As you know, every week we spend an hour hatching evil schemes with a business owner from somewhere in the world with an interesting business. It's usually someone I don't know, but today on the More Cheese Less Whiskers podcast we're going to spend an hour hatching said evil schemes with someone I know very well! Richard Miller, the founder of Titan Event Technologies.
I've spent a lot of time with Richard. When we first met, he was taking over the role of running all the audio visual requirements for the big real estate seminars I did with Joe Stump and Eben Pagan.
He has a long, long history of putting on high stakes events for entrepreneurial businesses. We would do 600-800 person events every month for many, many years, and Richard was responsible for making them go off flawlessly.
He's done events for people like Dean Graziosi, Jeff Walker, Eben Pagan and many of the names you would recognize. He's a bonafide audio visual expert, and this is a really great conversation, hatching some evil schemes around the future of the audio visual business.
You're really going to enjoy this episode.
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Transcript - More Cheese Less Whiskers 157
Dean: Hey everybody. It's Dean. Welcome to the More Cheese Less Whiskers podcast. And as you know, every week we spend one hour hatching evil schemes with some business owner from somewhere in the world with some kind of an interesting business. Usually somebody, I don't know. But today we are going to spend an hour hatching said evil schemes with someone that I know very well, maybe a little too well. And I've spent a lot of time with Richard. Richard, when I first met him, the capacity of the meeting him was he was taking over the role of running all of the audio visual requirements for the big real estate seminars that we did with Joe Stump and at the time Eben Pagan. And so, Richard has got a long, long history of putting on very high quality and we'll call it high stakes events for entrepreneurs mostly in the business arena.
We would do, six, 800 person events every month for many, many years that Richard was responsible for, making them go off flawlessly. And he's done events for people like Dean Graziosi and Jeff Walker and Eben Pagan and a lot of the guys that you would recognize by name. And so he is a bonafide audio visual expert, and we're going to hatch some evil schemes around the future of the audio visual business. So here we go.
Let's talk about what's going on because I think this is a shift opportunity for you. And that's where we started talking about, as a way to think about what is the future of what you're doing here. And so, tell us the backstory and the sort of situation where we are right now.
Richard: Yeah. Well, so as you mentioned earlier, we do audio visual. I've been doing it since '97, but I actually started my own company in 2010, Seminars Simplified, I did it pretty much by myself growing the company, working crazy hours. And then about two years ago, I partnered up with a couple of guys that I'm working with in the industry here locally in Phoenix that were just total rock stars. And we rebranded the company from Seminar Simplified to Titan Event Technologies. And it's just taking everything to the next level. We've spent quite a bit more on equipment, our processes have gotten more and more refined. The shows, they're just amazing how flawless they run and the gear is great.
When I called you yesterday, we just found out that we lost a large client. Things in the periphery of what we do, we just do audio visual services. This other company offers full service event planning. They offer net logistics on site and they also, more importantly, they offer kind of some real time coaching to the presenter on the sales process like, "Hey, here's what you could do different."
There are revenue generating activities within the framework of the event planning and audio visual framework, right? So it's outside the scope of what we do. And then our conversation, you're like in a sense, "You need to be an above the line, rather than below the line," which has got me thinking quite a bit about that.
Dean: Exactly.
Richard: Right. Because ... Yeah, yeah.
Dean: Wow. Yeah. You don't position right now as a vendor.
Richard: Correct.
Dean: That this other companies maybe will check you out of the lineup of the potential people to fill that role. And so, it's a price sensitive thing in a lot of cases because everybody, technically you got to think as a baseline, everybody's going to do a good job. You hope. That's what you're thinking, right? You don't know that until the actual event kind of thing. But assuming that everything goes right, people are just looking at the outcome and the cost of it. And that becomes a cost sensitive thing because you're one of the line item expenses on the balance sheet of this, of the event that they're putting off.
Richard: Correct. And a big one in most cases, with bigger shows ... Well, good question. I think that if food and beverage could be bigger, you get to over 500,000 people, food and beverage requirements are probably bigger than us, but a show that is two to 300 people, probably our the biggest. Exactly. Yup.
Dean: And so I look at it and, part of the conversation that we started having yesterday when I realized let's record this and make it useful for everyone that, my thought about it is that we're at a point right now where collaboration has never been easier, right? Never easier than now to find people to put together multiple things that are required to make something happen. And I've been telling the tale of why the results of what's happening because of this. When you look at it, maybe you haven't heard me talked about this, but you know that Kylie Jenner just became a billionaire.
I tell that story because she was on the cover of Forbes magazine a year ago as almost a billionaire, right? 900 million. And in Forbes assessment of it, you could almost sense their reluctance to tell you, just as their admission that they have to. They're almost saying, "Listen guys, we don't believe it any more than you do. But even with the most conservative multiples and our discount on top of that, she's got to be at least 900 million." And the truth is she probably is over a billion already, but we're going to give her a 900 million, which prompted someone to start a let's get Kylie to a billion GoFundMe account, which was the best.
I tell that story because in less than three years, she went from zero to a billionaire, on the back of very carefully orchestrated collaboration, right? It's the ultimate who, not how story in that the thing that was the very best about her story is that she only has seven people on her team and they do $350 million in sales a year with a team of seven and every other element, rather than what most entrepreneurs would do if they want to go into the cosmetics business, they would kind of find out a recipe, well how do you make lip liners? And they'd order up the ingredients and cooking them up on the stove and putting them in tubes in the garage and all that stuff, figure out all the bootstrapping things of it.
She partnered with a white label company to manufacture her lip kits. She partnered with Shopify to do all the e-commerce. She partnered with the distributor to package and distribute and fulfillment for her stuff. Her mom's company does the administration of the business and she and her little team of seven people do all the creative stuff, the direction they change the name of the product, the colors, the what answers, what do they want to do?
I tell that story and unfortunately what most people get blinded by is they say, "Yeah, but she had 110 million Instagram followers. She's Kylie Jenner. She's not self-made." Right? And then I got the greatest gift because Old Town Road, which if it stays at number one tomorrow, again, will be, by two weeks, the longest number one song on the billboard charts in the history of all of the billboard charts, right? It's already beat the record. It's been on one song for 17 weeks now. And the story of Old Town Road is exactly the same thing in a different scale.
This young kid in Amsterdam making beats in his bedroom, 20 years old and then Lil Nas X in Atlanta, living in this grandmother's house, finds this beat online, downloads it from YouTube, then finds it on his Beat Stars or whatever place he licenses the beat and records Old Town Road in the closet at his grandmother's house that he's converted into a recording studio. This is seven months ago, right? Seven months ago the song didn't exist and now it's the number song ever in the history of the Billboard charts from two 20 year old kids that nobody had ever heard of until five months ago.
Richard: Wow. It's got 264 million views on YouTube so far too. Wow.
Dean: That's just one way version of it. That's just one version of it. So hat story, this kind of collaboration here is where the future lies, right? You get to take your capabilities and partnering them with people who meet those capabilities. Right? So when you look at this is where I think about what you do, right? So how would you describe what your baseline business is and how you make money?
Richard: Well, we do an event. Why is that production? We facilitate all the technologies that need to be handled during the event as far as the live experience, right? So the sounds, the video, the lights, live streaming, if they're doing that, cameras, we film information products. Anything that has to do with the user experience of the event had to do with technology going on around them, it's what we do. I would say that, that's what we do.
Dean: Yeah. And so, but in the way that you get paid is that, do you do RFPs?
Richard: Yeah. Correct. Yep.
Dean: So people say, "How much is it?" And then they're going to review and look at other people and try and compare apples to apples, right?
Richard: Correct.
Dean: And they're trying to say, "Well, this is going to be cheaper." And you go, "Well, we can match that."
Richard: In some cases. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.
Dean: Yeah. Or there's some other commoditized kind of way that people look at things.
Richard: Right. I mean my business has been a hundred percent referrals since we got started. And so when we get referred, the reputation that we have and the client list that we have, the longevity of the clients that we've been working with and the fact that we know the industry, that's the main foot in the door. And then if they happen to have gotten another quote from an in-house audio video provider at hotel and they see, "Wow, these guys are actually less expensive than in-house." I mean that's it. We're ready to go. Again, sometimes we have to massage "Oh, that's a little bit more than we were expecting. We don't want quite as many bells and whistles." But for the most part, if we can get an accurate assessment of what the vision is and kind of how much for bells and whistles versus how much for just basic, we want them to hear, we want them to see. Anyways, yeah, you're right.
Dean: But then people pay a deposit and then they pay the balance, but you're definitely an expense when they take all the money in from the event, then you're one of the things that they have to deduct from that amount to net whatever they're going to net sounds.
Richard: It sounds so harsh, but it's true. You're an expense.
Dean: You're not an expense. You are. Yeah.
Richard: Yeah. Right. You're the expense. Anyway. Correct. You're right. You're absolutely right.
Dean: So, when I look at this part of the thing, the reason that you have such a referral-based business is really because of your reliability, right? Otherwise, there's a lot of stuff that could go wrong and it's high stakes if it does, right? Because they're counting on the video of this to make a product that's going to be all the profit from what could be a break-even event or a slight loss on the event. But the product is what's going to be the profit maker, then hat video being flawless and usable is a big deal, right? So, you've built in all kinds of redundancies and fail-safe, all of that stuff, right?
Richard: Right.
Dean: And you know that game to make sure that something's not going to go wrong, no surprises. And then also, the fact that you've been doing it so long, you would be the best thing that could happen to somebody who's about to do their first events just as you would be able to take the whole thing on for them, right? In terms of you know how to negotiate ballrooms, how to negotiate with all the extra. You could literally be the event producer from beginning to end. Right?
Richard: Correct. And I would just want to say that we don't push that out so much because 99% of the time, when people come to us, they already have an event planner. And I don't want my relationship with event planners to be adversarial. Like, "Oh, well, next time they could just go to you." While we do have all of those resources available to us, right, we have letters we work with and we don't typically do that so much because we don't want that, like I said, to be adversarial towards planners.
I think that that's also, some of the thinking that I've had in the past, it's prevented some of these peripheral opportunities is that I don't want to create adversarial relationship with a planner that might be getting a little bit of a tension thing and that thing that they're doing, even though I know how to do it, I know how to get it, I know where they're getting it from. So it's a delicate balance there with the politics of that.
Dean: Yeah. When I look at this, one of the ways that I kind of slice things is, right now the way I see your business is that you are open for business and you are waiting and at direction of whatever comes in, right? It sounds to me like my understanding of how your business gets business is somebody will call you and say, "Hey, you did this event for this person, then we're doing something here. Are you available? And can you give us a quote on this? What would it cost to do something like this? Give me an idea. This is what we're thinking." And you're mostly saying to people, "Yeah, we can do that." That's really the thing is that it's more, I would say reactive than proactive. Would that be fair?
Richard: Yeah, in that context, absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.
Dean: Your during unit is on lock in that I have 100% confidence that anybody that comes to you with a need for an event like what you do would be in great hands to have you do it and you're able to convey that message. And most of the time people will hire you, right? So you get your share of those that way and people rave and they stay and use you again and again and again.
So when I look at it, is that now in the before unit of your business, what would you say would you say you do in that, in your before unit?
Richard: Lead generation activities? Is that what you're referring to?
Dean: Yeah. The way I describe the before unit here is that I try and get people to think of the before unit as a separate division of their business whose whole responsibility is to find people who want to do what your business does. So, the before unit would be someone who is in the business of finding people who want to do events and delivering them to your event business that is able to help people with that.
Richard: Correct. Yeah. Got it. Okay. Yeah, so we did some, SEO. I was paying a few hundred dollars a month for an SEO company for about nine months that didn't produce any leads. And we're also doing a few hundred dollars a month with ad words and same company was managing that. And after about, I think it was going on about nine months of spending whatever it was, close to a thousand dollars a month, we stopped all that and I'm like, "This has got to" ... And then we did nothing for a few months. And then a couple months ago I found a really amazing VA who started to reach out to people via LinkedIn and it's been emailing associations. They just got started with that and we already got one lead from that. But that's pretty much all we're doing at this point. We'll like LinkedIn and email to associations of the VA's doing that.
Dean: When you were doing the ad words, what were the terms and stuff, the keywords you were trying to-
Richard: I don't remember. I know we were trying to really focus on Phoenix because this has been so long ago. Again, this is, yeah, I think we ended that November of last year maybe. So it's been a while. November, December. But we're focusing on things like Phoenix Convention Center and Phoenix Conventions. Most of our ads have to do with trying to get clients directly in the Phoenix area, getting on terms that had to do with the convention center, conferences, Scottsdale's conferences.
We went back and forth on that quite a bit. I forget where the majority of that stuff was going on, which terms, but there were quite a few terms and all of them were Phoenix related because I felt like we'd have better luck here locally than trying to do something in another market or, you know what I mean? Just a general you type in event, unless you're doing it, Phoenix, so, but it didn't really produce any results. I think we got one call and started a conversation that the person just stopped responding. So that didn't really produce results.
Dean: What was the offer of the ad?
Richard: Call us.
Dean: Ah, hey, call us.
Richard: Right, right. Exactly. Pretty much.
Dean: Give to us as a business you would give to others.
Richard: Exactly. Right. Don't you know who I think I am?
Dean:Right. Exactly.
Richard: See who I've worked with, see who we've worked with. It wasn't a free giveaway.
Dean: It wasn't like the guide to events in Phoenix or the ballroom spaces or prices or anything that would've been-
Richard: Right.
Dean: You look at that, if you're trying to get in people who are in motion that one of the things that I would do is basically put together the directory of events spaces almost like we did in Toronto with the outdoor wedding directory of doing something like that. When somebody's thinking about doing an event in Phoenix, they might go to Google and type in event space Phoenix or ballrooms Phoenix or conferences Phoenix or some number of terms like that. Do you know whether you were getting traffic and not conversions or getting no traffic for the terms? Was it that nobody was searching the terms or that people were coming to your website but nobody was, reaching out?
Richard: I think it was, I'd have to look back at the stats, but it didn't look that we were getting less traffic because it was taking up-
Dean: I mean if you were spending ad words money, then you would have been getting some traffic. Right? Because that's the only time you pay is when somebody clicks.
Richard: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I have look back at the stats. I had a couple of calls with those things. I was like, "Okay, this is interesting information. What do we do now and why am I not getting calls?" I can't believe that was kind of the way I was, like what do we do here? I was like, "Well, this is happening. This didn't really" ... It was, okay, so what does that mean?
Dean: You needed a who.
Richard: Right, right. Yeah. It wasn't like, "Okay, what do we do now?" It was, "Okay, well we'll just keep doing this for a couple of months. Okay, great." That kind of thing. There's organizations like the Visitors and Convention Bureau of any town. Phoenix has got one. If you reach out, they'll send you a big magazine booklet of all the hotels, right? And then there's a company called C-Vent that if you want to do an event and you basically put it through, we say, "Hey, I want to do an event in Phoenix in whatever January I need, room for 250 people and I probably have a hundred room nights." And then they put it out to all these hotels and then they get the RFPs back for the hotels that have availability and space.
That's kind of the way that a lot of planners are doing at these days. That saves them a lot of time and money. I need to find some sort of bridge gap or some sort of little niche there of information that they're not getting from either C-Vent or the Convention Bureau. What would that be that they wouldn't be getting from either one of those. I need to think that through and figure out hat would be useful to them.
Dean: Yeah, yeah. Part of that thing, like even that business though, that's really about being in the commodity business again, you're just competing with others. That's why I was joking about the give us the business that you write kind of thing right? We're in here too. What about us? Our friend Terry on the phone would call part of the hound dog pack. Right.
Richard: I remember that.
Dean: Chasing after the people who are poking their heads up as someone who's looking for an event and all of the hound dogs come chasing and barking.
Richard: Well, after our conversation and we talked for a few minutes yesterday, I've been taking it. Obviously the key is the how do I get involved with the money making and I have really taken the Dean motto of figure out the what first and the how and stuff later. And that's typically what shuts down a lot of my thinking. I'm sure a lot of business owners, it's like that. It's the how, the who, if that isn't immediately clear than the what never really gets fully expressed into a useful idea. So if I were just to go to what, the thing that I came up with would be many events that we do, do not have any type of sponsorship. They don't.
If I were to create a division like business, we hired somebody and their whole job is just to get sponsors for events, basically, whatever that looks like, there's different things people could sponsor, whether that's printed materials, sponsored cocktail hours. If a client's going to do live streaming, they could do commercials on live stream. But we basically focus on getting ourselves paid for. We have a person on staff whose job is to get sponsors for your events so your AV is free, right?
So that was the first idea I came up with and I'm going to talk to my partners about that tomorrow. Like we need to do this, we're going to do it and we can figure out who and how later.
I would say pretty much one or two clients in the history of doing live streaming over years and years just never really figured out how to properly monetize it. People say we want to live stream it and then they don't do anything to monetize it. And so I've been working on an ebook around monetizing your live stream and I just need to get that finished because there's so much revenue opportunities of live streaming that people are not thinking about. Between the sponsorships, activities, getting sponsors in the door and encouraging them to live stream it. Helping them with the promotion of that, showing them that every 15 minute break is a monetization opportunity. Whether or not their own internal commercials or a sponsors commercial, there's so many revenue opportunities here.
Helping them scrip that out, in such a way that it's like there's money to be made from the live stream as well. So whether or not we're getting what we're paying for ourselves from the sponsors or the livestream activities, your AV essentially all goes well, not only become free, but also be a money maker for you. Those are the ideas that I came up with that I thought would be the most accessible and useful, easy to pivot, I think, for what we do.
Dean: Yeah. You start to think about the totality of what's involved in the event, what actually happens. Where does the money come from in the event? What is the moneymaking thing? What would you say just are the different ways that people make money with events that you've seen?
Richard: Most of it these days has to do with coaching programs and mastermind groups. Selling of the info product from the event, most of the time when we film it goes on to a member area someplace and it becomes just part of the membership of the mastermind or the coaching program. It's not a standalone product. There are some people who do that. Most of the time they do that in our studios, like a direct to camera thing, not in an event environment. But I would say it becomes mastermind sales coaching sales, those types of things are where the big money's being made these days. It's not necessarily the ticket price. The guys like Jay Abraham, they're still charging a few thousand bucks a head.
But not a lot of that. Most of the time it's the masterminds and the other coaching programs that are ... And then of course I know people will get, if they have sponsors, sometimes the people who are doing the sponsorship right, they'll get almost their entire event expenses taken care of if they have a good sponsorship person that's getting sponsors in their events like the mini trade show model where they had a half dozen vendors outside of the table. Those things when they're done right, those sins can be really profitable as well. I would say those are the main things because the ticket sales as you know, those typically barely help you break-even. In most cases, you're still underwater quite a bit.
Dean: And then the value comes from either the products that you create from it or the coaching that you offer at the event, the people coming on to the next thing. So you know yourself, that we have like a three level thing. I mean we're doing the big real estate seminars, we'd do free events that would lead to a paid event, which was basically break-even that led people to the coaching program, which was what paid for everything. And so, yeah, so getting those people in that space was the big thing. How often do you meet with people who it's their first event?
Richard:
Not that often, not very often. Maybe once or twice a year for the most part when we're referred other decent sized fish, refer us to another decent size dish, if you will, not a lot of first time. In the studio we do, but the studios usually direct to camera stuff. It's a coach or an expert who's just getting started in that role as kind of guru and expert, so we get a lot of newbies in the studio space, but not so much in the seminar space because they have to be usually be somewhat established before they're going to get to call that they've got a couple hundred people coming, so they've been doing it for a bit. Not a lot of newbies, not so many, many newbies.
Dean: Uh-huh (affirmative). Part of my thing was thinking, you wonder how many people, how big of an audience would somebody have to have to be able to pull off a 500 person event kind of thing. Which would be, that'd be your sweet spot, right?
Richard: Yep.
Dean: That's the sweet spot for most because most of the big ballrooms that setup a conference room, you could handle that.
Richard: A lot of hotels have decent sized space, 10,000 square feet ballroom. You could accommodate that and most of the bigger properties will have somewhere close to that nine, 10,000 square feet.
Dean: Yeah. Right. Yup. And, when you start to look at that kind of thing, those people have a pretty big following to be able to get that number of people or you have to have a pretty good size marketing budget to get to that. And your observation right now, what would be the kinds of events that are drawing that number of people?
Richard: Man, I'll tell you, we have a half dozen clients in the make money in real estate space and those events are still doing very well. The women's movements, women's empowerment movement, we've got a couple of clients in that space. We haven't worked with them in a bit, but that has been amazing to watch how fast some of those events have doubled and tripled and quadrupled in size. Just because the market's there, they want to be independent, they want to push you the dreams. And I think that the woman's audiences is really just kind of receptive to that.
The moneymaking thing, the biz op thing, people are skeptical about that. The coaching space is really also is getting bigger and bigger. I've been doing more of that space, kind of the Christian Michelson, coaches who teach people how to add a coach and make money. That's a big space there too. I would say those are the big ones. We've done some large events in natural health. That's a big one. We've worked with David Rule for a while. That last event we did with him before they switched directions and stopped doing events, we had 2,200 people at that event and natural health. And that event was filled with a lot of fun people, people that just wanted to make their health better. People that had some illness or disease, there were some wellness coaches as well. But I think those are big ones.
Dean: Part of the thing, like I start thinking about like what are ... If you look at the underlying stuff about like what are the different things of ... cause their ideal would be if you could get somebody who does multiple events, right. That would be a really good thing because that gives you some uniqueness there and stability. I was thinking about like the fixed things like where ... If you basically break up the different types of dynamics coming into an event, either somebody doing a destination event where their audience is first and they're going to bring them to a destination location, which would be like a Las Vegas or an Orlando or a San Diego, would probably be like three, New Orleans.
Phoenix, I would say yes, would be another one of those things. But Phoenix wouldn't be like the top of the ... If you'd say like Las Vegas or Lando. That's a draw on its own. Right?
Richard: Right.
Dean: And so for people who have like big audiences that disperse, everybody's going to come to one location that's always going to get some legs because you can add on to it, right? They can justify it with, well, we'll add onto it and we get a trip to Las Vegas or we can add onto it and we'll bring the kids to Disney World. That kind of thing. And then the other destination ones like Phoenix and anywhere in Florida in the summer, in the winter, San Diego, those kinds of things, warm destinations. That's one level of it.
But then there's another level where you've got a local population coming into the events. The way we used to do the big real estate events was we basically went to on a rotation, kind of the top 16 or 18 markets in the country on a two year cycle, right. So we'd always go to Chicago and Washington, DC and Florida or Tampa or Fort Lauderdale and Phoenix or Palm Springs and Denver and San Francisco. And go with like picking those top markets where the attendees at the event are going to be all from the local sort of market. Right. I would call that like the road show in a way, right? Like that's essentially what we had for 15 years. The circus was coming to town once a year kind of thing.
I mean that's really what it amounted to is we take the big, the big top and it was the big events and everybody was excited about that it was coming to town and you do all the big promotion around it and you'd fill up the event. That's kind of what the real estate guys are doing right now. I don't know whether that's kind of what the health and the women's things are. Is there anybody who is producing or promoting an event like that where you could be almost like the producer of something like that, right? If you were to put together the natural health summit that the sponsors want to put this on, that the speakers want to be part of it, that the speakers get to promote it as their own event, really.
I gave him some Giovanni Marsico here in or in Toronto with the Archangel events. I had him a More Cheese Less Whiskers. We worked out a killer idea, but he was running a big event. He has every year, called the Archangel Summit and he has 3,000, 4,000 people at the event with Seth Goden. He's had Carrie Vaynerchuk, Simon Sinek. All of these top tier speakers, right. That somebody would want to do an event with all of these people but may not want to run a big logistic event like that. And so the idea was that we packaged up an alliance of summit where anybody could run their event in conjunction with the Archangel Summit and have their events attached to it.
So it's a two day event, which now I do one of those with my real estate group. We do the Archangel Summit on one day and then the very next day we have a real estate specific one and there's about six or eight different groups that do the same thing that will bring their groups to it as well. They get some promote an event with Seth Goden and they a day to specifically for their group. Some I'm thinking about putting all these things together like what you've been talking of the sponsors, if you were just to take a thing of natural health and you start to think about that's the kind of event that there'd be a broad national audience for. So there'd be a big number of people in Chicago that would love to go to something like that. And in Atlanta and in Phoenix and in whatever in the top markets. Right?
Richard: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dean: And I wonder if you thought about putting together like a little tour like that.
Richard: That'd be really interesting. Yeah.
Dean: Where you package it up that it's going to help them reach that big of an audience kind of thing.
Richard: And the sponsors would also be part of that tour as well.
Dean: Yeah, exactly.
Richard: Yeah. Right. Just making some notes here. This is interesting stuff.
Dean: Because nobody stopping you from putting on an event like that. I think if you were just to do a practice one in Phoenix, like even for had a low numbers, right? Like just think to yourself like who in Phoenix would love to be in touch with people who are interested in natural health?
Richard: Right, right, right.
Dean: You look at JJ Virgin like her mindshare group and all of those, there's just a bunch of the smartest, most amazing natural health practitioners and idea people that would like to challenge to speak at an event like that.
Richard: Right, right. That's interesting.
Dean: If you put together, even just a one day summit.
Richard: And would you use Facebook to promote that?
Dean: I would look at all kinds of things. Yeah.
Richard: It's the promotional aspect of it that is really just a little bit elusive to me as far as what the most effective way cost effective out there. Because as far as negotiate with the hotel and any of the logistics having to do with setting up a little trade show or we know that's like that my sleep, it's more just figuring out the partnerships of promotion than the different platforms to ... Got it. Yeah. If you started small in a place like Phoenix, you wouldn't necessarily have to go crazy just to see the viability of it to where your break-even point is, you know?
Dean: Right. Just right there in Phoenix you've got Andrew Weil, you've got Alan Christianson, I mean number of are coming through Phoenix for Genius Network. It's an interesting thing that could have some ... I just think about how could you think like a producer, you know?
Richard: Sure. Right. Yeah, that's good though. That's good stuff.
Dean: I just think about that. Or maybe even finding the people who are on the rise who would be the next people who are going to pull off of that like that.
Richard: That was another idea I had just a couple of people here in town that I feel like they might be on the move up. We could potentially partner with them. Because if I would've met Joe Stump, in 1992 or '93, whenever he first started doing that and said, "Let's partner up with this." I mean, I've worked for the company as an employee at that time, but since thinking about, who's going up and how do you partner with them, they've got the list, they've got the message, they've got the charisma and other way up, but they don't necessarily have the revenue to do all the things that they'd like to do. Maybe they're not doing a lot of high quality videos on social media-
Dean: Well, the desire of all the logistics of it. You start to look at this as, that you make doing their event as easy as speaking at someone else's event.
Richard: Yeah. That's great. That's a good tagline too.
Dean: Yeah. There's no shortage of demand for simple.
Richard: Right, right, right.
Dean: Yeah. Yeah. I think you should come back to your, or bring it in anyway, your Seminars Simplified.
Richard: The language. Yeah, we moved away from that because it sounded almost like an education company rather than a production company. But, yeah. The internal part of getting tired of a name or a slogan for the public does, I'll admit to that.
Dean: Yeah. I hear it. I hear it.
Richard: This is good though.
Dean: Yeah. The other thing is what you really have is you've got the skills that you have. If we take just the mechanical skills of what it is, is it's capturing images and sound in digital format. That's really the thing. Now you primarily been doing that in the seminar environment, but you've also done outdoor stuff and studio stuff and music stuff and whatever else, right? We've talked about what your other outlets for your capabilities, like we've talked about you could potentially do more video work or more documentaries or or raining videos, all of that kind of stuff.
I mean, certainly you've got your mission control studios there. You've got an amazing facility that there's a lot of unused capacity.
Richard: resources. Sure.
Dean: Yeah. Right?
Richard: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Exactly. Yeah. Right.
Dean: If you look at studio days or studio a half days that are available kind of thing, you're probably at less than 20% capacity, right?
Richard: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Correct, correct. Yeah. Because we can run that separate in the seminar space. Yeah. Yep. Correct.
Dean: And so then you start to think about, okay, what kind of stuff could that do? We were just watching today over lunch we were watching some Dude Perfect videos. Do you know those guys on YouTube?
Richard: No, I haven't. Nuh-uh (negative).
Dean: It's amazing actually. It's one of the greatest success stories of YouTube. There are five guys in Texas that have a channel where on YouTube where all they do are trick shots and fun stuff. They'll throw basketballs off a high rise and landed in the basket or they'll do these amazing trick shots at football stadiums. Or they've got to some major fantasy factory in their town. But all they're doing is just doing all these things and recording them on video and putting them on their YouTube channel. But the production value is very high.
Richard: I'm looking at it right now. They've got a green screen here and they've got interesting little ... Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah.
Dean: All kinds of fun stuff. Yeah. But those guys are make some crazy amount of money, like $10 million a year from their stuff. But what they'll do is they do branded content videos as well, where Oreos was just sponsored there. They did 12 minute video of ping pong ball trick shots where they orchestrate all these things with ping pong balls and Oreo is the sponsor of all this because they'll use some of the tricks. They'll use Oreos to dunk the Oreos in milk or to do something, but that's exactly what happens because they want to get that audience. I mean, do you enjoy the video production work? That's not going away.
Richard: I enjoyed the ideation of that more than the actual filming of it. I enjoy it when people come in and help you out with the content of it. That's more interesting and satisfying than just the filming of it. But yes, I do.
Dean: Yeah. Because if you take them out the seminar itself, I'm not sure how the seminar business is doing, whether it's on the rise or down or it seems like certainly there's probably different ways to get messages out there. Yeah.
Richard: Sure. Yeah. It depends. I mean, for associations and things like that, for the info marketer there's a lot of other ways you get the message out there. But obviously in the other side of the business seminar. Every association that has a certain amount of members will do yearly conferences. There's no shortage of that stuff either. With the info marketer, yeah, there's a lot of things like Facebook watch and YouTube and things like that where you can get the message out like this. Yeah. Interesting.
Dean: I just think out loud about the things that I would like to do-
Richard: I got to stop watching this. I'm watching this in the background. I listened to it and it's really well cut too. It's definitely cut. I mean it's really well done, really well done. All right. I'm going to put that away.
Dean: I'm like you in that I like to come up with the ideas, but I would be inclined to start testing ideas to find ones that have traction, but be like a producer lab or start testing ideas and seeing if you get something that gets traction, you know?
Richard: Right, right, yeah, right.
Dean: Thinking outside the box. I mean video production is certainly video. There's more and more and more and more of that now. But you look at what you do, like all these comedy specials that people do on Netflix and all that stuff. I mean that's essentially, you could do that, right? You could introduce any of those Netflix specials. Is there anything special about that, that you couldn't do?
Richard: You mean like in the theater, you talking about like theater?
Dean: Yeah.
Richard: Oh yeah, no, that we could do that. That's in our wheelhouse for sure.
Dean: Yeah. And you've actually done stuff like that. Haven't you?
Richard: Yeah. We shot Lamborghini's racing through the desert. I brought some people out from-
Dean: Right, exactly.
Richard: We've done a lot of stuff, so, yeah. So like that, that's a fixed environment that's easy. You know?
Dean: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's part of the thing is I would spend a lot of the times just brainstorming and thinking about what actually makes money with this and how could I collaborate with someone who's got either has the audience and the ideas or we bring the ideas that start thinking about who can plug into these things. There's not many people who are packagers like this will be a dream come true for a local practitioner with a brand new book would be to be invited to speak at some kind of a summit with a name brand person. Right?
Richard: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Right, right.
Dean: And someone like that who may have a quote. I mean you're in Phoenix. Let's look at the environment where you are. You're in an environment where the National Speakers Association is right there.
Richard: Correct.
Dean: All the people who aspire to be speakers or are speakers are literally right there, a lot of them, a lot of the time. They start thinking about plucking these resources, putting them together in interesting ways that some of them might be interested in also the thing they get is access to themselves for free like you do.
Richard: Say that a different way you, that last piece was a little confusing.
Dean: Like someone who's got the juice to pull off or be a draw for events and they may have a speaker fee that people pay of, 15, 20, 25,000, 40,000, whatever the fee is that they get. But they have total discretion on that in terms of they may be willing to put together something like that and they're the anchor tenant of it.
Richard: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I got it. Got it. Okay. Right. I see where you're going with that, right?
Dean: Yeah, you look at something like that, right. Either just running that in a Phoenix one that's right there in their backyard or if you can, one that really works is packaging up that road show and taking it to all over, does maybe GNC or what's a national natural health-
Richard: Shopper. Yeah, yeah. Stuff like that GNC.
Dean: Right. That would want to promote and have some interesting opportunity there.
Richard: This is good man. This is really good stuff.
Dean: What's landing so far? What are we discovering here?
Richard: I think, the fastest path to the cash is, I mean the sponsorships and that's the thing that's ... And then secondarily, I've already started making a list of a couple of people here locally that I think might be interesting people to approach to see what they're up to, see what their vision is, see how big of a list they have now. And talk about taking what we have, what they have and moving faster and exponentially bigger, I mean, rather than them waiting until they have a hundred grand or whatever it is to put on an event and we could do this sooner and we could do a lot less money and just see what happens with some of that stuff.
And then I'd let it percolate a little bit on this local event. Do it ourselves. My partners and I actually talked about something like that, but those are all good ideas man. That's really good stuff and I think we can-
Dean: That's good thinking. That's good thinking fodder on that route.
Richard: One of the things that I say is, how do we get to a different part of the food chain? And all of this content is all about about being at a different part of the food chain. That's being above the line, where the money's coming in rather than being below the line where the money is going out. This is really good stuff meditate on and just really figure out what's the fastest pivot point to get into action with some of this stuff. Obviously it would take a few months to plan an event to where people would attend it, but we could potentially have a sponsorship person start next week. You know what I mean?
Dean: Yeah
Richard: It's just looking at all these things and figuring out what makes sense first and then how can we test some of these ideas small? There's a small ballroom, two minutes drive from our office, like a little four point Sheraton that we could get inexpensive to test something, and of course all our gear is here so we could make it look beautiful. Just percolating all this stuff, you know?
Dean: Yeah. Yeah.
Richard: That's a good word, percolate. I think I got that from-
Dean: I like it. Percolating is a good word. I like it. All right, well, normally your stories have become tiresome. No. Yeah. I think that's really the thing. I just want to see you really take more entrepreneurial control of something like this because you've got all the capabilities.
Richard: I'll just call myself out, thinking like a vendor foolishly, thinking like a vendor and vendors, if there's a better leverage opportunity, better pricing or better whatever, there's extra service you don't offer, it's like you could be replaced no matter even if you do a good job.
Dean: How much time you have available right now? How much time does your business require of you?
Richard: I mean on the seminar side, very little. I mean a few hours a week to keep that going. Just kind of manage the lead generation and I definitely have a lot of times available at this point in time to help things grow because my partners have taken a lot off of my plate and the goal now is to get new leads coming in, but I think we need to be thinking more strategically about what kind of leads and the kind of services that we offer and to not get-
Dean: I think this is the kind of thing, I mean if were to just put on your thinking hat and not think like a vendor and start to think like a, cute is a great word. I've been thinking like a venture collaborist where you just got to be able to find people and collaborate on things that maybe they're not going to throw in some money today, but they can in 90 days or in six months or something, you know?
Richard: Right, right, right.
Dean: But you're doing it together to create, your combined capabilities are going to create a multiple of what your individual capability could do as a vendor.
Richard: Right. Yeah. That's good.
Dean: Right?
Richard: Yeah.
Dean: Because you're capped on stuff and that's been my big aha, is that people are far less attached to future monies than present money.
Richard: True.
Dean: Especially when you're going to create this future money, you know? Well, that's really all I have to say from it.
Richard: Awesome. Thanks so much brother.
Dean: All right, I'll talk to you later.
Richard: Talk to you later. All right. Yeah, bye.
Dean: And there we have it. Another great episode. Thanks for listening in. If you want to continue the conversation or go deeper in how the eight profit activators can apply to your business, two things you can do. Right now you can go to morecheeselesswhiskers.com and you can download a copy of the More Cheese Less Whiskers book and you can listen to the back episodes of course if you're just listening here on iTunes.
Secondly, the thing that we talk about in applying all of the eight profit activators are part of the breakthrough DNA process and you can download a book and a scorecard and watch a video all about the eight profit activators at breakthroughdna.com and that's a great place to start the journey in applying this scientific approach to growing your business. That's really the way we think about breakthrough DNA as an operating system that you can overlay on your existing business and immediately look for insights there. So that's it for this week. Have a great week, and we will be back next time with another episode of More Cheese Less Whiskers.