1-on-1 Business Coaching Session (Demonstration)

What would you say is your biggest pain point, challenge, or problem that you're experiencing at the moment?

We're in amongst it and I'm on my own and I'm feeling the stress.

One of the most successful events I've ever been to, one thing they do is— Hello, nice to meet you. What's your name?

Luke Hazel.

Luke, nice to meet you. So tell us, what's your business?

I run Two Valley Events and it mainly focuses around one festival at the moment called Valley Fest. Um, and a farm.

Excellent. And local as well, I believe.

Local. Yeah. We're just outside Bristol.

Wonderful.

Overlooking the stunning Chew Valley Lake.

Okay. So you've got this awesome festival coming up and you shared with me pre-recording, like what some of the challenges are, but what's your, what would you say is your biggest pain point challenge or problem that you're experiencing at the moment?

At the moment we had a tremendous, uh, remarkable, like, yes, you're back. Sold 1,000 tickets off the bat first week. And then since then, it's just been slow, slow ticket sales. So we got 12 weeks to go. We got a mission to double ticket sales now.

Okay.

In 12 weeks.

Okay. Are you worried?

Yeah.

It's like, it's like, yeah, I can see the bit of the stress and the tension going on there as well.

So I can see your pants.

Do you want some help with that?

Massively.

Yeah. Okay. Fab. Right. Welcome to the business bench. Let's get to work. So Luke, give us a little bit more of a background and tell us a bit about the history of the event. And, you know, keep it pre-seed.

But yeah, we've been running this event for a decade. I started it in 2014 and it's grown organically. Started with 700 people from the local community, my mates, my family coming together, raising money for charity and trying to then create a harvest festival, communicating to people about food farming. educating people about where it's from. And that story then evolved into slightly more people. We peaked at about 14,000 in 2024, and 2023 was a good attendance, but with some big bands and like the Kooks and Tom Odell and, and like Deacon Blue, cuz I like Deacon Blue and a few, you know, and like, and It's sort of got a bit out of control.

Okay.

And so this year we—

That happens with business, unfortunately, sometimes. Yeah.

And this year we've decided to have a year off because we did a decade straight. Year off felt the right decision. And then I was, we've relaunched for 2026 and now we're in amongst it and I'm on my own and I'm feeling the stress.

Great. So you've got 12 weeks until the event. You've got shortfall in ticket sales, or at least revenue from the event. Yeah. Okay. And you're feeling the pinch a little bit stress-wise?

Yeah. And, uh, you know, I, I know the community will come together. I know it, they will be late in buying tickets and I know that people are lastminute.com nowadays. Or does that website not exist anymore?

Uh, no, I think it does actually.

Does it?

Yeah, of course it does feel like a bit of a blast from the past though. It does, doesn't it? So I think there's a couple of things which we can, we can look at, cuz a lot of the time, uh, and again, you can correct me if I'm, if my assumptions are right or wrong here, but a lot of the time when people are focused on events, they focus on the day itself and ticket sales on the day, and it feels like there's this zero moment of truth whether on the day, did you sell enough tickets or not, uh, we succeeded or we failed.

Yeah, there is a lot of that. Yeah. And this is why you look around this event here, it's like without these sponsors, without you guys coming on board and, and giving her the support that she needs, um, it also doesn't stack up.

Yeah, that's it. And I, I think, I think what we've got to get out of the way of thinking, and I think you'll be on this judging by our conversation pre-recording, but we've got to get out of this sort of binary thinking of it's a win or a failure when we get to that zero moment of truth on the day. And actually, in business, it's not just about a one-time thing. It's about how do we take the noise which you're creating from a marketing perspective and then turn that into dollars? Let's put it bluntly.

Yeah, yeah.

But not just dollars on that particular day in 12 weeks' time, but there are ways to monetize before the event, in the run-up to the event, at the event itself on top of ticket sales, and after the event as well. And I think if we can get you to a point where you're able to see a vision for building up customer lifetime value, where rather than it hinging around a £175 ticket sale, what if actually that £175 could— if we could double that through some of the other avenues? Now all of a sudden it's less about selling more tickets. It's more about extracting more value out of the people who've already put up their hands and said, yeah, we'd love to do this.

Yeah. And I have been, I have been re— trying to rack my brains about how we can pivot the festival, create a more regenerative future for it. And, and one of the concepts is, is that we try and take the community that believe in us. that have been there for the last decade and really love it and get it and understand it. But I want to take them on another journey for the next decade.

Okay.

In creating this model of sustainability, regenerate— regeneration. So I'd love for the ethos of the community farm which we've started to be done on mass scale. So perhaps there's a way in which I could invite you to come and plant 1,000 trees and then We spin some tunes after and we have a good time for the weekend. Yeah. Then collectively, which I love the sound of, by the way, we do that, you know, but you're, so we're active. We're asking the participants to participate. Yeah. In doing something good for the planet and have a good time at the same time.

So the only downside, I'm gonna sound like a pessimist here, but those, the people that know me, they, you know, they know that I'm an optimist by heart. So it's rare for me to say something like this, but unfortunately it's a very busy world that we live in these days. And we, it feels like that people have got quite selfish and one of of the things which they're thinking is like, what's in it for me? All that. So I'm fully 100% behind what you've just said, but there are going to be other people that need a stronger reason to get involved in that community piece. And actually, that could take a decade. You don't have that. You've got 12 weeks.

I've got 12 weeks.

Yeah, we still have to be realistic. There is a deadline here. Okay. But, and again, it's not a matter of like in one fell swoop, let's find a sponsor who's going to come because I know you had a big sponsor previously supported you for 9 years. Unfortunately, they've decided, you know, time is tight and maybe they've got their own precious financially, but we won't just find immediately another sponsor to replace them. But what if we could find— explore other ways to extract value out of the audience we've got? So first question I've got for you, and, and it's a very specific question: how many people— and be as exact as you can— how many people have attended your events over the past however many years you've been running it?

As it's grown, uh, probably well over 100,000. Yeah. And I mean, our database—

Not exactly.

No, I don't. Okay.

But do you know how many people are in the database?

About 20,000.

Okay. So you've had 100,000 people at the events, but only 20,000 in the database.

Yeah, because you only get the ticket holders and one, you might buy 4 tickets, 5, you know.

So here's our first thing that we can do when we, certainly through this event, how can we put something in place where we can gather not just that one ticket holder's, you know, ticket purchaser's details. How do we get the other 4 people signed up? Their family? Obviously kids exclusive, but husband, wife, aunts, uncles, grandparents, brothers, sisters. Let's try and gather their information. So what could you do?

Well, a QR code system or something, some sort of date. I don't know how we— you make it fun to participate in something to get their details.

Okay, so we've got 12 weeks where we could run a campaign, which is bring along a family member, they're going to get entered into a competition, say, to win some free tickets. And you're going to send it out to a database of 20,000 people with a view that they'll pass it on to their brother. Brother signs up to the competition and in we go. And there could be other things that you could kind of include within that to start to incentivize it.

Yeah.

So in this next 12 weeks, could we grow that list from 20,000 to 25,000 or 30,000? Okay. We all know in business that data is worth something. So the more data you can collect, the better. So be it the event, maybe that some kind of a competition continues. You mentioned about camping space that you've got coming up later in the year. Maybe you could rent— there could be some kind of raffle which is just off a QR code or within the, within the guide for the event that people can scan, pop their information in. And again, so if we could get you to from 20,000 to 25,000 by the event and from the event 25,000 to 30,000 because of all of those people that are there scanning codes and—

Yeah.

Entering competitions and things like that.

Well, the only, the other pivot that I was thinking was trying to launch a crowdfunding campaign maybe now for a 2027 or, or no, a '26 ticket, but also enabling that ticket to be something extra. So we do run additional wellness events. We do have a sauna on the farm. We do have the opportunity to have feasts. We run a campsite, so that £300 ticket could be a year membership. Yeah, not just that one weekend. Cool. And that's, that's something I would like to launch.

So that's again extending that customer lifetime value out. And I think you should— I would, I would pick a certain like number of people in the database, 200 people out the database. If you, if you've got the telephone numbers, yep, call them. Hey, this is Luke from XYZ. We've got this thing coming up. We're not trying to sell you anything, we're just phoning to see whether you might— that's something that you would be interested if it was available.

Yeah.

Just a bit of market research.

Yeah.

Okay. Okay, heavy lift because you've got to make all those phone calls, but what we want to gauge is if 10% of those people think, crikey, £300, that's a bargain, you know, we know we're on to something. And then you've got 20,000 other people who've raised their hand, signaled their interest in what you're doing over the last decade, who hopefully you can then just Farm through that list, and now all of a sudden you've not just got the £175 ticket sale, you've got a £300 upsell membership, whatever it looks like.

Yeah, yeah.

Future revenue.

Yeah, that's it. It's just whether I can pull that off in 12 weeks.

Maybe, maybe get some other people involved. There'll be plenty of people who are behind what you're doing who would give you 2 hours to spend on the phone, on a phone, give away, maybe give away some free tickets for a day.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, there, there are lots of people who are very hard up in 2026, you know, cost of living crisis, who had £175 ticket. Yeah, I'll sit on the phone for a day for you. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Uh, get my husband in as well. Can we have 4 tickets? No problem. Let's get everybody down. Right. So when, when'd you start? But, but this is about, it's, it can't be, if you get too focused on one outcome that day and hitting that number, you lose sight of all these other little things you'd be doing. So it should always be, What can we do to get 20 more tickets sold? What can we do to reach out to our list? What does our list want? So it's all what-based questions, not how, but what. And it makes it, you know, that much more kind of specific when you're starting to kind of reverse engineer it. Okay. What have you got from this so far?

Yeah, some really good ideas.

More specifically for the listeners, what have you got specifically?

I'm gonna go get away from this and try and think how, how I can create the membership thing for me. For me, that's got the most legs.

Yeah.

'Cause I know that I, I've got something really special to offer people.

Okay. And, um, I'm gonna say don't do that yet. Okay. Not, not don't do it ever, but how do you see yourself in your business? What role do you see yourself as sort of taking up?

Uh, as a vision or like, I mean, I suppose I, what I want to, my dream is to be like this advocate for regeneration. So I'm a farmer, I'm only a small-scale farmer, but I feel like I've got a voice to try and help this transition of other farmers reach the regenerative roadmap that I want.

So you're probably then the Steve Jobs to somebody else's Steve Wozniak, right? So you're like Hey, let's build some really incredible products because we want to inspire and revolutionize and things like that. Steve Wozniak was the engineer behind the products that Steve Jobs came up with, right? But what was Steve Jobs really good at?

The finesse of the— no.

Where do you— when you picture Steve Jobs, where do you see him?

At the top of the tree controlling the—

On stage in his black turtleneck jacket pitching the new products.

Yeah.

So when he's pitching a product, What is his job role?

To be the spokesperson for the brand and the advocate for the product.

Break it right down into like just basic business functions. What is he doing?

The leader and the—

Sales.

Sales, yeah.

That's all he's doing is marketing and sales, okay? You have this amazing, incredible platform and such a great vision, but ultimately when it comes down to the business, your job right now is to see yourself as the sales guy within your organization. So money, sales produces money. Cash is now the lifeblood. like the oxygen for your business, and everything which you should be doing should be thinking about how do we raise customer lifetime value, how do we bring more cash into the business, how can we leverage what assets we've already created. That email list that you've got, that list of telephone numbers, that is a cash machine waiting for you to dive in there and just have some nice down-to-earth conversations with people, you know, who've already bought into your brand, they've already attended your events.

Yeah, they have, yeah.

And yeah, but what's stopping you from doing that?

Do you know what? It's the barrier that I've created that I'm not a good salesman.

Okay.

And I think, I think that's, that's it.

Yeah.

Um, and I know I probably am, but I've, I've, I automatically have that like, yeah, if there's something, stop. I don't know.

What is sales to you? What, what is it?

Sales? Well, it's selling, you're selling a product and, and And being a salesman is not an easy job, actually.

Okay. Why is that?

I don't know. Because it's that— well, it is time as well. So I am not very time rich. Okay.

But imagine if for every conversation that you had that was 15 minutes long, it was like a cash machine, you bank £300.

Yeah, I know.

Are you motivated now?

Yeah, of course. Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's needed.

Let's play word association game. What is it? How would you define a salesperson? What's your typical— so you see a salesperson, what do you think? Well, annoying. Annoying.

Okay, what else?

Well, say it. Say what's on your mind.

Needy.

Needy. Annoying. Pushy. Persuasive. Aggressive. Like, and I'm not, you know, you're not that. No, you're Luke. Yeah, right. And Luke is just, he's got, he's on this mission. He's got a very passionate message which he wants to spread. But in order to be able to do that, he needs to have that audience of people in front of him so they can start to be involved in his world and see a difference.

Yeah, yeah.

Be part of that change. Okay. So it's far easier rather than persuading people who don't want your thing and don't want to be a part of that. It's far easier to find people who are already on that train.

Yeah.

They just need a bit of gentle, well, hey, come on, come inside.

Yeah.

It's an invitation. The example I always give is like, you know, you push somebody like that. What do you want to do? You want to push back, right? But if I say, hey, look, come over here, come over here, come over here. Yeah, literally. Oh yeah, I'm gonna follow you. Yeah, so it's, it's an invitation. It's a really simple invitation. That's all we're doing is just—

so what I was doing this week, I, I've been brave this week and I've picked the phone up to a number of, uh, businesses that I, I am trying to sell their concept bringing their staff to the best staff party, summer party they've ever done.

Yeah.

And that is— I have done that this week to try and sell 5, 10, 20, 50 tickets, you know.

How have you gone?

I had a good response.

Yeah. So what have you sold?

No, I didn't sell any yet. But I, you know, I've sent them emails of the information that they need to make that decision.

It feels like probably there's resistance attention. You have to be a bit persuasive there. Yeah, you're trying to get budget out of them, but you've got 20,000 people who've already bought into your products, your brand. Okay, I, I would literally be sat there, like I said, pick 200 people out of the phone book, out of the— that list. Oh hey, it's Luke here from XYZ. What's the event called?

Sorry. Valley Fest.

Valley Fest. It's Luke here from Valley Fest. I'm the organizer. Listen, I hope you don't mind, I was just doing a bit of research because we got the event coming up. Not trying to sell you anything, you know, it'd be great if you could come along, but I've just got 2 questions to ask you. First of all, what was it that brought you to the event in the first place? And then the second question could be something simple like, look, what, you know, I noticed you haven't booked your ticket yet this year. Can I ask why?

Yeah.

And see what they say. And then just take that feedback, go to the next, and you might find that just because you made that touchpoint, somebody say, oh my God, yeah. We thought we came to that event 3 years ago. I don't know why we haven't booked tickets again. Yeah, we should really, really encourage.

Let's do it.

Yeah. And all you say then is, oh my God, that's incredible. Wonderful if you could support us. Listen, can I, is it okay if I've got your number? Can I text you the link for the tickets? Not, not being pushy, just, yeah, you see, you've got it. Yeah. I bet you will find you do 20 calls like that, you know, a day, you'll get 5, 10, 15 ticket sales. You do that every day for the next 90 days and then run up to the event all of a sudden.

Yeah. Plus, like I said, plus they can then get a redeem code for your friends and give your friends a discount code.

That's it. Yeah. So, hey, would you mind sending this out to your brother? Get them to do the thing. We've got competition coming up as well if you do a referral.

Yeah.

So build a whole kind of referral system into it as well. Yeah. Um, the other thing as well, which I would then look at, is, um, at the event itself, um, it's really easy to get lots of concessions around.

Yeah.

Um, and they're charging everybody like £20 of bloody you know, poke bowl or whatever and stuff like that. Whereas I wonder if there's a way that you can, you can monetize your audience once they're at the event as well. And it doesn't have to be by much, but if you've got 1,000 people there and they're spending an extra, you know, £20 or £50 or whatever it is, now all of a sudden the gap's closed from quarter of a million down to £200K.

Yeah.

It's a little bit easier. You do the membership on top of that and then that That brings the gap down by another £75K, for example.

Launch the membership post-event.

Yeah, you do a massive campaign to get your campsite busy when it opens up in, you know, later on in the year once you've got the right permissions and things like that. Yeah, so that there's some incentive for people to book. Now all of a sudden, yeah, you didn't make the money at the event, but we've got £40,000 worth of bookings because people have got their 10% off discount code. Yeah, as a one-time thing for going to that event.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay, and then afterwards, so one of the most successful events I've ever been to, it's an event called Atomicom which is held up in Newcastle.

Right.

It's a sales and marketing conference, and the one thing they do and have done consistently each and every single year is at lunchtime during the event, they pitch next year's event. And then at the end of the day, just before the final keynote speaker, they pitch next year's event again.

Right.

So they're already pre-selling tickets for next year. And most people, again, we make these assumptions, these silly rules that we create for ourselves. Oh yeah, they'll know what to do. They booked a ticket this year, so they'll go and rebook next year, won't they? No, they won't. Because the moment they leave your site after the festival—

Yeah, there's a lot of distractions.

Nice, you know, stories to tell and stuff like that. But, but also, yeah, life gets in the way, distractions and everything else. And lo and behold, they then miss the emails next year for whatever reason and this, that, and the other. But again, if you can incentivize people to then sign up for next year's ticket because Yeah, you know, open the cart for on the day, but for 3 days afterwards, so there's some big incentive to get them along next year. Yeah. And then you're already— again, it's cash flow, so you've got to watch that because obviously you don't then want to spend all of that money. But again, if that— it's all about, right, let's pull this lever, close that gap. Let's pull this lever, close that gap. Yeah, this lever.

Yeah, it's good, good point.

But yeah, points. Unfortunately, you're Luke the sales guy now.

Yeah.

You've changed your job.

Yeah.

Okay. You no longer look the farmer.

Yeah. All right.

You're the advocate.

For the next 12 weeks.

Next 12 weeks you are a salesman. Salesman.

Yeah. Okay. I can deal with that.

But see it more as you're not selling to people. It's invitations. You're sending out invitations. Lots of invitations to anybody who's interested to listen and encourage them to come along.

Yeah. Well, thank you.

My pleasure.

Hopefully see you there.

Yeah.

Field.

It's my opportunity now to do a shameless plug, Luke. So I always try and do this at the end of these episodes as well. So if you've enjoyed this episode, listening to Luke's story, hearing some of the business tips and advice and things like that, my book is coming out on the 1st of June, my new book, Fearless Pricing. It's on pre-order at the moment, or if this comes out after the 1st of June, then you can go and grab it on Amazon or your favorite bookstore. And also we'll pop some links into the description below as well so you can go and access all of the resources we've got through Fearless Business. Thank you very much, Luke. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Yeah, thank you.