5 Wins 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. I also invite you to attend a free workshop at Igor.ac, where I’m teaching how I made $21,779.45 in affiliate commissions by sending just 481 clicks to my affiliate link in one day.

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Welcome back to another edition of the List Building Lifestyle with your host, Igor Kheifets. Last episode I shared with you what I’ve done wrong about the first event we’ve hosted. And those were the five mistakes that if you haven’t listened to that episode, go back to the previous one and go take a listen. Now on this episode, I would like to share with you five things I think we’ve done right and again, most of these things were done right by my team, not by me. Although some are mine, but for the most part, I have to give credit where credit is due to our operations chief of staff, if you will, Alanah. And of course Dennis who… I mean, they just pretty much made the event happen. Of course there was more work behind the scenes by the rest of the team, but the masterminds behind all of that were Alanah and Dennis.

So a big, big, big, big, huge, huge, huge thanks for pulling this off, I just had to show up and teach, right? And then I get to talk about on the podcast, that’s pretty much it what’s going on here. So the couple of things we’ve done right about this event and I would like to share with you five or maybe maybe up to seven things that I feel were some really good decisions made either prior to the event or at the event. So the first thing that we’ve done right is we’ve put in great attention to detail and I’m talking creating high quality environment, which means not trying to save money on swag, on writing material, on laminating the handouts, not trying to save money on the banner ads, or the hotel or anything like that.

I mean just really investing in the quality of material because nothing speaks cheaply about you and your brand then the cheap merchandise that you give to people who attend the event. You can tell. So we had logos on everything. We even had a custom mole skin notebook done. There were binders like it was just super high quality stuff. So something you would expect from a company that’s been hosting seminars for years, which is exactly what we’ve been asked throughout the event is like, “Oh wow, I, you know, I’ve never attended any of your seminars, but how long have you been, you know, hosting them?” And the answer was, “This is our first one.” They’re like, “What?” And then, “This is what, this is your first one? Wow, I’d like to do to attend, the next one. It’s probably going to be even better.”

So that was really, really, really, really good. The other thing, which I feel was a great decision on my team’s part was to feed the people. And I’ve been to so many different seminars where for the most part you have to figure out your own lunch and obviously because it may not be included in the price tag, and it did cost us a lot of money just to have food for 30 attendees every day for three days. However, it was really worth it. Even though it ate into our a profit margins significantly. The fact that our attendees did not have to go out and look for lunch themselves, the fact that they got to network and mastermind while sharing a meal with their friends at the event, the fact that everyone stayed in the room unless they had to go to the bathroom.
Igor Kheifets: That was a huge advantage to continue and foster that environment of support and success inside the room. So one of the, one of those compliments that we received after, as we collected feedback forums every single day, was like, “Oh, food was great. Thank you so much for having the food for us,” and stuff like that. So that was, that was really, really smart on our part and I think we’ll do it again next time. Now another thing which I think we’ve done right was to charge premium for this event. So the attendees had to pay anywhere from 2,000 all the way up to $2,800 depending on the type of ticket they were buying. And what this allowed us to do is it allowed us to almost break even. So I can’t even say we broke even. So we still lost a little bit of money, but this event, you know, we didn’t go in thinking we’ll make money.

Like the purpose behind the event was completely different, which I’ll share with you in just a minute, but you know, I expected to lose a lot more money than we did. We actually lost a minimal amount of money if we don’t consider the labor and the time and the effort and the energy that we invested into actually making it happen. But you know, it was acceptable and it’s not going to kill us or anything like that. We’re talking, you know, less than a couple thousand dollars.

And the reason I’m excited about that, even though I’m Jewish and I hate losing money and at any given point, even if we lose like $10 on something, I’m like really upset is because events are difficult. And one of the, one of those things that I’ve been told by my peers and by my friends who have hosted their own events is that it’s just really hard to make money. Although you have to do them every now and again to continuously to build your tribe, you still, it’s really hard to make it into a profitable model unless you sell something ultra high ticket. And so when we made a decision to price the ticket, when we we’re deciding how should we, like how much should we charge, I am really happy to say that making a decision to price it at a higher level was correct. Not only for the purposes of positioning of the event but also for the purposes of not basically having to come out literally having to cover the event costs from our savings.

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.

Now another thing which I think kind of happened as a result of even hosting the event was the fact that now our customers and our peers look at us differently. In fact, I know… It was really evident from the way people came in and from the way that they left. So the way people who I would consider to be equals, right, who attended the event because they really wanted to learn how we write emails and how we get them delivered. So the way they spoke to us before the event or when they arrived at the event and the way they spoke to us after it was all said and done and they were leaving.

That was, I mean you could sense, you can sense a difference in perception that now we have elevated ourselves into a different category of a company or a brand that is advanced, that is leading, that’s on the cutting edge, on the bleeding edge of marketing. And I liked that. I’ll be honest with you, having an ego as big as I have, I like to consider myself to be leading the way. Now, not in a nasty way where it’s like, “Oh, I’m the leader and you guys suck. You’re behind.” No, but in a way that it’s really important to me to, to be looked up to by my peers or to be accounted with for my opinion to matter, if you will. And so of course that’s the need of for significance. It’s present in all of us, but in some people it’s more obvious than others.

Well for me, this is really important. And so getting that at the event, and I know it’s a little bit selfish, but getting that at the event is definitely something that I’m really, really happy about and it only makes me want do another event to share more of what I know, to show people that there’s more to the game than just writing a good subject line, if you will. Now another great thing we’ve done was to collect feedback forms and to basically throughout the event, always ask people for feedback. And we’ve done it actually three times throughout three days. We will always do it after lunch and every time we got some valuable piece of feedback that we ended up implementing either the same day or the next day, which then towards the end of the day, on the third day when we collected the last feedback form, we actually received a 10 out of 10 from everyone.

We had I think 29 or 30 people in the room and we’ve got over 20 feedback forums. Obviously some people didn’t submit them and every single one of them ranked us at 10 out of 10, which means leaving the event, everyone had a great experience and only goes to show that you can make a mistake. Like you can make an error or a a misjudgment or a blunder of some kind, but if you are aware of the effect that it had on your attendees and you go back, you acknowledge it and you do something to fix it, people only end up loving you more for it because of the attention that you give them. So if you’re hosting an event or if you’re running a membership site or if you’ve got a tribe or something, it really pays to have a feedback form of some kind and have people submit those feedback forms immediately after interacting with your business.

Now another thing, and that would be the last lesson that I’ll share with you, another thing which I think we’ve done right is we made sure that every single attendee actually shared a testimonial. So even, you know, we had quite a few couples at the event actually and we made sure that every person who was there in the room, besides staff, took the time about 10 to 15 minutes to stand in front of a camera and share the testimonial or feedback about what they’ve been learning at the events starting with day one.

Now this is quite an achievement because I spoke to other people who hosted even small workshops like this, like 30 people is actually not big, and very few of them even think about collecting testimonials. Now, to me it was a fundamental issue that I made sure that my team is aware of and we planned it, meaning that with the video people, we actually spoke to them up front and we said, “Okay, so besides shooting the videos, besides syncing and editing and the sound that blah blah blah, we also, okay, we also need to make sure we’re shooting testimonials. So get ready. You will have to stay over time.”

Like we thought about that. The challenge was to get people to do it, all right? The challenge was to get people to agree to stand in front of a camera and share their feedback. And the biggest challenge was the first day because no one actually wanted to do them in the first day. They still weren’t really comfortable. But after you feed them a couple of times, people become a little bit more receptive. So the second day and the third day we had everyone, everyone share a video testimonial which ended up creating like a huge vault now of feedback of like 30 video testimonials done, you know, proper high-quality style. And that’s awesome.

I mean as far as I’m concerned, that alone was worth, you know, pooling of the whole event because now we get to take this feedback, now we get to take these testimonials, these credibility boosters, and we get to use them pretty much anywhere on our marketing material with relation to email marketing, email delivery, and any other interaction we have with our customers. Now, that’s amazing. That’s really, really tremendous. And these are the little things that really helped boost positioning of you, your brand. And your company within the marketplace, right? So wanted to share these with you. I hope you enjoyed them.There’s more lessons than that, but we’re going to keep things light today. So thanks for tuning in for another episode of the List Building Lifestyle, 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 showed the two step system that made me the top affiliate for people like Matt Bacak, John Crestani, Richard Legg, Michael Cheney, 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.