Lauren Bateman explains that hosting events often does not generate significant direct profit—events frequently break even or lose money. She argues events should have a clear secondary purpose (e.g., creating marketing content, collecting testimonials, building credibility) so the indirect benefits (content for tutorials, landing-page testimonials, brand credibility) justify the investment.
I think there's a lot of glitz and glamour around having events. I've done events myself, and I know from speaking to a lot of people that you sometimes lose money on events or don't make money at all. You break even. And I can tell you that's what it is. And you better understand that if you're doing events, you better have a secondary purpose behind it. Are you creating marketing content? So for us, we get a lot of B rail that I include on my YouTube tutorials. We get testimonials from students that we use on our landing pages. This way we can sell more courses. So while we're not making a lot of money on the front end of the actual event, we broke even based on what we did for ticket sales, VIP upsells. And we accepted that because we're like, we're creating some good fortune with our customers and our clientele. We're going to get all this marketing information. But also for me, it gives a lot of credibility to see me on a stage film jumping around, teaching people, being like, wow, she filled a ballroom with a bunch of people teaching guitar. Like, that's really cool. So.
