Living The Red Life - Creating Urgency around your Live Event with Bill Hauser

Episode Date: October 30, 2023

How do you get into live events? Bill Hauser is a brilliant marketer himself (all dressed in blue!) who built his company to over $30 million in recurring revenue, with a $70 million plus valuation! He started making sales for Yellow Pages online (before it went bankrupt) and was quick to learn the value of an irresistible offer in the right niche. He's been able to transform legal businesses with his law firm coaching and marketing company, SMB Team.Bill Hauser clearly has Rudy's respect and in this back-and-forth interview, it's clear to see why. Even though Rudy is living the Red Life, there are lessons to be learned from Blue as Bill shows us how he goes about creating culture in his company and how he prioritizes setting his company vision above all else. There's advice on where to start if you're looking to get into live events, the power of paid advertising, and how to create urgency with your webinar. Learning how to sell and then learning how to scale starts here. Join us in Wonderland - once you've taken the Red Pill!"Most of the success we've seen is because this is a business transformation offer." ~ Bill HauserIn This Episode:The importance of learning how to sell + having a great offerHow Bill got good at selling to lawyers with a business transformation offerThe power of live events with the right celebrity speakersAre in-person or virtual events a better way to go? How to get into live events with a multi-day webinarCreating urgency around your live eventHow do you create and measure event anticipation? The power of paid advertising Team building lessons (why talent is a risk)Why your culture is your biggest asset Connect with Bill Hauser:Instagram - Bill Hauser (@billhauserbiz) • Instagram photos and videosYouTube - Bill Hauser - YouTubeConnect with Rudy Mawer:LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/rudymawer/Instagram - www.instagram.com/rudymawerlifeFacebook - www.facebook.com/rudymawerlifeTwitter - www.twitter.com/rudymawer

Talent is a risk in some ways. I think all entrepreneurs in some way are disproportionately talented and that's a risk because if you're the smartest person in the room, you're not going to attract the smartest people in your room. The hardest shift for me as a leader now with the team of over 80 people is realizing that as soon as I crack the code on something, I have to stop doing it immediately. My name's Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast, and I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life. What's up, guys? Welcome back to another episode of living the red light podcast i'm excited today i've got my friend bill on he is not just one of the best looking guys i know with a similar haircut to me all in blue not red but he's actually a genius marketer as well he built his company to over 30 million in recurring revenue of 70 million, welcome. Excited to have you here, buddy. Yeah, man, me too. And holy crap, dude.

Look at the contrast here. The blue, the red. This would be an amazing Facebook ad to snippet this, you know? Well, the only problem is I say, you know, I think it's taking the red pill. And if you're the blue pill, I don't know if you know what the blue pill means, but it's not as attractive as the red pill, Sally. There you go. But anyway, let's dive in. So obviously, you've done a lot, you're building a massive company, you're doing a lot of great marketing that's got you there. So I'm excited to break that down for the members today and everyone listening. But can you give a two minute overview of what you do how you got to

you know this 30 mil and what's important guys is you know 20 20 30 mil 40 mil 50 mil that's great revenue right but this is recurring which is like 10 times better i would soon have a company doing 30 mil recur and then a company doing 100 mil normal growth so just just write that down and intro yourself for everyone today. Yeah. So five and a half years ago, I didn't really know what business was. So I basically was a Yellow Pages sales rep. So we started with contractors and very quickly learned that contractors didn't pay their bills. So that decided me to pivot and start to look at different niches. So we did some industry research on this tool called IbisWorld, which I was lucky to have a subscription to for my prior job. And we looked into different areas of law

by luck and found out that the legal niche was recession proof which meant a lot to me so what are the what are the things you know obviously you've grown this company pretty fast from a reoccurring revenue standpoint so can you give the overall arching kind of breakdown now of your system how you're growing it i know obviously from being friends with you and catching up with you a lot live events really took off for you And I would love to cover some of that today because we haven't taught our members a whole bunch about live events, hosting them, selling them in person. I know you're transitioning more virtual too, but can you give us a bit of a lay of the land on the key marketing methods that got you here?

Yeah, so the number one and most important marketing method is that we have a completely differentiated offer. So a lot of people think that it's the events that made us grow this fast. And that's true in some regard. But if we were selling a piece of crap with a bow on it, we wouldn't be doing the revenue that we hear from these events. So our offer is there's nothing even remotely close to it. So when a lawyer signs up with us, they get full service marketing. So that's Facebook ads, Google ads, local SEO, LinkedIn ads, YouTube ads, Google Display Network, all of that.

So full service marketing, lead gen. They get an ROI dashboard where they can measure their ROI. And then similar, they get put into a multi-hundred attorney coaching program where we coach them on how to build a business. They get a marketing track of the coaching program, a sales track, and then a management and operations track where we actually train their team on how to run their business without them. So that's another part of the business. We have a fractional CFO business. We have a virtual assistant business that hires virtual staff for the law offerors. And then we have a recruiting business where we actually do recruiting for the law firms.

So we built this business growth ecosystem for the niche of lawyers. So when we sell this during events, and we say this is a business transformation solution for your law firm, it really is, right? It's not like theory. So that's one serious part is we have a business transformation offer is what I call it. That is recurring revenue base, right? Most of the success that we've seen is because this is a business transformation offer that's done for you. We're not just teaching them stuff and leaving them on their own. And it's tied to recurring revenue in such a way that clients renew at, in some quarters, north of a 90% rate, right? So we wouldn't be able to compound this growth and get the valuation that we did

if we didn't have the recurring. Now, the events, certainly it is a blue ocean strategy that we use that no one could even come close to. And that is a result of the conviction that we have of our offer, I would say. But the events started with me doing a webinar, right? And then learning, oh crap, I got a lot of people on my fourth webinar. Maybe I should learn how to sell stuff. And then that's when I found Jason Fladlin and he brought

me under his wing and met with me and taught me everything he knew about webinars for free. When I showed him my numbers of how many people I was getting registered with zero sales, he was like, dude, you need to learn how to sell. And then I did my first sales webinar. And then that went into a two-day webinar. And then I did my first challenge. And then I did my first three-day bootcamp. And my first three-day boot camp, I called a summit, but really it was me talking for six hours straight for three days. And that's it. And I just called it a summit.

And I had like, you know, a couple hundred people sit through this for three days. I was like, what if we increase the amount of focus on this? And I started hiring all these huge celebrity speakers, you know, Magic Johnson, Alex Rodriguez, Gary Vaynerchuk, the amount of focus on this. And I started hiring all these huge celebrity speakers, you know, Magic Johnson, Alex Rodriguez, Gary Vaynerchuk, Damon John, Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank, all these people I've interviewed as a method of doubling down on scaling these virtual events.

And now, you know, we've had over 60,000 people sign up for these virtual events in three and a half years. So I wonder about what's the most you've done? Because I've heard some pretty crazy numbers from you from in-person events. What was some of the top numbers in person? And can you give a couple of minutes, reverse engineer, on how you made that happen? Yeah, so in-person sucks. So we did in person, we had the event I'm referring to, we had Magic Johnson, Jillian Michaels, Gary Vee, Alex Rodriguez, all these big name speakers.

And we did, I don't know, $2.8 million in sales from this event, which was not worth the additional stress and the additional $500,000 in expenses to pull off an in-person event. All the stress of, are we going to sell enough tickets to fill the room, right? But Jimmy, there's a level of it that puts your brand on the map that has a ripple effect for the next couple of years or not? I think people like to say that out of ego. But, you know, we have 12 full time people on our in-house marketing team and we run the data. And there was no increase in brand or anything after that event.

And we're 100 percent online now. Yeah. So and our ROI has exponentially increased and we're able to do every quarter that which would take six months to do in six months to a year to do in an in-person event. So it sounds like the in-person stuff, obviously you did a couple of mil, most people would probably say that's still worth it. But just to give them context, have you got close to that with online commercial events? Yeah, we've got past that. Wow. So, I mean, we've done over 3.5 to 4 million from our virtual events and that's

not even including sales teams. So with our sales team, we were able to do an additional four. So we're able to do an average of around 7 million per quarter with the combination of our sales team and virtual. So, but it takes, it takes a lot of burning the ships. I mean, we, we went all in on this. This is something we're in the top 1% of 1% of 1% of people that we're executing at. Our, our, our friend Jason Fladlin, you know, said, you know, I was texting him this week, I told you about this when we talked. He said that we have reached the max you could possibly do with this quarterly model. So, you know, I'm excited to now learn from people like you

on ways that we can build up our evergreen and get into other marketing channels. But yeah, it's definitely something we went all in on. Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. Before we go into the rest of this episode, I'm gonna interrupt abruptly and just ask you one big favor. I hope you're getting a ton of value, a ton of knowledge. I hope you're getting some breakthroughs from myself and the guests.

And I want one thing in return. What I would love is for you to subscribe and leave a review. The reviews and the subscription grows the podcast. It allows me to bring you even better guests. It allows me to invest even more time and money into this podcast to bring you the latest and greatest, the best entrepreneurs from around the world that are crushing life, crushing their business and giving you all the tools, the mindset hacks, the knowledge and the environment you need to be successful. So do me a favor if you've got any amount of value from today's episode so far or any previous episode or any of the content I've done, it would mean the world to me if you hit a five star review, give us your feedback on the show, the episodes, and subscribe and download. Plus, if you do that and send me a screenshot on Instagram at RudyMoreLife,

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I appreciate you guys and let's dive back in. So it sounds like you're capping out at the event side, but what are a few tips? Someone that wants to start their own online event, right? Baby steps to maybe make 30K, right? What are some of the biggest things you've learned? Yeah, so you don't ever want to start with an event. So you want to start with a webinar.

The kind of ascension model here for someone looking to make money with events is to start with a webinar. I look at an event as a multi-day webinar. I look at an event as a bigger commitment than a one or two hour long webinar. So I would start there. And what you're going to do is you're going to practice synergy. So synergy I look at is what you say the events about, and it's not directly relevant to what you sell. And that's a big, unseen, unspoken issue that people have when they don't sell from events is that there's mismatch

in the synergy of their promotional messaging to the delivery of the event to the offer. So that's one thing. And then next, you have to learn how to get registrants. So that's probably the hardest thing for people to learn is how do you frame the event in such a way that if someone was about to meet their biological mom and they had one chance to meet their biological mom, but then they see an ad for your event at the same hour when they were supposed to have lunch with their biological mom for the first time and they choose your event over the mom right so that level of scarcity urgency importance is what we hold our team to when it comes to selling tickets to an event so it's not like oh sign up and learn some tips and tricks about, no, no, no. It's like urgent, alert, like the whole world's

going to tumble. This is going to, this is going to, like if you don't change now, everything is going to blow up, right? Click the link below and you're going to solve your family, your this, your that, and not die, right? So like once you learn that messaging, your cost per acquisition goes down. You're able to cut into cold audiences a lot faster. And it creates this effect where the audience is feeling anticipation before the event, which is one of the hardest things to measure is like, is your audience like bursting at the seams for the start of the event, right? Because it's one thing to get someone signed up for the event.

It's another thing to get them to maintain anticipation before that event starts. And that's all done through your marketing and a little bit of kind of curiosity for, you know, how you get them to show up for the event. So that's step three. So you need synergy. You need a registration strategy through a massively compelling offer. Then you need a show up strategy. So that's vitally important. You can have thousands of people sign up and no one shows up. Well, you need to make sure that you're promoting the event close to the date of the event. You don't want to promote a one hour webinar three months out. You actually have to know some shit. Like you actually have to

deliver good content and you actually have to have an offer that people want and that is going to solve their problem. And that's your conversion vehicle, right? So how you open the event by sharing the reasoning for the event, the event theme, why you decided to hold this event, the three secrets of the event, and then going into your value stack. All of this has to be embedded with you knowing your shit. Everyone says, you know, when you go into, I've done all the public speaking trainings in the world,, you know, selling from stage stuff, Myron Golden, all this. You know, they say, you know, you have to dumb it down to second grade level.

You have to shatter beliefs and not teach anything. And the more you teach, the less you sell. And like, yeah, that's true. If you know your shit, people will true if you know your shit people will sense if you know your shit right so if you if you know what you're talking about you need to deliver some of the goods um and and that's that's something that i i see a lot of people just they seeing a grant card own event and they go oh i'm just gonna motivate people up and then tell them to buy and who do you get to buy when you're just motivating people up with giving them no substance?

You probably get the wrong people to buy. And then the last thing is you need to find someone like you to teach about paid advertising. Yeah, I love all that. That's awesome. Awesome stuff. And I think that's a great basic framework for anyone hosting webinars or starting to transition into the live events, the challenges. We've been having a lot of success with it,

especially the last few months because we've always ran low ticket and the automated evergreen side, which I love. But I'm learning that the more I can throw in these, the faster it grows the list, the better it grows the brand. And we get these big cash injections too, which helps reinvest into the other stuff. So just to finish today, we've talked a lot about

the online events, the event side, but obviously you've built a big team, a big company, right? Can you give a few of the key lessons just in the last two or three minutes on general business, general marketing, general team building that you've really learned over the last few years? I think talent is a risk in some ways. I think all entrepreneurs in some way are disproportionately talented. And that's a risk because if you're the smartest person in the room, you're not going to attract the smartest people in your room, right? So for me, the hardest shift for me as a leader now with the team of overeating people is realizing that as soon as I crack the code on something, I have to stop doing it immediately. And I have to train someone else on doing that or find a replacement. And that skill

is, it requires so much humility. So for context, when I got started in business, being a sales guy, sales and marketing guy, I was really good at individual performance. And you can build a 10-person team if the owner is focused on individual performance. We were legit rated the 71st best place to work for by Fortune Magazine last year. All of our team members were interviewed.

It was intense. And we were one of the smallest companies on that list to actually make the cut in the top 100. And that came from realizing that culture is the asset, right? So I spend more than 50% of my time making sure we have a world-class culture, making sure I do three things now in the company. I do vision setting, strategic thinking, and impactful communication. So vision setting, strategic thinking, and impactful communication. And I know you do this too in your team. I want everyone to feel like they win when the company wins, right? I don't

want it to feel like only Bill wins if the company wins. I want the whole team to feel like they win, right? Yep. So vision setting, strategic thinking. So I spend the majority, if you look at my calendar today, tomorrow, and Friday, I have nothing in my calendar. I make it that way. My job is to have nothing in my calendar and to be able to strategic think as much as possible throughout the day, right? So tomorrow, I'm going to come into the office. I have a huge whiteboard wall. I'm going to put up some challenges up there.

I'll get my COO in there. I'll get some different members of my team in there. And we'll come up with some cool solutions and stuff, right? But the thing that really ignites is impactful communication, right? So if I can be the spokesperson for something in the team, externally to clients, whatever it is, like make me the spokesperson, I will thrive. I love that.

That's something that brings me energy. So we've really tried hard to build a team of what we call unique greatness teamwork, right? So not just me to be doing the things I love. I want my team to also call out if they're doing stuff they hate. I want everyone on our team to do what they love and what they're excellent at.

And that starts with the top. So I try to be as much transparent as I can with everyone on our team that, listen, we want volunteers, not hostages, to work for our company. And we want you to love what you do every day. So, yeah, that's a little bit about the culture obsession. Yeah, and we even have our staff, like, you know, at quarterlies and stuff,

they'll all kind of do the four-square segment of what are you doing that's great, what are you doing that's, you know, great, but really time-consuming, what are you doing that's not great and time-cons that's, you know, great, but really time-consuming, what are you doing that's not great, and time-consuming, and then we've got to kill that, right? And we kind of help them work through that. So, I mean, we share a ton of similar values there, and that's where we get on. And we've both grown teams. You know, we started this year at 100 staff,

and you learn a lot building a team that big and managing a team that big. So, yeah, awesome episode. Loved how you broke down the events at a beginner level and love to hear more about the general lessons for the company. So just to finish, last question. Where do people find you? How can they model some of your success? Look at what you're doing.

I know you don't do masterminds and coaching like I do, but can they connect with you on social media or how can they see some of what you're up to? Yeah. So I would go to my Instagram, Bill Hauser Biz, B-I-L-L Hauser, H-A-U-S-E-R-B-I-Z. And then my YouTube as well is Bill Hauser. So those are the two best places. Good stuff. All right, buddy. Well, I appreciate you coming on today. I appreciate you sharing your wisdom and I'm super excited to see you growing continuously and keep sharing ideas together. And I hope that I'm sure everyone got a ton of value from this, especially as the live events and the webinars, I feel are really

strong right now and hot in the industry. And it's been awesome to watch you grow and keep watching you grow. So until next time, you keep living the red life, not the blue life. And I will see everyone very, very soon. Take care, guys. Thanks, Bill. My name is Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast. And I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red life podcast and i'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week if you're ready to start living the red life ditch the blue pill take the red pill join me in wonderland and change your life