Ricardo Molina and a guest rethink event production costs and revenue. Instead of selling one-off tickets, they switched to annual memberships that renew yearly. They ditched traditional production companies for theatre producers to add theatricality on a tight budget.
Chapters
Big numbers, financials. How can we do this differently?
We really thought about it in terms of the sell was actually less around each individual sponsor. Actually, Ricardo, it was more around the phrase. The thinking for us is around the lifetime customer value of our community and of our audience. Right. So I was more interested in how what I think the event world calls delegates and for us as a community. So they don't buy a delegate ticket with us, they buy a membership and it renews every single year. And that membership concept we've played with for a long time. And we've played with the kind of the content side and the networking side. The networking side has really helped ramp up that kind of that value. But the key is actually on kind of the renewal. The key is looking out with a long lens and saying, okay, what happens in 21? What happens in. And I'm looking at that. And so the studio for us was really key because that's what differentiated us. You know, we didn't have the long term event experience to be able to say, here's how you produce that event. That's sort of slick and. Slick and smart. As a traditional event, we focused on the quality of the content and the quality of the people in the room. And it was how you reflected that in a studio. So. And what was interesting was when we started talking to the supply chain and the contractors, that was an alien language for a lot of individuals. It was kind of like, well, what do you mean? Normally you've just got a fixed budget for production and you kind of rinse it through. It's like, well, that wasn't the case. And it was for us, it was this kind of left and right brain thinking, right? It's the emotive and the logical buy. And that's what I'm looking for. It's like, how do I get my sponsors and my community, my delegates, my membership? Call it what you will. How do I get them all excited about this? How do I get that energy into it in this new environment? And to be quite honest, I talked about the theater early on. That was where really out of desperation more than anything else, we actually said, well, there's got to be a better way who can produce, you know, and build sets effectively, who can inject that kind of that live theatricality and who can work with a very tight budget, you know, to be able to deliver something of high impact. And that's where we started talking to theatre producers and that changed it.
So for the benefit of the audience, is that. So you went and took this obvious steps and speak to these kind of production companies. And then, as you were saying, big numbers were coming, coming in, like, wow, extremely expensive, extremely everything. And then you kind of have to think about it with a team. And then you then take that decision to let's think outside the box. And then theatrical and everything. And that's kind of when you started talking to these kind of all the different production companies.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it wasn't that, just to be clear, it wasn't that we were averse to spending or investing. You know, my view, you know, and I still find this interesting now, Ricard, because you'll look at an event that's coming up and you've got sponsorship revenue loaded against it, but there's suddenly, when you move to a virtual, is this propensity not to invest. And I find that quite curious because it's kind of like, look, you've got to be able to invest in that same way, or you've got to be able to invest in a different way, but you've got to be able to invest. And for us, that was the key. It was kind of like, look, I'm not averse to investing with one of these sort of the kind of commercially loaded production companies. The problem was they weren't listening to what we wanted. You know, they had a. It was a, it was a very, it was a. It was a very set way of.
Being cookie cutter approach. This is exactly the way we do it. This is the way we deliver it. We kind of take it or leave it.
And that's not.
That highlights the element of wanting to be different from the outset. You see what I'm saying? It's not okay, how do we translate? What can these people provide? How do we find a partner that helps us deliver what we're expecting to deliver?
