In this recorded recap, Sally Curtis explains to Sharon how she helps business owners grow their companies by running small, strategic events. She begins by outlining the common challenges her audience faces – generating leads for events, filling seats, and deciding on pricing. Sally then presents her proven 12‑element model that builds visibility, credibility, referability and profitability, emphasizing that the missing piece for most clients is education. The model is broken into four core components: Direct Contact, Network & Search, Awareness, and Educate. She describes a step‑by‑step digital‑first lead‑generation workflow that relies on personal connections on LinkedIn and Facebook (not business pages). The workflow moves prospects from a digital conversation (like a virtual coffee) to face‑to‑face interaction through invitations to her own events, other people’s events, or coffee meetings. Ongoing content and regular touch‑points keep the conversation alive and grow a database of ideal clients, which fuels referrals and future event attendance. Sally shares the evolution of her own business: starting with free meet‑ups, then charging $15 for paid meet‑ups, then mentoring 52 small‑business owners, which revealed a common client pain point – marketing fatigue and lack of ROI due to no lead‑generation system. Using these insights she created specific programs, systemized her process with templates, and set a personal outreach target of 200 new contacts per week, converting about a quarter into her database. She later built an outsourced team to execute the system for herself and her clients, and now coaches others to build similar teams. Overall, the talk provides a practical, repeatable framework for using small events as research, list‑building, networking, and credibility tools, combined with a disciplined digital outreach and database strategy to consistently generate leads and grow a business.
Chapters
Hi Sharon, Sally here. I just thought I'd share with you a little bit from last night. We had a very full room, and to give you a bit of an outline, as I mentioned in my email, we tend to have a bit of an open conversation around the topic of how to grow your business through running small events. So I did ask the group what were their current problems or challenges that they were facing or knowledge gaps. And ultimately the main questions were how do they generate leads to events, which is always a big one, how do I fill the event, put bums on seats, etc. And then the next major question was do I start with free or paid, or, you know, how do I work out the pricing, etc. So let me give you a bit of an overview first. So the reasons I spoke to or shared last night was the reasons I run small events and suggest small events is that they are great leverage. It's a great way to do research and development to find your ideal client needs and fears, etc. And it's a great way to build your list. It's a great way to move into new networks and collaborate with new networks. And it's certainly a brilliant way to increase your visibility and credibility and demonstrate your value. The reason I've mentioned that first whilst I've got this visual on the screen is these are the 12, I suppose, elements that I work to. This is our proven model of how to build your visibility, credibility, referability, and then profitability in your marketplace. When I'm working with clients, both small businesses and the thought leaders and larger organizations I work with, Predominantly the missing element is this education component, which is why I just wanted to start with this element first. Lots of people do lots of things on social media, but they don't educate their audience, therefore they're not demonstrating their value or positioning themselves well enough to actually fill rooms. People aren't curious enough to bother attending their events, etc. So I just wanted to show you this quickly. The 4 components are having direct contact, network and search, awareness, and educate. And these are the elements within each of those sections that I generally work to. You can go to my website and fill out an influencer questionnaire, and that will actually explain this and give you a report to look at. just something I just wanted to mention to you as I mentioned to people last night as well. So this is predominantly the model that I discussed and worked to last night of what it is that I do to generate, do lead generation for my events and for my business. Now I predominantly use LinkedIn but I also do use Facebook and the strategy is exactly the same. So the first thing that we do is actually digitally connect with people, and what I mean there is I actually connect to them and actually add people to my LinkedIn profile or onto my Facebook profile. I don't use a business page. From connecting with them, I actually start a digital conversation. Just like having a cup of coffee with somebody. I actually start a conversation with them. Whilst that is going on, on my social media and on my posts and articles, etc., I help educate them. I give them tips and ideas of how they can improve and understand the world of business that they're in. The 3rd step in my process is when you're building a digital conversation, Is to be able to connect with them in some manner, face-to-face, and that involves an invitation. So the key point here is that I don't actually always and only invite them to my events. If I'm attending other people's events, etc., then I will, in part of my conversation, will say things like, hey, We've been having a great chat. I'm attending somebody's event locally. I thought you might be interested in going. Did you want to come with me? So I am always educating people, and I'm always inviting them to join me in one form or another so I can get to meet them face to face. And that's— and then, as I said, that's either taking them to other people's events that I'm going to, to networking events. Catching up with a couple of different people that are similar over coffee, and then of course also inviting them to my events there as well. And this is how you move people from a digital connection into a humanised marketing approach where you can then engage with them, because you can then start to build a database of your ideal target market. And then the process in the engage section is just to have good content that they interact with and and that you continue the conversations that you started and have ongoing conversations with them and touch points with them regularly. And that's how you build a very, very strong, very influential network of people that refer you and bring more people into your events, etc. And so I just wanted to share that with you very, very quickly. We also talked about the need to grow a database and know your numbers, generating leads every week or month into your business, and we talked about different ways of doing that. A little bit difficult for me to share that with you because I don't know enough to share relevant enough stuff with you, but more than happy to have a chat. And then we went through very, very quickly the steps of how my business evolved, and I drew that on the board as well. In a snapshot, I don't have a visual for this, sorry, but to give you a bit of an idea, I started with free, doing free meetup events, and then I got to understand and worked out my audience. I asked them lots of questions, I did lots of surveys. I then moved from free to my $15 paid meetups. And from there I then did, I mentored 52 small business owners, and it was from that mentoring and asking the previous questions that I was able to really start to see the patterns of the, the regular problems that most of my clients have, which is they've generally all got marketing fatigue. They're doing too many things that aren't working and they're totally over-marketing and overwhelmed by it. And they're not creating a return on investment on their marketing at all. And generally they don't have any lead generation or systems in place to help them grow their business. So that was what I discovered through my first 3 steps, which was free, then to paid, and then to mentoring a series of 52 clients. From there, I was able to create my very specific content the programs that I deliver, and I was able to support those business owners make that change. From there, what happened, I was then able to systemize my process, create templates for my lead generation and my content, which I used and perfected on myself where I tested and tweaked it. I did have a couple of great mentors there at the time. From using myself as the case study, I worked out the best way to grow my business was to reach out to 200 people a week. A quarter of them get added to my database because they're my ideal target market, but I do consistently connect with people each and every week on my social media platforms and move them from followers to friends. And then from there, I was— I built a team, an outsourced team, that then did all of this work for me. I also then built— build other teams for clients, and I also coach people to build their own teams. So don't know whether that last little bit was relevant to you, Sharon, but just wanted to give you a bit of an insight of some of the conversations that we had last night as it related to building your business through running small events. This is effectively my system, a model of what we do, and I'm more than happy to answer any more questions if you'd like to know any more. Thank you.
