I Spent $500,000 On An Event...

Yes, it is true. I am spending over $500,000 to throw an event coming up next month. Now, a lot of people have been asking me, Bridger, where does all that money go? How much does each line item cost? How much will you generate from the event? Is it gonna be a pitch fest? So in this video, I want to answer all of those questions. I'm actually gonna walk you through it line by line of the entire event breakdown, how we're planning to generate revenue at the event, and what my motives are to spend $500,000 on an event is. Actually, let's just answer that The reason I'm spending $500,000 in this event is because it's going to be freaking awesome. That's why. Cue up the B-roll. Welcome to Vegas, baby. People like us love the game. We love the blood, the sweat, the tears. The competition drives us. And that's why you're here. Everything we do here is to get you one step ahead. This is the way you beat competition next door, down the street, across the country, and across the world. Starting a fund is the only business model that has been proven time and time again throughout history. People overestimate what they can accomplish in 1 year and underestimate what they can do in a decade. Wall Street has been hiding this information for decades and now it's not a secret anymore. It's not reserved for the private elite. It's a question for you and for me of do or do not. So the question for you is, what are you gonna do? So, I'm an event junkie. I love events. I'm a product of events. Everything you see here at IFS, our funds, everything I've done in business have been some way or another a result from me attending an event, hearing different speakers and different ideas, different ways of looking at the world, and me taking that and applying it to my business. Literally, the reason we started Investment Fund Secrets, the sign back here, is because I went to an event There was a guy on stage. He challenged me to start publishing. He challenged me to get out and start having a voice and go after a niche that I wanted to go after. And I'm not saying this just to pump it up. It really did change my life. And that's the reason we have what we have today. And before we go any further, this event's going to be amazing. Let me show you what it looks like for a second. Okay. So this is our landing page for Fund Launch Live 2022. You scroll down. It's all about launching and scaling a fund. We're going to have economists there. We're going to have fund managers that manage hundreds of millions and billion-dollar funds. We're going to have crypto people, forex people, real estate people, pretty much in every investing category. We are bringing these people in. To share their little golden nuggets that they can give to you as you go on this same journey. Here's a list of some of our speakers. We've got Jeff Sechinger, $60 million crypto fund. We got Vu Tran, who has an incredible 8-step pitching strategy. Gopala, one of our members, went from $0 to $2.5 billion in just 18 months. We've got Lincoln Archibald, you guys have seen on the channel before. Sean Whalen, founder of Lions Not Sheep, an incredible speaker. I've heard him speak before. He came to our last event, lit our hair on fire. He's coming back. Vusi, Africa's number one venture capitalist, over $200 million AUM. Mia Love, she's on a bunch of boards, boards and Fortune 500 companies, former congresswoman. And we have another 10 speakers we haven't even announced yet. We have a speaker that runs a $50 million venture capital fund out of the UK. We have another world-class speaker who's spoken on stage with Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi and Russell Brunson, all those guys, spoken on their stages multiple times. He's been a repeat speaker on multiple stages like that. We've got another speaker that's bought and sold over 1,000 businesses in his life. Anyways, it's gonna be a hoot. Now you're probably like, Bridger, let's get to the numbers. Let's get to the cold hard facts. of what this event looks like. So what I did, you can come over to my screen here. I broke down, we have a spreadsheet. I'm gonna have things come up. I just hid things on purpose so you won't look ahead. Everyone, you throw numbers on a page, everyone looks to the bottom line, they wanna see everything. I'm gonna go line item by line item and why we decided to spend that much on each line item. So number 1 here, you see the event center. The event center right here, um, forecast, the total contract is about just over $60,000. We've paid half now, we'll pay another half here in a couple weeks. Now event centers are tricky. We shopped almost a dozen event centers around the country before we landed with our event center in Las Vegas. We want an event center that could house over 1,000 people very comfortably, could sleep them, was in a nice area, had good food, good restaurants, and a great room and stage presence for the event. Again, I said before, I'm an event junkie. I have to have good— like, I— if I'm gonna throw an event, it's got to be amazing. It's got to be all out. And that brings us to our next line item, which will make more sense, is our AV production. I geek out on AV. I'm very particular about AV. I want it to run just right. And so we spent $116,000 just on AV, okay? We've paid half now. I think we're paying another half when they do the event or something like that. And this is actually a funny story for people that have thrown events. We shopped around a lot of AV teams. Now you can go very low end. I didn't want that. I wanted really nice lighting, projector, like all the stuff, really cool stage design. And we got quoted. I got my first quote on AV was $480,000 for AV. Anyways, I kind of laughed and said, shoot, I hope it's not that much. The next quote I got was about a quarter million dollars, $250,000. For AV, and I was like, holy smokes, like, maybe we can't do an event. And finally I found a company that they said $116,000, and man, I felt like I was getting a screaming deal at $116,000. Isn't that funny how you get price anchored so high? And I was like, wow, okay, where do I sign? And we signed up. Maybe next year we'll find a better AV option, but these guys are really good. I didn't want to go cheap on AV. I wanted to have something really high quality. And so that, that's what I wanted for this event. And this brings our current total here to $176,000. Now, like I said before, I'm an event junkie. I love events. And one of the biggest pieces of having a good event or a bad event comes down to one person. And a lot of event throwers overlook this. They don't think about it. That person is your MC. The MC is the person that comes out on stage, introduces speakers. It controls the energy of the crowd. It gets people up and as you sit, you know, sit down, gets people in the room at the right times. I have seen MCs completely destroy million-dollar events. People that have spent over a million dollars on an event, an MC doesn't know what they're doing or they just had some random person go up, yeah, introduce the next speaker, kills the energy in the crowd. We needed one of the best MCs on planet earth. I found him, his name is Devon. He's gonna be incredible. He was $13,000 for us to book. I've heard him specifically do 3 events and I have never found a better MC than him. I made sure we had him, he was booked. We paid $13,000 just to have him come run our event. All right. Next on the line item list, we have an inner group called Black Card. Black Card's our top tier group. During the event, we're going to have a special VIP dinner and event just for those Black Card members. We are forecasting spending around $70,000 for this event. It could go as high as $100,000 depending on RSVPs. So right now we're still getting RSVPs, but this will happen just for our current Black Card members there in our top tier group. Brings our total to $259,000. Now, before we go any further, I'm sure you're asking yourself, well, Bridger, what's the angle? How, number one, are you going to make money? What's your ticket sales breakdown? And is this going to be a pitch fest? You go to— I've been to events like this. You show up, everyone's pitching. There's speakers all day for 3 days straight. They're just pitch after pitch after pitch, and you're just exhausted at the end of this. You know, oh, that's how they're doing this. That's how they make money. So the first thing I want to say is no, this will not be a pitch fest. I hate pitch fests. It is so disgracing to your audience, people that have flown across the country to come here and have their lives changed, and you just pitch them all day. So no, this will not be a pitch fest. Actually, we have a contract signed by every speaker that says they will not pitch at this event. The only offer, there will be one offer made at the entire event. It's a very passive offer. If you want to join our black card program, you can. There'll be a table in the back. You can join our black card group. That's it. Because, and if you want me to be 100% transparent, this event is a major brand builder for us at Investment Fund Secrets. When you throw a 1,000-person event and invite speakers from all over the world, people in your space and category. Number 1, the speakers come and I get to network and meet all of these speakers that I've been dying to get in their circle or get in their realm of influence a little bit more. Number 2, all of the attendees. We want them to walk away feeling like they got 10 or 20 times the value that they paid when attending this event, and when that happens, that boosts our business like crazy. It helps me over the next decade raise capital for more funds I'm doing. It helps me land more partnerships and deals. So even if I made $0 or even lost money on this event, I would do it every single time because of how it benefits myself personally and our business by throwing a big event like this. So rest assured, this is not a pitch fest. There'll be one offer made. It's if you want to join our Black Card group, you can. It's a passive offer. In the back of the room, there's a table you can sign up. That'd be great. But really, this is a huge brand builder for us. So back to the thing, let me go through our income strategy. So here we are with tickets. We have already sold out of VIP tickets with 227 of them with an average cost of $1,150. That's generated $261,000 $309,000 of revenue. General admission totaling, this would total 1,000 tickets once we sell out with an average price of about $400. $309,000 brings us to $570,000, which actually net, we'll see at the end here, you can see our whole numbers, should net us a profit. So again, this is a long-term play for me. Throwing these events is how I build my investor network, build my database, build my brand partners for the next decade. Too many of us think in days or months or even years. We got to think in decades. This is a major, major thing for us. And we're going to continue to do these every single year to continue to grow that brand. So there it is, that's me showing my hand. There you go, there's my cards. You can see why we're doing this, why we're throwing this event. That is why. And also, it's freaking awesome to throw events. I love events. I love— I have a dream of being on stage and this whole thing. It is so fun. But yeah, it's freaking amazing. All right, so back to the line items here. We're at $259,000 total right now. All right, up next we have merchandise. We want to have you guys have cool gifts when you come to events, so we're spending money on general admission and black card merch, $35,000 apiece. Bringing us to $329,000. Now, if you're in our ecosystem, you've probably seen our ads running. We've currently spent $58,000 on ads for this event. We have a budget of $100,000 for ads. People got to know about this event. They got to know what's happening. Now, to get the quality of speakers that we want, to get our whole team there, you can see the breakdown here. So speaker fees, we budgeted only $20,000, which is actually very, very low. You hear other event throwers, they spend $200,000, $300,000 on speaker fees. Now, what's cool about our event is we are the first of this type. Funnel Launch Live is the first fund type of event. We have a lot of speakers begging us to come and speak at our event. People that typically charge $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 speaker fees are saying, hey, I'll waive my speaker fee. I want to come for free as long as you guys fly me out to the next thing. So this is our speaker transportation. This is just us flying them out and giving them a room for a couple of days. $36,000 there. They're saying, hey, I will come out. I want to speak to this audience. This is a really cool group. Group to be in front of, which is kind of cool to hear that from some pretty high-level speakers. And then this last line item is for our team to fly out and stay for a couple days there, which brings us to $496,000, which is crazy. And we're not even to all the boring stuff yet. And finally, some of the boring stuff. We got insurance here, security— we got to make sure no one's bringing in crazy stuff to the event— branding for the event. Usually branding's $20,000 or $30,000. We got a really good deal on our branding deal. We know some people. It's gonna be awesome. And then registration as well, $5,000. So that brings to a total $526,000. We are currently projecting $570,000 of revenue, which brings us to a total profit of $44,000 projected once the event starts. And like I said before, speakers are not pitching this event. We do not have booths or sponsors of the event. We don't want any of that. This event is designed to provide a ton of value upfront. If any of you guys have ever joined any of my programs or products or our free course, I'm a big believer in giving value upfront. If I give enough value upfront, I will be paid in the long term for that. So here's a few of our variable costs. If we want to add them, we can. We can add more event branding. We have virtual viewing, but a very like comprehensive, crazy virtual viewing, like the whole stage setup thing. We can do that if we'd like for $14,000. Stage extension, speaker fees. We could sign 1 or 2 more big speakers for $50,000 if we'd like. I don't think we will. We're actually full on speakers now. That brings us to $93,000. And then we want 2 more cameras. We want to add more things here. Registration. We can add all this stuff for a total of of $69,000 of additional fees if we'd like them. Currently, I think we're sitting pretty good with our forecast. I like these numbers. It's kind of funny. You're like, Bridger, why would we do all this effort? Again, we're playing the long-term game. This gets me so many potential investors for my funds. It gets me a lot of people in our ecosystem, a lot of branding partners, which will hopefully make me tens of millions of dollars over the next decade. And these events are so fun. And my life has been changed by events. It's why I want to throw an event. That's why there's no events of this type in this space. I said, if no one else is doing it, we're doing it. And so here we are at Funnel Launch Live. It's coming out April 28th. 29th and 30th. Tickets are selling out fast. We have VIPs are already sold out. We only have a few hundred left of general admission. We've actually sold very, very well. I was talking to a guy, he runs huge events. We told him how many tickets we had sold and he was like, wow. He goes, how many days you got? We're like, well, we're about, you know, a month and a half, 2 months out. He went, shoot, next event you guys need a bigger space. We will probably be sold out here very soon. And as we keep selling, the ticket prices keep going up because we can just justify a higher cost. Sorry, it's capitalism. Okay. So with that, let me know what you guys think in the comments below. Maybe we messed up on here somehow. Let me know what you guys think and I'll see you in April. In Vegas.