Behind the scenes of my Rise Above Summit

Your Dream Business

Today’s episode of the podcast is a solo episode where I am giving you an honest account of what it was like to run my first ever Virtual Summit.

In the episode I share with you the good, the bad, and the ugly lessons that I learned, and what I will do differently next time!

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

1. My experience of previous summits and what I did differently
2. What I spent money on and what I did to ensure I covered costs
3. The statistics on my registration numbers and how many people turned up

If you enjoyed this episode then please feel free to go and share it on your social media or head over to iTunes and give me a review, I would be so very grateful.

LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE

Connect with Teresa on Instagram, LinkedIn or Facebook

Transcript

Today, I am taking you behind the scenes of my first ever summit. I'm going to be sharing with you what worked, what didn't, what went absolutely wrong that we didn't plan for, and I don't think could have planned for. I'm also going to be sharing with you my registration rates, my turn up rate, and what it did for my business. I learned so many valuable lessons in this process. And I'm sharing them all with you today. Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of your dream business podcast. How are you doing this week? I hope you are good. So this week I have decided to share with you all the stuff about my summit, basically the good, the bad, the ugly, the things that went wrong that we did not expect, and whether I'll do it again and what I would do differently. And whether you're looking at doing a summit or not, I think this is going to be a really interesting look behind the scenes of running something like this at this level. And some of the lessons I learned with the summit actually are going to help me in lots of other areas of my business. And actually something that kind of come up during the summit is now inspiring me to make some changes in the rest of my business. So I've written some notes. And I'm kind of hopefully going to go through them in order. As you know, if you listen to this podcast regularly, I don't script it. That's just the way I like to do it. I like to be very off the cuff. I like to have an idea of what I'm going to say to you, but I like it to be a conversation. I like to imagine that you've just said to me, Oh, how did the summit go? And I'm about to tell you how the summit went. So it is very relaxed. It's the style of the podcast. If you're new, welcome. So lovely to have you here. If you are new and you don't subscribe, then I would love it if you took a minute to subscribe to the podcast. That would be amazing. Okay, let's get cracking. So why did I even do a summit in the first place? Now, this had been on my radar for a really long time. I have been a guest on many summits over the years, and at the moment I seem to be getting a flurry of them. And my experience of them was mixed, but I would say more to the not brilliant end. And I've spoke openly before now about Fifi Mason and her summit and how that was the best one I'd ever done. She really kind of seemed to get it in her head what she wanted and how to manage it. And it was marketed really well. And it was It was just brilliant, and she was great, it was really well organised, and I loved doing it, but like I said, on the whole, I had had lots of experiences and summits that weren't brilliant. Even though it'd been on my radar for a while, I just thought, I don't want to do a summit. It seems like a lot of work, if I'm honest, and it was. It's a lot of work and I don't know that it'd be that brilliant. And I am going to be honest and say, I think there was an element of, not imposter syndrome, there was an element of fear. What if people said no? What if I asked speakers to come onto the summit? Because doing a podcast is different, and I've had some obviously phenomenal names on this podcast, but summits are different. And like I said, I think lots of speakers maybe have the impression that most of them are a bit rubbish. So, and I say that very fleetingly, they're not rubbish, obviously. So, I decided that I was going to take a bit of a punt and make a decision to do a summit based on one thing only. I attended, what's like this, I attended the Guru Summit, which basically is a summit for email marketing. And I was interested to see what they were talking about, signed up for it. And it was a really, really good summit. I was only an attendee, but they used a really good system. They did more than just your average kind of interview thing. And they had thousands of people like register for the event. So I was like, That's how you do a summit. And at the event, they had Martha Stewart's keynoting nuts and Amy Portfield, and I, and they were the reasons I signed up. I wanted to see both of them speak. And so I thought to myself, I'm going to do a summit. I've got to do a summit that has a really good keynote. And as you know, I'm very fortunate that Amy and I are friends. However, one of the things that you probably need to know is that. I don't ask Amy anything from a business point of view. We don't talk about business. We only ever do social stuff. And we only really ever do that when I'm over in the States, obviously she doesn't travel here to the UK and we, you know, have a really lovely time and I love spending time with her and she's awesome. And obviously I massively admire her from a business point of view, but we tend to keep those really separate. So we don't talk about business. I don't ask anything of her, you know, so I thought to myself, I'm going to do it. I'm going to ask Amy. And I spoke to my husband and he was like, just ask her, you know, basically use my language back to me. What's the worst that she can say? So I said to the universe, you know, I love a bit of woo. I said to the universe, okay, I'm going to ask Amy to speak at the summit. And if Amy says yes, I'm doing a summit. If Amy says no, I'm not doing a summit. It's not meant to be. So send her a DM. And I have a text. I have her phone number, but I thought I won't text because that's really personal. I'll send her a DM on Instagram and. I'll do it that way. So I sent her a DM saying, is there any chance you would do a summit? If so, you know, what would you charge? And all that sort of conversation. Anyway, she didn't see it. And I went to, I was actually doing one of my in person events and I was sat with Becci McEvoy who edits, not edits, who does the show notes podcast and helps me with social media. And I'm sat with my husband and they were like, have you heard back? And I said, no, she's not seen it. And Paul said to text her. My husband and I don't want to text it. That's really personal. Like I feel like that felt to me as if I was stepping a boundary or overstepping a boundary. And Becci said to me, what would you tell us to do? Because she's in my executive club. And I said, I'd tell you to text her. And she's like, there you go. So I decided to text her and I sent her a really casual text and said, Amy, I'm not sure if you saw, I sent you a message over on Insta, you know, if you want me to send it again, let me know. And within like 10 minutes, she replied on Insta going, Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I've just seen this and yes, a hundred percent. I'll speak at your summit. And we talked a bit about how that might look and what it would be. And that was it. Summit was born. So my objective was to add people to my list. That was my main objective. The reason people do summits is because it's a really good way to get new people onto your email list. Credibility. I wanted people to see me at the level I am. And by pulling in someone like Amy, by putting on an amazing summit, then people would realize my level of credibility. And from a financial point of view, I wanted to break even. I knew I was going to invest a lot into making the summit really good. And I'll talk about what I invested in a bit. I wanted to break even. That was my objective. If I made money, brilliant, but that wasn't the objective to make money. Now, a couple of things that I went into thinking is On an average summit, and I say average because obviously I've done lots of them, what normally happens is they get between 15, 20, 25 speakers who pre record interviews. Now, from a speaker point of view, this is awesome. Like, I love nothing more than someone saying, can I interview you? Because I don't have to prep. I don't have to think about what I'm going to say because I do, Kind of do things on the fly anyway. And I know my subject I'm good at what I do. So I have no concerns about someone saying to me, can I interview about this? And I know I'll be able to speak. And then, and the interviews can last anywhere between 20 and 30 minutes. And then they tend to do the summit over a number of days. It's not live. The videos are released at certain days. Sometimes they have a Facebook group. Sometimes they don't. And I just thought, I don't want to do a summit like that. Like if I'm going to do a summit, like everything I do, I want it to be the best flipping thing you've ever seen. And there's nothing wrong with doing summits the way that people do them. There are a million reasons why they're great. And believe me, some of the things I did, it would have been much easier to do the summit that way. And there are some amazing people that teach how to do something this way. One of them being Krista Miller, who is going to be on the podcast very soon because she had a big part of the, to play in this summit. But yeah, so it's not, there's anything wrong with summits that way. I just didn't want to do mine that way. So my summit was a two day live event. So everything was sent live as in some sessions were live, some were prerecorded. The only reason I had prerecorded sessions was because I wanted particular speakers and they weren't free on the two days that I had booked. I ended up having 38 speakers, which was insane. And I decided that I didn't just want interviews. In fact, I didn't really want interviews at all other than the keynotes. And I was more than happy. And I wanted to interview them. I wanted different types of sessions. Not only did I want workshop style, that's easy to say, sessions and practical sessions and keynote sessions and Q and A's. I also wanted some slightly different sessions. So we had yoga on one day, we had meditation, we had tapping. I just wanted, we had like a 10 minute marketing thing. I wanted something a bit different. So like I said, I'd not only had different types of sessions, but I also had different tracks. So when I say tracks, what I mean by that is imagine you're going to an in person conference and it goes, okay, at 10 o'clock in room one, we have this person in room two, we have this person in room three we have this person. I wanted the online version of that. So at different points, we would have three speakers on at once. So, and like I said, there was an element of prerecorded and recorded, but the sessions were streamed live and you could only attend live. There was a VIP upgrade option, which is very typical for summits. And this is one of the ways that I knew I'd helped to cover my costs. And In most summits make money and the idea was you would get all the recordings if you signed up for the VIP. So let me explain a bit of the planning. So I decided that, like I said, this wasn't going to be your average summit. It would have been super, super easy. And like I said, there's nothing wrong with this. This is my own annoying, Want for perfection and amazingness. Like, I could have created a Kajabi landing page that released a video every day and used the systems I had currently got in place, which would have cost me no extra. However, because I wanted to create an online conference. I wanted it to be more than, than an average summit. And I'm keep getting saying there's nothing wrong with average summit. This is just me. I decided that I was going to have a look at systems that could manage this level of live event and have the option to have tracks because that was really important to have different rooms online. So I ended up using and paying for a system called Hopin, which is by Ring Central, and I will touch on them some more in a bit, but that was a big investment. That was thousands to have that system. So, That was me really stepping out of my comfort zone and going, okay, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it really well. And it's going to end up costing me money, but that is going to inspire, drive me forward to try and make money on this summit. I also hired a producer. So I worked with the amazing Lorna Reeves, who you heard in fact, last week. And Lorna helped me manage the event as we talked about last week. That again was a big decision for me to bring someone on at her level. And again, take it that seriously that I'm having a producer to help me run this event. I had a brand new brand created, a new name, a new website, new logo, new everything. And I worked with Katie from Geek Boutique and Sooz Frear to do copywriting. So I had both of them work with me and they sponsored the event to create all of this new stuff. And it was stunning. Like, and that was the other thing. Sometimes. Now, design is very, you know, like, what's the word? Subjective. But I have felt that sometimes the design of some of these summits I've done have not been that attractive. Like, they've not been that beautiful. So when it's come to me promoting them, I won't put them on my feed because it doesn't go with everything else. Like, you know, and I now that sounds ridiculous. Very like high maintenance of me. But how things look are really important to me. So therefore I needed to make sure it was exactly the same. And the other thing that I did that was, I guess a cost was I decided to give away loads of swag. So I bought hoodies, t-shirts, I bought branded seeds. 'cause I love gardening, so why wouldn't I? I had full focus as a sponsor who gave me a load of their stuff. I had a Pellicraft as another sponsor who created the lovely pens that I'm currently writing with right now. So I wanted again, I wanted to bring another element to the summit from a I want to be able to send stuff out for people. I want them be able to get excited about stuff. So like I said, I tried to bring in a few different things, but also I massively increased the cost of this summit that you wouldn't have to do. If I did a summit again and I decided that I didn't want to do it in the same format, I could do everything with the systems I currently use with ease. If I wanted to do a more traditional summit in terms of, and really, I guess calling it a summit is, is the wrong thing because summits are very much seen as a pre recorded thing and as a, over a number of days rather than this really was an online conference. So like I said, I ended up spending out quite a bit of money in terms of, oh, the other thing that I spent money out on his ads. And I'll talk about the marketing in a bit in terms of what we did. So what was good, bad and the ugly? Okay. So some of the things that were brilliant was one, I got to work with Krista Miller who Was brilliant. And I joined her accelerator program and her and I will talk about that in a few weeks when I interview her and it was phenomenal and just helped me no end. So that was amazing. But again, her and I will talk about that soon. Bringing in those two big keynotes were such a good move. So, and the reason I'm kind of giving this, these kind of Good, bad, and uglies is really if you're going to do anything like this, then it's just some, hopefully some kind of things that will help your life a bit easier, or will tell you what worked really well or not worked really well. So, the keynotes, they, the other thing, another way that a summit works, sorry, just backtrack a sec, is the reason you get other people on your list, new people on your list is because the idea of a summit is that everyone promotes, all the speakers promote. So one of the things I decided to do Like I've literally had someone ask me to apply for a summit this morning and it says in the application, you must send two solo emails to your list between this day and this day and one newsletter email to your list. Well, first off, I don't send newsletter emails. Second off, I'm not sending two emails to my list and I'll only send one if I think it's a good fit for my list. And I didn't want to be that prescriptive with my speakers because I hate it. I hate someone telling me I've got to do this stuff. And, and the other thing that I hated from previous summits is they never marketed particularly hard. And it was like, no, hang on a minute. If you want us to bust our gut and market this event for you, you've got to be doing 10 times more than what we're doing. So for me, they were really key. So the first thing was I didn't ask the speakers to, I asked them nicely if they would, I never insisted that they emailed their lists. I, I basically said to them, I won't insist, but I want to put on an event so amazing There's no way you won't want to shout it from the rooftops. That was my objective. And I feel like that was a really good move on my part because no one felt pressurized. They all wanted to do it. And lots of them did do it. And I'll talk to you in a bit about the signups. So, but having those keynotes, was key for them wanting to promote it. Because what I did was when I reached out, I laugh as I say this, but when I reached out and I'm really fortunate, I know a lot of people in this space, in the online space. And, and hopefully I have a really good reputation in this space and I have lots of friends. So I was able to personally reach out to lots of people that I knew. And I started the email with, or the subject line was, would you like to be on a summit with Amy Porterfield? And obviously, Pretty much 99 percent of people went, yes, please. How do I sign up? So me going to the effort of getting Amy and then also getting Michael, because I had Michael Hyatt as my other keynote, was a game changer in terms of not only attracting people to the summit, but actually getting other speakers to sign up. Because once you've got a big name like that. People are going to sign up when you're able to say, I've got this person. People are going to say, okay, cool. It must be credible. And that's what I hope when people ask me on a summit is that other people will go, oh, right, cool. She's doing it. Must be credible. So that was the first thing that was really good. The second thing that was really good was, We designed, we, Katie designed an amazing looking brand. And one of the images I wanted her to create, because when you do a summit, you give out assets to the speakers. So basically a load of images that they can use. And one of the images that I said I wanted her to create was based on what do I want? If I'm a speaker, what would I want? And what I wanted as a speaker was to be shown next to those...