Secrets From a Room With $6.3 Billion in Revenue 😦

Okay, I'm gonna take you behind the scenes of a private marketing event that has over $6.3 billion in revenue. All the attendees added up, $6.3 billion in revenue. I'm gonna show you behind the scenes. I'm gonna show you how you can build a multi-billion dollar network. And if you stay to the end, guaranteed, you're gonna get some secrets that you haven't heard before when it comes to building that network, because your net worth is your network.

Behind the scenes of a private business conference. I'm over here in beautiful Miami. You can kinda see the background a little bit, kinda not. I'll walk away from it. I think what's important to understand is that the way you build your network to be worth, I don't know, hundreds of millions or billions of dollars— people like to say your network is your net worth— and the way you build a super strong network is actually by just continuing to give. And I know that sounds corny and it sounds counterintuitive, but it's true. Because any time that I've continued to just give— and so for example, I'm not getting paid to throw this event with a wonderful team. Over two years, we spent over two years planning this thing. Usually, I would charge for events like this. You know each ticket we're charging about thirty five hundred dollars or so, and we have about hundred eighty five people confirmed so far. The way I look at this is most of the time I'll host my own events, right? And so I've done this quite a bit. So that's why I'm used to throwing private events like this. But when you have a bunch of business operators coming and the average revenue is forty one million dollars a year, these people are going to have very high expectations. The event hasn't happened yet. I hope it's going to go well. I trust that it will go well, but. These are all things that I learned over time. How did I get here eventually? Well, first I started to throw dinners where the dinners were just a couple of people and all we had was to eat a half-eaten bag of chips. And then we upgraded to the next level. Next time we had some more people come and then, you know, we upgraded to eating Mediterranean food. And then after that, we upgraded to maybe doing a happy hour, maybe 50 people showed up. And then after that, maybe I hosted another event and I've hosted a couple of my events where these are these more intimate, I would say, masterminds. And I hate using the word masterminds, but that's how I look at it. There's just a lot of learning, a lot of people sharing things that they wouldn't share publicly. Doing these things gave me the confidence that I can do these things, obviously. But you know, you, you're going to screw up a lot. And I think for me, I had a lot of nerves. It was very nerve-wracking doing these things. It's very nerve-wracking speaking, but it's also very nerve-wracking throwing events like this because— and sorry for the echo— but the expectation is just really high. I continue to learn the nuances of what people liked, what they didn't like, and also more importantly, what I liked and what I didn't like about events. Because I'm not, you know, for example, we're doing this event, it's loaded with speakers, it's loaded with people's chance to network with each other. We have these dine-arounds, we have this wonderful Cuban-themed opening night where we have a Cuban Adele coming, we have a Cuban band, and we have DJs coming in. So it's gonna be amazing. I think you have to figure out if you're gonna do things like this, if you're gonna try to build your network by throwing events and becoming that node, becoming that connector, the way you do that is you learn one step at a time. And I've been doing this for a while now. I would say that Probably I started doing these mini events, probably 30 years old or so. I mean, I started doing these retreats. We have a group called the T Illuminati and we started doing that in maybe 2017 or so. And that's a group that we want to grow old with. And that's a much smaller group. Let's call that like 8 people or so. Again, we have a good amount of people coming to this one. It's basically sold out. Again, I think you have to understand that if you're going to build your network, the move for you is you're going to get tenfold back what you put in, but it's not going to be on your timeline. And that's the whole point of this video. It's all the things that you want to build. Typically it's going to take a lot longer than you think. And what you should focus on more is actually enjoying the journey. And I certainly am enjoying the journey right now. I mean, we're at a beautiful hotel in Miami and I'm very grateful for that. And so I'm okay. Like, do I need to get paid to do this? No, because I also know I'm going to get a much better, much bigger ROI on this in the long term. And so that doesn't make me bitter. Now, is it nerve-wracking to have to do all this stuff? Absolutely. But you just have to understand that there's a long-term payoff to everything if you're willing to stick around for the long term. Most people just aren't willing to do that. And if you are, Willing to put in the work, put in the effort, and delay or defer gratification, you're gonna be way ahead of everybody else. You know, if you're curious, you're watching this right now, the people that are coming to this thing, they're no different than you. They're also curious as well. They do want to get better. They want to hang out with like-minded people. And if you can again be that node, you can be that connector, you can put these types of things together, you're gonna become next level. Like, if you ask an 18-year-old version of myself, you know, is Eric the connector? Is Eric the guy that puts these things together? You know, everyone would have never looked twice at me, right? Yeah. So you just, you just get there by, by learning how to do these things, by, by doing them right. And, you know, the meme right now is you can just do things right. So that's what it is. More on this later. We'll come back in a bit.

Continuing on the networking piece, this is the day of the opening reception. And last night we did a pre-speakers dinner. We had a couple of speakers come and some of the people that are hosting these dine-arounds, and I'll explain what these are. But you're looking to create as much networking moments or moments to build relationships as possible. You're looking to increase people's surface area of luck. And what I mean by that is, so yesterday, for example, connecting the speakers together, letting them meet each other, letting like-minded people connect with each other, talking about who you are, what you do, what's one thing you can offer to the group, what's one thing you need from the group, and then connecting everyone through text message afterwards. That goes a long way because now you've created new relationships for people and every high-value person, every person that wants to achieve, they want to meet more people like that because it gets very lonely at the top. And just keep in mind that the average revenue here business operators doing $41 million a year, and they wanna meet people, they wanna learn things that will help them grow their businesses faster. They wanna learn things that might be able to help them with personal issues, right? 'Cause people like to do business with people. So there's an opening reception tonight, and then tomorrow there's a dine-around at people's houses or restaurants. Those are more intimate opportunities to get people to connect, and then obviously a lot of ample room for learning as well. I think if you are going to try to increase your surface area of luck when it comes to relationships, just understand that You know, you have to like the easiest way, at least in my opinion, is just to become the connector. And you start small first. You start with— you might say, oh, I have no relationships right now, but you start small. Like when I first started speaking at things, it was in front of 20 people and I was super nervous. And when I first started hosting things, it was like 5 people with a half-eaten bag of chips, right? Which I mentioned earlier. You know, these things keep compounding because you keep doing it, you get better over time and you create the experience that works for you. So for example, for this one, I've loaded it with learnings, you know, who I think are some of the best marketing speakers in the world. And I've loaded it with lots of opportunity to network. I'm not much of a partier, so we're not doing that. I didn't load it with, oh, we're gonna go do like some, you know, wine tasting experience. That's just not what I do, right? And so you have to figure out what works for you and just do it and do it with confidence and trust that it will all work out. As you gain experience, you become more confident over time. And what ends up happening is second nature, when you go to events, you're going to be the one that, that invites people naturally to these dinners, right? And then you can decide if you want to cover the bill, you can decide if you want it to be user pay. That's your decision. At the end of the day, so we're going to go into opening reception, and I'm going to show you what we got going on. Let's get into it.

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All right, so more on the networking piece. We got our goodie bag over here.

Let me show you this, this little, this little goodie bag. So we got this Laundry Sauce. These are detergent pods over here. So that's from my friend Ian Blair who runs Laundry Sauce. And then my friend Nick Shackelford, who's speaking. So he runs this company called Brez or Brez. And then my friend Kat Cole, who's also speaking. So she is the CEO of AG1. And then we put in these little bag tags here that you can take for your AirTags. This is a YPO logo over here. Everyone will know it's from YPO. And then we have our little $1,000 off on Carrot. And then this free AI consultation piece, right? This is just from Single Grain and Carrot. If people want to take this offer, because we don't have any physical goods. Um, but that's, that's my company. And then unique here, they put in these little, yeah, Stop Burning Pipeline AI Sales Roleplay. I guess this is a candle, Stop Burning Pipeline. Anyway, my point of showing you all this stuff is to say that these are relationships that, as I mentioned earlier, it takes time, it takes years to foster these relationships. So, you know, Ian, for example, I met him in 2016. So it's actually been 9 years now, 8, 9 years. Yeah, 8, 9 years since I met him. I would also say that, um, Nick Shackelford, I've just known him for a very long time too, probably 5, 6 years or so. And so last minute, Well, we weren't sure what to put in this goodie bag. I had to call in a couple of favors here. And then even last minute to speak to Kat to get this in. She was gonna give us a really big one, but we just couldn't fit it in this bag. And I also wanna give credit to Taryn from the Plan A team. She is the one handling the event. I would say she's the primary event manager for this event. And she did a really good job with this AirTag idea. And I think that was great. It's customized over here. And then obviously we have this wonderful bag over here too that I think people will remember. I'll definitely be using this just because, you know, We put a lot of work into this thing, right? So, so that's what it is. And then, yeah, again, if you want a superpowered network, it's gonna take you a very long time to do it, but you might as well start now. The best time to start is now. And I don't think there are any excuses when you— when people say, oh well, I don't have any connections, I don't have any money, I don't have this and that. Those are just excuses at the end of the day. People that make it happen don't make excuses like that. Thank you.