a thon@theplanathon.com and then get into our group. That is the only pinned video right now. That may change by the time you are listening and get into the group. But as of the time that I am sitting down with you right now, that is the only pinned video in the group and it is my two youngest daughters. And there is more to that song. That was just the chorus. They have verses they wrote and that was a part of our planning experience and those videos as well. So we wanted to entertain, we wanted to engage and we wanted to inform with the purpose that people could take action to build their strategic plans for the week. Now I said that I'd share why we did these videos versus Live. At the time that I kicked off the Plan A Thon, I was still working in corporate. It's a full time job. And it was soon after our first couple of Plan A Thons that I transitioned to a part time role, not full time employee role in the organization and I transitioned out of the full time employee role and I was able to spend more time on the business. But I wanted to have flexibility while I was still in a full time employee role and after I transitioned out of the full time employee role to not have to be on all of the time hosting an event, hosting a webinar, hosting a workshop, hosting four part video series Hosting a community in a group, you know, these are things that there are a lot of moving parts. There are places you want to show up for community. And I wanted to show up in such a big way, but I didn't want emergency came up with the kids. If an emergency came up with the corporate client I had at the time, I wanted to be able to be present for them and for it to not hurt the experience that we were creating. So we did not run this full event live. Well, we ran it live in that these videos that were pre recorded went live at specific times but and we commented at specific times and I was there showing up live in the comments together with people at specific times. But if I couldn't be there that immediate moment, the video would still go up. I could go take care of what I needed to take care of and then I could come back. So it reduced and you can even hear my voice as I'm talking about this. It really reduced the anxiety I had about hosting this event at the time as a solo business owner. So I was juggling the tech, I was juggling the emails, I was juggling the posting of the videos and the scheduling and I was juggling the comments in the Plan A thon experience. And also this was all posted in a Facebook group. So for the first 10 years of running the Plan A thon this was exclusively hosted in a Facebook group and we hosted one live workshop at the end of the of bring it all together. And so and why, why did I host it in a Facebook group again? Because I wanted the tech to be simple. That was something I knew I could navigate and handle. At the time, the planet thought opt in pages were on lead pages. Simple for me to operate and simple for me to run. If you are looking for an easy place to set up your opt ins, you can go to amber mchugh.com forward/lead pages as well and you've got a link to check that out also. In fact my team and I are working on a landing page the other day and our ops director Malia said man, lead pages made this easy for us. We were looking to do some split testing. We were looking to make some updates on a page and yeah, leadpages does make things super easy. So. So check that out. If you're looking for a simple place to set up opt in forms where you can integrate to your email platform. One email platform I really like is Amber McKee.com/forward/low desk as well. And so you can integrate so that people are automatically getting emails when they're RSVP for something like the planethon.com, check it out if you have an RSVP yet. And then so this was all tech that was really easy for me to manage on my own. And then after the Plan A thon the first year, we invited people simply to get that planning workbook that I mentioned. Fresh startworkbook.com you can check that out. It'll be updated for 2024 shortly as well. But it you've got an undated version available there. And so we set this up and immediately the feedback that we got was incredible. The first year I ran this, I did not run Facebook ads. It was organic participation. I believe we had 300 people in in year one, all from organic connection, marketing, promoing. And again, because it was just me and because this was organic and because I was stretched across multiple projects at the time, I started inviting people into the Plan A thon weeks in advance. I didn't give myself one week, I didn't give myself two weeks. I gave myself three to four weeks, maybe even more to invite people into this event. And this is something I think that we forget about. People are busy, there's a lot moving, we're moving fast. So, yeah, can you invite people to a live event or an experience with just a couple of weeks notice, 7 to 14 days notice? Yeah, you can. And there are some places where that makes a lot of sense. But because this was an event that I wanted to connect with people in, I wanted to show up for people in and I wanted people to show up in it because I knew that's how they were going to get results. And I knew it was going to be fun because we were bringing that entertainment factor. We invited people to this weeks in advance, like a month. And we continued that practice. And this is one of the reasons I believe our engagement is high in the Plan A thon was in the very beginning and continues to be high 10 years later because we're giving people notice. People are busy, people have a lot going on. I'd say people might even be busier and more distracted now than 10 years ago. The pings, the demands on your time and attention are exponential, off the chart for so many reasons that we could go into in a whole nother episode. But this is why I think it's important to give people notice. So. So don't worry if you're letting people know about something in advance. Mark your calendar, create space, carve out time, and you're going to see our invitation for you to do that. Inside the Plan A Thon experience this year, which you can RSVP for at the planet. Com. I knew I didn't need to say that again, but I wanted to put it in there just in case you haven't RSVP yet. And so you can see that we're going to take you through examples of all of this Inside the Plan A thon and you're also going to see how things are changing this year. So as I bring this particular episode and behind the Scenes to conclusion, I want to underscore a couple of key points and things that we called out through these examples and this behind the scenes. Number one, have a purpose for your revenue generating event. Number two, it's okay to start small. What's important is that you start do not be afraid to start. Number three, tech. What tech, especially if you are solo right now, is going to be easy and simple for you to navigate. And even if you have a team, what tech is going to be easy and simple for your team to navigate? And number four, create an experience that allows you to generate revenue immediately. And don't be afraid to give people advance notice because that advance notice will allow people to block their calendar and create space and time to get a specific result from the experience that they are going to be a part of with you. And giving that notice, I believe is more important now than ever because we have so many demands for our time and for our attention and when something matters, you want to give people space and time to carve out time on their calendar to go through that event with you. So don't be afraid to give notice. And with that, I'm going to be back next week to tell you some of the things that are changing for this year's Plan A Thon that is taking place the week of October 30th for four days this year already a change there four days October 30th, 31st, November 1st and 2nd from noon to 2pm Eastern each day. So mark your calendar rcp@the plan athon.com and I'll be back next week with more details on what we are changing this year and why and I cannot wait to share it with you.