Bedros Keuilian Podcast Show - How to Create a Hugely Popular, High Profit Live Event - 005

Episode Date: July 26, 2017

Have you ever dreamed of speaking from stage and sharing your expertise with an audience of hundreds of awe-struck people? Have you ever wanted to harness the power of industry celebrity to make clients hand over fistfulls of cash for your coaching and consulting? In this episode, Bedros Keuilian and Craig Ballantyne finally reveal their field-tested methods for creating a hugely profitable live event.   Here’s what you’ll discover:   1:07 - How Bedros hosted a live event earlier this year with over 1,200% ROI. 4:47 - How to organize your speaker list so that your audience gets the best education and falls in love with your brand. 8:16 - How to drive guests into your event at low cost or even for free. 10:14 - How to build value and urgency for your event by creating strategic price bumps leading up to the event. 19:24 - How to find—or create—a celebrity speaker for surprisingly little money and generate huge excitement and buzz around your event.

By the time the weekend ended, we had already made three quarters of a million dollars. And from that event, we have another $2.7 million schedule to come in over the next 12 months. So you can see that it is a phenomenally successful event. But it wasn't always that way. Hey, have you ever gone to one of those amazing events that has a huge impact on hundreds, if not thousands of people in the audience? And you sit there and you think, I want to do this. I want to impact a lot of people. I want to help a lot of people.

I want to have a live event. Well, today we are with the master of live events, Baderos Gullian. Baderos, why don't you take us through how we're going to, you know, build an empire from live events by starting with the success of your recent event. Yes, absolutely. So we wrapped up Fitness Business Summit. It ended up being a four-day event because I put another workshop day in front of that, and it was a smash hit success.

Now, this was our 11th year of doing this, and in those 11 years, we've learned a lot. Just to give you an idea, we had over a third. thousand small business owners in attendance from almost two dozen countries here. And we ended up, and I'll be fully transparent here with the numbers, it ended up costing us just over a quarter million dollars to put the entire event together on. And by the time the weekend ended, we had already made three quarters of a million dollars. And with the revenue that's scheduled to come in from the coaching programs and the franchises we've sold from that event, we have another $2.7 million schedule to come in from this event over the next 12 months. can see that it is a phenomenally successful event. But it wasn't always that way. And so in 2007, when we started our first fitness business summit, it was just in a small ballroom of a hotel with

no stage, poor lighting. Literally no stage. So you were on the same level. Same level. And I remember when I first got in front of the group, I realized people in the back, there was only like 80 people in the room at the time, were craning their neck to see me. And the entire weekend, I thought about, gee, Wouldn't it be great if we have a 12 or 16 inch stage that I could be standing on top of so people in the back aren't craning their neck? Now the reality is there is no user's manual or how-to program for putting on a live event. But I can tell you this. I can drop some lessons to you right now that's going to make your next live event a smash hit. Thing number one is don't look at it as a seminar. Look at it as a show. So where that's concerned, what do we do? We have a lot of fun gimmicks that we've added to our event. And in fact, our good friend Joe Paul is,

has adopted from my event and moved along to his event. And I'll give you an example. One thing we do, if you want to get people into your event in between the breaks, for example, right? Well, what do you do? Because you've got a great speaker that's about to take the stage, but people like to linger in the hallways and talk and communicate, hang out with the sponsors. What do you do?

On the very first day of the event, you simply have an announcement that goes something like this. Hey, friends, we want to make sure that you get the most information possible from this weekend. For that to happen, we need you in your seats as the first. the break ends. So we play a little music the last 30 seconds of the break, lowrider by war, and we tell them that when that song ends, soon as you hear that song, you got to run to your seat. When the song ends and you're not in your seat, you're going to give us $20 or you're going to do 20 push-ups. Now, if you give us $20, we're donating it to Shriners, my favorite charity.

And so we've kind of taught the audience. One, it's a fun little game that we play. Everyone starts running around like a chicken with their head cut off when the break ends, when they hear the music. But number two, people sit in their seats. We're not disruptive to the speaker or to the other people in the audience. So that's thing number one. Number two is you've got to get people standing up,

sitting back down, standing up, sitting back down. So we decided to take $5,000, load them up in plastic Easter eggs, and all weekend long, we're just randomly, from the stage, every presenter is throwing eggs into the audience, which gets people excited, happy, right? And when you don't look at it as a seminar

that's boring and just people start nodding off at these things. I want to get people to stand up. I want them to move. I want them stand on their chairs, stand on the tables and catch the eggs. And that also has another purpose, by the way. If you've got a great videography team and if you've got a great photographer, you're going to capture such amazing footage to use in a sizzle reel and to share on social media. So again, don't look at your event like a seminar or a workshop.

Actually consider putting on a show. I look at it as like a stage play. So we'll go into thing number three where the stage play is concerned. Who are your speakers and how are you going to introduce them to the audience? Meaning in this particular event, we had 32 speakers over the three days. 32 speakers over the three days. Now it's important to not overwhelm the audience by putting the guy who's going to talk about Facebook pixel retargeting first. That is pretty overwhelming.

Friday morning, the first guy speaking is talking about Facebook pixel. retargeting. So you've got to structure this event. If I was in the audience and I'm coming to this event, not everybody coming to the event. In fact, over 70% coming to the event is coming to with walls up and arms crossed, resistance. Right. So not everybody's a huge fan yet. Exactly. Not everybody's a huge fan. So your first half day of the workshop or seminar or event is going to be spent bringing down their walls. So we talk about the speakers that I bring up on stage that first day or they talk about their big reasons why, why you're here, that you have a gift and it's your job, duty, and obligation to maximize your gift and reach your fullest potential with that gift.

So we go from mindset and teaching them about their gift and finding their big reason why to overcome adversities and such into slowly migrating them into business systems and structures, into lead generation, and by day three, we're talking about sales and conversions and, of course, scale and structure. So you've got to think about the presenters that you have and how to- We also start starting off with comedy act first. Yeah, in fact we did. In fact we did.

Again, going back to a show, if it's a stage show, this year we brought in Master Ken, and he did a 20-minute comedy act using the audience as participation. And we've brought in Hawaiian hula dancers, fire throwers, we've brought in magicians, illusionists. Marching band? We've even brought in a marching band. Although that was a dud for us, because it was only three kids,

banging pots and pants together. It was entertaining. And in my mind's eye, in my defense, in my mind's eye, I was picturing the USC marching band coming through my event, serpentineing in and out of the audience. And I mean it was just going to be this magnanimous thing. What I got was what we ended up getting with just three kids smashing pots and pants together in a flute.

But we go from entertainment to why and then we work our way up to structure and scale. Yes, yes. So the content that you're delivering is very important. So where that's concerned now, let's talk about the breaks and such. oftentimes we end up doing way too short of breaks and overwhelming our audience. So typically you want your breaks to be at least 30 minutes long. You want the lunch break to be about an hour and a half long. For every three presenters, if you're doing 30 minute talks, for every three presenters,

you should have a break. I'm moving away, I've completely moved away from 60 minute talks. Let's look at what Ted does, right? Ted talks. 18 minutes, they get some of the best, most talented experts on the planet to deliver them meet in 18 minutes. So if they can do that, surely you and I and our speakers can deliver the meet in 30 minutes. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally, totally. All right, so, you know, go back to that first event. You had 80 people in the room. Yeah. What kind of email list size

would somebody need to get 50 people, 100 people in the room to their first event? Yeah, very good point. The reality is today you would not need any email list because you've got social media. Okay, great. You've got social media. But if you had an email list, even better. So I'll tell you what we do. When I had my first event, we had 80 some odd people in my workshop. We had 4,000 fitness professionals on my list. And from that, by the way, there was no Facebook back then. So from those 4,000 fitness professionals, we were able to fill up 80 people into my seminar. And of course, we converted, I believe, eight or nine of them into mastermind coaching clients. But today, if you've got an email list and you've got a Facebook following, you can literally

target anyone you want in any vocation in any industry in any niche and expose them to your event because Facebook allows you to retarget it allows you to it allows you to upload your email list to Facebook and chase your clients and prospects on Facebook inviting them to your event so there's so many great ways you can use Facebook YouTube and Instagram to pile on the audience into your event and then you can get some affiliates as well and some paid advertising if you want to invest more money absolutely if you're in some kind of niche industry odds are there's an industry publication or two. Like in my industry, there's a personal fitness professional magazine.

There's the idea fitness journal. And so you can literally buy ads, or better yet, buy email drops. And so if they have a publication, odds are they have email lists of readers of their publication. So you would buy the email drop and you would say, hey, would you mind sending out this email? And I'll give you either a flat dollar amount to send out this email or I'll give you 50% of the registration fee as a commission. Now, what we do is we don't just register them and stop. We will register them on the front end. And of course, upsell number one becomes the recorded video and the notes, professionally

taken notes from the event, is upsell number one. Upsail number two is we have a pre-event conference. Would you like to attend this pre-event conference for an additional $1,000, which is something that you and me and Shauna ran this time around? And of course, upsell number three is, would you like to buy tickets at a discounted fee for the following year. You have to remember that when people are buying something, their desire to buy is not reduced.

It is actually agitated. So you want to take them, even for a live event, through an upsell process. Well, what are some of the deadlines and prices increases you have built in there? So let's say you start selling your event four months out. Is it a lower price and then it works up to a higher price? How would you do that?

Yeah, very good question. So you always start selling at least five months out. That is the rule of thumb has to be five months out these days because there are people are getting a lot of content marketed to them, and they need to make a decision, plan for travel, plan for babysitting, whatever it is they have to do, look at their budget. So you want to start marketing five months out. And five months out, I like to start my price point at about 80% of what the final price point is going to be. So in my particular case, and by the way, you can decide the final price point is going to be $2,000.

So, you know, whatever, an 80% discount off of that might be, what does that end up being? Like $400? A lot. Right? Right. So we started my tickets at around $400. And every three weeks on the website, we had a timer ticking down that this discount price goes away on this date and the price goes up by another 25 or 30%. And so really every three weeks, you're bumping up the price. We went from 400 to 650, from 650 to 997, from 997 to 997 to 1,100, and finally we settled at $1,600 three weeks before Fitness Business Summit. The line share of your attendees actually end up coming on board usually about two months out. So they pay that mid-level price. They pay that mid-level price. And that is your sweet spot.

You don't want to necessarily crank up the prices so quickly that now here we are three months out, the price is at $2,000 or $1,600, and they feel like, man, I could have bought it for $400. Now I don't want to waste all this money. Got it. I'm going to sit out. Got it. You used a lot of Facebook live streams to fill this event. Tell us about some of the most effective ones that you've done.

Oh, man. So the last two years, we've been using Facebook live streams, and it's been super powerful. Because, listen, people see your ads. They see your sizzle reels. They see the pictures. They land on the website. When they're on the website, you're retargeting to them if they haven't bought tickets to your event. But the reality is they even see the people who are speaking at it.

Sure, there's bullet points of the accolades of what Craig Ballantinthine's done and what he's going to speak about and what Matt Wilbur has done. what he's going to speak about. But what if we actually do a Facebook live and do a deep case study into three of our presenters? And that's what I do. Once a week, as I'm building up to Fitness Business Summit, ticket sales, I'll do a Facebook Live,

and you don't even need those people there. I'll just go into a case study of, hey, let me tell you about the three speakers, three of the 36 speakers that we have a Fitness Business Summit. I'm going to tell you about Stephanie Flynn, I'm going to tell you about Craig Ballantyne, and I'm going to tell you about Matt Wilbur. And I'll go into a deep dive into why you're speaking,

what you've accomplished, what the bottlenecks were in your business or your life, and how you've broken through them, and then what you're going to teach to audience. By doing that, I'm buying you so much social proof and so much credibility that someone is going to resonate with one of those three stories. The following week, I'll do three more deep dives and two, three other speakers. And the following week, three more. And I'll just keep repeating that cycle. So not only is a...

Which is really great if you have 30 speakers, because then you can do more live streams. If you only have 10 speakers doing an hour, then you have fewer... Exactly right. Yet another reason to have 30-minute talking spots and not 60-minute talking spots because you can get double the speakers on board. Absolutely. Okay, so where's the real money made here? You know, because you're going to spend all this money on advertising and, you know, there's food and beverage and all that stuff, which is another seminar about events on its own. But tell us about how there's, you know, $2.7 million coming in the next 12 months.

Well, so as we talked about, we just spent a quarter million dollars on the event itself, right? So if we spend a quarter million dollars on the event, you're really in the whole. Sure, you're going to have sponsors and we brought in about 30 sponsors at $3,000 apiece. Well, that's great. They covered a little chunk of that quarter million dollars. But what about the rest? How do we really monetize this? Where does the real money come from?

Okay, we're going to sell the footage later to people who didn't come. Great. So maybe there's another 30, 40, 50, $60,000, $60,000. You play your cards right with the ticket sales, sponsors, and selling the footage, you may break even. But is that really worth it to you? Is that really worth it to you to have a live event to displace yourself and your entire team for three or four days. I don't think so. I think if it doesn't

make you at least triple of what you invested and over time, you know, 10x that, then it's not worth it. My goal is still the 10x what I'm spending. In other words, make 10x what I spent. And so the number one thing is you want to sell high-end coaching programs. And this really starts off with the mindset of letting all your presenters know that this is a non-pitch event. And this is important. A lot of events in all industries say, hey, if you come and speak at the end of your speech, you can pitch, and whatever you pitch and sell, we'll split 50-50. I believe that's bastardizing your audience. And I don't think that's a great thing to do. I don't think that's a way to, that's not coming to them with a giving hand. That is not coming to them with goodwill. That is

coming to them and taking advantage of them. So I say this, hey, I'm going to pay you to speak, or I'm going to pay for your flight, or after you're done speaking, the following week, I will mail out for you to my list and I will promote you, but from that stage, I want you to deliver the best you can, your greatest content, don't leave anything off the table, and don't pitch. And by doing that, it's content, content, content, content, content on the first day. On the second day, it's content, content, and then I get up, you get up, the person putting on the event, and you pitch a mastermind, a high-end coaching program. In my case, I pitched a $30,000 a year coaching program. We brought about 52 members on board into that coaching program. In fact, I raised the price by $600 a month from last

year. The other thing I had was my big franchise. We have a fitness franchise called Fit Body Boot Camp. It's $25,000 buy-in and $700 a month for seven years. We had that and we had a Fit Body Boot Camp Discovery Lunch happening one of the days. And so the only two things we were pitching the entire weekend was my mastermind and our franchise. And it's the people who know me like me, trust me, they're going to buy from me and they're in the audience. And that is what accounted for that massive growth in revenue. Awesome. Awesome.

So what was some of the cool things? Coolest highlights from your recent event. I mean, from your daughter singing on stage, you did something cool for the rock. And then it probably had over 25 million hashtags on Instagram. Yeah. So some of the coolest things we did is we made a, not on Instagram, a Snapchat filter, a specific Snapchat chat geo filter for that area of San Diego that we were at for those four days. And we encouraged people.

to Snapchat using our filter and get it up there. And of course, we had them share that on Instagram and on Facebook. Why? We want people to feel the pain of missing out, right? The fear of missing out is very important so that we can sell not only the footage from this event, but also we can sell tickets to next year. Speaking of footage of the event, the number one thing we do is we turn around the footage from this event within five to 10 days. And by doing that, you get maximum sales. And, you know, people go, hey, why did you bring your daughter up? on stage. One, I love my daughter. I love my family and I want to showcase my family because you want to show every aspect of your life. So I tell, take them deep into my life and I use examples of my

life on how they can be successful. But I also brought my daughter up on stage and she sang her little song that she's going to do at school for a talent show. And I got to showcase my family, my child, and people really want to see that you're a family person. They want to see what are your hobbies? What do you like to do? One of the greatest compliments I got, several of them I saw social media was, man, here's a picture of me and Baderos talking, and when you're talking to Baderos, it feels like you're the only person there, even though there was a thousand other people there. So be fully engaged.

Make yourself fully accessible. I'm not a big fan of events where the head honcho gets off stage and disappears. They go backstage and disappear. You know, I have an MC. The reason I have an MC is so I could spend time in the hallways, shaking hands, taking pictures, hugging people, thanking them, showing gratitude. And I believe that's the number one reason. We haven't bastardized our audience.

We've kept it fun and entertaining and made it a show. And I spend as much time, energy as I can, out there shaking hands, hugging people, taking pictures, showing gratitude. And that's been the result of our exponential growth of our seminars. And you know what, you taught something very interesting this weekend. You said it used to be no like trust. What is it now? It's no longer no like trust.

Today it's no love trust. And if they don't love you, if they don't love your lifestyle, if they don't love your family, if they don't love the workouts that you do. I know it sounds crazy, because you might be in the financial space, you might be in the franchise space, in the fitness space. You might be a dentist, and this still matters. You might be a dentist, a chiropractor, a mechanic. It doesn't matter what industry you're having this event in. If they don't know, love, and trust you and feel like they are connected to you and your family, right?

Your lifestyle, they're not going to buy from you. They're going to buy from your competitor, and that's just the reality of it. So you've got to be comfortable with being fully transparent in everything you do these days. Two more questions. So first of all, how important is a celebrity speaker? And if someone did get one, how much should they pay? Good question. So the importance of a celebrity speaker, and by the way, you can manufacture someone into a celebrity speaker.

How do I say this? We have a friend. His name is Steve Weatherford. He played for the New York Giants. And he was a punter, right? Arguably probably not the most popular position on football. But the most rip punter ever. Most rip punter ever.

And so we brought up on stage, and we talked about how he's a Super Bowl champion and built him up. I've seen our mentor, Dan Kennedy, talk about George Foreman. He's no longer the pro boxer. Long gone are the days of him selling the Foreman Grill. And I believe he paid something like $15,000 to get George Foreman up on stage. So you really shouldn't have to pay more than anywhere from $5 to $15,000 or $20,000 for a big celebrity speaker. If you think you're going to have to pay $100,000, $200,000 for a good speaker who's got that celebrity pull, they're not going to fill up more people into your audience.

They might bring some excitement and sizzle and more shares and pictures on social media, but it's not worth the trade-off. So you're going to go between 5 and 15,000 for a celebrity. And one of our friends, Ed O'Keefe, really taught me a really cool lesson about this. He said, choose someone that you would want to pay $5 or $10,000 or $15,000 for just to have their ear. And then you get to interview them in front of all these people. You get your information from them. You know, you would have paid $5 or $10,000 just to ask those same.

questions in a private room but now you ask them in front of people you get all the people excited and you do bring people in so basically they pay for you to have that five or ten thousand dollar conversation right I love that advice from Ed now last question what happens after you know how do you continue that communication you said you get the videos out and I was telling people all weekend long yeah you know I wasn't able to see all the speakers I was like I'm gonna watch it next week because I know how fast you turn that around but what about for the sponsors and for just continuing the relationship with the

people that attended what do you do Very good question. So we have a Facebook fan page for our event. So following up the event, the next 30 days, I'm always posting tips. Hey, you took 15 pages of notes, grab the top five things off those pages and implement them this week. And I'll be back next week to help you take the next five things and implement them. You want implementation to happen because if the people that came to your event did not implement, they're not going to come to your event next year, let alone join your coaching program by your franchise or buy more of your products and services. So that's the thing. Number one. Thing number two is you've got the power of social media at your fingertips. And so you can start cutting, and that's what these guys here behind the cameras have done for us, one minute sizzle reels that we are sharing all throughout social media while we're getting the sales page up for the videos to go. So we got the audience hot and we were sharing it on social media live by doing live streams. Now we didn't, by the way, people always ask, how come you're not live streaming your entire event and selling tickets to the live stream? Here's why. It's unlike. It's unlike. that I'm going to sell you a coaching program or mastermind program if you're watching via live stream. And so what I'd rather do is create a massive pain of disconnect and just we tease the first five to 10 minutes of every speaker on a live stream and then we shut it down. Once we shut down the live stream, a video comes up that says, hey, this is Bedros. We can't show you the rest of this live stream because people in the audience have paid for it and you haven't. However, you can go pre-order your videos at FBSVios.com.

So the entire weekend, while we're teasing live streams and then shutting it down, we're moving people into the pre-order. pre-order list for the video footage. And finally, of course, I make sure to follow up with my entire attendee list and our entire community via email, letting them know if you missed Fitness Business Summit, these are the things you missed, but the pre-order video content can be purchased right here, so go get that. And if you came to Fitness Business Summit, you have pages of notes. Here's what you do to extract those notes into the lowest hanging fruit and implement

those things so you can make more money and impact more clients. Awesome stuff. So you can see there's scale, there's structure. There's all of that systematically put in place. You're not just hustling out there trying to sell tickets. There is something so much more behind this. Everything is calculated. Everything is calculated.

Excellent. So that is how you go and put on your first live event. That is how you go and put on a seven-figure live event. That is how you put scale and structure into having that impact that you know that you can have.