Surviving the Side Hustle

From Waiter to Multi-Million Dollar Entrepreneur: Steve's Journey of Resilience and Event-Driven Success

• Coach Rob • Season 1 • Episode 83

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What if you could go from serving tables to serving as a top entrepreneur in just a few years? Meet Steve Werner, who did just that by leveraging the power of live events to build a multi-million dollar empire. This episode uncovers Steve's transformative experience at a Tony Robbins seminar that set him on a path from a waiter at Vail Resorts to a business mogul with over $50 million in sales. Steve's narrative is a testament to the resilience required in entrepreneurship, especially when faced with a daunting $300,000 debt, showing us how grit and a supportive network can turn setbacks into stepping stones.

We also venture into the world of startup hackathons, where innovation meets intense collaboration. Discover how the camaraderie of these weekends can jumpstart a business, with insights into learning from failure and fostering a growth mindset. Through personal stories and shared experiences, we highlight the profound impact of mentorship and specialized coaching in overcoming personal weaknesses, drawing inspiration from industry leaders like Noah Kagan. Our discussion underscores the invaluable lessons learned when connecting with seasoned entrepreneurs who offer guidance during challenging times.

Strategic event planning takes center stage as we explore the nuances of tailoring events to maximize sales success. Witness the power of smaller, more personalized gatherings and the shift to virtual events that have kept businesses thriving amid the pandemic. Learn from Steve's journey from event organizer to public speaker, gaining fresh perspectives on marketing and communication. Whether it's crafting a high-ticket event or planning for upcoming workshops, the key takeaway is the marathon nature of entrepreneurship, where setting realistic expectations and maintaining perseverance pave the path to long-term success.

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Speaker 1:

What's up, guys and welcome back to another episode. On today's show we've got Steve Werner. He is an incredible individual. We connected recently and I'm excited to dive in. He's sold over $50 million using live events, spoken on more than 500 stages and transitioned from waiter to multi-million dollar business owner. Steve man, how are you doing, dude?

Speaker 2:

I'm doing great. It's been a very good Wednesday.

Speaker 1:

Good, good. Yeah, we were just saying a second ago before that it's kind of been a busy Wednesday too, and busy is good. Especially this time of year, there's always stuff going on. Time of recording now is right after Thanksgiving, just before my birthday and Christmas, so a lot of action going on this time.

Speaker 2:

It is a busy time of year. When's your birthday?

Speaker 1:

It is next Friday, actually December 13th.

Speaker 2:

Oh wow, December 12th.

Speaker 1:

Oh dude, no way that's awesome. Happy birthday, man. Yeah, Happy early birthday to you as well.

Speaker 2:

That is cool. Yeah Well, let's jump in.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I'm excited. Let's kick it off a little bit about you. Who are you? What do you do? Obviously, we got some live events and speaking. I'd love to kind of dive into how'd you get involved in that and pretty much just let you take it from. Where do you like to start?

Speaker 2:

off. Yeah, no worries, the. I mean the simple thing. I was a waiter, a bartender, worked in service industry and I ended up. I went to a Tony Robbins event in 2012. And Tony asked you know, is, is your life where you wanted it to be? Are you doing what you thought you were going to be doing? Um, and of course, the answer was no. I think the answer was no for everybody in the room. And he said you know, well, what would you like to be doing? And we spent the rest of the event kind of painting that picture and what the roadmap would be to get there.

Speaker 2:

Well, I went back to my job. Um, at the time, I worked in Vail Resorts. I worked at a ski resort waiting tables, which I loved. I put in my notice and I planned my leaving of Vail. I cashed in my 401k, moved to Las Vegas to build live events because I wanted to be a public speaker and failed, blew through my whole 401k. I thought it was going to last like two years. I gave myself a good amount of runway. It was gone in three months.

Speaker 2:

Um, we tried to hold, I tried to hold the first event and I did everything wrong that you can think of um, I don't necessarily recommend burning the boats. I mean, the name of, uh, the name of your podcast is surviving the side hustle. Um, it would have been a lot better for me, I think. I mean, who knows, hindsight's always 2020. But I don't recommend that people burn the boats. I think that it is a bad idea. It would have been a lot better for me if I would have kept my job and worked on the events on the side. It led to a lot of pain. The first event crashed and burned. We spent more than 45 grand trying to market it, reserving a space, all of that stuff, and I mean the immense amount of pain.

Speaker 2:

I got called into. I had rented Treasure Island's largest ballroom so this is Main Strip, las Vegas and they called me about six weeks before the event and I had been lying to them and saying, oh yeah, everything's going great, we're going to have a great event, it's going to be amazing. Well, you, you sign a contract for something called. You sign a contract for the room space, food and beverage and a room block, which is the number of hotel rooms that you promise to fill. Well, I had the event space for 2,500 people. I had a room block for 200 hotel rooms for three nights at whatever the going rate was I think it was $120, $130 plus a $50,000 food and beverage minimum. And they called me six weeks before the event and then she said you know well, how's everything going? And I said you know, everything's good, like meanwhile I'm down to like my last five grand.

Speaker 2:

We had tried everything to market the event, everything that I knew how to do, not everything, but everything I knew how to do. And I told her that she said Well, you know we're looking at your room block and you haven't had one one person reserve a room. I wanted to be like well, I, what do you say? I hadn't sold any tickets at that point. So the gig was kind of up.

Speaker 2:

They called me in and they threatened to sue me Cause there was no way that I could pay. I mean, basically, I was on the hook for about between $250,000 and $300,000. They ended up letting me out of my contract because I said if you want to sue me, you can sue me, but I don't have anything. They let me out of my contract and it was very painful, that's what I would say. But from there I had some really good entrepreneur friends who they own an app company, and they took me out to dinner the day that I had this conversation with treasure island. It was probably one of the lowest days of my life because I was like you know, I can go back to waiting tables, but I just blew through all the money that it took me 10 years to save up.

Speaker 2:

And they ask they ask a handful of questions. I still have the napkin. We literally wrote it down on the back of the napkin. The questions they asked were one do you still believe that you can do this? Two what went wrong and what do you need to learn to make sure that stuff doesn't happen again? What would you do differently? What are the learnings here? Um, and three, what can we do to hold an event that is successful next time? And we just kind of brainstormed all that stuff out, the main things that I didn't know. I didn't know how to hold an event. I didn't know how to market an event. I didn't know how to hold an event. I didn't know how to market an event. I didn't know how to speak on stage. I didn't know anything. But I believe Tony, when he stood up there and said, burn the boats go all in. You'll figure it out. Well, I did figure it out. Took me years, not six months. Yeah, that's kind of the origin story of where, where this all came from the TLDR.

Speaker 2:

For the next piece, though, is I went out and joined Toastmasters. I knew how to speak, because, as a bartender or server, you talk in front of people all the time. You actually sell all the time. I tell people that are looking for salespeople, find a great waiter or bartender. They sell. They just don't know that they're salespeople.

Speaker 2:

Um, I, so I joined Toastmasters so that I could learn how to speak. I went, and I I could not afford to buy marketing programs anymore. Um, courses and things were were around back then, but not the same way they are now by any means. Um, but I went down to the library, and there are these things called interlibrary loans, where if another library anywhere in the United States has the product, they can get it for you. So I found good marketing courses. Uh, the course that I found that helped me build the events. Uh, one of them was called butts in seats by Dan Kennedy. That program definitely changed my life and then.

Speaker 2:

So I learned how to kind of put together an event which I didn't know how to do before. I learned how to get good speakers, I learned how to speak myself, but I still had to go sell the event. And this is like the moment I had to go out and the way that we filled the next event. So I had to go. There's no way that I could go to Treasure Island. We went to South Point Casino off the strip and I talked them into giving me a side room. The total cost of the room was $4,000. I did not have to pay for it till the event. I did not. I talked them out. I had to sell them on this. I talked them out of having a food and beverage minimum. I talked them out of having a room block. So I literally had four grand and I was like do or die. If I have to, I can figure that out, I can pay that. I could sell my car, I could do something.

Speaker 2:

And then I went out and I started flyering businesses. And you want to learn about door to door sales? I got so many donuts. My trick was I would take six donuts into the office manager of a dentist. We did dentists, chiropractors and med spas. I literally spent four days a week, every morning picking up 10 dozen donuts, dividing them into six. So now I've got 20 offices I can visit and going in and selling tickets. And we sold. The tickets were $2.97 and I did a buy one, get one free. If they bought one on the spot and I would go in by giving them donuts, I would get about a 60-second window to pitch the office manager and we ended up selling 80 tickets. So that was event number one in 2013.

Speaker 2:

And from there we kept rinse, kept rinse, repeating, learning more things, growing, um, and it, it, every. I I will say it knocks your ego down a notch when you, when you, you get flattened. But if you learn to be curious and you learn to always ask what don't I know, what can I learn more about here, how can I do something better? If you start asking those questions and you start living that way, your life will get better. And that's that is what happened we.

Speaker 2:

We slowly grew over the next couple of years Uh, 2000, 2013,. I think we held three events. The first event I didn't sell anything because I didn't know what to sell. I made about 10 grand. The second event I figured out how to start selling stuff, and the second event we made about 30 grand Third event was about the same. I think it was 30 or 40. The next year, though, I learned all about like, really selling. What do people want to buy from stage?

Speaker 2:

Um, there, those first two events where I sold, I was selling other people's products. We started to develop our own products. Um, we started doing consulting for some of those businesses. We started a Facebook ads agency. Um, that year I think, we did about 400, and then the following year we broke a million dollars. Um, but it was a long road to get there and it was. It did not get any easier. That's the other thing that I'll tell people it you, you grow in relation to the size and complexity of the problem that you'll solve, and we grew, but the problems just get bigger. The problems get harder to solve, but you continue to grow with them, and then you look back and you're like, wow, I now have a huge skill set that I didn't have. So that was kind of the first three to five years of the business.

Speaker 1:

I love how resourceful you were through the whole thing, just kind of like scrapping it together, figuring it out. And who were the friends that you kind of connected with and did they stay with you the entire journey? Are you still in touch with them? Do you still have a relationship with them?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, they're good friends. So I actually had met them in Vegas. I actually had met them in Vegas. I did. There was something called. It was a startup hackathon and I think it was run by score. Score is a business coaching like free business coaching. There's offices all over the U? S. It was a. It was some ad. I don't actually know where I saw the ad, but it was. I think it was maybe 50 bucks and what they do is you went, we went, on a Friday night and they chat, they put you in small groups. They put you in groups of I think it was five or six people and your goal is to build a business by Sunday noon and it's just fun. So it's like a big convention room. There were probably 300 people there and the prize there were. There were prizes. There was a grand prize and a runner up and the prizes were like an all expense paid dinner and a show Um, and then the runner up got like a trophy Um. But it was just super fun and I saw it.

Speaker 2:

I think I don't know I was probably on an email list or something, but I it was the first week or two I was in Vegas and, uh, they were in my group and they owned an app company. Um, they had sold a couple of businesses and just phenomenal people, um, and I kind of kept in touch with them. I just said, hey, like let's grab coffee. Um, and they had asked you know they I I'm very vocal about what I'm doing. I like to talk. Um, so they had asked a couple of times like how are things going with the event? And I was probably a little bit more forthcoming to them than I was the hotel. But when, when, all the, when, everything fell down in like burning ball of fire. I think I had had coffee with them that weekend, or like we had gone to dinner or something. I told them and they said, you know, like this is something that I want everybody to hear, like for sure, you're never you're, you're not. How do I want to say this? Your first time you do something, you're probably not going to be successful. They weren't successful either. Um, they've since gone on to do I mean, more than a hundred million dollars. Um, they live a phenomenal life, but they started off. Their first couple of businesses failed. They had to move home and live with they were married and they had to live with one of their parents while they were getting their business going and then they lived in a studio apartment that they worked and lived in grinding till they got. It was like their fourth or fifth business, grinding till they got. It was like their fourth or fifth business.

Speaker 2:

So when I, when I told them that things were kind of going sideways, they weren't phased by it at all. And I think there I can't remember exactly what they said, but they something along the lines of she was. She was like I'll go down there with you, I'll stand by you. She was like it is not nearly as bad as you think it is. And I was like you don't know what you're talking about. I just burned, like I just lit 45 grand on fire and nothing worked. And now they're gonna sue me. And she was like they're not gonna sue you. She was like you just tell them that you don't have any money. They're gonna threaten you, they want to be angry and upset. She was like they're going to be fine, they're a hotel and I think, having that perspective, I can't go back to who I was at the time, but literally I was like I'm a waiter, I'm a guy who tends bar, I like food, I have no idea what I'm doing and like imposter syndrome was through the roof and she was she.

Speaker 2:

They both just kind of told me in different ways, like they were like everybody's an imposter till, you're not, and you just got to do the thing. And like I think the questions that they had, like that dinner, they didn't try to cheer me up. They didn think the questions that they had, like that dinner, they didn't try to cheer me up. They didn't tell me, you know, like everything's gonna be okay. Instead, they said you know you'll be fine.

Speaker 2:

What did you learn? What do you need to learn? What are the mistakes? What are the learnings? Um, and I still have, like I keep apple notes. I use apple notes for pretty much everything, and when something doesn't go good and bad, right and wrong, right and wrong, may, and when something doesn't go, good and bad, right and wrong, right and wrong, maybe a little bit different. But good and bad is a construct of our mind. Who's to say what is good and what is bad? There are outcomes that we say we want and I'm I'm I'm not one of those people who says like, oh well, you shouldn't aim for an outcome, you should definitely have a goal and you should be very clearly defined Now. If you don't hit that goal, you shouldn't necessarily be mad because there's nothing saying that you won't hit that goal six months, a year, two years from now. The question that you have to ask is and you have to be able to be honest with yourself about what went wrong what do I need to change? Who do I need to change? Who do I need to become? What are the skills that I need? Prioritize those?

Speaker 2:

Um, there was something I was listening to. There was a podcast last night that I took notes on and, uh, it was. It was pretty funny. Um, it was noah kagan and tim ferris, and noah kagan owns app sumo, a business that he built from zero to I think they're doing about 80 million a year now no investors. And he said Tim asked him. Tim said I'm looking at your sheet and you have seven coaches right now. Why do you have so many coaches? And Noah said well, I've got a specific coach for each thing that I am weak in. And he said what have you learned from your coaches? And Noah kind of took it a different direction. He said the reason that we hire coaches is because it's the things that we hate to do. I don't think anybody likes leg day. Do you go to the gym? I do. Yeah, you hate leg day. Right, everybody hates leg day, kind of.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, I hate it. Sometimes I embrace it, but yeah, everyone hates it.

Speaker 2:

You hire a personal trainer because they're going to be the one to push you to get better results. A coach, when you hire a coach for business, or when you hire a course, when you go buy a course or you figure out how to learn the thing, it's going to be hard. You're hiring somebody because it is not your skill set and I think that, like you would think, most people would know that, but instead most people think that spending the money hiring the coach or buying the course is going to make whatever. It is easy. Nope, it's still going to be really hard. You're just now. You have the tools in front of you and you have somebody there. If you're hiring a coach to help you, you still have to show up and do the work and what's crazy to me, this is like a very small side tangent.

Speaker 2:

I won't go too far down it, but, like courses, completion read on courses is one out of 10 people. Outcomes out of courses is probably one out of 25. Outcomes out of coaching is probably 50%. Get a reasonable outcome and it's not because of the coach and not because of the course, it is because of the person going through it and the takeaway that I can tell you guys, if you're on your way up, be the best student of whatever it is that you're learning. Don't put it on the coach. Don't say, oh, that coach is a mess or I didn't get the emails.

Speaker 2:

How can you be the best student? How can you learn whatever they are teaching? Whatever you need to learn and be the absolute best at it, you need to learn and be the absolute best at it. If you take that attitude and the other thing is, one course is not going to fix your entire journey. I've spent more than 700,000 on coaching courses, how-tos, masterminds. If you go to college in a fall semester, you're taking eight different classes, maybe six different classes. Each course, each coach you hire is one of those classes. It's not a one size fits all or one program solves all. There's a lot of things that you have to learn and if entrepreneurship was easy, everyone would do it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I love that. I love that analogy with the university and such, because it's so true. I noticed back when I was a personal trainer actually I was going to a lot of different courses and different schools and theories of thought and training and everything seemed to be pretty much similar. There were just like slight differences. And after going through a whole bunch of different things, I started to adapt my own kind of strategy, my own coaching philosophy, and that's how I would start to do all my coaching.

Speaker 1:

I would take a little bit from here, a little bit from there, and it wasn't ever just one size fits all. It was just kind of like let me pick and choose what works for me and let me pay attention and lean into those. So I love that. You shared about that there. I got to ask you a little bit, though. So when you first started out because you said live events were your first idea of what you were trying to get into were you intending to be the speaker or were you just looking to host different events? And how did you get into the speaking and where did that whole thing evolve and go about?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So I wanted to be the speaker, I wanted to do public speaking and I don't. Honestly, this is like where I went completely sideways. So at Tony Robbins event it was I want to be a public speaker. How do you become a public speaker? Well, this was 2012.

Speaker 2:

I Googled it. I think there were maybe one or two books on it. There was the National Speakers Association and I was like like I had gone to. I'd gone to, I think, three events. I'd gone to tony robbins. I had gone to an event called the learning annex, which was a bunch of different speakers over three days. Uh, donald trump was one of the speakers.

Speaker 2:

This was like 2002, it was a long, long time. And I'd gone to this guy named Marshall Silver and I remembered Marshall said I wanted to be a public speaker. So I built my own event Somehow. That's what stuck in my head, because if you just want to be a public speaker, there are way better ways to go be a public speaker, like you can get on events. You can definitely do that without building events. I took the hardest way possible. I didn't know any better and it didn't occur to me. I can be pretty stubborn and I can also be kind of blind to things sometimes and I was just like I'm going to build my own events, and I think so. The I put my notice in at Vail. I went to Tony Robbins September of 12, 2012. I put my notice in and I stayed at Vail for six months.

Speaker 2:

So I stayed the winter season and instead of any of you guys listening that work in restaurants, you know at the end of the night what do you do? You go to the bar, you have a few drinks, you get some pizza, you go to bed at 2am, you wake up at 10 and you do the whole thing again. Well, I decided that season I was going to do something different. I was going to start reading, I was going to start doing some other stuff. So I would go home and I would do this stuff. And I was thinking this whole year, that whole six months, about how I was going to start an event.

Speaker 2:

I don't know why I didn't just go do some public speaking. Instead, I was like I'm going to build an event and Tony said if I burn the boats, it's going to work. So I was like I'm all in. What's the largest room I can rent? What's like we build a. I mean, I spent 10 grand on a website because I thought a website was important Spoiler alert websites are not all that important Like, just, I had no idea what I was doing but I believed if I took action it would work. And it did, and I do believe that. But, man, it was painful.

Speaker 2:

Um, if I would have hired a coach, I remember, uh, this I don't man, this guy probably doesn't remember at all um, I found I googled life coach because I was like maybe I do need a coach. And I interviewed with some guy that lived in california over skype and like he was like, how did you find my information? I was like I don't know yelp. And he was like, well, uh, what do you want to do? And I told him and he was like, I can't help you with that. And and I was like, man, this life coaching thing sucks. Not true at all. I did not put in the time, I did not find the right coach.

Speaker 2:

Anyone who says something doesn't work usually has only tried it once. This is the other. I mean it goes back to fail, fail, fail until you succeed. People who say Facebook ads don't work Well, you probably haven't learned how to run them yet because they work for hundreds of thousands of businesses. Oh, webinars don't work. I have tons of evidence to the opposite of that. You have to know how to do them. You have to learn how to speak. They're not easy. This stuff is hard skills, hard skills to learn. That you have to learn.

Speaker 2:

To your question, though I started holding these events because I wanted to speak, and I did so. I was the main speaker. We would bring in two or three other speakers. The trick that I would use I would look at industry journals and I would find people that had penned articles, and I would reach out and just say, hey, would you like to speak at my event? I'd pay for their airfare and hotel, and we did really well with that. So you got well-known people to come and speak. I would speak alongside of them, and then, when we started selling stuff, I started selling.

Speaker 2:

So this is actually kind of a fun story. The first event I held, we made eight grand. I was over the moon. I was like, yes, I'm going to be a millionaire. I don't know how, but we did it. Eight grand, I mean in 2012 dollars, that's probably like 20K now, but still not that much money.

Speaker 2:

So I went to Dan Kennedy, the guy that had had the butts in seats program. I went to his event and I paid to sit at his table. You could have lunch with Dan I think it was an extra 200 bucks and you got to ask him one question. Well, it got around to me and I'm like so excited I tell him about this event and I'm just like fanboying. And he just looks at me. He goes you're an idiot. And I was like what like? And if you know, dan dan's a crotchety old man. He's like a bad grandpa. Um, so he's just, he's like you're an idiot. I was like what, why? And he's like you didn't sell anything. And I was like well, I don't have anything to sell. He's like you see, that table over that table's full of stuff you can sell and if you sell any of it, I'll give you 30%. Later I found that most people get 50% for affiliate offers.

Speaker 2:

But I went, that's what we did the next two events. I sold Dan's stuff and I said well, I don't know how to sell your stuff. And he said read it, pick one of them up. And he was like you can buy it. He was like listen to how I sell it. He was like you have a tape recorder with you Record me. And I was like tape recorder who has a tape recorder anymore? But that's what I did.

Speaker 2:

And then Dan challenged me because I told him I was in Toastmasters. And and Dan challenged me because I told him I was in Toastmasters and he was like Toastmasters is great if you want to make toasts. He was like if you want to learn how to speak, pick somebody that you like. That is a really good speaker. So I picked Tony Robbins. I picked Tony Robbins and I picked Brennan Bouchard and I watched both of their TED Talks 20-minute talks, probably 200 plus times and I mirrored them. I would play 30 seconds of the video and I would act it out in the mirror. That's how I got better at speaking. Toastmasters is good Dan picks on it but it actually was a good program and it's helpful. That's how I learned the public speaking piece and how I learned just to keep going with the events.

Speaker 2:

And then what happened? We had held by 2017, I think we had done close to 30 events, which is a lot of live events and people started noticing and I was in some masterminds and they said, hey, will you help me with my event. And then I figured out that this, like this, is a really hard thing. People really struggle with this and I struggled with it. Um, so we I still hold my own events. Uh, we usually do two to three events a year for myself, um, but now we have transitioned fully into helping other people hold their events.

Speaker 2:

So what we do? We take their offer, we look at what their offer is. We then build the event around the offer so that by the time you get to the offer, people have already said they want to buy it. That's the trick to sales. We'll build out the event, I'll build the speeches, I will teach them how to speak. I'll then go emcee the event if they need it. I'll usually run sales at the back of the room because usually the people that hold the events are not that great at sales. Sometimes that's not true, but they're not always the best salesperson and we've been doing that model now for probably going on seven years. I like it. We help with webinars, we help with workshops. During COVID we switched to 100% virtual, but that's how we got to where we are no-transcript.

Speaker 2:

Yep, there will be a workshop in Austin. The workshop in Austin will probably be 25 people. So it's a smaller event, 5k price point and then we'll probably do a bigger event. So bigger events for me. I try to keep my events max 100, 150 people. I'll explain why. I'll explain why you can definitely do.

Speaker 2:

Everyone has the picture of Tony Robbins in their head. They're like 10,000 people, zero to 25 people. You can hold the event for three. Be more like 10 to $15,000 range. Once you hit about 60 to 70 people you've got to put your AV budget doubles, your room rate doubles your food and beverage doubles. Now you have to have a room block. So about 75 people. Now you're going to be spending 50 grand and your conversion will actually drop. The best conversion is 25 to 30 people because you can hot seat every single person in the room. You can give them a breakthrough and most people will buy. We've had 100% closes at 25 and 30 person events. Now that's not to say you can't hold a larger event.

Speaker 2:

We did an 1800 person event this year. We ended up at 3.2 million in sales, about 1.4 in cash collected. His budget for the event was 1.2. So think about the risk he had to outlay 1.2 million. He made two hundred thousand dollars in cash profit and then the rest was in payment plans and he did all right. I mean, he did that's. That is a, that's a, that's a win, like that's a very good event. But it is. It's a huge swing and if your business can't take that, I don't want to see people putting this on a credit card, especially when post COVID you can do a virtual event. So this is the model that we use now versus pre COVID.

Speaker 2:

This is actually a pretty good piece for people. Pre COVID it was get them in the room for the live event, sell the 25K mastermind. Get them in the room for the live event, sell the 25K mastermind. Post-covid it's get them on a virtual event, a two-day workshop, something like that. Sell them something at like a 10K price point 8 to 10K, include the live event and sell a 50K mastermind. Your marketing budget is now in that virtual event and that whole virtual event the key there. You want to be at like a 1.5X ROAS. People will fight me on that. They'll be like well, why don't you want like a 2X ROAS or a 3X ROAS? If you can grow, the bigger you grow that virtual event. The more people you have at your live event and the larger your back end will be. You should put all the money that you make up here in that virtual event Put it back into another virtual event. If you do two or three virtual events in a year, then you can have a 300-person live event where the 300 people there have all paid you $8,000 to $10,000. Live event where the 300 people there have all paid you eight to 10 K. That room is going to convert at like 25 to 30% into a 50 K. That's where you really make your money.

Speaker 2:

Um, my events. To be to be very clear. You ask a couple of questions. I don't like I don't. I don't have a huge staff. It's me and two people. Um, I like to run really lean. I don't have a huge staff. It's me and two people. I like to run really lean. I don't like managing a lot of people. I also don't like managing a lot of stuff.

Speaker 2:

I have a small personal mastermind that I run. It's 12 people and then I work with high ticket people. We do our events. I'll sell the event. I'll help people that want help, usually through some workshops. So I'll sell a package. We have a workshop coming up the 18th of December 25 people. That's a virtual workshop. I'm going to sell them on a four meeting plan and a live event in April and then we'll move them into the mastermind if they want to come in. But it's my model, is I like working with one or two, three people a year doing high ticket events and not having a huge staff and not having a ton? I still do a lot of speaking, but that's it's very spaghetti type answer to your question.

Speaker 1:

No, it's good. It's good and I know we're kind of cutting it here on time, but so people are interested in the workshop in in August and not in August. It's an Austin right. When is that? When is that workshop? That's in December 18th.

Speaker 2:

December 18th is a virtual one. The live one will be hang on, I'll tell you, it's the first weekend in may. Hang on one second March, April, May. There we go. It will be May. We'll be going May 2nd and 3rd, most likely, or 1st and 2nd. We have that whole weekend blocked right now. That's when we'll be doing the live workshop. Then we'll probably do one in the fall.

Speaker 1:

Cool. How do people find out about the workshop? How do they touch base with you If they're interested?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, if anybody wants to reach out, it's stevecoffee. So S-T-E-V-E dot. C-o-f-f-e-e. You'll find a couple different things there. You'll find our free course on webinars. It's called Death to Bad Webinars. It's completely free. I used to sell it for a thousand bucks. I just give it away now. You will find a way that you can book a call with me or, if you want me to speak to your group, happy to come on and share some knowledge. This has been kind of a roundabout podcast. Usually I'm very laser focused and I teach either stories that you can use to sell from stage, how to get more speaking events or how to build a webinar.

Speaker 1:

Awesome, awesome. Well, dude, I appreciate you sharing some of the stories and such. I know I was getting a lot of information from it Very, very cool stuff. I love talking with you, but before I let you roll, though, I got to ask you that kind of cliche question If you were to boil it all down and you give one person let's just stick it to one person who's starting a speaking career, what would be your number one piece of advice for them?

Speaker 2:

Man, if they just want to speak on stages, focus on speaking on stages. Take action every day. I actually just wrote a blog post and email about this. What is the end result that you want? You want to speak on stages. What is a routine that you can implement in 30 minutes a day that will get you on more stages?

Speaker 2:

If there's one thing, it's probably reaching out to people and being of value to event hosts, finding a way and then just keep at it Like I am here because I kept at it at it Like I am here because I kept at it. All the people that I know of that are entrepreneurs that have made it. It's because they kept at it. It's not a, it's not a one year game. It's a 10 year game and if you can keep moving forward, this is actually a Tony Robbins saying people grossly overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in 10. I think they just don't even think about 10 years. They just say I'm going to, I'm going to sprint the marathon. It's a marathon. Know that, going in and have an expectation that's going to take 10 years and work every day as if you need to get there in the next six months, you'll get there.

Speaker 1:

Man, I love it, dude. Thank you so much. This was really insightful and helpful. Um, it was just cool chatting with you, so appreciate you taking the time and hopping on today and chatting with me about all this stuff look forward to my pleasure again soon thanks, rob, I'm in peace, peace, peace. See you guys later.