In this episode of The High Profit Event Show, host Rudy Rodriguez is joined by Dr. Alok Trivedi, also known as Dr. Rewire. Dr. Trivedi brings a wealth of experience to the conversation, with a background that includes speaking for over 25 years, appearing on major media outlets like CBS, Fox News, and Ebony Magazine, and consulting for some of the world's most influential CEOs and CFOs. As the author of "Chasing Success" and the founder of The Align Performance Institute, his expertise in expanding human awareness and potential is unparalleled.

The episode delves into three main topics, each packed with actionable insights for event leaders. First, Dr. Trivedi shares his journey into the world of events, particularly virtual events, highlighting the importance of adaptation and innovation in the wake of COVID-19. He explains how his early venture into virtual events before it became a norm taught him valuable lessons about audience engagement and interaction without physical feedback.

Next, the discussion moves to the key strategies for maintaining high engagement rates in virtual events. Dr. Trivedi emphasizes the critical role of technology and the need for contingency planning, recounting an instance where an unexpected Zoom outage forced a swift pivot to a Facebook group. This story underscores the necessity of flexibility and the benefits of preparing for technological mishaps.

Lastly, Dr. Trivedi shares his insights on the art of event presentation, focusing on the importance of connecting with the audience beyond just delivering content. He advises on the use of storytelling, dynamic camera work, and personal interaction to keep attendees engaged and invested in the event. The episode is a treasure trove of advice for anyone looking to enhance their virtual event experiences and create deeper connections with their audience.

Listeners can find more about Dr. Trivedi's work by visiting his website at drrewire.com and taking the rewire score quiz to learn more about his approach to unlocking human potential.

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Hey, welcome to today's show. This is Rudy Rodriguez, the host of The High Profit Event Show, and we have a very special guest today. Actually, a dear friend of mine, Dr. T. Welcome to the show, sir.

Hey, thanks for having me, Rudy. I appreciate it.

Absolutely, man. You and I met through another mutual friend of ours, Rohan Seth, CEO of Growrev and I just knew when I met you right away, you and Amanda, your significant other, that you guys were salt of the earth people. You're at this high-level mastermind event, but you were there really looking to serve and make a difference for others. I just knew, man, I had to get to know you and what you do. I've been just so impressed, and I'm grateful that you're on the show today to be able to share with our guests your experience with events. You've done, gosh, over 30 three-day virtual summits or so over the last three or four years. You've done summits with as much as close to 1,000 people in attendance to your summits. You've been speaking for 25 years, which is remarkable. You've appeared on CBS, Fox News, CT News Canada, Global News, Shaping, Ebony Magazine. You've consulted some of the most powerful and influential CEOs and CFOs in the world. You developed The Align Performance Institute, which is dedicated to expanding human awareness and potential around the world. You're the author of the acclaimed book, Chasing Success.

I am. Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. It's going to be a lot of fun.

Absolutely, Dr. T. So let's jump into some of the meat and potatoes. I know you and I want to make sure that this is the most action-packed, value-packed 20-minute, 20, 30-minute podcast possible for the guests. One of the things that you own is the fact that you have, on average, 87% of people who attend your events that begin and end. By the way, as a note inside of that caveat, that's also including a mixed audience of paid attendees as well as free attendees. So roughly 40% of that audience is free attendees. In my experience, free attendees, typically their stick-through rate is much, much lower than 87%. So I am really eager and excited to hear what you have to share with us today.

Oh, thanks. I appreciate it. We do well with that. We don't have the biggest events on the planet, but we have really high-value events. That's what I really am. That's our coup de grace, I guess you can call it.

Awesome, man. Well, maybe if you can share with us a little bit about your – this kind of gives a little runway for the audience as to, well, gosh, kind of your journey into events and your formula that you kind of discovered on how to create this level of engagement.

Absolutely. So I got into events. I mean, I've been speaking for a long time, and kind of what I've always done to build any business that I have is I speak. I've enjoyed speaking. I've worked on my speaking. Speaking has been something I've been doing for a long time, keynote speaking. All this has been a part of my life for a very long time. But it wasn't just about keynote speaking. Being a keynote speaker is great, but how do you make an impact? We were doing live events, and then COVID hit. Right before COVID, before anyone did a virtual event, we actually did a virtual event, believe it or not. Before Tony did his virtual event, we actually did a virtual event. We really did. We had this little thing, and we got this ATEM Mini, and we had one TV, and we took a camera and just said, let's do this thing on Zoom. We kind of figured it out and kind of started it. I learned a lot in that first event. It wasn't a big event, but I learned a lot from it. How the medium is different, how to talk to the camera is different, how to – a lot of times as speakers, we go up and say, oh, I know how to speak. I can speak. Here's a stage. But how do you speak to an audience when there's no feedback? How do you speak to an audience when there's nobody who's engaging with you? How do you dial them in? How do you pull them in? How do you get them to stay with you that whole time? That was a big trick. There were certain things – I've done a lot of TV over the years, and so I wasn't afraid of the camera. But how you entertain the camera was a completely different experience than the audience. So I really took that and I started working with that from just the talent perspective. Then, of course, there's procedural things that we'll talk about here, too, that I really started to work on to help. I don't know what our first numbers were, but to help improve that as time progressed.

Awesome, man. Wow, it's cool to know that you were one of the first to innovate onto the virtual event space before even Tony.

It was before Tony. Now, I don't know if I'm saying the first, but I'm just saying that I'm the first that I know of, that I do know.

You're just like, let's grab a camera. Let's figure it out.

That's what I did. Literally, I remember we had the event starting on Friday morning, and Thursday afternoon, we were figuring out, what's this ATEM Mini thing? We called video guys, and we're trying to figure it out. We're like, this is how you do a switcher. It was a whole thing. Now, of course, we've invested lots of money into it, the whole studio, the whole setup now. But when it started, it was a camera. It was an ATEM Mini box and a TV, and we went to work. It was great.

Really cool. I'd be curious to ask you, that first event that you did, or maybe the first couple events, what were some of the mistakes that you made? Obviously, now you're looking back, you're like, oh, that's a no-brainer, because you've learned that. But it's always good to hear what those initial counterintuitive things were for you.

So I got a great one. So on the third day of the event, about 9.45 in the event, we lost Zoom. I'm thinking, how on earth do we lose Zoom? This doesn't make any sense. How do we lose Zoom? There was nothing going on weather-wise in my community. There was nothing happening inside of this. I thought, I didn't understand, because we rented this abandoned building space where there was no heat, and I did the whole thing in the cold. My staff was all wearing coats. We had an event a week to plan, and we figured this whole thing out. Zoom basically shut down, because they had a tornado or a hurricane somewhere in North Carolina at the time. Lots of rain. So Zoom goes down for several hours. I'm like, oh, my god, what are we going to do? So I pivoted, as what we do. In the time of pivot, I pivoted again. I started, like we had a Facebook group, and we just sent a message, and I started doing the seminar from the Facebook group. When Zoom came back on, we got back on Zoom. I found out through that process where people were looking, there were other Zoom knockoffs that were out there, other companies that do similar to Zoom. So we learned contingencies were huge when you deal with technology. It's one of the biggest things we learned. So we actually, every time we do an event, we have Zoom. We have our normal Zoom, but we also have, I can't, you're going to ask me the name, but I don't remember what they are anymore, even. Because Zoom has upgraded itself.

Obviously, it's much better than it was back then. But we have two different softwares that are like Zoom, pretty much exactly Zoom, on backup in case Zoom crashes. We can literally forward everyone to this next version and just send the text out. Everyone goes to this thing, and they'll register for whatever, and they'll get on board. We've never had to use it, but that contingency was bred out of that chaos.

Plan B and Plan C. That's right. Well, you only have to experience that one time.

When you deal with technology and you're running your own events, it depends on what kind of events you do. When you're running your own event, you don't know. There was another time that our upload speed had gotten super slow. It's like, why has the upload speed gone so slow? Because Comcast came and did a bunch of work here, and they did something to the line, and now we had to go, and it's like, oh, why is my up speed so slow? So the technology wasn't working. So you just don't know when you're, there's so many variables. That's the problem with technology and virtual events, is there's so many variables that you're trying to play contingencies for. Especially when you have more of an operation versus just like what we're doing right now, computer or TV or laptop or something like that. So technology makes it more complicated. You have to prepare for it.

Definitely. Thank you for sharing that. I think that's a good, helpful note. So, that was your first couple virtual events. Here you fast forward three, four years, you've done about 30 and now your engagement is at, on average, 87%. I'd be just curious to hear, like, I don't know if you have a formula from beginning to end. How do you think through your events and how you communicate, market, promote, fulfill, such that you have 87% of people engaged for three days? Especially online, because with Zoom fatigue these days that's a thing.

It's a thing. People are tired of it. But the thing is, I'll tell you one thing, several things. Let me just kind of go, I'm just going to kind of berate a bunch of different things and hopefully some of them stick for the listeners. Your cameraman is essential. Your cameraman has to know how to work the camera, how to zoom in, how to, it can't be just, oh, I'm just gonna take any camera person that just goes back and forth. It's not about that. It's about really working the camera. So you've got to have a cameraman that understands that they're an essential component. You have a dance with that cameraman that's so important to bring the audience together, bring them to life. I study TV shows. What we do, one of the things that we do is that if you look at a TV show, they typically have a seven to 10 second frame or an event max, it goes as 30 seconds. It's not going more than 30 seconds before it goes to another scene inside of it. But they'll keep one scene for 7 to 10 seconds. So one of the things that we do in our frames is we host 7 to 10 second frames. So different camera angles change every 7 to 10 seconds. So that's one of the ways that people don't get bored. Instead of just like a talking head, you've got something that's engaging and changing the screens at all times. So the TV feels different for them at Zoom because people don't just watch on Zoom. Many people will, especially if you're doing a three day event, you don't want to sit in front of a laptop. You project it onto your TV. Now you're watching it on TV. Now you're a TV star. Everyone can be a TV star now. Those are two big things that I would say from the art side. Third, I'd tell you that I really, I can't urge this enough because I've seen so many programs and I'm supposed to attend one this weekend.

If the presenter doesn't do this, it has a hard time keeping me on. If I would under deliver the content. What I mean by that is this, is don't under deliver. Let me rephrase what I say. I don't want you to under deliver content. What I'm trying to say is connect with the audience with far more stories. Give far more stories inside of it. When you give a story, you actually allow people to connect with you. A lot of people in the speaking business don't realize that. You know what? Let me just give content and content and content and content. It's more content. In the beginning, I wasn't, this is not, I learned this as time progressed. I was just dumping all the content I had in this event. Problem was that they were already bored. They were already fatigued. They got over taught in that capacity. People didn't want to stay. But the less content I taught, that was enough for them to learn and absorb. The more I engaged and the more I let my personality be open inside of it, the greater the retention state. It's not about believe it or not. It's much more about the performer than it is about the content. That's so difficult for some of us who just want to, we have so much we want to share and teach. We're also looking at it from a conversion standpoint. We're trying to convert. The greatest conversion factor is be likable, I think.

So there's a bunch of ideas, different ideas that I found to be helpful in the art side of it, for sure.

You mentioned the greatest conversion factor is to be likable. One quick comment I'll make on that is I often reference on the show, the book Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini. There's six weapons of influence. One of which is likability. People like people who are like they are or like the way they aspire to be. If someone likes you, they're much more likely to engage and connect with you and ultimately become a client of yours. So I love how you just said the greatest conversion factor is to be likable and allow your personality to be open instead of just trying to overteach them.

In the beginning, I found I was wearing blazers. I like wearing blazers when I speak. It's just kind of my thing. Some guys can wear just a jacket or a sweater, whatever makes you, you. For me, it's blazers. I love blazers. When I speak without it, it kind of feels, I feel kind of naked without it. But even my blazers, the ones I was wearing in the beginning, were a little bit too hard on the audience. It was a factor that would turn people off like big shoulder pads. I'm like, I've got big shoulders, relatively big shoulders as it is. So you put big shoulder pads on now, like it feels too forced. We went with much more of a casual blazer inside of it. It made people much more open and receptive to soften my look. I didn't think about it, but it played a factor. I think it played a factor.

That's a good point. Thank you for that. Two millimeter distinction there. It's just your clothing, communicating more of a relaxed, likable, relatable personality. Which includes what we wear. That's just what we say. A quick note. Other things you said prior that I made a star on my notes is changing that frame and having that relationship with the camera person who can keep that camera angle dynamic every 7 to 10 seconds, creating that experience for the attendees by changing the camera angle. That was great. I think that was a great nugget right there. I wanted to emphasize for our audience.

It's super important. If you don't do that, then what happens is it becomes a talking head. I studied this stuff. I love this stuff. I've been studying this stuff for a long time. I'm studying like how the TV is doing. If you notice certain scenes, drama scenes, like right now I'm watching Suits. I've never seen Suits. I've only seen the previews for it.

So it's a show that I've been watching, but you can see certain things, how they, at the end of the scene, they take the music up and how they bring applause and audience and music. They use sound. So we study all this stuff. We look at it. I have my team sit and say, okay, how do we make the event better? How do we use a Plaza? How do we get better at it? And transparently like when other people are doing events, see what you like, what they do. See what the others are doing that are valuable inside of it. Incorporate what works. We use dance in our things. We use music and dance as a big part of our energy inside of it and keeping the community and the knowledge base up. Those are important things. I also think that it's important to not go more than an hour, an hour and 15 at a time, going more than an hour and 15 on zoom. It kind of gets tiring for people. You may be able to go two, three hours in a live audience, but when you do it on zoom, it becomes a little bit tiring. That's good. That's been my experience at least.

Same here. I do my best to keep it no more than any segment on zoom, no more than 90 minutes. Ideally an hour segment, even 50 minutes. That's cool, man. What else, man? You're like a mad scientist, you and your team in the background, you're like tweaking, studying like all these little things. I'm super curious now. What are some of these discoveries, other discoveries that you guys have learned and put in place to create such great engagement?

I think the other thing is that we do the standard, like send them their manual and stuff ahead of time. That's pretty standard. We do that. We didn't do it one time and we did find that our show rate was down. So that was something we did. We also do a good job with my team to make sure that they're in the chat box or communicating. Something we do ahead of time that probably helps people is that we actually call every single attendee personally and welcome them to the event. It gives an added touch because we don't have the biggest events. We don't have 10,000 people that it's hard to call since we're under a thousand for most part, at least at this point, we can call every person and have my team call and at least leave them a voicemail. That's one of the things that they found so appreciative is that they can connect with that. That may be when the numbers get bigger, that number goes down. So if the volume of the participants goes up more, maybe that number goes down a little bit. I don't know. I'm not there yet, but I would suspect that it may, but we find that it's a huge component.

So you have your team call each participant and what do they do when they call them? Do they just welcome them? Can you kind of talk us through some of the things they just welcome them to the event?

They welcome them to the experience. They kind of pre-frame what to expect on the weekend and they let them know personally kind of what the event is going to have and where to kind of sit and how to prepare yourself, all that kind of stuff. They're just grateful because, you realize that like everyone at this point, the vast majority of the people that are going to be at your events have done a virtual event. It's not a new thing, but what do you do to make yourself stand out differently? How was your event going to be different from every other event under the sun? When you have giants out there like Tony and Eric Worry and all these guys doing these massive events, how are you going to be different? How are you going to be unique inside that? What we found is that what is our uniqueness? We found our uniqueness. Our size was our uniqueness. Therefore our connection, our ability to connect was going to be a uniqueness factor. So we take advantage of it because we can now, if we ever get to the point of doing events of 25,000 people inside of it or 10,000 people, then maybe it's a different element, but whatever situation you're in, I look at it and say, what's everyone else doing and what can we do differently that will help us connect to the audience better?

I think that's a quality question right there. What is everyone else doing and what can we do differently to help us connect with our audience even better? I'm making a note of that. I imagine as you ask yourself that question, you keep finding new ways to innovate and to improve connection and engagement with your audience.

We do. So, we have a mandatory policy that after every event on the Tuesday, after pretty much a day, after two days, after every event, we sit down with the entire team and we run through everything that we did well and everything that we did crappy. Then the third question we always ask is how can we connect deeper? And that's a whole day meeting. It's just purely brainstorming and the events team takes that back and sees what they can implement for the next event.

What I appreciate about that is that you do it with immediacy. So imagine you take a day off of rest for the event, and then you do it while it's top of mind and you don't just do it for 30 to 60 minutes. You said it's a whole day event. You don't just ask what worked, what didn't work, but you ask specifically, how can we connect deeper? So you ask that intentional question. I can see how doing that consistently makes that difference. Go ahead.

I was just going to say, I think it's important. Like, look, we want to help people. We're doing these events because we want to serve people. We want to help people and everyone that's doing it realizes that you found a medium and a way that you can actually help people. You love to speak and you love doing the events. You love the whole thing and you love the spotlight. It's great. All of us do. That's why we're in the business. That's why we're in the speaking business for granted. It's part of who we are, but how do we get more connected to them? Because if we don't connect to them, we don't help them. If we don't help them, then they don't really change. They go back saying, oh, that was a great event. Fantastic. I learned a little bit of information. Now what? They go back to their old routine life. So our job, and then that's where conversion comes in. Kind of what you do in that world, it's like, how do we convert at that level? Then if you take that and say, if we're connecting better, our conversions are going to be better. We know this as a hundred percent correlation inside of it. So if we're really looking to make a difference in the lives of the people in our audience, then I think that's probably the most important question we can ask in our debrief.

That's great, man. Wow. That's really good. I'm curious to hear any other innovations that have come out of asking that question in your debrief.

I think there's been so many, honestly, like I think if you just do it with your team, there's so many things that'll come out that'll be right for your audience. Here's the thing, like everyone tries to take a template of, that's what this person is doing. This is what this person is doing. I'm trying to, but I don't think that that's the answer. I really don't think that's the answer. There's some, maybe some best practices, but then there's going to be best practices for your community. Your community is going to be different from my community and everyone's community can be different based on the culture of the environment, but they expect what you give, and your team is going to know that community. So I think that question opens up innovations that will become best practices for you to serve your community at the best, depending if you have a bunch of males in your audience, you're going to have a different set of best practices than a bunch of females. Completely different. If you have a bunch of hairdressers versus a bunch of entrepreneurs, you're going to have a different set of personal development, completely different. I think it's important to address that for them instead of, because if you just do a generic best practices thing, I don't know that you're really, what's the old saying? Care enough about your client to be able to serve them with care or something along that line. If you know them, then you'd be able to serve them at the highest level. That's what I believe in. Innovation will show up when you ask that question for sure.

I love your emphasis, focus on not necessarily the answer, but the question and how the question leads to the answers. There's a story, and I'm paraphrasing here, maybe you've heard this one as well. I believe it was Einstein. There was a professor and he would administer an exam, I think at Princeton every year, and he never changed the questions. At one point someone came up to him and said, hey, what are you doing? The students are catching on. They know it's the same questions every year. He says, yes, the question doesn't change, but the answers do.

It's true. It's actually funny that you mentioned that because I went to visit Princeton on a college tour with my daughter and I saw the room or at least the building where Einstein used to give the lectures, but I remember that story from that. It's absolutely true.

So you heard it. Very cool. Excellent. Dr. T. oh man, this has been really informative. If, of everything you shared, is that one quality question, man, that's gold right there. I'm highlighting, molding that, starring that. I'm using that myself. I'm going to ask that question myself. Cause I agree with you. If you can increase your connection and really care deeply for your clients and keep them engaged, connect the conversion is a natural next thing that'll happen. If you don't have that connection, then man, it's like lifting, pushing a boulder up a hill to try to convert someone into a client.

If you don't have that, you're fighting objection handling. It's objection, objection, objection. If you have the connection that objections kind of go away, fade away.

One of the trainers that I worked with for years, basically he would say that cell strainers, he says 40% of the conversion equation is the trust rapport connection. If you can get that right, your objections are like 5%, 10% tops.

I probably learned it from him at some point. Cause I don't know if I'm smart enough to come up with that, but that's probably right.

Awesome. Dr. T. Well, hey, if our audience would love to learn more about you and what you do, what would be the best place to send them?

You can go a couple of places. Just go to my website, drrewire.com or you can go to the rewirescore.com. You can kind of take a quiz and learn a little bit more about what I do and the brain, the function, how it works, and kind of get more information from there as well.

Awesome. So that is rewirescore.com for the quiz and your website is drrewire.com. So we'll be sure to include those links in our show notes as well. Dr. T. As we wrap up here in our last couple of minutes, do you have any final comments or recommendations or word of advice for people who want to have profitable events and can people that have that kind of engagement that you have?

If I was to say anything, it is that I love events. I love doing events. Keep doing them, keep perfecting them. The other thing I'll tell you is make sure the event is what your event wants it to be. Make sure you want it to be what your event is. I remember for a while I was chasing the big numbers in the event, but I wasn't able to. It's not about chasing those big numbers in the event. It's about using the event numbers that you have and then growing to the next level of number. That's kind of what I figured out in my process. People can say, well, you can spend a million dollars and fill it up. Okay, great. But are they going to be the right people? Is it going to be the right quality? All those questions that come into play, but I think if you're going to do events, go all in on them. I think they're amazing. I love every aspect of them. Make sure that the event is congruent to you. 100%. If it's not congruent to you, the audience and the camera does not lie. They'll catch it.

Absolutely. That is key. Connection and congruence leads to the themes of today. I think that's the three C's. Connection, congruency and conversion. There you go. It could be the name of a good virtual event. Awesome. I appreciate you being such a great guest on our show today. Send my best to Amanda and your family. Thank you again. Appreciate you.