How To Run A Profitable Virtual Summit with Liam Austin

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Welcome back to Bacon Wrapped Business. I'm Brad Costanzo and today we have got a very topical topic. Today we're in the middle. This is March 26, the day of the recording and we're in the early stages with the middle of a massive virus and lockdown and quarantine that, that everybody is working at home and staying at home and events are being canceled and people are joining those of us who work in our pajamas most of the day working at home. And.

One of the hottest topics right now is how to switch to virtual events and how to host virtual meetings. Whether it's for small, like one on one clients or gigantic hundred or several thousand people, events and virtual events in general.

Have been something I've got a lot of experience with in the past, whether it's with myself, whether with some clients and doing it a multitude of ways. But one of the types of virtual events which is really exciting, it's proven it's a great business model, especially to generate a a lot of awareness and traffic and add a lot of value to the audience is a virtual summit. And today's guest is Liam Austin. He's a virtual event strategist. He's launched over 15 of these virtual summits and online business networking events and he's hosted over 400 speakers while educating 100,000 plus business owners through his programs. He's also the founder of Entrepreneurs HQ and especially specialist in making it easy for people to create and host their own summits and online conferences. I'm lucky to have him here today straight from Malta where he's hopefully inundated from some of the virus, unlike us. But Liam, welcome to the show.

Yeah, Brad, it's interesting times and glad to be able to kind of share this really topical content with your audience today.

Yeah, me too. And this is one of the things that I've been, as I said, I interview people all the time just on the podcast part of my business. I don't do it in a virtual summit type strategy, but as I mentioned, a lot of people are, you know, they're paying attention to virtual events and virtual summits and looks like you've done this Quite a bit. Why don't we, for the folks who are listening who aren't 100% familiar with the concept of a virtual summit.

Give us the, give us the groundwork, tell us what it is, tell us about some of your experience in doing it and why you believe it's such a good way for people to. Or good initiative for people to follow.

Yeah, great. So people are familiar with in person conferences, or what I call offline conferences, which is say, an event that's being held in person at a specific location with a set amount of speakers and attendees. Maybe there's sponsors, maybe there's exhibitors, and there's a few things going on there at the conference. And a lot of the time they might be a ticket price for that conference, whether it's a few hundred dollars or even a few thousand for some of the more expensive exclusive ones. And there you've got the costs of your flights, your accommodation, food, their travel, all that kind of thing included when you're going to an in person conference. Now, a virtual summit or a virtual conference is looking at replicating that experience, that in person conference online. So we're looking at again a group of speakers, whether it's 20 to 30 speakers for our virtual summits that we've been running ourselves in the past, looking at, scaling the amount of attendees at these virtual events so that we have the attendees, the speakers, you've got a host, and if you've got 20 to 30 speakers all talking about one specific topic, one specific maybe problem that they're trying to solve for that group of audience. So it's really looking at just yet replicating that in person conference, but doing it online, being able to scale it to, you're not limited to the size of a conference hall or a room. You can really scale infinitely online. And it's obviously a lot lower cost and simpler to set up.

Right. So let me, let me tell you, let me frame this up the way that I'm familiar with them and I, and for my audience as well, kind of like the flow, the experience, the flow from the customer's standpoint, etc. But, and then you let me know if I kind of miss anything or if there's anything that you, your approach to it kind of differs from this, but in general.

You invite multiple speakers around, ideally a similar topic. Let's just say it's, you know, how to save money or, you know, something we were talking about earlier, and.

You invite them to be interviewed. A lot of times you interview them. It's not necessarily A live interview. I mean, it can be obviously, but you prerecord the interviews, you stack them, and then you invite people on the web to register and watch each one for free. Like you release them at certain times. And although it's free to watch, the times are, you know, it's like, all right, today we're only releasing this one or these, these couple, et cetera. So they can watch it for free as long as they're willing to show up and commit to the actual time. And then the way, one of the ways to monetize this is to sell them the access to the on demand recordings, so. And then obviously some bonuses and you know, whatnot, which I'd love to talk to you about some of the ways to just make the offer even more attractive. But so, yeah, it's like if you show up live, you can watch it for free and if you want to pay, you can get on demand access. And then ideally you have a lot of the speakers who are being featured promote the show to their list as well. Obviously, I would imagine with an affiliate link so that if somebody does register and then does buy, they get paid. Did I cover the foundation there? I'm sure that you probably have some unique ways and angles, but is that kind of a good foundation?

Yeah, I think that's a really good explanation and I think that's like the industry standard in terms of running these virtual summits that they are pre recorded and released on a certain date.

Nice. Is there anything that you brought to it that is a little bit different than what I said? So for instance.

In that workflow, is there anything that.

Like any different angles or anything, anything that makes it more effective, such as, you know, it's one thing to get a lot of people to say, yes, I'll be interviewed, but I know getting them to a. Agree to promote it can be a challenge because it's. It's not. They don't know how well it'll do. You know, sometimes, you know, they're happy to promote it, but getting affiliates and the guest speakers to really, really push it can be a challenge. I'd love to hear how you've kind of approached the. Not only the invites to get them on, but the invites to get them to promote, as well as just some of the ways to help increase the conversion that people will actually purchase the recorded events.

Yeah, absolutely. So I look at the virtual summit as anyone can really organize any kind of small business owner all the way through to corporates. And we look at like five core benefits of Running a virtual event, and that is to grow your email list by thousands of prospects. We want to try to really get at least 1,000 raving fans on your topic into your email list and into your funnel. We want to build relationships with our speakers. And when we're inviting the speakers to be involved in our virtual conference, it's really looking at who are the top influencers in our market that we want to build relationships with. And this kind of alludes to your question here, which is about trying to figure out who are those top influencers that I want to build build relationships with so I can partner with them long term to support each other and grow each other's businesses. The third one is really looking at building your own authority and influence in the marketplace as the host being almost elevated to the role of top influencer in your niche by bringing together and organizing that group of top influencers to be speaking at your event. The fourth is obviously generating revenue and that's direct revenue from you mentioned earlier selling tickets or an all access pub from the event. But depending on what your goal is, it may be number one goal is to build my email list versus make money so I can put people through my funnel into my high ticket offer off the back. And then the fifth and final one really is about the cause and the impact that you can have, which is a worthy impact to be able to influence and make a change for your audience and thousands of people by allowing them into your fun free event. Accessing speakers that they'd normally be paying maybe hundreds or even thousands of dollars for in total to travel and get to see them at an in person conference. So if we look at all those benefits and we look at, okay, how do we get traffic, how do we get people to this event, how do we get people onto our email list? And we look at, I mentioned before, our speakers as partners, but they're just one of three.

Partners that we talk about when we're running our virtual conferences. And with those three partners, we're looking at yes, speakers who are partners speaking at the event. Affiliates and affiliates may include sponsors, media partners, or any kind of thought leader or community leader who wants to get involved in promoting the event and sharing it with their community. Because hey, it's a free ticket and well, the way we do it, free ticket to come. And it's valuable for people to attend and access these speakers that again, they would normally pay maybe hundreds of dollars for. And then the third partner that we're looking at is our actual attendees for the event. So we're looking at turning our attendees, once they get onto our email list as an email subscriber, turning them into what we'd like to call an ambassador so that they're referring their friends or inviting their friends along to the event. And we're incentivizing each one of those attend by rewarding them if any of their friends end up registering for a free ticket. So those three partners.

There'S a number of ways that we like to convince or encourage them to get involved and promote the event out to their community.

That's great. Especially if you're new and you haven't done one of these. Like if you have some good industry cachet and.

Authority already, it's a little bit easier. But if you're kind of new and let's just say you've got some decent speakers to say, yeah, I'm happy to be on it. Is there anything that you do in order to really encourage them to promote? Because, and I ask this just because I've somebody who's done this in the past, that's been one of the challenges. I got a lot of really, really high profile people to say yes, but it seemed like the only ones who really promoted or even gave it more than just maybe a quick little Facebook share or something like that were the smaller, were the smaller participants. Because.

I mean, I know from, from somebody if they approach me to be on the show, etc. And I've got a good following. I don't have like the Megalist, I don't have hundreds of thousands of people, excuse me, on my, on my email list. But I know that I might be thinking, well, this is not a proven converting offer. I've got all this other stuff, like maybe I'll throw a little quick link out, but I don't know if I'm really gonna put my shoulder into this. Are there any ways that you've really been successful at getting some of the more high profile people to say, yeah, you know, I'll actually give this a nice push because I know that can be a big challenge.

Yeah, this is an interesting one. And this is where, you know, the planning of your virtual event really comes into play and being strategic about the agenda and the invitations, the invites to the speakers of who you want to be involved to not only make sure that the content of the agenda is really valuable for attendees, but also that we're.

We'Re getting say a couple of speakers that are a listers, that are household names, that people recognize their face, like, oh, okay, I need to attend this event, and we've got a couple of those A listers there, and then we've got two other types of speakers, our B listers and our C listers. And these B listers may not have the clout or the following as the A listers, but they do have a strong presence. And then the C listers are really trying to get to where the B listers and the A listers are. So if we look at getting a couple of A listers and then the majority of our speakers, the B and C listers, and encourage them to be the promotional partners or the collaborators in the event. And that's how we like to approach each of these collaborations, because that's what we see our virtual events being a collaboration between the speakers, between all the partners, so especially the speakers, and then your affiliates. So those sponsors and media partners.

Nice. When we're, when we're.

Yeah, when we're. Sorry, when we're approaching them, it's really that collaboration that we want to go after. So, well, why would that person, that speaker, that influencer want to be involved in this event? What's in it for them? So we really need to figure out and go to that conversation with, okay, well, here's the benefits for you being involved. And if you manage to convince them to get on a phone call, really it's about asking them, okay, well, what, what is important for you in the next 12 months? What can I help you with in the next 12 months? Your biggest project that you're working on, how can I help you? And they'll tell you about it and what they need, and then it's about, well, how can I facilitate, helping them achieve that goal for them and make that project a success? Maybe it's. If you don't have a, if you do have a community, it's about promoting and getting the word out about that project, or it's making introductions to other people. You're making all these great relationships with other speakers, being involved in the event, so you can create those relationships. Or it's maybe like, you know, what, post the event you're launching. You know, two or three months after our event takes place, I'm going to have, you know, email list of a thousand or a few thousand people that I'll be able to tell about your project. So whatever it is, it's about really figuring out, well, what's in it for them and, and making it a collaboration so that they're happy there's a win in it for them. And then obviously you'd want to be asking them if they could be supporting you in the promotion of the virtual conference.

Right? Yeah, no, that's, that's really smart. I love that some of the, some of the things that we've done in the past is depending on who they are, just paid them.

Now keep in mind that there's, I guess, two ways if you're doing a summit. There's doing this with other speakers who are just real thought leaders and maybe there's well known authors or speakers or experts in a certain industry, but they're not so much marketers. Right. I've got, most of my experience here is doing these summits around like really astute marketers. And the only bad part about that is sometimes they're so astute that they're really cynical and harder to get to promote versus other people. Right. So the more marketing driven and dollar driven they are, they might be like, well, I've got a different promotion going on, but other people really are looking just for the, you know, like, yeah, I'll promote the hell out of this because it makes me look good. So I know that's one caveat, but when I was working with people who are more the astute marketers, like, well, what's really in it for me? Sometimes we just pay them to say, well, listen, and if you promote, you know, we'll pay you, if you have the budget, like, you know, 3,000, $4,000 just to, just to throw an email out there. Right. And sometimes that's just easy, guaranteed money. It's not even in an affiliate thing. The other things that we've done a little bit, we've had two people agree to this. Is that because the relationship was there, which is, well, if you allow us to advertise, be an advertiser on your Facebook page, for instance, we'll run, instead of paying you $3,000, we'll run ads to your audience. So especially let's say they've got half a million Facebook followers or whatnot. If we can access their audience and they just allow us to run ads to, to their appearance on the, on the summit as them, then that's even, that's really good because we get to access the people who are really close to them and they see like, all right, this person's paying money to get me in front of my audience even better. And then the other thing that we've done is to say if there is like some reciprocal promotions, this is, yeah, if you promote this, then once we, you know, we're obviously going to have a big list from this and we'll be, you know, we may be able to, we can promote some of the products that you have and some of the services early on. So if, yeah, if you really do a good job, you know, we'll, we'll send traffic back to you in a priority way. Now I think that most of the people who do virtual summits don't necessarily need to work through all this. It's just some of the experience I've had of kind of pulling teeth and trying to get them to jump on board and, you know, just think of different ways to incentivize them.

Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things you mentioned there, which was the, like affiliate payments. And I think that's something that is encouraging. Like, okay, well if you do send through and promote the event, we'll give you a unique tracking link to be able to track those visitors and anyone that purchases, whether it's the all access pass or you know, things down the funnel, we will give you some commission for those as well.

Do you suggest typically like on the flow? So let's say you've got 30 speakers and you're doing this. I sign up. Okay. You know, it launches tomorrow. How many videos are you typically or how many interviews are you typically showing per day? Is that, is it like three per day or something like that? Or one per day or how do you.

Yeah, again, like we're talking about say, you know, the foundational, the standard type of option which we look at say 30 speakers across five days. So we look at a six person per day event and looking at, you know, different industries. I mean, we've run one in the property market in Australia. So really geographically targeted and outside of the, you know, the business, you know, audience. We're targeting consumers here. We needed to run it after work. So it was a virtual event happening across five days, but it was happening Wednesday after work, Thursday, then Friday after work and then Saturday. Sunday was where we put the majority of the speakers. So I think it was actually the first day of the virtual event. We had a keynote speaker plus a live kickoff call. And they were the only two sessions for the first day on the Wednesday. So you can mix it up, you can change it up a little bit depending on what your goals are and your target audience. Nice.

As far as the offer goes to purchase a, you know, after the, after they register, typically you say, hey, great, you know, would you like to upgrade VIP or get access to these? What have you found? Has been a really successful offer besides just being able to access it Like I would think intuitively, such as other bonus products or maybe even workbooks and notes and, you know, different stuff like that. What have you found to be really successful in getting people to actually purchase the. Or upgrade?

Yeah, the bonuses are critical here. I mean, the interesting thing is that when people are registering for the free ticket for the event, they're registering because they want to see 30 speakers speak on the topic. So at the end of the day, what you want to do is you want to really make sure that whatever you're selling is lined up with that initial offer, the initial reason why they're signing up. So we see that most people are buying because they want to get access to those 30 videos because they've missed maybe one or two or a few of them or they just want to rewatch them in their own time or even, you know, share them with it with their partner. So that's the main reason. And then in terms of like bumping up and getting even higher conversion rates, I mean, changing up the modality of how people are absorbing the content. So from video to just audio so they can listen on the go or when they're exercising or on a walk through to text based, which may be a transcript we've moved on to. I mean, that would be the basics of video, audio, video, audio and transcript. And then if you start providing notes or summaries, you can even charge more for those and people are able. We see an actual extra 30% in revenue jump if we add those as like a bump offer on the cart, which is really cool. So it's a bit of an advanced one.

That's like, for me, I'd much rather buy the notes than sit through all that other stuff. It's funny, you know, we got introduced through, you know, Joe Fear and Matt Wolfe from Hustle and Flowchart to business partners of mine and like really good friends and you know, they're on their podcast, they now like opt in for the show notes for this.

I don't even.

I used to listen to their show all the time. I don't even listen to it anymore. I just opt in for their, for the companions because I can just read real quick and kind of get the gist. Which means that that's like super D valuable and why I could see how if you do have somebody taking show notes, etcetera, It's a really good way to.

Bump up the value of the bonus offers.

Yeah, and another couple of things that are pretty standard as well that I'd like to include in most of Them are like some kind of live Q and A where it may be with the host or a few of the experts post the event. So it's more of a private session with, you know, serious people who've obviously paid and then on top of that a community aspect to the event. And those are successful to a point where you need to be providing enough value on an ongoing basis for there to be enough engagement. So that could really turn into a membership. But that's a different way of positioning that in terms of the sale post the event. But just in talking about like engagement.

During the event, I think this is where it's become really interesting in the last say 24 months where there's some really cool tools, tech that enable you to not just do say these recorded sessions and releasing them at certain times. But yes, having live elements to it having. So there might be a live presentation as well as the recorded. So a mixture of them or all live. And then we can talk about mixing up of say the speaker presentations. Maybe it is an actual presentation with slides, maybe it's included with the host where there is the slides, but the host jumping in and asking questions as we're going along. It could be a pure Q and A play. There could be a panel of speakers for experts plus the host facilitating a panel of speakers. We can include then the attendees and the interaction of that asking questions to that panel or if it's a live Q and A to the live Q and A. And then we talk about that with the speakers. But then there's the ability to have break off rooms or round tables around certain discussions that are happening alongside the event or maybe not at the same time, but at different times during the day and then even networking between the attendees. So it's not just about the speaker anymore. We're actually making our virtual conferences like our in person conferences by letting people kind of meet at the bar and have a chat, exchange business cards and make it more of a networking element of going there to meet the attendees versus just purely a content from the speakers right now.

And then do you ever do the interviews like live and do that or they are the actual interviews always recorded and then played kind of like live. And then you have the software where you can interact with the people.

Yeah, I mean we've done a combination of all of the above. I think just playing with what works, what doesn't. When it's live, people are more likely to show up and engage, especially when they can ask questions. So it's always a good idea to do that and a lot of the time with our kickoff sessions, the very first live kickoff session, we do do that as a Q and A live. We do sometimes one mid conference as well, and one post the event, which is for those paid subscribers as well. That's kind of like the minimum if we want to add live elements to it. But then, as I mentioned before, you can make even the whole virtual conference a live event.

Yeah, I love that. One of the. I told you, I've done some of these in the past, and I haven't actually done them exactly like the model that I understand, but one of them I did, which it wasn't so much a virtual event, but I did interview 25 experts. And this is years ago, maybe back in 2010. And one of the products I had was in the dating and seduction space. And it was kind of funny. I had a small product there, but I knew a lot of the people and I was really well connected. This is prior to me selling that business, but it was general dating advice, etc. And one of the things I noticed that a lot of the summits and things like this, they were great. But, you know, I would have to sit there and go through everybody's different advice to get, you know, answers. And I might get totally different opinions. And I was like, that there's a value for that. But what if I just wanted to know, like in a panel way, like, what. What would you suggest for this? So I, what I did is I came up with 25 questions and had 25 gurus, and each one of them answered the exact same. And it was an audio interview. So it still cracks me up that I was in this business. But one question might be, you know, what is the best. You know, what is the best way to approach a woman that you see in a bar, a nightclub? Right? That would be an example. And then another one would be like, what do you. How do you keep a conversation going after you initially, you know, approach somebody? And then once more, There was like 25 questions. They were the exact same, by the way. This was a nightmare to edit, but it was a cool product. So then what we did is we had editors. It's like 25 times 25 is, I think something like 600 or whatever. So then we had the editors go through and just isolate the all 25 answers, not even my questions. And then we created a grid inside a membership area so you could go to question one, which might be, you know, how do you.

What's.

What's your best pickup line? For instance, and then they would go there and they would see a grid of all 25 gurus and then the little play button next to each one and it would just play what they said at that time so that you could hear 25 people give slightly different answers to every single one of them. And it was a, that was kind of an interesting one, but man, that was a nightmare to put together. It was a great idea, but the logistics of it was in the editing was such a bitch.

Yeah, that's very cool actually. I really like that idea. And we haven't used that one specifically, but it's something that we have done in our intake form. When we're preparing for our sessions for our summit, we'll normally ask.

The speaker a specific question that we ask all of our speakers. And ask them, maybe it's like, what are your three favorite tools when it comes to, you know, finding dates online? Right. Or what are your three favorite websites? And so we have them listed and then we gather them all and we rank them as the most popular tools by the top influencers in the dating market.

Right?

And there's a list of the top 10 or 20, however many has been listed. And then we use that as a lead magnet to encourage more people to opt in and sign up for the event. Which is really interesting because our partners are promoting the event. Remember they might be promoting it via their email list or via social or however way, but there's only so many ways that they can say, hey, go grab this free ticket, go grab this free ticket to this event. Right? How about like, well download this, you know, list of the most recommended tools from the top influencers in our niche. We can start appealing to maybe a different audience and start increasing the amount of opt ins for our event as well as increase our email list at the same time. So yeah, there's some cool ways that we can really leverage, I think the content from the speakers so that we've, we've actually in the past, and you mentioned in the intro that we've interviewed over 400 experts and it's quite close to 500 now. But we ran a daily email last year where we ran I think 250 emails across 250 days, five days a week where we would have one speaker.

One. Each email was focused on one specific speaker's session at one of our summits and we basically delivered a summary of that session plus the key takeaways for people. And so what I'm trying to suggest here is that you can repurpose your content for 12 months of email marketing campaigns, social media, Facebook, LinkedIn. Like, there's so much content, quotes, snippets for YouTube, you can even take those.

After it's all done, throw them up. And now you've got a podcast.

Exactly, exactly. I mean, there's so much valuable content coming out of this. And I think when it comes to the summit, there's almost like unlimited amounts of benefits. Such as these relationships we built with our first Summit back in 2015. We're still doing partnerships with these people. We're still having conversations and helping each other's business. And one of the businesses actually that we had on as a speaker.

In 2015, we've now actually become a business partner with that speaker. So there's some amazing things that can actually come out of organizing your virtual event.

Absolutely. And not least of which you mentioned, one of the things is the building your own authority. And it creates a platform. You are the center of the wheel and all the spokes are kind of pointing to you. So it automatically just makes you have an authoritative presence. It's one of the reasons I started the podcast five, six years ago. God, has it been so this June, it'll be six years ago. And it was in order to just establish my presence. I was like, oh, Brad's got access to all of these other people. Brad must be somebody I should know. And a virtual summit does that incredibly well. One of the other ways that I did this was a few years back. I didn't have a list in the health and wellness space, but I wanted one. So I did one called like 10 minute, 10 minute health tips or 10 minute wellness tips. And it wasn't even so much a summit, but the idea that it was like a 10 minute tips thing got the attention of some really big health and wellness professionals where we said, look, it's only going to be a 10 minute interview. And the question is, what is your number one tip for maximizing health and wellness right now? And we would approach everybody from functional medicine and integrative specialists to diet, different gurus and whatnot. So everybody had a slightly different number one tip. So this whole 10 minute tips thing, it allowed them to say, okay, it's a 10 minute interview, I'll say yes. Then a lot of them promoted it. One of the ways that we got people on there, one of our reach out, because I had a partner in this, one of our reach out techniques was really simple and it's not really misleading, but it is a little bit stealth. So on the introductory email, I would say you know, hey, Liam, loved, you know, here's who I am, here's what we're doing and here's why we'd love you to participate. Other, other speakers who've been invited include, you know, and make like I would put the biggest of the big Oprah Winfrey, Mark Cuban. It wasn't really people like that, but it was the top, top, top of the industry. And.

Then it was like, we'd love for you to participate too. Let us, you know, let us know. So what that did is a lot of people would just read like subconsciously that oh, the top of the top people are participating in it. We didn't say that. We said other speakers we've invited include. We didn't say they've accepted, but we just said we've invited. And that kind of gets their, you know, their eyeballs on it. Nobody ever called us on it and said, wait a minute, you said you've invited but they haven't said yes. But then, so what's great is then once we do invite those big speakers and they see what's going on, we just, you know, we're able to change it. Like so and so has said yes and we've also invited Blankety Blank. So just that little wording, just that little wording tweak was really effective in getting some big people to say, oh yeah, I'll be a part of this.

So that's cool, that's cool. And I've used that similar technique when reaching out to sponsors in the past for events. So yeah, we've had Vimeo, for instance, come on board and sponsor one of our events. They paid a five figure sum to sponsor our virtual event. Right. So there's some serious dollars to be made from these events. And just talking about my experience, I mean, we've done 15 events, most of them have over 10,000 virtual attendees. And we've had over 100,000 people come through our events. And when we approached Vimeo, we literally said, look, this is our concept. This is the event that we're going to be organizing. This is the date, this is the name. We, we organized everything. We even created a logo for it. So we made it look as if it was happening. And we said, these are the types of speakers that we will be inviting to be speaking at this event. And we had some of the biggest names out there that they'd recognize. And that got us in the room, that got us the call and eventually converted them into our major sponsor for that event. And then because the event worked out so well, that they came back to us and said, hey, we want to sponsor the next 12 months of your events. So that was an extra four events. They came on board and gave us another five figure sum for. So that was, that worked out really well.

I love that. That's fantastic. It reminds me of. Are you familiar with the.

Summit folks? They do like Summit at Sea and.

It'S a big thing over here in the US they have something called Summit Series and they do a big, they do a big super.

Mega event and I mean it's like three to five thousand people, but it's some of the top, top speakers in the world. And I mean I was at 1 in LA a couple weeks ago, a couple years ago and like Jeff Bezos was the, was one of the speakers, but he was, he got interviewed by his brother, something else, Bezos up on stage. And then, you know, Tim Ferriss was there and then one of the top Hollywood producers, Brian Grazer was there. Like they have some of the top, top, top thought leaders in the world there, but then they also have some other people just doing cutting edge entrepreneurial stuff. And the whole concept in the birth of Summit series is amazing. You can read about it. But it was a bunch of kids, you know, I call them kids. They were in their early 20s and they were, there was, I can't remember, there was maybe about a dozen of them and they were friends and they always hung out and they decided they wanted to do something real cool. Now this wasn't a vir event, this was a live event. But it gets to the point you were saying, and they like, we want to do an event for younger entrepreneurs and bring some younger entrepreneurs who are really doing some cool stuff to this. But we're nobody, but we want to do this at a ski resort. So they booked a thing at, I don't know if it was like Park City, Utah ski Resort. And.

They reached out to a handful of big time speakers like Tony Hsieh from Zappos and some other folks and said, hey, we would love to have you come speak at this event. We'll fly you out there and you'll stay at the hotel for free and free ski passes, et cetera, et cetera. And they would ask just a couple of them to say, look, if we take care of everything, will you show up? But then what they did is they went to the hotel once, they kind of got a yes. Remember they didn't have to buy it yet, but then they went to the hotels and the ski resorts and say, listen, we're putting on this really high powered event for.

Entrepreneurs, et cetera. Would you be able to at least if we do it at your place, would you compass the rooms for some of the speakers? Maybe not even all of them, but maybe all of them, whatever. And they're like, people like who? And they're like, well, like Tony Hsieh from Zappos and blah, blah, blah. And they said, yeah, yeah, we definitely comp them. We give them a free, we give you, we'd allow you to give them a free room and lift tickets, etc. So then they got the yes from the hotel. Then they went back to those speakers and they said, look, you know, they went to all the ones they wanted and they said.

Flight and hotels are on us if you just come. So now they've got these confirmed speakers at this night and this nice hotel who's doing this? And then they started to sell it. So it's just kind of a really interesting way of playing people off each other and just saying, well, would you if I was able to do this? And they say, if they say yes, okay, then go do that. And I just love that kind of creative deal making and thinking that allows you to get access to either sponsor dollars or guests or barter, et cetera. And all those kind of things that I just mentioned could be done in a virtual summit as well, which is why I think it's such a cool model.

This is great. I think what you touched on there is so powerful and is maybe, maybe unique to a virtual summit. And why I love it for someone that's starting from scratch. Because once the model works for people who don't have any audience, any authority, no email lists like this virtual summit model works for you. I mean, we've done it with plenty of our clients who are starting from nothing and were able to become not a household name, but have authority in their marketplace, build their email list by thousands and have these strong relationships with the top influencers in their niche. And it all starts with, well, you need a little bit of traction. Just need a couple of speakers. We normally look to try to aim to get at least two to three speakers to say yes. So you can name drop the rest when you're inviting those other speakers. But once you've got that little bit of traction, it really does snowball.

Absolutely. You just got to get a little bit creative on how you do it. This is fantastic, Liam. Now, obviously over at Entrepreneurs HQ you have resources. Not only do you host these and do you do your own, but from what I saw it looks like you also have some great resources for people to learn how to do this on their own if they want to. Is that correct? Tell us about kind of your offers and what you, you know, how you help people do this besides just going on podcasts and talking about it.

Well, yeah, I love talking about virtual events, virtual conferences. And now's a really great time to. If you've got maybe a side hustle idea or concepts that you want to start, but you're locked indoors, you're working remotely, you all you need really to be able to start a virtual event is a webcam which most people have on their computers, these and a microphone and the ability to call up people and zoom is free. We normally recommend though you do pay for the pro version so you get the higher quality video. But once, once you've got that, you can really just start creating your event. And we recommend that you do have at least a few weeks, if not a couple of months to prepare to give your speakers the heads up that this event is happening, that they can block out those promotional spaces in their calendars. And we want to be looking at promoting the event at least around about two weeks prior to the actual first day kicking off. So if you've got a bit of spare time now you're in lockdown, then you can just start sending off some emails and inviting speakers to your event, knowing that you do have the name of the event, the dates of the event and you know, some of those speakers that you're inviting into your conference. So for us, I mean, we work with clients helping build their virtual summits from scratch and we can do all the done for you services. So in terms of setting up the tech and helping with the copywriting the funnel, all that type of stuff, all the way down to people who want just our help, maybe some coaching, some personalized advice. We can help with that as well as if you just want to go out there and do it yourself. We've got a program called Virtual Summit Academy, which is a six module training course with all the scripts, templates you need to be doing. The email invites for speakers, for your partners, for sponsors, even for the introductory videos, the Q and A sessions you may be running live, how to structure your agendas and so forth. Everything that you really need to run a successful event that's going to build your email list, build your authority and bring in revenue. And then also we do have a free guide, which is probably one of the most in depth guides on running a virtual conference that's on the web. It's 23,000 words.

I saw it, by the way. It's awesome.

Yeah, so you can print that off. It shows you some of the tools you can use and some of the tips and tactics to get your dream speaker to be involved in your event. And you can just go to entrepreneurshq.comsummit to get access to that. And there's some downloads there, some free checklists and guides and we even have a bit of a masterclass there that you can watch and learn in a bit more detail.

Yeah, it's a terrific resource and I'll make sure and I link to that for everybody else. Man, I really appreciate you being on the show today. And this, as I said, this is a hot topic right now and a lot of people do unfortunately have a lot more time on their hands and they're pivoting and trying to readjust. And one of the things that I always recommend in times like this, and one of the things I'm trying to do as well is just to get out there, add value. I mean, you know, show up, give information. The nice part about virtual summits like this is, yeah, if you have time on your hands, it's free to attend. You're not holding it back, you're not causing people to have to pay for it, etc. So you're offering something really great and then you're simply, you know, making the offer to get monetized for a more convenient and bonused up version of this. And it's, it's a terrific way all around. It's time tested and proven and I love all the resources you've got on your side for people. So entrepreneurshq.com and entrepreneurshq.com summit and I'll make sure that all of those are in the show Notes. Besides all that, Liam, is there any particular nuts you're trying to crack in your business right now? And by that I mean it could be people you're trying to meet, something you're trying to learn, something you're trying to a challenge you're just kind of racking your brain on and not 100% sure how to do it. Because this is a chance for me or some of my get listeners even to maybe say, hey, I may be able to help.

Cool. Yeah. Well, so I mean our focus, my life for the last five years have been all about virtual events and trying to make them more interesting, more interactive, more valuable for not just the host, the attendee, but everyone involved, from sponsors to media to the attendees in the interactions going on. And one of the things that we're working on now is we've been running some virtual networking events. Kind of like if we're talking about the dating topic, it's kind of like speed dating except with for business owners to speed network and actually do that virtually. So actually matching people based on profiles and so forth. But it's about. I'd love to get some ideas on how to make that more interesting.

In terms of what you'd like to see at such an event when you're meeting colleagues, what types of people that you'd want to meet, what would make it beneficial for you. So any ideas around what would make a really cool, fun but valuable and worthwhile virtual networking event? I'd love to hear.

That is interesting. Yeah, like I could see, I mean there's definitely. I could imagine some tech challenges just to make it efficient and if you have a lot of people in there trying to meet a lot of people, it's as hard. That's easy to do if you're all in a room. But none of us are in a room with a bunch of other people right now hopefully. But I love that and that's definitely something I can, I can think about and that's innovative. I actually hadn't heard about somebody trying to create something like that before. I've heard of apps. There's apps out there that, you know, you can meet up with people like you can go there and.

I think I forget who else. There's a couple people I know who have apps somewhat similar to this, but it's really just like a. It's almost like a Tinder or a matchmaking app for, you know, other people. But it doesn't really facilitate it besides just yeah, here's the people. Go contact them and see if they want to meet and hang out. I like the idea of doing it in kind of a virtual event space. I know that once a year myself and about 11 other entrepreneurs who we're in a local mastermind here in San Diego. We do an event called the Speakeasy and it's just a one day multi speaker event. There's nothing for sale. I mean it's a small ticket price just to cover our cost, but it's really good. We have about 60 people who come and we do a speed networking. It's like a speed dating, speed networking thing, but that's all in a room to where it's like, you know, three minutes with each person and you just kind of move on. So I don't know if that's kind of the angle you guys are looking to do, but that's really fascinating.

Yeah, we've run a couple of these already, just internally with our own list, but we're looking at trying to make sure that we get people coming back each week or each month. I mean, how frequently do people want this and how do we make it fun so that.

It becomes like with speed dating, there's a bit of games going on where people work in teams to go and find things. Or maybe when you're doing this virtually, it's going finding things around the house. Maybe it's like you have to bring back a banana or whatever it might be. Right. But how do we do that for business so that, that we're not just having fun and building maybe relationships with these other people, but making sure there's a relationship so we want to build that's going to help us say, when we come out of. Especially come out of this lockdown phase and we're able to move on with these relationships and start partnering with them, creating conferences or making sales potential customers, whatever it might be. I just feel like there's a way that we could do this even better than we're currently doing.

Yeah, no, I love it. I love it. Now, if I think of anything on that, I'll definitely hit you up and stay in touch. But Liam, once more, thanks for being a guest. That brings us to the end of the episode today and if you all are listening and it's recent, you're still locked down. I've got a lot more episodes you can listen to if you just hit subscribe and scroll through and listen to all the shows. If you are hopefully listening to this a few months from now or God willing, a couple weeks from now and things are back to normal, please don't hesitate to reach out to me and let me know if you have any big challenges you're trying to work on, any big suggestions for topics that we can cover and just let me know what you think. You can review the show or send an email to askbradaconrappedbusiness.com and Liam, I really look forward to staying in touch with you and keeping an eye on some of the summits you're doing. And I just really appreciate you taking the time to be on the show today, mate.

Thanks very much for the invite. Hopefully it's been useful for everyone and yeah, happy to hear from anyone if there's any feedback for that one, especially on that challenge with virtual networking. But Brad, this has been awesome.

My pleasure all right, guys, I'll see you on the next episode.