Here’s how we did it
We generated $186,000 of revenue for our coaching business with a 2 day live event. In this post, I’ll give you a run down of how we did it.
If you're a six-figure coach or consultant right now, you've got your business somewhat figured out. If you want to add another six-figure branch of revenue to your business, this is how you can bolt on a two-day live event to add more revenue to your business this year. In this video, I'm going to break down the math of the front-end and the back-end of the real financials behind this two-day live event. I'm going to show you the opportunity that currently exists in your business. I'll tell you how many tickets we sold, I'll tell you how we marketed this event. I'll even share with you the top 10 expenses you can expect for your next live event.
Benefits of live events
If you're a six-figure coach or consultant right now, you've got your business somewhat figured out. If you want to add another six-figure branch of revenue to your business, this is how you can bolt on a two-day live event to add more revenue to your business this year. In this post, I'm going to break down the math of the front-end and the back-end of the real financials behind this two-day live event. I'm going to show you the opportunity that currently exists in your business. I'll tell you how many tickets we sold, I'll tell you how we marketed this event. I'll even share with you the top 10 expenses you can expect for your next live event.
Who should use live events
Now, who should use live events? Well, if you are an established six-figure coach or consultant, an advisor, a mentor, a spiritual healer, a coach, whatever you want to call yourself, if you advise other businesses, if you advise other people on how to go from point A to point B, if you can help people make a transformation right now in your business, then adding on or bolting on a live event to your business model makes total sense.
Naming your event
So this post is a case study of my own business, of how we generated $186,000 with a two-day live event. I'll be honest, when I saw the numbers for myself, I was pretty blown away because I've been doing events since 2016, and some people look at me doing events and they just think they don't work or I'm just doing my little side thing. They don't understand the power of live events. We hosted an event called “How to Host Profitable Retreats.” Simple. We help people host profitable events. We added Add on the words how to in front of it. And there you go. We had our retreat title. So think about the transformation you help your clients make right now. Add on the words "how to" at the beginning of it. And you've just created a retreat name, a workshop name, a boot camp name, a live event name. You wouldn't believe how many people get stuck on the naming of their event. Just stick a how to in front of it, and you're already off to the races.
Pricing the event
When you think about the pricing for your event, remember, people are paying for a transformation. One of the biggest mistakes coaches and consultants make is that they position their events as nice to have, or as what's known as a vitamin. If your business is a vitamin, we know as well as the next person down the road, a vitamin is a nice to have. It's a, yeah, maybe we'll take it, maybe we won't. Whereas if you had a bursting headache right now, you need a painkiller, right? So your event has to be positioned immediately as a painkiller, not as a nice to have vitamin, but, Oh My God, I need this thing right now because I'm suffering, I'm in pain. There's an obstacle that I haven't yet overcome yet to be honest but that's how you need to position your event.
Busting the biggest misconception
So we positioned this event specifically for coaches and consultants who want to add another six-figure branch of revenue to their business. So we titled it "How to Host Profitable Retreats" and it was a two-day live event. Now, we sold 12 tickets for this event. You're probably thinking, 12 There's no way this event can be profitable with 12 people, which is one of the biggest misconceptions in the events industry is that you have to fill a room with 30, 50, 100, 1,000 people for your event to be profitable. Big events are a logistical nightmare. Hotel negotiations, room blocks, food, pricing, audiovisual. The expenses with big events are outrageous. And in fact, I know so many of my personal friends who have lost big money doing big events. And I'm a big believer that you can make big profits using small events. So we sold 12 tickets for this event at $6,000. Again, we didn't want to make the mistake. We didn't want to undercharge to make the event available for everyone. We wanted people that were seriously committed to showing up, taking us up on our offer, being one of 12 people. It was very intimate, very hands-on for the participants, and that's how we positioned our event. We positioned the event that you would walk away with a framework on how to host your own profitable small events.
Incorporating payment plans
So we we sold 12 tickets at $6,000. Most people paid the $6,000 upfront. A couple of people asked for a two-pay payment plan or a three-pay payment plan. And because we were so far out, we were willing to offer payment plans for the event.
Calculating front end revenue
You have to understand this. This is cash coming in the door right now this week as you're making ticket sales long before the event. So if you needed a cash injection into your business right now and you weren't ready to put people into your back-end program, your high-ticket mastermind, selling tickets right now to a future event is like you buying a gift card to something that you will consume later. The money is spent, the money goes to the business, and you consume it at a later date. So we were able to collect that $72,000 in just a couple of weeks time from ticket sales, payment plans, and so forth. So our business really just had a cash injection of $72,000. Now, you could price your tickets at 5K, 10K, 2,500. Pricing is a story for another day. But again, $72,000 cash injection into your business for an event that is in the future is not a bad way to start your event. At the event, of course, we design our events in a two-day structure over the course of five pillars. And again, we'll save this for another video. But essentially, whatever you're teaching your current clients right now can make for the event curriculum for your own live event. So think about the first step that you would have to take someone through when they hire you. What's the first step you would take them through? That becomes Module 1 of the event, which is typically 60 to 90 minutes. What's the next thing you would have to teach your clients when they get to the next step? Well, that becomes Module 2 or Chapter 2 of the event and so forth. So that's how we design our event structure. Let's talk about the math because you're thinking, well, you said you made $186,000 of revenue on this two-day event. Right now, we've only calculated $72,000, which was front-end revenue, which leaves us with a gap of $114,000.
Filling the gap - Invitation to an on-going program
So then how did the additional $114,000 come into our business? This is where we make our invitation, our offer, where we present a natural next step to the attendees of your event to join a ongoing program. This could be your mastermind, your consulting program, your high-ticket program. Whatever the natural next step is. You have to understand that even with a group of 12 people, there will be some people who are going to want to keep working with you. We know that when we make the invitation to join our back-end program, not everyone's going to take it, of course.
It's not for everyone, but it's for a certain group of people who do want our ongoing support, our ongoing guidance to help them over the next six months, over the next twelve months, to help them fulfil their business dream. So at the end of our event, on the last day, we made an invitation to join our $30,000 a year back-end program. That's our mastermind program. We offered it and we positioned it in two ways. You could pay in full and you could save 10 %, or you could just pay a monthly fee and you wouldn't save 10 %. So think about it, it's a $30,000 a year program, which would equate to $2,500 a month. Now, two people signed up right away at the monthly rate, the monthly rate of $2,500 a month. Extrapolate that over the course of a year. That was $60,000 of revenue generated. $5,000 of that we collected, of course, on the spot to account for month one. But then if you extrapolate their $2,500 a month over the next 12 months. It'll be $30,000 per person. So two people signed up for the $30,000 a year program using our payment plan, which again generated $60,000 of revenue into our business.
Now, again, like I mentioned earlier, we also offer a paying full option where some people have access to the resources right away to invest, and they're eager to save the 10 %. Not a bad way to make an offer. Then we had two people take us up on our pay in full offer where they could save 10 % if they wanted to just make one payment and get into the program for the entire year. So we had two people save 10 %, which brought their annual dues down to $27,000. So two people took us up on that offer right then and there at the event. That resulted in $54,000 of additional revenue, and that was collected pretty much at the event. So now we've got $72,000 of tickets that we talked about earlier, which is your front-end revenue, combined with $54,000 of people that were wanting to pay in full and save the 10 %, combined with $60,000 of ongoing monthly recurring revenue for our coaching program. If you add those three numbers up, that's how we did $186,000 with a two-day live event.
Why live events?
Why we do these live events, of course, is to differentiate ourselves from other people in our marketplace. But let's be real, bringing people together in person will never go out of style. It is the most underutilized way to bring your high quality prospects and leads and clients together over the course of an in person experience to really wow them with your transformation, your energy, and invite a handful of them to naturally take the next step with you.
Marketing of the event
Quickly talk about the marketing of this event. Because it's only 12, 15 people, we always advise our clients to host small events with 10 or 15 people because 10 or 15 people of the right people will pay the right fees. It's when you try to attract the masses, where you find yourself having to discount, underprice, and overdeliver. So with a 15 person event, let's say your target was 15 people, our go-to strategies for marketing this event is number one, organic social media all day, every day. Most people are sitting on a massive asset list already. This could be your social media contacts. This could be your current clients, your past clients. This could be people on your email list, people connected I could get to you on LinkedIn, Instagram, the contacts list on your phone.
The truth is, you may not have a lead flow problem. Most of our clients actually already have a ton of leads existing in their business. They're just not really sure how to categorize those leads. So we have to extract those leads out of them and even in a simple word document or an Excel sheet, you could come up with 10, 20, 30, 50. We've had clients come up with 100 names who they could think of at the top of their head who would be perfect for their event. So we created a simple organic marketing strategy where essentially we don't even run ads. We don't need to use paid media. We just tap into our existing networks. Go look at every customer that has done business with you in the last two years. Open up your Stripe or your PayPal or however you collect money. Go look at your books. Go reach out to every single person who has transacted with you in the last two years. Chances are you could fill your 15-person event just using that strategy alone. Trying to use that engagement to generate sales calls. We have clients who get their first one to five ticket sales, typically in the first couple of days of launching their event publicly just from their existing network.
So right away, they get this cash injection of $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 sometimes because they're only reaching out to people in their current network. Next strategy we use is a simple five-dollar-a-day Instagram boosting strategy. Now, if you look at our Instagram profile here, the first three pinned posts on our Instagram profile are examples of how we create very specific Instagram reels, have people comment specific words on our reels, and then we turn those comments into not just giving them a lead magnet, but then we generate sales calls using this exact five dollar a day strategy where we're targeting coaches, consultants, and people in our desired target market.
Expenses of the event
When it comes to the expenses of your live event, we've listed here nine expenses that you should just be aware of. We could dive into these into a later video. Expense number one, of course, is your venue. Is that a hotel, a retreat center? How are you actually structuring your event in terms of logistics? Next is your flights. If you're doing this event in a different city, a different country, you may have to fly there. Third is materials. We like to print out really cool workbooks for our events, and they do cost money.
Food and drink, right? You have to provide lunch, breakfast, dinner at your live events. Next expense is any marketing expenses that you have. Facebook ads, Google Ads, marketing your website, hosting your website, things like that. The sixth expense is your team. Let's say you're bringing support or a plus one to come help you out, well, you're going to compensate them for their time. The next thing is any off-site excursions, ATV rides, zip running, getting massages, whatever type of experiences and excursions you want to bring into your live event. That's another expense you have to be mindful of. The second expense is really around joint ventures. We often recommend a joint venture strategy, even for a small group of 15, where you essentially a commission to anybody who makes a referral introduction. This could be 10%, could be 15%, could be 20% of the entire ticket price. Again, you get to decide what that number is. But we have a specific line item in our budgeting for joint venture referral fees. And then the last one, of course, is processing fees. So when someone pays you right now on credit card, chances are your payment processor is taking anywhere from one to three % for processing fees. Well, these are fees that we actually build into our expenses as well.
Concluding remarks