5 Mistakes From Our First Live Event

I’m Igor Kheifets and this is The List Building Lifestyle, a podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world and help people improve their lives in the process, then this podcast is for you.

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Welcome back to another edition of The List Building Lifestyle with your host, Igor Kheifets. We’re just coming off hosting the first ever List Building Lifestyle Marketing Workshop, where we taught people how to write emails that convert, as well as how to get those emails delivered by sharing some up to date, super advanced inboxing strategies.

The purpose of this episode is not to sell you the event, although the recordings will be probably available for sale sometime soon, or are already available depending on when you hear this. But I wanted to share with you some personal insights that I feel are really important and some some things that I really wish I knew before I hosted my first event. However, obviously you can’t really know everything out of time. So the first one, you always make those mistakes. So I would like to share with you the five mistakes that I believe we made and some of them that I personally made, not just my team but me specifically, with regards to this first event.

The first mistake was to hosted in Toronto. Now the reason we hosted it in Toronto is because we decided to do it in our hometown. It just made things easier. We didn’t have to stay at a hotel so I could sleep in my own bed. I could still see my kids in the evenings, and just overall I didn’t feel that I was away from home. This way, it just seemed like an easier thing to do. Plus in all the prep work for the event, you still had to travel to the venue. Logistically it seemed like the easiest thing to do, and it probably was.

The problem was two fold. The first problem is it’s hard to get people to visit Toronto because although it’s a pretty neat city, it’s not a vacation destination. It’s more like a destination you visit just because you happen to know someone, like a family member or if you’ve got a seminar or if you’re just crossing the border to Niagara and you’re like okay, well I’m near Toronto now so I might as well go visit. So it’s not an exciting destination like Vegas or Orlando for instance, where people go and they love Disney and they’ll go in and just have fun while being at the event, which really, really helps. It’s not like Maui or Hawaii where people can justify a vacation that’s also write off, but rather it’s also like it’s always about the business. So that’s one problem with Toronto.

The other one is not really a problem with Toronto. It’s more a problem with Canada in general. Turns out lots of Americans can’t get in. It turns out that there are quite a few people, at least in the internet marketing space, who’ve done something when they were teenagers or whenever they were kids or whatever, they got rowdy apparently. And Canada doesn’t forget, so they can’t cross the Canadian border. Now, that obviously created a barrier because a lot of people that I’ve invited to the event who would have happily gone and attended it, they couldn’t get into the country. They just couldn’t get in. So that was a major problem that I was not aware of.

And then at the event, and another friend of mine, a very famous online marketer, actually shared that he’s been hosting events in Canada for a long time. And one of the biggest issues is that some people just can’t get in. So he had speakers who refused the speaking engagement, a paid speaking engagement just because they are not allowed to get into Canada, which still came as a big shock to me.

Another mistake that we made, we basically had to commit to a date. We had to kind of draw a line in the sand and say okay, this is the deadline, we have to make it happen and there’s no matter what. And so the deadline we chose was four weeks out, and that was a mistake. We should’ve probably committed to a later deadline so we had more time to market the event. But even though we only had four weeks, we still managed to put 30 people in the room at $2,500 to seat, which is not bad. And it just goes to show you the power of having a list and a tribe.

But still, four weeks put a lot of pressure on us and put a lot of pressure on the attendees. It was not only about the marketing part of it, but also about the fact that people, they just make plans and four weeks out for a trip to a marketing seminar, well, it’s hard for a lot of people. It’s hard. In fact, many people who wanted to come couldn’t come because of it. They had a scheduling conflict all like another event or another trip that they were having. Or other people, it was, again, it was just really, really hard to rearrange a schedule. Plus we had it around, I think the week before Thanksgiving. So that’s also a complicated time for people to leave. Again, in spite of all of this, we still put people in the room. Yet I think if I was doing it again, I would have not committed to that deadline.

The third mistake, which is purely on me, is we didn’t upsell anything at the event, meaning that we had no upsell opportunities, even though people were asking. This is how I know we should have. You see, people really want to buy more when would they get is good. That’s just a natural thing that people, it’s just a natural progression that people go through at the events. The funny thing is that we made a point to follow up with the people who requested all kinds of different things. And the further we got away from the event, the less response we received.

So in other words, if you are to sell anything, make sure to sell it right there in the room. Don’t wait for them to go back home because then it’s not the same. They are back into their routine. They get busy, distracted, things change. Your emotional state changes. It’s so different.

But when they’re in the room, they will approach and they will ask you can you do this? Can I get this? Can I get more of you, et cetera? And that’s when when you need to sit down and close the sales, make the upgrades. Not doing it at the event, I think, was a mistake because people wanted it and we didn’t give it to them. But again, this was my decision, even though my team insisted we sell something. It was my decision. I said okay, it’s our first event. Let’s not complicate it. Let’s not add more layers of complexity. Let’s just go ahead and and just deliver a great event. Let’s figure out the sales part next time.

Yo, it’s Igor. If you’re loving the content, hop on over to listbuildinglifestyleshow.com for more free training and a free transcript of this episode. Oh, and I’d really appreciate if you logged into iTunes and rated the show. It really helps. Thanks.

The fourth mistake was teaching complex marketing secrets, or I guess advanced email marketing secrets, after lunch. What I noticed is that, it was a three day event and the first day people were mostly good. The second day though, after lunch, they were just tired, like yawning and looking really bored and checking out. The third day I had three people fall asleep at the table, one of whom I actually had to wake up by touching them on their back. It’s really hard.

I’ll tell you what. It’s really hard to keep going with your presentation knowing that people are falling asleep without addressing it, without feeling butt hurt about it. But afterwards, I realized that it was lunch. It was the third day, so they were probably tired. We were just post lunch and people were practically falling asleep. So next time, next time we have to really make sure that we teach the complex and the advanced stuff in the morning and then we teach the lighter stuff and more entertaining stuff after lunch.

Last but not least, the last mistake is that I actually did not review the schedule. On the second day I did not properly review the schedule. I mean, I did review it, but I guess I made a mistake there. And I delivered what was supposed to be a 45 minute talk in two hours, basically stretching it over more and more time than I should have. Then I had a whole section which I have not taught, through which I had to rush through. And instead of taking an hour and a half to teach it, I taught it in 30 or 45 minutes. And I got some flack for that. Attendees mentioned that they felt I rushed through it. It wasn’t enough time. So we had to extend the program on the third day just to cover for it and make sure we devote enough time to show all the examples, to explain all the campaigns.

But that was a mistake. Now, thankfully that’s the one we were able to fix the next day, which, in my opinion, why it’s so critical to collect feedback every single day on your events, because your customers tell you exactly what they think is good or bad and that way you’re able to adjust accordingly.

But these were the five biggest mistakes I think that we made on our first event and definitely the ones that keep haunting me for sure. Especially the one where I forgot that it was a 45 minute talk and then took two hours to teach it, deliberately, making it more expensive and telling more stories and telling more jokes rather than kind of zipping through it and then moving to the part which was more valuable in my opinion, showing examples of the emails that I wrote and breaking those examples down and explaining why those emails worked the way that they did.

So anyway, that’s what I learned. But here’s another big lesson about the events. I was really afraid of the event. I was really, really afraid because it seems like this big thing with lots of moving parts. Of course having a great team really helps. But what I learned is that once you do this one complicated thing once, it stops being complicated because you’re able to see the journey from start to finish.

When it comes to any project that scares the crap out of me, more often than not, what I find is I’m afraid of it because I don’t see the journey from start to finish. And anytime I feel I need to bring someone on board to walk me through the process, what I really mean is to do the process with me start to finish so I can see how it works so next time I can do it myself. That’s how I did it with my podcast. When I launched it I had someone on board to basically launch it with me and I sort of relieved the responsibility to them, making this process much easier than it could have been. And in many ways, the same happened with Google AdWords, when we started doing YouTube ads.

But you know what I learned besides that? Anything that seems complex most of the time is not. It’s the not knowing the details of the process, what makes it seem complex, but when you get into it, it’s actually just like anything else. It’s a series of steps taken in a certain sequence that then create an outcome. Your outcome can be 20% good, 50% good or 100% good depending on how you execute these steps.

But taking the steps even if blindly and making mistakes and losing time, losing money, is still better than not taking the steps at all. At any point in time I’ll take on a bad funnel that sort of works instead of not having a funnel at all. I’ll take a list that’s semi responsive over having no list. I’ll take a bad marriage or a marriage with issues for no marriage. You know what I mean? I’ll take something that could be improved, but it’s not perfect over not having it at all.

And that’s the philosophy that I’m learning the more I go for things that are scary. So writing the book, hosting the first event, launching the podcast, creating products, selling stuff, all of this, it just leads to more and more and more of the same to recognize that nothing is impossible and most of the time, it really depends on whether or not you can see yourself going from zero to 100% or from start to finish. And whether you’re willing to do that in spite of not knowing what the journey looks like. That’s what it really comes down to.

So on the next episode I’m going to share with you the five things we did right and the five things which I feel were really critical for the success of the event. So stay tuned for that, and until next time we chat, have a good one.

Thank you for listening to The List Building Lifestyle. Get access to previous episodes, the transcription of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also, don’t forget to claim your free seat at the workshop I’m hosting this week where I show the two step system that made me the top affiliate for people like Matt Bayside, John Crestani, Richard Legg, Michael Chaney, and many, many others. In fact, on this workshop, I’m going to show you the exact approach I take whenever I promote an affiliate offer, the exact offers I promote, as well as how I was able to make over half a million dollars in commissions using my small list of just 18,000, people promoting a weird type of product that almost no one else promotes. All that is yours at Igor.ac. So go ahead, claim your seat right now and I’ll see you there.