A seminar business owner spent a decade chasing the wrong metric: total attendance. He switched to dollars per buyer instead, capped events at 50 people, and raised average spend to $15,000 per attendee, hitting roughly $700,000 per event. The lesson: your industry's favorite number might be killing your profit.
I followed advice from a friend of mine for 10 freaking years, and it was the wrong advice. Let me explain a little bit to you on this. So when I ran my seminar company, so I started to measure what was the most important thing, which was dollars per person buying from me in the room. Eventually, I started to realize, wait a minute, how do I get the number of people down but get the dollars per person up and measure the right thing? So I started to measure the dollars per person, and I wanted that to increase. I didn't care how many people were in the room. In fact, I'd wanted to get my room smaller because the room would would be different. I'd get my expenses for the room down. I'd get the expenses for the event down dramatically. And eventually I got to around 50 people in a room. And on average, those 50 people were spending $15,000 per person with me, like $700 from 50 people in a room. My question to you, are you measuring the right things in your business? Because a lot of times we get taught measure like more people in the room. It's the whole event industry. It's all about more quality people in the room, more quality buyers in the room, people that will buy from you, people who will make your business grow. 'Cause if you are, you'll be getting there really quickly. Sometimes you measure the wrong things, you don't get there as quickly. Make sure that you are taking advice from the right people and listen to your heart sometimes because many times the advice you've been given, you're like, "No, I'm sure I can do it differently to measure the right things, to grow my income, scale my business, and make more money overall."
