Episode 150: How to Create an Amazing Virtual Event for Your Customers

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. Skucast is the official podcast of Common Skew. If you're a distributor, something like this, an opportunity to engage your customers to, in our case, connect, inspire, and educate them, is, is not a bad business idea at a time when business may be slow. A lot of us have talked about ways to stay engaged and connected with our customers when their budgets have dried up. What an amazing opportunity to do that with, say, end clients, to put on something. It doesn't have to be as big as SKUCon at Home, but could be a much smaller version of it that serves to inspire your customer base at a time when they don't have budget. But I can certainly assure you that in 3, 6 months, let's say things return to normal, at that point marketing budgets return, those end clients are going to remember that a distributor like you stayed connected with them and inspired them and helped guide them through some of these tough times.

A few weeks ago, we hosted SKUCON at Home. Our mission was to inspire, connect, and educate. With nearly 800 attendees and a few dozen amazing speakers, we had a blast gathering together as a community to learn from each other and share. And with everyone scrambling to figure out how to engage virtually with their clients now and how to host virtual experiences, We thought we would share our experience with you, warts and all, in the hope that it would give you some insight into how you can create magical virtual moments for you and your customers. We'll peek behind the curtain and look at all aspects of putting on a virtual event, from marketing and branding to the platform and other tools we utilized, the amazing SkuCon at Home kits, the attendee experience, working with our speakers, and the practical details of doing this with a small and entirely remote team. Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, the Chief Content Officer at CommerceHQ, joined today by Mark Graham, President and Chief Brand Officer, and we love having Kate Macewicz, our Marketing Director, join us because she was truly the maestro of SKUCon at home. We'll get to the episode in just a moment. You might have heard by now that we had to cancel SKU Camp Austin. We're heartbroken over this. When the pandemic arrived in mid-March, we always hoped that SKU Camp would be spared, but given how the situation has developed, We unfortunately had to make the very difficult decision to postpone the 2020 event. Note I said postpone and not cancel. SKU Camp is one of our most cherished events. You can read more about why we decided to postpone it at community.commsku.com. In the meantime, you can check out all the webinars we are hosting, including the new SKU Talks, our unique take on supplier virtual presentations hosted by our enigmatic and ageless VP of Supplier Partnerships, Dave Schultz. We also have some exciting developments just released for shops. You can learn more at commonscue.com/webinars. Today's episode is brought to you by CommonSkew, the work from anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. To learn more or to begin your free trial now, visit commonscue.com. Now on to my conversation with Kate and Mark. And by the way, in the show today, We reference a few articles, we'll link to those in the show notes. One of the most important aspects of doing a virtual event is purpose. And I know that's going to sound basic, pedantic, and too elemental for some people, but if you don't, I think if you don't wrestle with the purpose at the front end, then you're going to struggle with your event. Meaning not every physical event needs to be turned into a virtual event. And then there are things that we're doing as businesses that can become a virtual experience like an event. But I think the one thing that we need is a strong purpose. And by way of example, Mark, why did we decide to do SKUCon at home?

So, if we look back at the very beginning of our event strategy, the whole purpose and mission of what it is that we were trying to do was to do 3 things: to connect, to inspire, and to educate those that were in the Common Ski community. And those 3 things were really, really important for us. And that was kind of the guiding light. Like, number 1, we wanted to be able to connect this very dynamic, optimistic, creative group of people that were highly social and and would learn from each other. Number 2 was the educational side. So we wanted to be able to create this strong foundation of education because you and I, Bobby, in our distributor backgrounds, always looked at industry education as such an important part of our success. So we were inspired by that. And that's a nice segue to the third, which is inspiration, that I think that education on its own might be a little bit boring, but inspiration where you might be able to learn from someone else's story about how they've launched their business or maybe a mistake they've made is the basis of inspiration, which I think is actually a little different than education. So those three things really represented this purpose. And if you fast forward to SKUCon@Home, which we did last week, the purpose of that event was no different than a SKU Camp or a CommonSKU Sessions or a SKUCon or a CommonSKU University. In that respect. And we just really felt that there was this opportunity as our industry and society as a whole was reeling from the negative impacts of COVID that there was no greater time than now to connect, educate, and inspire the folks that were on Common Skew as well as the broader industry.

I want to add similarly to what you said, Mark, that we needed to provide a space for the community to come together because none of us had all the answers at this time. So it's a diverse industry. Many businesses have different UVPs. They serve different clients, but there are some similarities. So it was about gathering together the collective, you know, the wisdom of the collective. And it was, and like you said, it was meant as a way to provide a moment of encouragement, a boost of hope at a time when people just felt lost. And so it was really important for us. I know the conversations we had in the beginning were. When we got to timeline, you guys might remember this, we all sort of had a nervous response like, we gotta do this soon, like soon.

Yeah.

And we also realized the overwhelming— what would normally take us 6 or 7 or 8 months of planning, and we had what, a maximum of 5 to 6 weeks?

Maximum.

Maximum. So, um, when we all knew that we had deadline in mind, it kind of blew us away. We're like, oh boy, here we go. Use our event as a way to demonstrate how you too can put on a virtual event, no matter the size of your company, no matter what your purpose might be. So we're going to share a little bit of the background again, and when we get into the tech setup and platform, the reason why the technology and the setup of the platform that we use was so important is that Mark has always led the charge for our physical events. It's been the linchpin for us in terms of developing an effective conference, and one of the keys, the primary keys is our venue. Our venue is our canvas. Once we have our canvas, once we know where we're going to host the event, we know our creative opportunities and creative limits. So some venues we've chosen had more rooms, so that would mean more breakouts, or some venues had a really cool central gathering space, or maybe a really cool cove area where we could hang out. And that would literally change and shift our program. We never dictated the program and then put it on top of the venue. We always looked at the venue and went, what would be the coolest experience here given the canvas that we have? So, Mark, tell us why platform selection was important.

So I think that we were looking for something that would provide for an interactive, engaging, collaborative experience, because when you're hosting a virtual event, One thought or one negative thought goes immediately towards a dry webinar that you've signed up for and you are paying scant attention to because you are on Slack and email and whatever other web app. And while the speaker drones on in a non-interactive environment, I think all of us on this call and certainly those that are listening to this podcast can reflect on some of those negative experiences. And so, for us, when we were thinking about a virtual event, noting this idea of inspiration, education, and connection, it was like, how can we bring people together in a way that where it doesn't become anarchy, but it is a central tenet in the application? So, we did a fair amount of research. We have used Zoom like many have extensively and have had great success with it, but Zoom, I think, really thrives in more of that webinar-style environment where it's sort of one-to-many and it's less interactive in the way that we were looking for. I'd had some experience in attending the local technology meetup with Hopin about 2 months prior, and I was impressed with it. And so we attended a kind of a sales webinar with them. We thought it was awesome and we just jumped in and Kate probably was cursing me shortly thereafter because we jumped in with great enthusiasm and then realized there were all sorts of limitations and challenges. But we just said it, we set about solving that. And Hopin really did a great job. I think we're gonna get into some of the shortcomings and some of the challenges that we had to overcome. But it in many ways, I think represented kind of that modern canvas like we have with many of the events we hold in person, like the ACE Hotel, Memory Alive. And that meant a lot to us.

What folks don't know, and this is the case with a lot of our creative endeavors, is Kate is truly the maestro of this entire experience. She's gonna hate that I'm saying this, and I already had to, um, I already had to push back on her before we hit record because she really didn't want us to be pushing that that much. But the fact of the matter is Kate was the maestro, and putting on an event like this requires someone to be in charge, someone to be in control of the event, someone. And Kate did a masterful job of doing that. But I'm gonna let Kate talk and I'm going to shut up because it took all of us. But there was a primary point person on this, and the reason it was— it pulled off the way it was, if you had to single out anyone, it would have been Kate. Kate What was most important to you with the tech setup and the platform?

I think building on the venue as the, like, the center of the events was similar for this virtual conference in making sure that there was a platform that operated the way that we wanted the conference to be was very important. We knew that we didn't want it to feel like a webinar. We knew that we would want a platform that would enable us to incorporate breakouts and one-on-one networking. So with that in mind, that helped us make that decision on, on the platform to use. And also, I've attended many virtual conferences before the pandemic, and I've always felt that they were missing that attendee connection and interaction. Yeah, most have a chat function, but with hundreds of attendees commenting at once, it can often feel overwhelming or like your comments questions and comments get buried very quickly. So, with all of that in mind, I think that helped us narrow down which platform that we would choose. And then, it was once that was decided and committed on, then it was all about learning the platform, trying to master it as much as possible before the event because—

What was that experience like? Just to pause right there and ask you, what was the experience of adopting, learning, and training this new— with this new platform?

The platform itself wasn't too difficult, but honestly, the training was grueling. I'm not going to lie, just because— just because it was getting not only myself up to speed, but making sure the entire Commonsku event team was up to speed on the platform. And then 25 speakers, making sure that they knew how to use the platform was not an easy task.

Yeah.

And it required you know, multiple test runs of the event for us to understand it, how two videos were recorded to make sure that they knew how to operate and function. So that—

Let me clarify something here. We had something like 3 training moments with the team. First was like a lot of people, a lot of people on the team. Then we went, oh, we can't do that because we all basically showed up and couldn't like, we're like bumping into each other in the hallways kind of thing. It was very awkward and intense and a lot of, is this on?

Am I here? A lot of that.

And then we minimized it to the probably the the event team, plus Katherine and maybe another person for the subsequent training moments. Because most of our team, so that folks will know the way we divvied up responsibilities, we have a core event team of myself, Mark, Kate, and Ali who are primarily doing the events. And what we'll do is our colleagues will jump in and do anything they can to help. But in this case, what they were is they were breakout leaders. So we needed them to understand the platform well enough, but the 4 of us really needed to understand the platform the most. And we, so we had a couple of subsequent training programs there.

So, so Kate, um, would you say that we were completely rock solid after all of the training sessions that we had? And maybe, maybe more a detailed question. Talk to me about what the 24 hours before the event was like in terms of, you know, my outlook, your outlook, uh, in terms of how confident we were that we were going to be able to put on this, uh, event for 700 or or so people?

It was utter chaos, I think. And, you know, with our in-person events, I thought what was so unique about this was we usually are able to do a full AV run-through with all of the speakers. And we do, you know, we have mic checks, sound checks, all of that the day before, at least. And no matter how many test runs we were able to do, it's still, we still couldn't replicate what the event would be. So I think that was, that was a big cause of anxiety for us. And it was just, you know, we had a lot of moving parts, making sure that speakers were where they needed to be at a certain time virtually instead of in person. Again, in person, you can see someone, wave to them, and tell them to come over to where you are. Virtually, like at one point, I was emailing a speaker, I was calling another speaker, and I was video chatting with one, making sure that they were all like set up and where they needed to be. Then plus bouncing around to the breakouts at various times, making sure each speaker was in there. And all while that's going on, I never really get to experience the event for myself. So I'm like, just hoping that everything's going well throughout. But I think just beforehand to just making sure everyone, because everyone else, this was their first time using the platform. So making sure that they knew where they were, where they were supposed to be, the links that they were using were correct. And of course, even during all of that, when we send all that stuff out, some people use the wrong link and, or the link that, that they were sent doesn't work anymore. And you just have to be prepared for every possible scenario. I think I had 3 different docs set up. One was for the support team for, to be able to email people when they couldn't log in or if they couldn't log in to be able to send those responses. Another one was for Allie to be using in-app like in the chat to be able to tell people how to troubleshoot. And then, Bobbi, like I know that you and Marc and Katherine were also doing that on stage too. So it was like all of these things that we had to prepare beforehand for, like any possible scenario that could go wrong.

Yeah, we each had— so folks will know, we each had multiple screens. Like when you're watching the recording, I'm watching the recording of even being introducing a keynote, and you're watching me watch the screen, and my eyes are diverting to 3 or 4 different screens. Because as my responsibility with the speakers, I had everybody's cell phone number and people were texting me like they were Kate. And, um, then we had the backstage that you could toggle to, then you had the actual event you could toggle to, then you had our Slack channel for our team that we were communicating on that we said, okay, this is for the event, but we were also communicating to each other on private Slack channels. And so in a sense, you had about half a dozen channels open all the time throughout the event, even though you were trying to participate in the event. So it was that was part of the fun.

Yeah. I think my biggest fear was that no one would be able to figure out how to log on. And no one would be able to access the event. But I was very, very relieved when, as soon as those numbers started to roll in and we started to see the attendees roll in and then type in the chat.

Yeah. Well, another thing you did, you and I were texting each other. There was a few speakers that couldn't find the backstage, just like a real event sometimes. And you're messaging me going, where's so-and-so? And I'm going, oh.

Oh shit. Um, we need to find out.

And you were doing that too. I mean, Kate was really the one herding cats at this point. Um, and getting everyone there. I have a question now to Mark because I want Mark to fess up. Mark, what was your headspace like the night before the event?

Oh, it's the same way I am before any of our events.

Uh, right.

Terrified, uh, anxious, um, maybe a little bit antsy. Grumpy. You know, I find I have these moments where I just need to go out and take a long walk or I need to go for a run or in this case, I went for a 2-hour mountain bike ride after our 24-hour before test. I was like, man, I have to clear my head. And it's just, and it's funny to me whenever anyone says like, oh, Mark, you're so calm and relaxed. And I'm like, you don't know me at all.

Internalize.

Yeah.

That couldn't be further from the truth.

So many internal demons that I think are really driven by this desire to really want to do good work. And I think I go back to the times when I was doing public speaking in high school, and I remember I had a teacher who said, listen, Mark, if you're nervous, like you want to throw up, before your session, that's a sign that you respect the audience. It's a sign that you want to do great work. Whereas if you weren't nervous or weren't anxious, then maybe there'd be something wrong with you or you might not have the same level of respect for the audience. And I think that that's the same, I think, in this particular scenario is this desire to really want to do great work because that's what we do. In everything. And I wish that— I'm not saying this is just me. I think that a lot of us at the company are like this. And I think to some extent, I wish that we weren't like this because it would make life maybe a little bit less crazy. But when you do your best work or when you feel you're doing your best work, I mean, it may be ugly at the end of the day, but you feel like you did your best, the feeling is euphoric afterwards. Like after every event that we've done, whether it was this virtual event or SKUCon or SKU Camp or anything like that, even though the event itself might have had lots of warts, right? Like I don't think we've ever done anything that's been perfect. We all just look back and go, man, that was just the greatest accomplishment. And to me, I feel like that's really what it's all about. So that's my answer to that, Bobby.

I had the morning of, you know, I felt just like you did, you guys did. And you guys know I'm an anxious type like Mark, but more so probably, and create with anxiety. It's like a part of my creative process. Well, the morning of, this calm just came in and hit me, which was a little odd. It was a little odd and scary. And then I realized, because I'm like you, Mark, I, I, nervousness is a very important energy. I think it signifies something and it's something you can use. But I had this calm kick in that I hadn't before. And I realized what it was. It was the calm before the storm, and it was the calm that basically says, all right, you have this moment and it's all about to hit. Yeah, but I'm— same thing with you guys. Let's move on to marketing. There were fundamental questions for us to answer through the process. Now, Kate and Mark, here's what folks may not know about our events. Kate and Mark work together closely and honestly in secret from most of the team when it comes to marketing our events. And they like it. They enjoy it. It's like this secret kick, especially that Mark gets out of it. But they also do that to control the process, to control the ideation phase so it doesn't get robbed by people. And so not robbed by people, people that you don't get the skeptics too soon in the creative process. But there were fundamental questions for us to answer through the process, like, you know, how will this be different? What should the message clearly convey? You know, what, what do we, what choices do we make about basic things like name and brand identity, colorways? But all of that sounds unimportant, but it's so critical. It's like the energy and the motion behind the marketing. Kate, tell me what was important to you once we got, once we understood what we were going to call this and what was important as the next step for marketing the event.

We had a slight advantage because we were building on SCUConn, which is an existing brand. But I think when we were initially discussing the idea of a virtual conference, we went through all the same exercises that we would do when we're coming up with a new concept. So we discussed what we liked, what we disliked about a virtual conference so that we could have a clearer picture of, of how this version of SKUCon would translate. And then our marketing team kind of sits down and we do a brainstorm and we kind of go over, we go over who the audience is, what the tone of the event should be. We go over keywords that we'd use to describe it and ultimately the experience that we want our attendees to have. We also talk about things that we don't like and imagery that we don't want associated. Like one thing that kept coming up was like, we don't want any beds. Just because it's SKUCON at home doesn't mean we want like a bed anywhere involved in the branding. And our designer Moose is really great at taking all these notes. Yeah, and taking all these notes and, and our thoughts and feelings, even if they're random, and bringing them all to life. So, so I think working with a team like, like we do is super important so that, you know, we can come up with that clear messaging.

Yeah. Mark, do you want to add any thoughts to that?

I think it's bang on and it's no question my favorite part of it. It involves a lot of visioning, a lot of dreaming, and also just working with some really creative people that don't necessarily agree with me all the time, which I like. And what I will say is that normally, or I should say in normal times like the pre-COVID times, this process would take place in one of our smaller boardrooms where we would sit down, there'd be a whiteboard, we'd be hashing things out and we'd be locked in there for kind of hours on end and people would be desperate to get out. But it was always a fun process. And now we don't have that luxury. I mean, we haven't seen each other in person for 2.5 months and this entire event took place over video chat, over Slack collaboration channels, over Asana. It was actually kind of amazing to me as to how efficient we were. Not to suggest that we're inefficient when we're there in person, but I don't think that there was any disadvantage for us being apart. And that was really, really, it was a special part of the process. And I love how we can go or how we've always gone from this high-level kind of dream state vision scenario into being able to, uh, go into tactics. So the ability to juggle this sort of macro and micro is, I think, a really special part of the process. And I give a ton of credit to Kate and her leadership, and also with Ali, who's on the team, and then we mentioned Musa, um, on the, on the design side, is, is just a really special thing to see.

Uh, let's talk briefly about one of the most fun parts of this conference, the SKUCon@Home kits. Now, before we get into this, I want folks to know we're not going to cover in detail maybe a lot of this because we have a couple of resources at community.comandsku.com. We have the lookbook for the SKUCon@Home gift collection so you can see what it was in case you didn't get one. We've also got an article written by Ali called You've Got Mail: A Guide to Wowing Your Customers at Home. And we also have a podcast episode that we recorded with Maddie Toome of Profil, who is a fulfillment kitting company, and it's called Mastering Kitting Projects. So there's more details there. But guys, tell us a little bit about the kits. The kits were a huge hit and people had a blast with those. Kate?

I think because these items were being shipped to, to like the attendees' homes, that's kind of where we started from, right? So that was like, okay, so these are being shipped directly to their house. So we wanted to choose items that would be both useful at the event like the pen and the notebook, and then something that you'd want to keep in your home post-event, like the mug. We knew we wanted it packaged all together in a relatively small box, and we knew we wanted to include a note card for the attendees, so like a nice little written note. And really, like Numo being our sponsor for the event, they really checked all the boxes there. And that, that really helped us to be able to finalize what items we wanted. There was a couple more things that we definitely went back and forth on, and we debated over t-shirt or hat because of the whole video aspect. But I think we were, we were able to be clear by knowing what our purpose was with this kit, and that helped us kind of narrow down the items there. And, you know, again, the importance of having a truly incredible supplier partner like Numo to work with.

Well, let's talk about speakers, topics, and content. You know, launching this at the time that we did was adventurous. It was very nerve-wracking, actually, in that there were and still are so many unknowns. So Unlike previous conferences where we have basic fundamental topics— sales, growth, marketing, collaboration— this really, really challenged us. I mean, what does the world need right now? That was a big question. But also, from a content perspective, we had some early talks and debates, and we were mostly aligned on everything. But we— Mark made the statement one time, and I love the statement, and that was, how do we prevent this from being COVIDCon. Like, we want— the balance was we wanted it to be helpful for people in this moment, so we knew it had to be relevant, but we also wanted it to be timeless because that is something that we, um, think through as we're putting together curriculums for all of our events, is that we want it to be relevant and we want it to be also somewhat timeless. Um, Mark What factored big in sort of speakers and topics and contents for, for this event?

I think like any conference we do, Bobby, I think that we always approach it from what kind of speakers and content would we want to hear, because we've always seen ourselves as, uh, as insiders and practitioners within the promotional products industry as opposed to approaching this from this a more clinical approach. And so while I think that we want to consider speakers that can speak to things beyond just what you and I want, I think that that's always where we started based on our curiosity in the business world. And then of course, we have so many interactions with other people in the industry that help inspire additional elements of that curiosity. Which I think then informs additional speakers that we can bring on. And I think the final point I'd say is, as we've done so many of these events, it's been really thrilling for us to branch out and invite industry friends of ours that are not necessarily professional speakers. They may have never spoken at an industry event before, but their business model is so it may be so unique and they may have a certain perspective that we feel should have a voice at our events. And some of them go, are you crazy? I am terrified of public speaking. I don't want to speak. But we usually have a way of twisting people's arms. And then they work with you, Bobby, and you do an amazing job of putting people at ease and helping guide them through the process. And as they say, The outcome may not be perfect, but what I can say unequivocally is that the presentation is at least honest. And I think that that's what resonates with people is this honesty and people speaking from experience that I think is really a hallmark of a Common Skew event.

Yeah. From a content perspective and working with speakers, working with the speakers was easy from the standpoint of they were all willing to help. People were just willing to do anything they could do to help the community at this time, nervous to help too because, you know, their businesses are in disarray. We're not tapping professional speakers, we're tapping people who are in the trenches, who are struggling, and they're honestly at an emotional, a very emotional time. And so when you think back to 5 weeks ago, and we talk about unknowns, that we were in the heart, in the thick of the unknowns at the time. So as far as putting content together, it was honestly the hardest experience I have had of all of our events putting together content. And the reason is because, like I said, normally you have, you know, in peacetime scenario, it's easier to come up with ideas and topics and everybody's on top and everybody's winning. And you can, you know, you can call an entrepreneur who's had their best year ever and they say, oh man, I can talk about sales or I can talk about marketing. Well, these calls were more like, hey, how are you doing? First of all, that's most important. And second of all, what are things like with you right now? What's changed in your business? And then third, they of course knew we were talking about content to speak about at SCUCon at Home. What's happening in your world that's relevant right now and be helpful to folks? Because what you may not know is behind the scenes, Mark and I will come up with the framework, like the table of contents of what we think it might be. But there are many speakers that we speak with that we have such an immense respect for that those calls play is more like a dance where we call and say, hey, Denise, we realize you can speak to so many amazing topics, but given the state of where business is right now, where's your heart? What are you passionate about right now? What is the most relevant topic for you at the moment? Because what Mark and I have learned, that if you prescribe something to a speaker, they can speak on it. Adequately. But if you co-create with them something they're passionate about, then the energy is just completely off the charts and it's different. It's just different. And what happens is everybody's learning, you know, the speaker's learning. And then so, um, this was the hardest from a content perspective to put together because everything was in such disarray. I think by the time I had to ask myself why this was so fatiguing, but By the time I was done, I realized I'd created over 150 questions or 120 to 150 questions for all the various interviews that we did. And the way that process looks, we'll have an initial call with a speaker just to kick around ideas. We'll finesse that down to a central idea. Maybe that takes a couple calls. Then we'll call back and vet a series of questions and topics. And usually that can involve just one conversation, but sometimes it'll involve two. So with every speaker, you could have upwards of four different conversations. This was so intense that this is the first time I'm getting calls from speakers like the night before, like late, you know, going, this is going to really— I'm going to really suck tomorrow just because they were scared or they were nervous. And so it was a different experience this time. But damn, was it rewarding. Mark, why was the format important? Important because it was important. We wrestled with this a lot.

So the format of the event was split into 3. So we had general sessions that were on the main stage. We then had a series of breakouts where you could choose your own adventure, so to speak. And there were 12 breakouts that were divided across 2 different times. And then we had this experimental thing, which was one-on-one networking, which turned out to be kind of the sleeper hit of the event. And where we, where we had a lot of fun. And I think there were, there were some people who had so much fun that they actually missed the entire last session because they were continued networking. Having those three areas, I think was important because it allowed us to connect the audience again, going back to one of those pillars of our purpose. But the other thing that was a really interesting learning point is that when you're at an in-person event, a physical event, you can get away with longer sessions because the speaker who's physically on stage can just hold someone's attention longer. Even if they're boring, they can hold your attention longer. And there may be also social pressures around making sure you can listen or that you're not on your phone the whole time. So you can get away with longer sessions. Sessions. When you're in a virtual environment, it's almost like a television show. When you think about a television show with all the cuts that are made, and that's done on purpose, the editors do that on purpose so that way the viewer's attention is not lost. And so I think in much the same way, the format here had to be quick. I don't know that we necessarily perfected it, but I think we were onto something by having the sessions purposely short. I think in some of the feedback that we received, some folks were almost frustrated that they were short because it left them wanting, that there were questions that were not answered. But I think that we erred on the right side because what you don't want is for someone to then get lost in their email, to get lost in their Slack channel, get lost on Facebook. And they're less likely to do that if there's lots of different things that are happening. And that's just really celebrating what you've got in terms of your format, virtual versus in-person.

Right. I have had both distributors and suppliers reach out to me personally, Mark, you probably have too, about how do we put this on? Can we have a call? Can we have a chat? And that's been refreshing to see that so many distributors, and that's why we're recording this episode, are curious about how they can do this for their clients, for their community. What advice would you have and how could they do this? Mark, let's start with you and let's talk to distributors specifically. About what they can do to put on an event like this?

So I think first off, what SKUCON at Home really demonstrated for us is that it's an engagement vehicle for our customers.

Yeah.

Customer satisfaction and customer retention is extraordinarily important to us as a business. And from that standpoint, I think the event was able to achieve that. And that's, that's really important for us. We have to We want to keep our customers happy. We want to keep them talking about us in a positive way. So if you look at it from that standpoint, if you're a distributor and, and your business is dried up, um, something like this, an opportunity to engage your customers, to, uh, in our case, connect, inspire, and educate them, is, is not a bad business idea at a time when business may be slow. A lot of us have talked about ways to stay engaged and connected with our customers when their budgets have dried up. And what an amazing opportunity to do that with, say, end clients to put on something. It doesn't have to be as big as SKUCon at Home, but could be a smaller version of it that serves to inspire your customer base at a time when they don't have budget. But I can certainly assure you that in 3, 6 months, let's say things return to normal at that point, marketing budgets return, those end clients are going to remember that the fact that a distributor like you stayed connected with them and inspired them and helped guide them through some of these tough times.

Yeah.

And, and so I think that every distributor should have some kind of virtual engagement strategy, um, whether it is a simple Zoom meeting that is— that takes place once a month where you convene 5 to 10 customers and just put them together in a room and have like a social hour with drinks. Yeah, that's an example of what could be done. Or it could be something that's a little bit more structured with Zoom or something like Hopin where there may be a couple of speakers. Maybe it's a 90-minute thing. It's an event where there's registration. There's obviously opportunities for promotional products with virtual kit drops like we did at SKUCON. Like, talk about an amazing opportunity for inspiring an end client. That stuff is is child's play for distributors. And so I think it's an incredibly dynamic opportunity where everything is in flux right now, and those distributors that take the bull by the horns with a bold virtual strategy, I think are the ones that are gonna come out the clear winners. And that's why we wanted to do this so that we could share the ups and downs that we had in producing this. And hopefully that serves as a form of inspiration for other folks that are looking to augment their virtual strategy.

Yeah, one of the reasons why I think a distributor should actually do a virtual conference is because it moves beyond the product to ideas. So we're very product-centric industry, of course we are. But what, what a virtual conference does is it forces you to think about the why and the how. And you can actually set up a virtual conference where you have breakouts with HR folks that are learning about, you know, incentivizing or inspiring employees. You could have different breakouts based on professional specialty, or you could do all kinds of things. But I love the fact that it forces distributors to come to the table with ideas beyond product that aren't, that aren't divorced from product, but that first and foremost, this is about solving problems. And I just love the idea you would create a conference built around something like that to inspire and energize and solve problems.

Problems.

And because the costs are so low, like there's no travel expenses, there's no food and beverage or venue expenses, like, right, it makes it easy for anyone. Yeah, exactly. To give it a try, as long as you think about the purpose of why you want to do it and make sure that that's— that intention is set.

All right, guys, I want to know, uh, I want to close with this. I want to know from you personally, Kate, what was the most rewarding aspect of this experience for you?

I would say, even though I didn't have too much time to interact in the chat, I think once, once we got in there, seeing all the positivity pouring through that chat was exactly why I, I do these things, like why I do these events and why I spend so much time and energy and why I'm so passionate about these events is because we really do see that, that outpouring of support and and engagement in there, and that's, it's really priceless.

Yeah.

Mark?

I think it was just so amazing to see the positivity and the enthusiasm and the new ideas that were coming out fast and furious in the lead-up to this event, as well as during and after the event. And there is every reason moment that we as an industry have to feel depressed, crushed, a sense of just having no hope whatsoever. I mean, this has been a truly tragic moment for many of us in the promotional products industry. And what I love about what happened in this particular event is the people who showed up had none of that negativity. If anything, it was, listen, we've been dealt a bad hand of cards, but we are going to face this challenge by pivoting. We're going to face this challenge by collaborating and innovating. And I will say that I don't even know that this is exclusive to the Commonsku community. There's so many other industry friends that we have that are outside of Commonsku that are also leading the charge in positivity. And I think for me, Like that's really, really exciting. And we've never seen that. I mean, in my entire career of 20-plus years in this industry, I've never seen things as bad as they are from a macro standpoint as they are right now. And to see our industry rising to the challenge with positivity and enthusiasm and new ideas absolutely blew me away. I didn't expect that.

Yeah. A woman from India attended and said that in my 5 years in the business, SkuCon at home was the most fun and inspirational thing I've ever done.

She— why?

Because she said, I don't get a chance to attend all of these conferences I always hear about. So it was a very unique opportunity for me. So it was rewarding to know that we could bring the experience or taste of the experience of SkuCon, for example, to everyone. There were folks that signed up their whole teams and they got to see a different perspective about the, in the industry and how much richer it is than that sole focus of their role in the company. So I think that was fun to be a part of enriching, um, a company's outlook on how diverse and incredible our industry is. Another friend told me, and I think this was incredibly rewarding for all of us, he said, you know, I've been to all your events and SKU Camp and SKU Con are so polished. They're so seamless. You know, if there are problems, you don't really notice them. And he said, I'm sure behind the scenes it's not— doesn't feel that way. But he said they're very polished. I know Kate just snickered. He— but then he said what was a blast about SCUCon at home. He said it was raw, it was unvarnished. And he said— and I was— he said, I can't tell you, I was in such a down place. I was so inspired. By that, that it was, it was the kick in the pants I needed. He said, but part of it was just knowing that you guys hustled together to put together something like this so quickly and then did it with all the risk that it entailed. And it sort of, we, I fed off of that energy, that creative energy that came from that. Go ahead, Kate.

I was going to say, and I think that was our biggest concern was that we wouldn't, we wouldn't be able to capture that magic that we have at SCUCon and SCUcamp and those other in-person events. And I think that was weighing down on us for sure.

Right.

I'll never forget after the first SKU camp, sitting on a patio with Mark and look across the table at Mark and this silence just fell across the patio. We're sitting there, the whole event was over and Mark just had his head back in his hands and he was like, wow, kind of like, well, what do we do now? And what was that? And we actually all laughed that we each shut down our, turned off Hopin and the conference was over and we sort of had this like almost strange moment where everything felt surreal and euphoric and was like, well, that was a rocket ride. What do we do now?

And my jam is the post-event. When the event's over, I'm like, this is my event, right?

But it was a euphoric experience, and I think we all agreed that it was a rocket ride and it was a blast. Any final thoughts?

I just wanted to say thank you, Bobby. You played a huge role in all of this. You know, I didn't get the texts from people at 11 o'clock at night the night before saying that they were going to suck, you know, so I was just in my own little dream state. So, but yeah, it all came together. As I say, you know, it wasn't perfect, but I think we just had a lot of fun doing it and are happy to share our experiences with other folks. Thank you for allowing us to tell the story, man.

It really is fun to pull off something like this with the small team. It's actually— it's hard work. It's grueling at times. We can get on each other's nerves and it's stressful, but it's also incredibly rewarding to do that kind of work on a dime with an amazing band. So thank you both. And Ali's not on this one, but there's— thank you guys for just being a part of this. Experience, and thank you for being Kick-Ass bandmates.

Thank you.

Thank you, Bobby.

Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of SkewCast.

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