Welcome to Incorporating SuperPowers. I’m your host, Justin Recla. Today, today you’re in for a treat because if you’re a coach, if you’ve got a business and you’ve wanted to do live events and you just haven’t cracked the code yet, our guest today is Steve Werner, and he’s magic in this space. He’s been doing this for some time. He used to do it for the hotel industry, and made those people a lot of money. Now he’s transferred that skillset over to helping people like you that listen to this show who have a business and have a coach that are coaching others, mentoring others that want to step into that space and really uplevel what you’re doing. Steven, thank you so much for being on the show today.
No problem, Justin. It is my pleasure. I’m happy to be here.
We were connecting a little bit before the show and just feeling around as to what’s the best way of highlighting what it is that you exactly do, and so today folks, we’re going to be talking about how to plan the perfect live event. Steven seems to have cracked the code on this, and he’s got some points that we’re going to cover as to what that looks like. Steven, tell us a little bit about your history and what it is that you do for your clients.
Yeah, of course. When I got started, I used to run events for major hotels, and I really wanted to go out on my own. I looked at what I could do, and I was like, “Live events, I know how to do them. I know I can do this.” I rushed out after saving up. I saved a little bit over $20,000. I moved to Las Vegas, and I was like, “I’m going to hold this big amazing event.” I went and rented space for a thousand people. It was the largest ballroom that Treasure Island offered, and I immediately blew through all $20,000 and got a total of two registrants because I did not know marketing.
I knew how to hold events, but I didn’t know how to fill events. I didn’t know… like I knew the technical details of how to set up the chairs, which I, for some reason, thought was the important part. The important part is what you actually offer at the event, and that’s what draws people in. After failing miserably, I went with my hat in hand. I begged Treasure Island not to hold me to the contract because I couldn’t pay it. They let me out. I ended up moving into a friend’s utility room. She let me stay for free because she believed in me. She was like… I remember sitting at the bar at Treasure Island after begging them not to hold me to it. She bought me a couple of beers, and she was like, “Look, you don’t have to go back to your job. You can move into my room, figure it out. I believe in you.”
That led on this odyssey. It was really painful at the time, but it was probably the best possible thing looking back at. It led me on this marketing journey. I started off at Dan Kennedy. I found a Dan Kennedy course called Butts in Seats in the Las Vegas library. No idea how it was there. It’s a $2,000 course. Somebody must’ve donated it, but it helped me. It didn’t do anything magical, but I studied it. I took some of the ideas. I understood now, it was really about the transformation that people would get at a live event.
My next event, I scraped together the little bit of money that I had. I had a credit card with about four grand on it, and I rented space for a hundred-person event, and I cold-called, I cold-email, I flyered, I did in-person meetings, I did networking, but I was able to fill that event, and I ended up making about $8,000 off of it, which I was thrilled.
That’s better. Well, that’s better than losing 20 grand.
Yeah. But from there, I moved along, and now I’ve held 46 events, 45 of them profitable. I learned how to sell at an event. I learned how to get people there. I learned how to fill them. Then about a year and a half ago, so many people were coming to me, and they’re like, “How do I hold an event like that? How do I sell $150,000 in a weekend? How do I get my message out?”
I started doing that. I started with two clients at the time. Got both of them a successful event. Since then, I’ve worked with, man, over 20 people, helping them hold live events, helping them scale their live events, and helping them sell at their live events because the key is if somebody comes to your live event, they were willing to get an airplane, fly to your event, get a hotel room, pay for the ticket, you need to sell them something. That’s where the transformation happens.
Well, and I think some of the things that you’re talking about here… Folks, if you’re listening to this and a lot of this is resonating with you because you’ve been through this process, you’ve tried to do an event, and you spent a ton of money on it, you aimed for the stars by trying to get a thousand people to your event, I think that’s one of the areas that a lot of people experience that pain point of doing it. They think that throwing some Facebook ads out there or whatnot is going to fill up the seat, and there’s so much more to it. Before the show, we were talking about some of those key points of things that you should have in place before you go from being a small event to a large event.
Not only that, but the closing rate on a small event versus a large event, so let’s talk about that a little bit more. Talk to me a little bit more about what you see, one, obviously the bigger events are going to be harder to do, and there’s so many people that know the power of running a live event is almost essential to a growing business, especially in the coaching space and the training and education space. Absolutely. What are some of the things that, like mile markers that business owners should be focusing on before they’re even, one, even ready to step into the event space? What’s that look like for them?
Sure. When a client comes to me, what I’m looking for is, one, they have to have a course… they have to have an outcome that they’re providing for the people that they work with. They have to have a very clear avatar. If they don’t know who they serve, they’re probably not even successful in business, but besides the avatar, they have to have a clear product that they’re selling so that we know that they know that they can deliver. From there, we look at how we can turn that into a high-ticket product. The thing at an event, if you’re selling a $2,000 event, you can probably pretty easily sell a $20,000 offer.
About a 10X ratio then.
Yeah. Give or take a little bit. I mean, some markets are definitely different, but if they’re willing to pay $2,000 to come to an event, that means that there is enough value that they will pay for a high ticket. Now, ethics are very important to me, and I won’t work with somebody that can’t deliver on what they’re saying. If they come to me and we do our initial meeting and I look through stuff, and they have a bunch of bad reviews and they’re not getting people results, I’m not going to help them do this because it’s such a powerful thing to come to a live event. You touched on closing rates a little bit. I guess let’s stick with what I look for. We’re looking for… You have to have a clear avatar. You have to have a clear outcome, and you have to have some kind of course that we can turn into a high-ticket coaching program.
Okay, so I want to pause there because this is important. There’s a lot of people that want to run an event and don’t really have anything to sell. They just want to create their own speaking stage, but then there’s no way for them to generate revenue. Folks, if you’re looking at planning an event and you don’t have something that’s going to 10X whatever your ticket price is, then it may be difficult for you to convert. There’s a beautiful lesson that I think a lot of people learn the hard way, but even if they fill the room, they don’t really have anything to sell, and they wonder why they go broke and they don’t ever do another event again. Outside of the avatar and having a course to sell, what else should they be looking at?
Well, they have to be willing to sell. We touched on this a little bit. This is a headspace issue. So many people are like… they’re scared to sell. They’re scared to be salesy. They’re scared to… and that’s serving people. Man, there are… So many people are like, “I really want to help change the world.” Well, nothing wrong with that. You should. I mean, that’s part of it, but there’s two sides to it.
One, if somebody doesn’t pay you for something, the chances of them paying attention to what you give them is very low. Case in point, how many people have said, “Hey, can I ask you a few questions? Can I take you out for coffee?” You go out for coffee. You spend an hour with them. You give them a ton of value. You run into them three months later, and they haven’t done anything with it. That’s because it’s not important enough. What people pay for, they pay attention to. That is 100% true.
The other headspace issue is, “Well, I don’t have anything worth X number of dollars.” I talked to a coach last Friday. He sells his coaching for $100 an hour, and that’s all he sells. I’m like, “Well, no wonder you’re broke because you’re… ” He’s like, “Well, I can’t charge more than a hundred dollars an hour.”
Well, what he’s selling though… People buy because of outcome, what is the transformation that they’re getting, not because of the value of your time. If you’re not selling anything and you just want a platform to speak on, I would say first off, it’s selfish and it’s immoral because you really just have a big ego and you want to be up on stage and you want everyone being like, “Oh, look. He’s awesome. He’s up on stage.” That’s not changing anybody’s life. It’s not making the world a better place. It’s not doing anything for anybody except yourself. That’s a hard pill for some people to swallow, but-
Especially in the coaching and mentor arena, as you know. There’s so many coaches out there. They’re really good at what they do, and they want to have an impact. They want to change lives, and they’re just missing that piece of the business aspect of what to charge and how to charge, how much charge and so forth because they get too focused on the impact.
It’s a fine balance, right? Because we’ve seen it, especially in the due diligence world. We’ve seen it to where it’s the complete opposite. You’ve got people that are charging $25,000, and the impacts they’re going to have on you is very little or out of integrity or you got sold, and it’s ugliness. I think the entire events industry kind of got a bad name, a bad rap in that arena, which is why I love the fact that you said integrity and your ability to be able to deliver is so important that you won’t just take on anyone. Real quick before we hop on the break here, Steven, where can people go find information about you?
Myt.how, so that’s Monetize Your Tribe, myt.how. There’s a free 10-minute course there. It’s four short videos that walk you through what goes into a great event. You can also find me at steve.cash.
Fantastic. Folks, we’re talking about planning the perfect live event with Steve Werner. Stay tuned. We’ll be right back. We’re going to dive into this a little bit further. We’ll be right back.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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