Episode 017: The Key To Hosting Networking Events

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This is the Rise of the Young podcast, bringing you insights from the most innovative entrepreneurs and influencers of this era. Hosted by 17 year old entrepreneur, author, public speaker and branding expert, Casey Adams. Now let's get right into the show.

What's going on, everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome to the Rise of the Young podcast. Today it's episode 17 and we're gonna be talking about the key to hosting networking events. So over the last year, year and a half, I've always wanted to start hosting these Mastermind events that I call mansion events. My team and I, we've had the privilege to travel all around the US to San Diego, to Los Angeles, to Chicago, New York, Las Vegas, Miami and all these amazing places, and hosting these Mastermind events with entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs. So today in this video, I'm gonna be breaking down the way that we've been able to host these Mastermind events, the marketing strategy that goes into it, how we lay out these events and how we can really determine if an event's going to be successful or not. So that being said, let's go ahead and get right into it. So I get all the time people are asking me, how do you host these Mastermind events? What is the layout? How could I potentially start hosting my own events in my local area or some city around the United States? So for that being said, number one, the first thing I want to get into is the power of having a central niche for your event. And what I mean by niche is that whenever I'm hosting Mastermind events, I do it for entrepreneurs. I do it for people who want to learn about whether it be making money online or just how to creating a personal brand, social media marketing, e commerce, and just different niches that revolve around the entrepreneurship niche. And yes, you can have different types of events, but for our team, we host entrepreneur mastermind events, sit down execution strategies, we teach people at these events and then we have a networking portion for people to walk around, meet, exchange contact information and all that good stuff. But when it goes to finding your niche for an event, that very is very critical to the marketing side of things. Because before you even think about hosting events, make sure you write these three town. Make sure you write these three things down. Number one, have a central niche for your event. Number two, create an event layout. And number three, figure out the speakers for your event. Because that is the main three things you're going to be targeting when you are marketing and branding your event. So back to creating that niche. Make sure that you're bringing quality speakers who have credibility inside of your niche. So if you're hosting a mastermind about estate, you don't necessarily want to bring in people that are is a car mechanic, right? Whenever you're hosting these events that you're hosting, make sure that you're staying within the niche regarding having speakers coming, regarding actually talking at the event. Making sure that you keep the people centralized around the main topic is the key. And make sure you want to bring in high quality speakers. And I'll be going more into depth in the next couple of minutes about how to find good speakers. So that being said, that being said, the main thing that I want to talk about next is creating an event layout. Because this is by far the most critical thing for any event is how the exact event will flow, what will happen after the speaker starts talking, what will happen when the event is kind of winding down, how do you know what time you're eating or this or that or whatever. It may be the way that you're determining how the event is. So I would say when you're creating an event layout, you have to know how you want the event to go. As myself, I've hosted multiple events and whenever you are the host, you have to be very, very precise about what way you want the event to go, what direction you want it to go, how everything's flowing and you have to figure out what's happening next. And you have to do this beforehand. So what I mean by creating good event flow is just the transitions between speakers, the transitions between. Is it a sit down mastermind or is a stand up networking time? You have to be the key leader and the key person, whether it be you yourself or your team that directs people and directs the speakers, the audience to go certain places at certain times and the Best way to do this is to keep everybody informed at these events. So for example, my team and I, team jet set. Whenever we were in New York City, there was multiple different speakers that were speaking and we all had a group chat that we would tell each other, all right, next person's up in five minutes, make sure you start closing up. And then we would have people in the back, whether it be just waiting signals at the person, that you got five minutes, that you got 10 minutes, and just keeping everything in check. And this is very, very important when you're hosting these events because the people that are paying to attend want to know that they're paying for quality service. And you must be very, very particular about how you want the event to go. So if you are hosting events, I'm just going to kind of regroup on what we've been talking about so far. Number one, have a central niche for your event. Number two, create an event layout. So once you've created the niche, once you've created the layout, so you say, hey, I want this event to be about E commerce, dropshipping, real estate, social media marketing, boom, you have your niche. Number two, do you want to have public speakers? Do you want to have people speaking before, is it a networking event before then you transition to a sit down, note taking event or do you want to just to be a stand up networking event the whole time with food? You have to very, very be precise about which way you want to go it from before you're even thinking about selling tickets. So that being said, we're gonna move on into how you control the event a little more as well as your team. So like I was talking about you as the host, you have to make sure that everything is running smoothly, keep eyes on all of the event. Whenever I'm hosting these events, I'm moving around the place that we're at the venue back and forth, make sure that people are good, making sure the speakers are good, making sure the food is good. And then I just have to create my event plan. And I do this by either writing it down on paper or which I do majority of the time as well as I'll create a checklist about things I have to do when the event is going. So that being said, I want you guys to very take this to heart and making sure that you're writing these three downs. Once you're listening to this is create a niche for the event, create the event layout and control the event. Once you figure out how you're going to do those three things, Then you can move on into finding the speakers, finding the venue, and how you can market it to get sales so that your event is successful. And that's what I'm going to be getting into right here in a second. So I hope this is providing you guys with some value. So moving forward, the first thing to finding the right speakers is number one, the most critical is people in your network. Whenever I'm hosting events, whether that be in Los Angeles, in Las Vegas, Chicago, New York, is there people in your network that are in the area that you're going to be hosting event, that would be down to speak. And what I mean by speak is that there are qualified individuals that could cover a topic regarding something that your event's gonna be about. So for me, for example, we have these events that we talk about social media marketing, where I will speak. We have my boy Thaddeus that will talk about social media marketing, majority of E commerce and drop shipping. But regarding entirely finding the right people all comes down to the most critical for me, and that is people inside of your network. And I do this by building teams around it. You build a network of people that you can host at these events by just speaking with them, DMing them, building a relationship with them, and then if you want them to speak, you can either compensate them based on their time, so just have a flat rate fee for them regarding ticket sales and paying them, or you could have a commission fee. So if it's someone that has an influence, every ticket they sell, you could get them to get paid from that. So it's a value for value proposition. They can take videos of them speaking, they can use that for branding purposes and they will overall just create a good relationship with the speakers. But if you're listening to this right now and you don't have experience with hosting events and you want to possibly host one in your local area, or you want to get the right speakers, there's a I say this all the time, guys, and this is very important. And it's simple. Send a DM to people on Instagram that you know have credibility, that you know are qualified to speak about a certain topic and that they would be willing to promote the event. And this is how you should do it. Pick out 10 different speakers that you'd want to host or speak at your event. Send them a direct message about, number one, the event niche, about what the events going to be about. 10, talk to them about how the event would go and why you'd want them to speak there and why they fit in to speak at your event. Once you can do that and you land four to five speakers, then you can figure out how to compensate them. And a lot of people, they may even be able to speak for free if you put in the work, you put in the time. And they actually just want to provide massive value. They can sell their products at the event, they'll get more exposure, more publicity. So you just have to be very particular about how you want to find the right speakers for your event. Been blessed to run into an amazing team of speakers and team jet set that we were crushing these events regarding entrepreneurship, regarding online money making, regarding real estate dropshipping, social media marketing. And yeah, it's just, it's been a great experience hosting these events all over the United States. And you got to remember, guys, I'm literally 17 years old from a small town in Virginia, and if it wasn't for my team that I've been able to build, I would not be able to host these events all over the country with 100, 200 people at these events. So I just want you guys to put this in consideration that if you've been thinking about hosting an event, it's very, very simple. But then also there's multiple things that are complicated that I'll be getting into as well. So that being said, I'm just gonna regroup once again. Number one, find a central niche. Number two, create an event layout. Number three, control the event and build a team so you have good consciousness about how the event's gonna go. Number four, find the speakers, use this and build your event by sending people direct messages on Instagram. And then send them the three things that I just talked about. Send the speaker or someone that you want to speak, send them what the event's gonna be about. Create the event layout, tell them why they should go and why they're qualified to go. And then tell them that they could either be compensated one time fee or just be given a flat rate percentage of ticket sales. So that being said, moving on, I'm gonna talk about something very important next, which is the venue. And if you don't know what that word is, it means the place you're going to be hosting the event. Because this is very critical. I've had great experiences, I've had bad experiences with this. So I'm just gonna be breaking down to you a little bit about what I've found when hosting events with venues. So number one, before you even sell tickets, before you even move into marketing your event, figure out and plan ahead about how many People you want to start coming to your event. So for a lot of our events, we'll like to cap them about 60 to 80 people, so a 20 person limit in between. But some events that we have bigger venues, we like to do around 150 people to 250 people. And those really determine which venue you're going to be hosting it at. So this is an example of the bad things to do with your venues. So my buddy Kieran and I, we hosted an event in Beverly Hills Hills and it turned out to be an amazing event. We had over 250 people there, amazing individuals, amazing speakers, and overall it was an amazing event, like I just said. But some of the downfalls that we had is that we were planning on getting Airbnb Mansion in Beverly Hills about a month in advance. We had the one we wanted to do. We ended up booking it about two and a half, three weeks out, we were good to go. The money was sent, but then last minute, a week before, the Airbnb guy canceled on us, didn't give us a refund for our ticket sales until about a month later. So we had to take money out of pocket. We had to really adjust our budget about the way that we wanted to host this event. So that being said, making sure that you're being very, very crystal clear on having a good event space, making sure someone can do it, and being very responsive with the host of the event, location is very critical because we ended up having to get an Airbnb and we definitely, definitely could have done a lot better with the timing and of getting the place in the venue, but we ended up getting an amazing place in Beverly Hills. It was the perfect spot. It was actually a place where the Grammys after party was hosted. And we got super lucky to have this amazing, beautiful location. But like I said, the point of this is I don't want you to wait until last minute to book your event space because it can be stressful. It can get kind of just detrimental to the event if you don't have everything planned correctly. But this is coming from experience. And yes, I'm not an amazing person that's hosted hundreds of events. But over the last year, my team and I, like I said, we've traveled all over, we've hosted big events. And this is just key things that I've learned from hosting some of these events. And then number three, make sure that you check out the venue before you go to the event. Make sure that someone on your team, whether it be if it's in your area or you're flying out somewhere, make sure that you get to this venue a couple days before, check it out, making sure that everything's set up, the chairs, making sure that you got some food, if there's going to be food provided, making sure that you have a good spot for the speakers to stand, making sure that the presentation area is big enough for the speakers. And overall, just don't wait until last second to plan your event and don't wait till the last second to check out the venue space because it's very critical to knowing if anything will go wrong. So that being said, the next thing that I'm going to be speaking about is, number one, the budget for your event as well as marketing for your event. So whenever my team and I are hosting these events, we figure out, number one, what value are we going to be bringing to these people, how many speakers are we going to be bringing, and then overall, what will the people there be learning and how valuable is it to them, as well as what would we think that we would pay for these tickets? So when we determine an event price, we always look at it from the value being provided, the time it's taking us to do overall, how much work it's making us put in, and then we determine a price based on the value. So like I said, so these are some examples of tickets for events that we've had. For the more personal things where we have hundreds of people, if it's just a networking event, we've had events that are $57 a ticket and then they kind of range. We have some events that we've sold tickets for 140, $247, which is a great price. Some events, 247. And then for some VIP sections, we've had 497 as well as some 997. So there's just different types of event prices that we've been able to work with that we've found are very beneficial. Like I said, you can always change it up. But something from one of my mentors, Dan Fleshman, he says if you're selling any product, any ticket, the price between $47 and $87, people will pay for the 87 because there's not much of a barrier of entry for people. So if you are hosting events for low ticket, I'll recommend $87, $97, whatever is best for the budget of the event. So regarding that, if you have any questions about events, hosting events, planning events, how to actually make it happen, I want you Guys, to send me a Message on Instagram aceadams1, let me know that you came from the event hosting podcast. And then the best, last but not least, we are going to be talking about marketing your event. So the marketing your event is by far the backbone of having a successful event. It is the make or break factor of saying, are we going to have people buying tickets? Are we going to have people attend? Does the speaker's time matter? Is it only going to be two people? Or is it going to be 30, 40, 50 people or 20 people making sure that you can actually sell your event? Or it's very important, before you spend the time and energy to find a venue, to figure out ticket prices, to book speakers, to pay for this venue, make sure that you actually have the resources to market your event. So right now we're going to be going into depth about how I market my events with my team, as well as how you can do the same for your events as well. So, number one, I'm sure a lot of you guys listening came from my social media page or you found me on the podcast Apple. But social media, I'm sure you know, is by far the best place to market for any, honestly, any product, but especially for hosting events. I've had the privilege to grow my social media following to thousands and thousands of followers over the last year, and I've been able to build an amazing personal brand. But I would say that the most critical thing about hosting events is having the right people on your team to promote it. So when it comes to social media promotions for events, and you want to do a lot of different things, but the three things that I'm giving you right now are very critical. And number one, that is branding of event structure. So whichever event you're hosting, you're going to want to make sure that the sales funnel that you build for this event clearly states what the people are going to be paying for, who will be speaking at this event, what kind of value that will be there, and number four, how much are they going to be paying for? Because if you can drive thousands of people to a link, but if they don't know what the price is, what they're getting, what time it is, the date of the event, where it's gonna be, you're not gonna be closing sales. So when you're marketing an event, making sure that the structure on the sales funnel is very, very clear, concise, simple, easy to follow is very important. Because like I said, you could drive hundreds of people to a link, but if it's not clear. And if it seems sketchy, they don't have a date, there's not a location, they don't know what they're gonna be getting. They don't know who's gonna be there, they don't know how much gonna. You're not going to close people on the event. It's that simple. So, that being said, if you want to close people on an event and get people to your event and paying for it, making sure that, number one, the sales funnel is by far super clean, you can tell them who's going to be there, how much is going to be, the location of the event, the timeframe it's going to be in, and then once you have that, this is the most important thing, getting sales for the event, getting people there, and the ways that we've been able to do it for our events is by leveraging our social media pages. These are a few practical tips about having people at least check out your link and buy it. Number one, do a hardcore promotion on your Instagram page. Post a picture of the event location and then give simple facts and objectives about what the event is going to be about. Create a nice caption that pretty much states, hey, we're having a Mastermind event in this location. These people will be there. It is this time in this location, and this is what you're gonna get from it. Boom. So that all of your social media followers will be able to get notified about the event you're having. And that will allow you to drive in tons of leads as well. As I like to do a lot of Instagram stories, because Instagram stories creates a very personal connection with your audience. And it's just something different than just seeing a picture or a video on your page. If you create a story and you're talking to one individual, and especially on Instagram, if you have more than 10,000 followers, you have the Swipe up feature, which is very, very amazing to have because it allows you to drive someone to a link with a swipe of a finger. So if you do have more than 10,000 followers on the event, or if you have speakers that do, making sure that you're promoting using the Swipe up feature is very beneficial and very, very good to help drive people to an individual link. So you're gonna want to make sure you do, like I said, an Instagram post, a Facebook post, swipe up stories on Instagram, and then do an Instagram Live. And this is something that my team and I have been brainstorming about a lot recently, since Instagram recently released the dual live streams, you're able to go live with someone on Instagram. So if you have a speakers that will be speaking at your event, if you do two person live streams and talk about the event and you let the people know about what you're going to be talking about, you drop free value on the live stream. People are going to be fired up coming from that live stream. And if you can direct people to a link using the link in your bio on Instagram, you're going to be able to drive people from that live stream that are watching you live in the moment, getting fired up to a link telling them they can get more. These people are gonna be there, this is how much is gonna be, this is where it's gonna be and it's a networking opportunity for you. So I would just say regarding marketing, event marketing the event, talk about it in your stories, do joint live streams, post about it on your social media page and if you, if you can experiment, we've done a few of this, but paid advertising on Facebook and really targeting the Central location or 30 miles away or 50 miles away from where the events gonna be could be very beneficial because it can just get some local publicity. It was funny because our event in Beverly Hills, we wanted to only have 80 to 90 people at this event and the word got out, the social media page blew up and we had over 250 people at this event. It was an amazing spot. We made it happen. But by far, when it comes to promotion of the event, if you do it right, your events can be very, very successful. So when it comes to the speakers and when it comes to the marketing the event, make sure that you have the speakers on the same vision as you and invite people and speakers who may have an audience that they can market it to and make sure that they will. Because these speakers, if you can get every single speaker to promote it on the same day, with the same purpose, with the same tonality, these speakers will be able to drive in individuals from their audiences and they'll be able to learn multiple different things from other people that are coming to this as well. So when it comes to the entire event structure, I want you guys to be very, very crystal clear about what I just said and what it means to you. So number three, I mean number three key points about what I wanted to kind of restate to you guys right now is number one, create a good event structure and plan ahead. I cannot stress you enough. If you are not planning your events and ahead at Least a little bit. I mean, get this, we've had events that Sometimes we've planned 10 days ahead in advanced, but we've been able to market it very properly now. And we have our system in place that we're able to sell a bunch of tickets in a short period of time. But we have a plan, we have a plan ahead. We know where we're gonna do it, where we're gonna do it at, how many people we plan on having, how much it's gonna cost, and boom, we can make it happen. But for everyone new listening, if you're trying to host an event, give yourself time to market, give yourself time to learn the course of hosting events. And this is coming from personal experience. Number two, be in control. Remember, you're the host of this event. You make it happen. You control it. You control your team, you control the speakers, you control the audience. So making sure that you're in control before the event starts, make sure you have the event flow down, making sure that you know what's going to happen next, making sure you know how and when the event should end is very important. So number three, the most critical things to make a successful event is focus on the purpose of the event and market it correctly. I know we just talked about social media marketing, a few paid marketing strategies, but if you want to host an event, be confident that you can get people to this event and focus on the value you're bringing. See, if you want to host an event just to make money, you're doing it all wrong. You must focus on the value you want to bring to people. Focus on the people that are gonna be there and make it for the people. Like I said, if you're focusing on just the money for these events, you're not gonna do well. You're not gonna market it well, you're not gonna give enough value, and overall, it's not gonna be a win win. And remember, you want events to be win wins. That's how it's gonna work, you know. So that being said, like I said, my team and I, we've hosted tons of events all over the United States over the last year. And regarding the next events that we have coming up, we have an event coming in Washington State on February 15th, 16th and 17th, and this is going to be an amazing event that we haven't done something like this before. It's going to be a snowboarding, skiing networking event in Washington state. And I'll be able to give you guys more information on my Instagram aceadams1. So if you are interested in going to an event in a lodge that sleeps 40 people, your tickets are going to cover, number one, a free snowboarding pass or a skiing pass so that you can snowboard with the team on the mountain. It's only going to be 30 people at this event, so it's going to be a smaller event. You're going to be able to connect with all of the amazing speakers and if you want to know who will be speaking there, go DM me on Instagram right now acadams1 and I will send you the more information regarding this event happening in Washington State on February 15th, 16th and 17th. So that being said, we have a ton of events coming in to 2018, so make sure that you stay tuned and let me know what you thought about this video. I know a lot of people want to host events or you may be listening to this and you're already hosting events. Well, if you are that person, I hope you got some tips, some value, some experiences that I've had that you could maybe, maybe conquer, maybe switch up your planning, whatever it may be. I just hope that this podcast added a lot of value to your life. And that being said, guys, make sure that you subscribe to the Rise of the Young podcast. Make sure you drop a rating. Help US hit top 10 business podcasts in the world. And that being said, I hope everyone has an amazing night and I will see you on the next episode.

Peace Legacy of Monsters An Apple Original Series the world is on fire. I decided to do something about it on November 17th. This place, it's not ours. Believe me, the most massive event of the year arrives. If you come with me, you'll know everything. I promise.

Oh my God. Go, Go, Go.

Monarch Legacy of monsters streaming November 17th only on Apple TV.

Plus.