MBA2070 Q&A Wednesday: Any tips on running an in-person event?

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Visit Dell.com deals. Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA show. No fluff, just the good stuff every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is Q and A Wednesday. On Q and A Wednesdays I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you got a question you want to ask, just go ahead and email me over at Omar MBA Net. Today's question is from Morgan and Morgan asks. Hey Omar, Love the podcast. Got a question For Q and a Wednesday, I'm thinking about running my first in person event for my audience. I actually wanted to do this a couple of years ago but Covid now that it's a possibility, I'm in the planning phase and would love to know if you can share some of your experiences with live events so I can avoid any obvious mistakes. Thanks for the help. Love the show Morgan. Great question Morgan. Live events are a lot of fun. There's something very special about bringing people together in real life, creating moments for people, creating a great experience and pulling it all off successfully. It's a bit of a high. I run several in person events. Some big, some small. I'm actually running a in person event this year, a small founders retreat for Australian founders. So I got a lot to share with you when it comes to this topic. I'm going to be outlining the things I would tell myself before starting my first event. What to look out for, what are the most important things to focus on. How to stay out of trouble and make sure it's a success for you and your attendees. And lastly, how not to stress and lose your head while doing it all. We got a lot to cover, so let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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It feels good to save big. It feels good to geico. So Morgan asks on Q and A Wednesday if I have any tips when it comes to organizing and running in person events. I want to start with with your goal, you gotta ask yourself why? Why are you doing this? What's the purpose? What are you trying to accomplish with this in person event? And don't list seven, eight things. What is the one thing? If you pull this off and it's successful and you accomplish this one thing, then the event is a success. What is that one thing for you? It might be, I want to make new important relationships. I want to be able to help people connect. I want to make a profit. That could be the one goal you have. I want to make money off this event. It could be, I want to be able to sell my products or services at the event. Where the event becomes a way for you to drive traffic and attention to your business. It could be, I want my event to be the event when it comes to this niche or topic, whatever it is, choose your goal from the start. Choose what's the one thing that's most important to you and the main reason why you're doing this live event. This is going to help you because it's going to allow you to see that as a North Star. You're going to see this as the reason why you're doing all of this. And it's going to dictate a lot of your decisions. For example, I'm running a founders retreat for Australian founders. My number one goal for this retreat is to build deeper connections with impactful founders and entrepreneurs. So knowing that's my goal and that's the most important thing that I'm trying to accomplish with this event. That means the guest list is the most important thing. I need to make sure I curate the right people to attend this event. People that are willing to have deeper relationships, that are interesting, that are doing interesting things. So now you could see why that goal at the start that you write down, that you decide is so important. My next tip is plan early. A lot of people think events are easy to plan or you can put together an event last minute. But in my experience, if you're running an event that is going to last over a couple of days, more than one day, you need to start planning a year in advance. I know that sounds like a lot of time, but there's a lot of logistics when it comes to multi day events. Whether it's the venue or transportation or accommodations or food or sessions or whatever it is, it gets really complicated and there's a lot of moving parts. And it's better for you to have more time and have a relaxed couple of weeks leading up to the event than having less time and not being able to pull off what you need to pull off to be successful. Now, if you're running an event that's maybe a day event or a few hours, even a few months is not a stretch. You should give yourself at least three months to plan that kind of event. The thing about events is that there's the planning of the event and then there is the marketing of the event. It's like creating a product and then having to market and sell that product. You need to be able to sell tickets or admission to your event. You got to allow yourself the time to do that. So having the time, giving yourself the time is a huge, huge win. So I like to plan way ahead. I have a three day event that I'm planning and I have been planning this thing for over 18 months. If you are not taking sponsorships on or you're not planning to sell at the event, like your programs or things like that, if all the revenue you're going to make is from ticket sales, I highly recommend that you do not undercut yourself and sell your tickets cheap. You need to have a surplus in budget even if your goal is not to make money. Why? Because it's very easy to run out of money when it comes to events. Things get expensive, things come out of nowhere. You're going to have to think about how much is this going to cost you from all different angles. I like to create a spreadsheet and write down all the expenses that I could possibly have. I take those expenses, I triple them, and then I break that down into, okay, how many tickets do I need to sell to make that amount? Every event is different. You might have different kinds of expenses. You might have catering. You might have to pay for a venue. You may have to pay for speakers to show up, maybe even their transport and accommodations. This stuff gets expensive. So don't start thinking about your event and saying, I'm going to sell this event at $99. Who said $99? Do you know how much this thing's going to cost you? Don't do that to yourself. Work backwards. Total up your expenses. Triple it. Yes, triple it. And then work out your pricing. That way, how much do you need to earn to cover that number? Now, if you pull off the event and there is surplus, you have made money. Great. You can take that cash and invest it in next year's event or your next event. Next. And this one no one wants to talk about, but it's a reality. Liability in person, events have some level of liability. You want to release yourself of any liability. Somebody gets hurt, somebody gets sick, something gets stolen. Anytime you're dealing with real life, real things can happen. You can have people sign a waiver. You can have really tight terms and conditions. But my advice is speak to a lawyer in your local area where you're holding event, because they'll be able to tell you more. There are other ways for you to kind of release yourself or sort of relieve yourself of some liability is to hire agencies. A lot of these agencies have insurance. Make sure they do. And they kind of take on the liability. So say, for example, you're running an event in a interesting location. Instead of you trying to organize the hotel and the transport and the food and all the logistics, you can just go to a travel agent and tell them, hey, I have X amount of people attending this event I'm organizing. Can you organize this for me? I would recommend this. If you're even doing a team retreat. This puts the ball in the travel agent's core. They are responsible now. They can even bundle in travel insurance and all that kind of stuff. Now let's talk about what makes a successful event. Well, it's pretty simple. Think about an event that you went to that you enjoyed. What did you enjoy about it? Well, there are things that you see and there's things you don't see. Let's start with the things you don't see, actually. And the first thing that you don't see is organization. Yep. Run a tight Ship have an organized event. When it's not organized, that's when people notice. That's when people complain, when things start late, when people are confused, when people don't know how to check in, people don't know what's happening. There's no agenda. Half of having an organized event is really communication. It's just over, over, over communicating to your attendees what's going on. It might seem like you're speaking to people with no brain cells at some point, but the point is that people that are attending, they are not in the weeds. They don't know what's going on. They maybe glance on the itinerary, on the website, they might have glanced on the agenda. They don't really know who's speaking or keynoting. So you're going to get people asking questions. So one of the ways to avoid a lot of questions or confusion is just to communicate over communicate, whether that's with emails or a private community or a slack group, or with announcements or messages. The point here is that you cannot over communicate. And by over communicating, you allow yourself to mitigate a lot of disorganization and confusion from your attendees. This is where planning ahead really matters. Because when you plan ahead, you have time to be organized, to know exactly what's going on. When we run our events, we have something called a call sheet or a run sheet, where the organizers of the event, me, Nicole, our assistants, people that are working with us, we have our own agenda, our own, you know, schedule to ensure that basically it's a seamless experience for the attendees. We know exactly when they're arriving, we know exactly what to do, how to get them into the event, how to give them their passes, how to give them the right information, like where the bathrooms are and when lunch is and all that kind of stuff. The more planning you do ahead, the more organized your event will be. So organization makes a delightful event. Another thing that makes an event delightful is fun. Okay, having fun. A lot of people miss this and they wonder why their event kind of fell flat. Well, you got to prioritize fun. That means having great music, smiling, having a good time. Having a good time is contagious. When people that are running the event are having a good time, the people that are attending will have a good time as well. But if you're running around stressful and you're shouting and yelling and looking like you've had better days, that vibe is going to really infect other people. One of the ways to have a lot of fun at your event is to get somebody who is a great mc, somebody that's funny, somebody that loves the crowd, somebody that is entertaining, somebody maybe that has a really fun YouTube channel could be your MC. They don't need to be a subject expert, they just need to be fun. I've seen events where they've spiced things up with prizes and giveaways and little quizzes between sessions that allow people to get rewarded for their answers. It's pretty cool. Another tip for a successful event is understand one of the main reasons why people go to live events is to meet people, is to network. So don't jam pack your schedule. I've made that mistake in the past before and I never made it again. Where you just have 20 minute sessions back to back to back to back. People get fatigued, people feel like they're tired, they've been sitting in their seats, they haven't talked to anybody other than the people that have been sitting next to them. You want to break things up. You want to make sure there's time for people to mingle, to talk, to get a drink, to get rapid by, have extended lunches. More is not necessarily better when it comes to content. If you have a ton of ideas, that's great. You don't need to jam them into your event. You can save some for the next time around. Another tip that makes it easier for you to run your event or sell your event the next time around is to document, take photos, have somebody take video. We ran an event called Webinar Ninja live back in 2015. We were still first kind of starting out with Webinar Ninja. It was early days, we didn't have a lot of money. We went on Craigslist on the classified section and found a freelance photographer videographer that was willing to just spend the day with us taking photos, interviewing people, shooting videos and edited us a nice little sizzle reel, nice little trailer for a very reasonable price. It was like something like six or seven hundred dollars. That's all we could afford. But he was a film student, he needed some experience. He wasn't the best person that we could have gotten, but he was really good value and good enough. And that allowed us to promote our other events because we have great footage, great photos, great testimonials that we can use to promote. We also sent out a short and sweet survey to every single person that the day of the last day of the event. So anytime we run an event, the day of, the last day of event, before it's even over, like at the morning of, we send out a survey because people are in event mode. People are tuned in. People are willing to take the time to take this survey. And if you wait a week, if you wait a month, they're going to forget. They're not going to remember. They're not going to know what it felt like anymore. Right? That feeling has passed. So even if the event's not totally over yet, we like to send out a survey while things are still warm. And this survey's purpose is just for us to learn what they loved about the event so we can continue to do that next year and what they didn't love so much. So we could just cut that out.

We've all been there. You hold onto a coupon but forget about it and suddenly it's Expired.

Expired in 2012.

Dang it.

Fortunately, by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to geico. To wrap up today's lesson, we went a little bit long because I know this was such an important topic. It's such a big topic, and I wanted to offer everything that I can think of that could help somebody run a live event. One more tip for Morgan and everybody who is listening who's thinking about running a live event. If you're going to be involved in your live event other than just organizing it, meaning maybe you're speaking at the event or moderating a panel discussion, you're going to be busy kind of making sure that you do well on stage as well. You might not be available to answer questions or take care of things while you're on stage. So I recommend trying to get some help. If you're on a budget, you can easily get people to volunteer and be event assistants, coordinators, communicators, for a discounted ticket price or even free admission. We did this with our event at Webinar Ninja Live. We got some amazing help from some of our friends and supporters of the community, and we just saw them as a part of the team and we were just so happy we had another couple of people on the ground helping us out. Answer questions, serve our audience. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you got a question you want to ask, just like Morgan asked on today's Q and A Wednesday, just email me over@omar mba.net, i'll make sure to answer it right here on the show. Or if you got something out of today's episode or any of our episodes. The best way to support us is to subscribe to the podcast on whatever podcast app you're on. Whether it's Spotify or Apple Podcasts or Stitcher Radio or Himalaya or Overcast, we're on every single one. Make sure you hit subscribe or follow. That is a huge help. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Events are a lot of work and they're very, very tiring. Clear your calendar beforehand and afterwards. What I like to do is I like to have a few days before the event to just be dedicated to the event in terms of not doing anything else in terms of my business or my responsibilities. I know I'm in event mode. And then after event I like to take a few days off to just kind of recap, reflect and recharge. Okay, because it's very tiring. And then I'm back at it in the business full time. So look at your calendar. Take a few days before and after the event so that you take good care of your event and yourself. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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