489: The Most Important Strategies To Grow Your Business This Year With Phil Taylor

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You’re listening to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into what strategies are working and what strategies are not with their businesses. Today I’m thrilled to have Phil Taylor back on the show. And Phil is the founder of FinCon, which is the conference that literally launched my speaking career and allowed me to meet so many awesome entrepreneurs who I can now call my friends. And I’m actually speaking on the big stage at FinCon this year in New Orleans. So if you happen to be there, I’d love to hold a meetup. In any case,

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Phil and I are going to discuss the single most important thing that will grow your business this year. But before we begin, I want to give a quick shout out to Chase Diamond for sponsoring this episode. Chase is my go-to guy when it comes to email marketing, and he runs a successful email marketing agency over at Structured Agency, which caters to many eight and nine figure e-commerce brands. Now, for those of you who can’t afford to hire an agency, Chase offers a pretty good email marketing course if you want to learn how to do email yourself.

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And this course can be found over at mywifequitterjob.com slash chase. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash chase. I also want to thank Emerge Council for sponsoring this episode. Now if you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at bumblebeelenons.com. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council,

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is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. For example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself. And the students in my class have used Steve for copywriting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to emergecouncil.com and get a free consult. And if you tell Steve that I sent you,

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you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now onto the show.

02:07
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit or Job podcast. Today I have a very special guest on the show, Phil Taylor. Now Phil’s a longtime friend and he’s been creating content about personal finance probably for over a decade now. He runs the popular conference FinCon, which is one of the largest financial influencer events in the U.S. where I had my very first speaking gig and Phil took a chance on me as a speaker and I’m extremely grateful because

02:35
That experience actually made me super excited to speak on stage and at FinCon, I also met my mastermind group who is instrumental in helping me grow my blog to where it is today. And as a result, I owe a lot to this guy, man, and I’m thrilled to have him back. What’s up, PT? I owe a lot to you too, Steve. It’s good to be on with you, So the last time you were on, which was, man, years ago, I want to say FinCon was not nearly where it is today.

03:04
And I’m just curious how it’s evolved over the years. It’s been like 10 years, right? The event where we started in 2011. So what is that 12 years? Yeah, 12. Yeah, crazy. Yep. No event in 2020. Unfortunately, we did a digital one that year. But yeah, I think this will be our 12th or 13th. Oh, I’ve stopped. I’ve stopped keeping count. Oh, past 10. It’s like, who cares, right? I’m not there yet. I think I’m at year eight. And that

03:29
That pandemic year was really tough for me too, but let’s not talk about that year. Yeah. So a lot, a lot has changed. started in 2011 with 200 people. It was a side hustle for me. I didn’t know anything about events, but I had friends who knew about it and I’m better, better. I more importantly, I should say I had a community of people who were ready to get together. And if you go back and listen to the first podcast, I mean, that’s the first big nugget that I’m going to give you back then is if you’re going to be in events.

03:56
have people ready that want to be together. That’s the easiest way to do them. And I knew that. I knew that it was a great community. Started with about 250 people that first year. And yes, we’ve grown it to a high water mark in 2019 of around 3000. which is nuts. Yeah. It’s a great run there. We’re sort of post pandemic now and growing things back. We hope to reach back up to around 2000 mark this year. So we’ll be in New Orleans for our 12th and that’s in October. And,

04:26
You know, we’ve done a lot of iterations through the years. I’ve tried to evolve with the industries. We can talk about some of that. Um, we’ve got a fantastic community that we tried to shepherd through the years, but how has it changed? would just say the biggest probably change we’ve had is me moving the event from just bloggers because initially it was called the financial blogger conference. don’t even know if you remember that. So someone like you sort of was on the.

04:54
sort of the outskirts of that community to a degree. And so you might’ve perceived it as necessarily not for you, but you knew it was for someone specifically, which helped us to grow it. But then we quickly expanded sort of the umbrella, the tent, and it became ThinkCon, which really stands for financial content expo these days. And that could be a blogger, it could be a podcast or YouTuber, anyone really creating content around the idea of improving your financial life. And that can expand into

05:24
business and real estate. so that’s the biggest change, I guess, is the growing scope of it. Um, and then continuing to change that as we’re entering sort of this creator economy where everything is really sort of podcast and YouTube driven. Um, we really want to move the conference and that continue moving in that direction. So just trying to evolve the event, you know, from a scope standpoint. Yeah, you know, uh, I think I, missed the very first year.

05:51
I came the second year and I haven’t missed one since I don’t think and what I noticed is like it basically replaced blog world. Do you remember blog? That was a great event. I love that event. Yeah. And all the sessions were about how to content and everything. So I want to feel like FinCon has replaced blog world in a way it has. Uh, I saw it initially as a niche down version of blog world, right?

06:17
So, but what we ended up doing because the FinCon community was so great was just making a fantastic event that even people from other niches were excited to come. So we started having people from travel, from the entrepreneurship side. I mean, just really people were attracted to the community and this cool event that we created. And yes, I was a huge fan of what Rick Calvert built with Blog World Expo. think the last year he called it New Media Expo or something like that, because he was trying to make that scope change as well.

06:45
You know, not the, I don’t know the details of, of why, you know, he shut that event down, but I know that for me, it was finding that niche. so even having created FinCon, I now see other event owners create niches within our community and spin off events. So it’s just a natural evolution of gathering people. Uh, the bigger that gathering becomes, the more likely it is that a group within that group is going to then peel off and find their own thing too. Um, so.

07:14
That’s just kind of how events work. So it’s funny is you were pretty instrumental in helping me start my event. I have chosen to keep my event small just because I miss, you know, just small. I like small events over large ones, but I am curious. How does one grow an event to 3000 people? That just sounds ridiculous to me. Just the logistics gives me a headache. Actually, how did that happen? Yep. So for me, I always

07:40
I didn’t necessarily want to have a big event just to have one, even though that does improve the margins of the event and makes it more profitable. Um, but I always perceived it as our community needs a bigger event because our industry continues to grow. And so I’m not the person on stage, give it, doling out the advice. You know this, I, you know, get guys, smart guys like Steve to get up there and talk about, um, what they’re great at. And, and that’s what makes the event great. So.

08:09
Uh, if I’m not the talent, then the community is bringing that talent, but more importantly, the community wants to place to come and do deals. They want a place to come and do business at the event. And so financial creators are looking for brands to work with on a regular basis. And so this gives them a chance to work with those brands face to face, you know, be at a party together and sit down at a meeting table together and talk about like how their content could work with their brand and strike up a real deal face to face.

08:38
Not this cold emailing, you know, trying to hit people up on Twitter if you’re for a new creator. So the idea for me has always been about like creating these partnerships. And so if we want to create these partnerships, well, then it kind of matters. Uh, that we get a, there are all the right people that we, need the industry there from a brand side. And then from the creator side, we sort of need everyone there. So that’s been my natural push to grow it. And yes, you, you should be, you should.

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be strategic and intentional about whether you want to grow it or not. Uh, and, and, sort of understand that that’s what you want. So for me, it was all about growth because our industry was growing. So how did we grow it? Uh, I wrote an article, um, post and go check it out on PT money.com. It’s, it’s, uh, essentially seven ways to grow your business. And I sort of tried to apply this to any business, but the examples I use primarily were how we grew FinCon. Um, and so if you want, I could just go through each of those points and we can hit on them and kind of.

09:34
kick them back. Yeah, yeah, yeah, let’s do that. And I’ll post actually the the link to that article below. One thing I just wanted to say was, I remember I was just getting started blogging. And I wasn’t even writing about personal finance. I was writing about business. And I walked into FinCon. And I think I secured a bunch of sponsorship deals, like right on the bat. So I got I think, Hostgator to sponsor my or I can’t remember what the hosting company was just to sponsor my podcast. And then I got like a couple banks to

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to pay me to just promote their bank. And yeah, it’s like a great place to monetize whatever you’re trying to do. So I really appreciated that too. that’s good to hear. That was definitely the goal. So cool. So number one, number one way, just more context. During the first seven years of Vincon, I took it from around $100,000 in top line revenue to over a million. So it was seven years to a million dollars. And so that adhered these seven points I’m gonna give you. Perfect, right?

10:33
Okay. The first one is, uh, make the product better for us. We were, we had the, we had the posture of continuous improvement with our event. So every year I wanted to improve it. the challenging thing with events is that you have to kind of wait 11 months to kind of improve it or show the improvement, but that was the goal every year. Just make it better. Just make it a little bit better. So as you think about your business, um, have that growth mindset, have that, uh,

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mindset of trying to improve upon what you build before you go expand into other things. Just take this one thing you’re doing and try to make it as good as possible, right? And how do you get those ideas to improve it? How do you understand what you need to improve? Because what is good, right? The way we did it is from user feedback. So we actually polled, regularly poll our attendees, post conference, sometimes free conference, to try to understand what they want out of the event, what they’re getting out of.

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how they’re liking certain aspects of the event. So I think it’s Sam Walton who said something like, the boss, there’s only one boss in your business and it’s the customer. Right. And so I think that’s a good posture that we tried to take was there. This community is going to help us drive this event forward and make this product better. Um, and so that’s just the posture we took. How did we do that with our event? Um, we did it by, you know, trying to get better speakers.

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trying to get cooler locations, a better hotel. They wanted better parties. They wanted more networking opportunities. We hear up here in that in the initial outset, it’s like too many sessions. We just want to be able to like talk with each other and do business. Clear communication leading up to the event. So these are all the things that again, that our users told us. So as a business owner, it’s important to discover that feedback mechanism that you need to get and not be afraid of that. So many business owners I see.

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afraid to hear what their customers actually think of their product and that’s such a There’s insecurity in that and I have that too Sometimes you don’t want to hear those negative things but and there’s so much gold and opening that conversation up with your customers. So Yeah, let me ask you this PT What are some of the biggest challenges right now that people are asking for in the financial creator community? So just in general sort of doing business in that community

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How do you get a hold of brands to do deals? Because there are a lot of them are little scared right now to work with creators because of 2022 and sort of the FTX blow up. yes, that’s right. Yeah, I forgot about that. of a negative perception. I think sometimes with financial creators, especially YouTubers, overcoming that hurdle, overcoming the hurdle of sort of burnout is very common amongst this crew because you’re just a content creator and it seems like an endless.

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project that you’re working on. There’s no stop and start to it. Yeah. Other, I would say also the, one of the biggest that our business straight up solves is the fact that being it’s kind of lonely being a creator, right? So you’re sort of doing this editing behind the camera, behind the mic. And, um, you know, eventually it’s just like, man, I wish I had, or my wife’s tired of hearing me talk about this thing, the neighbor, he’s an insurance or he doesn’t relate to actually what I’m doing. So.

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How do I find this group of people that kind of understand me and I can relate to and kind of share ideas and move forward with, you I’m curious what types of content are working right now. Are those the people blogging or is it tick tock YouTube, uh, Instagram? Like what are people asking for right now? Yep. Uh, I think, I think you should think about your content like this and good creators out there like yourself are already doing it. They starting with some type of video.

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script, either scripted or interview based, right? And then they take that and that conversation or that monologue then becomes a blog post. It becomes short form video that they can put into the feed of what everyone’s really doing, which is just flipping through their phone on these, um, know, Instagram stories and YouTube shorts and all this stuff. But that’s so that you gotta have that out there to get people into the deeper stuff.

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But this deeper conversation is where the real content is being created and real relationships are being formed and people really get to know you and feel intimate with you and kind of understand your brand and really fall in love with you. Um, so that’s kind of the, that’s kind of what I see the best creators doing right now. They start with this either a conversation or that monologue and that that becomes a blog post. And then it’s chopped up into social media bits to go out on all the different channels where people are actually watching.

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to attract them into the long form stuff. I guess what I’m asking is, you know, the brands that go to FinCon, what type of sponsorships are they offering? Are they looking for blogs, videos, shorts? I mean, what’s the trend? think it depends on who you’re talking to. Affiliate marketers are still very comfortable with blog content. Yeah, because it’s evergreen and it’s richer to a certain degree, or can be.

15:50
Um, so the affiliate, any affiliate performance marketer you’re going to be talking to just likes that sort of static web organic SEO based traffic. Yep. Campaigners typically are more comfortable with a video. So someone who’s really charismatic on video and doing really having a good conversation with their audience tends to do well with campaigns. So sponsored campaigns, pay per video, pay for podcast episode, that kind of stuff.

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Um, and I think the context of it matters too. So if you’re a military finance show, I mean, there’s a handful of advertisers that are perfect fit for you and they’re going be more interested in working with you, regardless really of the size of your show. Um, and so I think you’re seeing a little bit more of a niche down with advertisers. They’re not just kind of throwing money at the Jake Paul’s of the world, even though that still does happen with big brands. They’re more interested in what you consider like a micro influencer or creator.

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who is really targeted. So think about that. that’s the kind of advertising you want to attract, then get more targeted. Yeah, I remember when I was first starting out, the main advertisers I was attracting was very e-commerce specific. And I was surprised at how much they were willing to pay because the audience is so focused. So I would imagine the more you niche down and you find that perfect advertiser, they’ll probably be willing to pay you a decent amount of money. I think so.

17:17
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18:33
PT. Sorry, we want off the tangent. So what’s number two? Well, just to close the loop on one, a great, great book to continue discovering sort of what your customer wants is asked by Ryan Leveque. So that’s kind of my second resource I’ll drop in there. Okay. And it’s sort of helping you understand like how to have those conversations with your customer. The second is once you feel like you’ve perfected core product, then it’s time to innovate with new products. And this doesn’t have to be done.

18:59
And a big splash all at once. You can take sort of the lean startup method, which is to pick these, um, little elements of your event to expand upon or kind of introduce something new. Right. And the key here is two things. One, it allows you as an entrepreneur who is a creative to come up with something new without completely abandoning the thing that’s your bread and butter at this point. Right. So, you know, you know how it is, you’re a creative guy.

19:28
You’re kind of chasing these shiny objects and all over the place. And it’s like, Oh, I could do this new thing. So with an event, you don’t have to necessarily go create a new business. can still sort of just iterate within the event itself. The key is not being married to them and just, and using almost as like figure out how to test them. Right. So, so come up with these small innovations within your, uh, event or whatever business you’re running and then, uh, test them instead of sort of.

19:56
going full board down that road. And if one pops, then you know you’ve got sort of a new product line or you’ve got this new sort of benefit attached to what you’re doing. So that’s kind of the perspective to have, I guess, when you’re thinking about new things to create. having been to every FinCon, give me an example. Yep. We expanded what we offered sponsors. So that was some of the that’s some of the we sort of iterate on that every year. We come up with something new. We can offer sponsors for them to pick up.

20:26
whether that be a new party or a new sort of a mastermind element to the event or this new meetup thing we’re doing, or for instance, this year we brought on, um, we made our own video recording booth at FinCon this year. So FinCon just put one up, we have one and you can buy time in it and bring an influencer and do stuff in there while you’re there. So we’re just kind of come up. Yeah, we’re just coming up with these all kinds of new things, new tracks, new ticket.

20:54
Something we did really well was create the, pro pass. So I resisted in the first couple of years, cause I wanted it just to be so accessible. said, we need a $99 ticket. This was the first couple of think cons. was $99 to go to our conference. Um, and I was so stubborn about that. Everyone told me that’s so stupid. You need a more expensive ticket. You need to make some money off this thing. It took me too long to figure this out, but, uh, essentially I said, okay, how can we keep that low, but still make a little more margin? Well, let’s offer like.

21:24
some more advanced people, you know, this more premium value ticket. So we put them together, make it easier for them to meet with brands, give them some extra swag, make it do an extra party for them, not to create a VIP status at our event, because I’m very anti that, but just to give people more value and we can charge for it. creating a second ticket tier was a big part of sort of expanding what we do with our event.

21:51
I thought that was ingenious by the way. just thought I mentioned this and it’s unique to your event because the people who attend are actually creators who actually want to get brand deals. And the best way to do that is to get the pro pass to facilitate that. It’s almost like unlike any other conference that I’ve been to. I don’t think anyone else could pull that off. Yeah. Yeah. We’re we’re it made sense.

22:15
So you got to figure out with your event, you got to figure out where is the deeper value for your attendee and the sponsor. Right. And then Mary, the premium ticket to that activity. And then you found this out just through surveys from the attendees and that sort of thing that you knew that. my own, uh, inclinations because I am, I was a creator at the time in the space. I’m less and less so these days, but I was, I was definitely like, you know, a member of the tribe. And so.

22:45
These were my needs too. And to give credit where credit’s due, Blog World Expo did have something similar. Yeah. So I, I, I did see an somewhat of an example that Rick was doing over there and you could say I, you know, I stole that idea a little bit, but still, still like an artist, right? Cool. I like that. I’m asking you now for selfish reasons. Really? I do like that booth because sponsors always want influencer content, right?

23:15
And just casually pulling someone over to just record a quick testimonial video seems pretty easy. Yeah. It just gives them a space to activate. Now it’s our first year doing it. And to be honest with you, I’m not sure how successful it’s been in selling it. And it may be one of those things where once we introduce it, the brands get there and they see it in action. Then it makes more sense. So there’s probably a better way we could have introduced it where we had more intentionality around it. For instance, maybe we made it.

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free for the first year, but you had to sign up for an official time slot. Um, that may have created more activation for it. And then next year, you know, we actually start charging for it. So yeah, you know, think about these things as you do them. You make some mistakes along the way, but again, don’t marry yourself to these new ideas. Just throw them out there within the umbrella. Don’t spend all your resources or time on them, but if one pops, then you know, you got something, you know, you got something else. Great. So, yeah. Awesome. Great advice.

24:14
Cool. Number three, you want to go to three? Yeah, let’s do it. Number three is creating content and social media. Obviously this was a no-brainer for us being a content, you know, financial content expo. We had to be sort of, yeah, but content can be scary for a busy entrepreneur. How do you get this done? Uh, for us, we reached initially into our attendee community, um, and said, is there anyone who can write?

24:41
You know, or we actually we asked for guest posts. Initially we started our blog at FinCon with guest posts. So we just asked people, the community, if they wanted to contribute something. And then we had the idea, Hey, instead of just a conference pamphlet, we give people when they walk up, what if they had articles in it too? So we make this little magazine that you could get when you showed up to the conference and it had these articles that these folks had contributed. So not only was it sort of a community building exercise, but it was a user generated. So didn’t.

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necessarily take us a lot of time to do it. We iterated from that into a podcast, the financial blogger podcast, where I interviewed speakers and sponsors who were coming to the event, leading up to it. We did that for several years, just like in the last six months before the event, which is a perfect vehicle for to talk about the event, but also hear from the people who are going to be there, get the audience comfortable with, you know, certain speakers and sponsors and, uh, do the, you know, do the work of promoting the conference as well. Um,

25:38
We got into newsletters in 2019 and did really good community newsletter, but frankly, we’re slipping in the content game. And so we’re going to bring that back in the next couple of years to do a, to a better job of that. know, walk me through that actually. as you’re considering what content to create, I know you mentioned a podcast, you mentioned the blog. What, where’s your focus? Is it going to be on video? Is it going to be on blogging podcast?

26:03
We have great resources and assets already available. We have all the pictures from the event. have all the videos from the event, including all the sessions. So my big push going forward with, with the team is going to be to suggest that needs to be what’s, what’s our YouTube channel. It needs to be all those sessions and then those need to be chopped up into smaller bits. It’s embarrassing that we’re not doing it already, but we’re just, we’re coming out of the lean years of the pandemic. got through that and now we can start.

26:33
Spending some more money on marketing to do it right and we just had we have all the assets that a year’s worth of video and That becomes short form those can become bulk blog posts. We don’t have to create anything new, but I am excited about one new thing So another idea that I had for in terms of content And this was sort of after seeing what the starter story well starter story is a good example where he builds essentially a database of

27:02
businesses and then he uses that database to sort of create lists and create like bigger content ideas. And so when we sign people up to the event, we ask them all kinds of questions about what niche they’re involved in, um, whether from how many FinCons they’ve been to what media, what platforms they’re on, all this information that’s very rich and valuable, uh, which should be shown, you know, to the community to give them perspective.

27:30
And to help them sort of understand the trends and what’s working and also to highlight people who are doing good work. So this user data that we have from the, from registrations is something that I’m toying around with playing around with creating a database of sorts. So then we can take that database and use it to create lots of content ideas. You started to see me do it already with, I think I did a list of top affiliate programs for personal finance creators, top top personal finance journalists.

27:59
So I’m sort of, you know, there’s tons of content ideas based on just the data we have. So the assets and the data are the things that are going to help drive the content generation forward. It’s not going to be me doing sort of a one-on-one deal. It’s going to be sort of expanding all that information that we have. Yeah. I mean, I’m just thinking about the size of FinCon and the number of sessions you have enough content for years without having to do anything. Yep. And we’ve been somewhat foolishly putting it behind a paywall.

28:29
Uh, to see if we can get people to pay for that content. And we do, but I think it would be better served. It’s just the community had it on a free basis and we figured out another way to offer premium content down the road. we wanted to do that. Cause I’m in kind of the same boat. I’ve got like eight years worth of content that isn’t even really behind a paywall. Actually, it’s just behind a wall that’s not getting paid. Yeah. I’ve never seen one of your sessions from your event.

28:58
Except maybe a keynote for you one time. Yeah. Yeah. I published the keynotes, but yeah. Uh, cause we sell the virtual pass, you know, during the event, but you know, the value of the virtual pass kind of declines over the years. Right. Yep. So even if we just started, let’s say three months post event and started publishing it on YouTube one at a time, it’s not like everyone’s getting this big data dump. They’re getting it slowly dripped out over, over the years. And there’s so much stuff we already have in the back catalog. That’s evergreen.

29:28
We could release so it’s a matter of distribution. Yes, great idea and I’m sure people listening probably have gold mines of content somewhere. Whether it’s something you’ve done for work or whatnot that you can just break apart and start creating content to promote whatever you’re selling and if you don’t have it start start collecting it now. Yeah, for all right. had number four create or foster or community. So the big thing we do here is we let the community sort of help form the event right? So we’re.

29:57
in a posture always of this is for the creators that are there and it’s by them. So they help us, uh, it’s open speaker submissions. So we get over 500 speaker submissions every year to the event, which is great. And we, publicize that we almost run ads for that. Cause I just want as much coming in as possible because again, that, gives a, and I say that I shared this in our, in our previous episode was, it’s just like ownership.

30:25
You’ve got to give the attendees ownership in the event, right? You got to let, make them feel like they helped craft it. Right. So that’s what we do as much as possible with our community is we empower them to help us build this event. New ideas, some of the new innovations we’ve done at the event have been things that the community has contributed. And so we sort of have this open posture toward open sourcing the event itself. Um, and then for community sake, we do, uh, we do.

30:53
Facebook groups, we’re still stuck in those. They’re not ideal. We’re about to move away for them, I feel like, but through the years, they’ve been a tremendous tool to bring new people sort of into our tribe when the event is not going on or being promoted. And then for them to have conversations 24 seven, and that’s sort of, you’re moving away from Facebook, just curious what platform you’re considering at school. That’s probably the one I’ll end up with. There’s also circle. And then what’s the other one? Mighty networks. So it’s sort of amongst those three.

31:23
Um, but I really like what I see out of school. know I like the founder and I like, he’s sort of taken a slow growth method with the platform. Um, very intentional. Um, so, I’ve, and I’ve been in some communities on school before and enjoyed it. guess the problem with that is like most people don’t even know what it is or have the app or whatever. They’re not logged in, right? Right. That’s right. And yeah, so that’s a hurdle is getting, but half our audience is not on Facebook anymore.

31:52
So, yeah. So we’re going to lose them either way. Yeah, that makes sense. So I think community is important. We also did local meetups for a while. We still do a few of those. So we encourage people in cities all over the US and the world to get together on a quarterly basis. We give them funds. We create a community leader and we give that community leader some funds to throw the

32:21
meetups, the happy hours, get some appetizers, that kind of thing. And they all gather together. And I do that personally when I go to places, I go to other events. It’s a, community building exercise. For instance, I just got back from podcast movement and my whole deal there was to connect with every financial podcaster there was at the event. And how do I do that? I throw them a big meetup party, drinks. Um, and then we have a podcast booth in our booth.

32:49
where they can come and do their show. They can kind of hang around that area and meet other people. So being that community builder with your business, just continuing that throughout all you do is important. I love it. Community is tough, man. You’ve done a great job. It really is tough to foster community. is. And yeah, it’s easy to screw up too. But, but you know, if, your heart, if you’re in your heart and soul, you’re,

33:18
You really value like trying to help these folks then over time, you know, you’ll be able to build that. So, uh, I am so thankful for the community. And again, that goes sort of goes back to posture. I think it’s important as a business owner to see your customer as really the most important piece of this whole thing. And if you put them in that position, then you’ll treat them, you know, appropriately and build a community. right. Uh, number five, charge more.

33:47
This is hard for me because I’m a frugal guy and I don’t like, I don’t like paying for stuff myself sometimes. So it was hard for me to increase prices at the event, but we were able to do it through not necessarily charging the loyal customers more, but just everyone sort of after that point. we introduced price increases post what do call it pre-launch, you know, another thing we did was I sort of talked about the one ticket new created, but ultimately we landed on three tickets that we now offer. And so you it’s the rule of three.

34:17
right? So you can you can see the three prices out there. I sense that you had a question, Steve. So I was just gonna say, I’ve always thought that the ticket prices were ridiculously low for you. Like, if you look at how much I charge for mine, I mean, yours is like easily less than half or a third. And I’ve always wondered. Yeah, it was a no brainer, I think because you give so much value for the for the ticket price. How much is it now?

34:44
It’s still probably pretty cheap. Am I, I’m guessing it’s essentially a less, we try to keep it less than 300 for the entry. Exactly. Crazy. And then we do around 600 for what we call the pro pass. So it’s a double price for that. And then we offer a brand pass. So if you’re coming from the industry, um, sort of not necessarily in that creator, uh, avatar, if you’re sort of someone they’re doing business and you’re not sponsoring or you’re not exhibiting with us, then you’re going to pay a

35:11
the biggest premium and that’s a thousand dollar ticket. So that’s how we structure. And man, by having that brand pass up there, those will, we don’t sell that many of those, but having that thousand dollars up there makes that $600 ticket look really nice, you know, for the creator. And so we, we could see it as soon as we launched the three options, man, people moved toward that second option so fast. I mean, it’s just, that’s just how your mind works. Right. I can’t do three, but I can, I could do two, you know,

35:41
That’s just, that’s how we think. So, it’s, there’s real value in that. It’s just not, there’s not trickeration going on, but if when we structured it that way, we saw a big increase in the second option, uh, versus just having two tickets up there. How do you get that? six. I’m sorry. What, uh, how do get that price? Right. That’s a challenge. I think, I do think it’s important not to discount and I’ve, I’ve stopped offering as many discounts through the years.

36:10
But my people are just financial nerds and they, they live and die by the price they’re paying for something. So, you know, and again, I told you, my main goal is to make it a place where everyone’s there. And so we, we, we make it accessible. Yeah, for sure. It’s, it’s actually, I mean, just look at all the events PT. I think yours is like one of the least expensive ones out there. It really is pretty ridiculous. Well, maybe I’ll raise the prices.

36:39
No, we but just for the other event owners out there, we do graduate our prices. So by the time the event gets there, I do believe it’s more than 300. And we had started at like 225 or something. So we graduate our prices gives us something to market off of, and also incentivizes people to join us really early. So I would definitely do that. mean, everyone needs a sense of urgency. So we always have a cutoff where I say, hey, prices are going to go up next month or, and every month or every two weeks from here on out.

37:09
That’s what I do. My next one is grow through a talented team. And so I’ve been able to do this by, you know, finding folks in my life who were specialists at event marketing, event organization, and event branding, as well as the AV side of things. So those four areas are so key when you want to have make an event attractive, but also make it financially successful. Having those team members is so important.

37:39
So someone to organize it, I’m more of a visionary community builder, but I need someone to sort of hold down the details. And that was Jessica. She was a college buddy who was actually my VA at the time with my other business. And I said, you’re perfect for this. know, you should help me organize this event. Now she’s the CEO of the event and runs it by herself. So she’s amazing. amazing. She is. She is amazing. And

38:07
The community is very lucky to have her kind of running things. So thanks for saying that. And, um, you’re right. She is. So, uh, for me with her, she wasn’t an experienced, big experience at event planner, but it was someone I could trust, you know, cause I, and I knew she was a detailed person. And so I think it’s important. Your first hire needs to be someone who compliments. You know, what, what skills you have. So I was good with the community. was good in sort of casting this vision, uh, wrangling the troops.

38:37
But she was so good with the details and filling in all that stuff. So recognize yourself. If you’re to bring someone on what you need there and someone you can trust is so important. We share a lot of values. And so that’s when that’s how I knew she’d be great for that role on the AV side with events. It’s so important. You need a bulldog, someone who can negotiate on your behalf with the hotels and the venues. And, uh, certainly had that in Jessica’s brother, Justin, who has come to the event every year. And at one point he was an employee.

39:06
He was a contractor, then he was employee. And then I fired him and said, you need to go start your own business and then I’ll be your biggest customer. So that’s kind of the situation we have now that he has his own AV company and, and, and I’m his big customer. So he fights for me every, every year with the hotel and with other AV companies to try to get those costs down. Cause he understands them. I don’t understand them. He does. He makes those negotiations, makes this be successful. Um,

39:35
Thirdly is on the, would say the third key there in terms of hiring with events is the look and feel of the event. And that’s been Libby who we brought on in year three, who’s fantastic and making the event look professional, feel like a fun event and just look. But very attractive to both partners and attendees. And you’ve got to do that. I mean, the first couple of iterations were me designing some things along with some buddies and you know, we tried our best, but it was a little janky, you know,

40:05
Uh, but once Libby came on board, she made us look professional. Um, and that goes so far with an event because people are spending time, money, travel to get to your event. They need to know that it’s going to be run well and they’re not coming into some fire festival type situation, you know? So yes, those are the, those are the three big hires for me. And I would encourage folks to do that. The visual piece, man, that skyrocketed the value and perception of our event. So I would go hard on that piece of the event.

40:34
If you want to grow, do notice you have all these displays out, you know, as you’re walking into the event itself, they’re pretty elaborate. Yeah, she did. Yeah. She does a great job. That’s what you’re talking about, right? Yep. That and just online visually. So if you look at all our social channels, and our website itself, she does a fantastic job. And so that means investing in a good photographer at the event and a videographer at the event. Those are two great investments for you. So those that’s that’s we’ve we’ve used hiring to grow it.

41:03
And then finally is our last point here is acquisition. So in the event industry, the fastest way you can grow is to buy other events. And that’s what you see the biggest event conglomerates doing is they don’t waste time on trying to like grow the particular event they’ve purchased themselves. They just go buy another one. That’s, that’s how they grow because you have to wait a whole year, typically for an annual conference or trade show to grow the darn thing. And so this is a slog. mean, I’ve spent 10 years.

41:33
12 years now, you know, iterating 10%, 20 % growth, 10%, 20 % growth. And like, finally you get there, but if you want to do it faster, just acquire events, you know, I don’t have experience in that until now. I just actually made my first acquisition. I did not know that. event did you guys acquire? When’s this going to come out? Good question. Whenever you want it to come out, probably soon, probably within the next three weeks. I’ll go ahead and share it. We’ve purchased travel con. So

42:02
Oh, yeah. it’s another creator event, uh, outside of the finance space, obviously, but a creator event nonetheless, that’s very similarly modeled like FinCon. fact, Matt Kepnes, who created and runs that event, he and I, he and I go back a ways. We’ve chatted through the years and whenever he started his event, the first time he sort of leaned on me for advice and suggestions. And I actually kind of pushed him into that. Um, he has a successful business.

42:33
Uh, with travel business that he does the event for whatever reason didn’t work out for him. And so we are honored to take that event over, which I think he’s created an amazing brand loyalty and, um, just a great look and feel as well to his event. So we were going to get into the travel space with creators there. And so that’s kind of the next phase of growth for us, but I would encourage everyone to be looking in the event space for opportunities, especially right now.

43:02
Um, folks, it’s hard event. The event business is tough. And so there’s oftentimes people kind of coming out of it where it doesn’t make sense for them anymore. Um, and that might give you an opportunity to, grab up an event and, and try to make it, uh, make it better. I will say this. Uh, so the first year post pandemic, the, least for my event, it was just so, so people were just starting to come back. this last event that we had in May, full strength popped.

43:32
Uh, everyone’s just eager to get out and interact. good to hear. That’s good to hear. Yeah. We’re excited about this, this event too. And then we’re excited in general about the creator economy. Um, I think it’s only going to continue to grow. And with our experience with growing the community at FinCon, we know it can help grow the travel creator space as well and support those people and help them to make more deals with brands and just grow their businesses. So.

44:00
And I will say this for anyone listening, I am going to be speaking at FinCon and I will be trying to do a meetup of people in the class or, you know, if you just want to hang out. So definitely be there. As I mentioned before, the ticket price is very inexpensive for what you get. I guarantee you’ll meet a ton of cool people who might be members of your mastermind group someday like mine. And like I said, I’m just grateful for you, PT, for giving me my first speaking opportunity ever.

44:28
And I was shivering. was nervous, but then you asked me back and I spoke again. So started my speak. don’t want to say speaking career, but it sparked my love for speaking. thank you. welcome, man. You certainly, we were lucky to have you. I’ll just leave it at that. And we’ve always been blessed to be able to work with you, Steve and any event we put on. So thank you for being a part of this year as well. I look forward to seeing what you have to say on stage and, just.

44:56
having you and your folks there at the event. So, more importantly, where can people find out more about the event and all the different options and everything? What, the sessions are? Are they, are they all listed yet? The sessions are listed. We’ve got all our speakers up there with the exception of a few main stage folks like yourself who we haven’t announced yet. So some surprise, surprise announcements coming up, but you can go to finconnexpo.com and see the list of speakers, see the agenda.

45:24
sort of understand what the offering is and just get excited about, you know, being a part of this community. So love to have you join us. Cool. Hey, thanks PT for coming back on, man. You’ve been great.

45:40
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now like I mentioned earlier, I’m going to be speaking on the big stage at FinCon this year, so if you want to meet up, go to the FinCon website over at FinConExpo.com. For more information about this episode, go to MyWifeClooterJob.com slash episode 489. And once again, I want to thank Emerge Council for sponsoring this episode. Now if you sell on Amazon FBA or your own online store and you want to protect your intellectual property from theft and fraud, head on over to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

46:09
Just mention my name and you’ll get $100 off. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-C-L.com. I also want to thank Chase Diamond. Chase is my go-to guy when it comes to email marketing. And if you want to learn how to run your own successful email marketing campaigns, check out his course over at mywifequitterjob.com slash chase. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash C-H-A-S-E. And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course.

46:38
Just tap in your email and ascended the course right away. Thanks for listening.