In the latest episode of the "High Profit Event Show," host Rudy Rodriguez sits down with the accomplished Shay Wheat, the CEO of Grace and Ease Productions. Shay's impressive journey includes collaborations with influential figures like Dr. Oz and Lisa Nichols, and under her leadership, her company has flourished, helping her clients do  over $20 million in event revenue, acquiring 3,700 clients, and influencing over 29,000 event attendees.

Throughout the episode, Shay emphasizes the significance of live events for entrepreneurs and the art of making them both impactful and profitable. She meticulously breaks down the five phases of event scaling. Starting with the "Starting Phase," she speaks about focusing on delivering results for the initial set of clients. This is followed by the "Visibility Phase" that centers on enhancing brand visibility. The "Growth Phase" introduces webinars and masterclasses, while the "Scale Phase" sees a transition to group sales conversations. Lastly, the "Expertise Phase" delves into hosting large-scale events and building a dedicated fan community.

Shay also highlights the importance of tailoring strategies to align event type, audience, and offers. She shares an illustrative example where an initial strategy targeting CEOs was pivoted to cater to a different audience with a more suitable offer. The episode delves deep into various event monetization strategies such as VIP upgrades, sponsors, and downsells. There's a special emphasis on budgeting, including hiring the right AV team to enhance the overall event experience.

One of the core discussions of the episode revolves around the "ACE" strategy, which stands for Attract, Connect, and Enroll. Shay speaks about the importance of post-registration nurture journeys, which might include thank-you notes and event reminders. She even suggests personal touches, such as welcome calls by event organizers or their sales team, to foster a stronger human connection.

Listeners are also introduced to the benefits of pre-event engagement, as Shay explains how successful event leaders utilize tools like emails, texts, and interviews. The episode further delves into Shay's consulting expertise, where she touches upon understanding audiences, planning ticket sales, and even managing event budgets. A notable anecdote she shares is how she saved a client $15,000 simply by reviewing a hotel contract, underscoring the value of her consulting services.

Towards the end of the episode, Shay generously offers a unique gift to the audience - the "High Profit Event Playbook." Exclusively designed for the show's audience, this playbook, available on highprofitevents.com, focuses on boosting attendance, effective sales strategies, and creating revenue streams. Shay ends by emphasizing the paramount importance of understanding and tracking business metrics for growth. As the episode concludes, Rudy expresses his gratitude to Shay for her invaluable insights and encourages listeners to explore the resources available on Shay Wheat's website.

Want to connect with Shay?

Grab Your “High Profit Event Playbook” here: https://highprofitevents.com/

Grab a Free Discovery Call here: www.EventsArePowerful.com

Website: www.GraceAndEaseProductions.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sawheat

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shay.wheat

Facebook Business Page: https://www.facebook.com/GraceAndEaseProductions/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shaywheat/

Instagram Business Page: https://www.instagram.com/graceandeaseproductions

YoutTube: http://www.youtube.com/shaywheat

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ShayWheat

Think you'd be a great guest on the show? Apply HERE.

Want to learn more about Rudy's work at V.E.S.T. Your Virtual Event Sales Team? Check out his website at https://virtualeventsalesteam.com/.

Welcome to today's episode. We have a special guest, Ms. Shay Wheat. Welcome, Ma'am.

What's up, everybody? I'm excited to be here.

Excited to have you here. For our audience, I want to give a little background on how we met and your area of expertise so they can really lean in. I think this is going to be a really great episode on learning how to monetize their live events. You're the CEO of Grace and Ease Productions, and you support entrepreneurs with event-based marketing and sales strategies. And you really help entrepreneurs build their authority, credibility, and visibility while scaling their businesses and saving time and money with events. You've worked with some pretty powerful people, including Dr. Oz and Lisa Nichols and you and your company, Grace and Ease, have accounted for over $20 million in revenue and helped acquire over 3,700 clients and impact over 29,000 event attendees. Wow.

And it constantly grows. So I probably need to update that as well.

So you've been involved in all sorts of aspects of event planning and promotion and sales and really excited to have you on today's show to pick your brain and learn how we can continue to improve our monetization strategies at our live events.

Absolutely. That's kind of the key piece I hear a lot of people is, how do I actually make money from my events? I don't want to lose my shirt, right?

That's right. It's key. Having a profitable event, a profitable and impactful event. So I would love to just maybe briefly share a little bit about your background as far as your journey from getting introduced to the event industry with Dr. Oz and how you could now become CEO of Grace and Ease, and then we'll jump into monetization strategies and how you help entrepreneurs make more money with their live events.

I kind of like to think I fell into the business. So 10 years ago I was speaking on a stage because as we all know, speaking on stage is the fastest path to cash. To get in front of your ideal audience, you need to be on stages. So I was on a multi-speaker event and they were one of those ones where you pass the microphone back and forth. So I was just kind of messing around with the guy in front of me and I'm like, hey dude, don't go spitting on my mic. He’s like, you're funny. Who are you? Well, come to find out he was the head of education for Dr. Oz's nonprofit. I'm like, oh my goodness. I just met his sister Saval at Maria Shriver's women's conference when she was the first lady of California. He's like, hold on. She's best friends with our CEO and we're doing a women's conference. You should help us. I went, okay. So that was my first gig as an associate producer. I was in charge of over 70 speakers and a hundred volunteers. So that was my first introduction to the world of events. Jump right into the deep end. Now I've been doing it for 10 years and I get to play with all kinds of different thought leaders and speakers and coaches and experts all around the world, which I absolutely love.

So cool. So you've been doing it for 10 years now as a CEO, Ease and Grace.

Exactly.

I like that name because at the end of the day, people want to have events and have everything go smoothly with grace and ease. They want to get the results and the outcome, not with stress, but with grace and ease. That's a good name. So would you say when you first really started getting involved with supporting entrepreneurs with live events, what were some of the most surprising aspects of the business for you?

Maybe some of the initial challenges that you faced so that you can really shine. As I started to progress and really started to understand the power of events, especially sales and enrollment or conversion events, the things I started to see out in the marketplace from a lot of thought leaders and speakers and coaches and experts out there, people that have some type of high ticket offer, were wanting to do events, but doing the wrong events at the wrong time in their business. So they would go, oh, I want to do a summit or I want to do a three day event. I want to do a one day event. I'm like, okay, great. That's wonderful. Tell me about who it is that you serve and what is your offer and what are the goals and intentions? And they looked at me with like this blank look on their face and I'm like, okay, so you're not ready yet. Like they saw the shiny object out there of all the gurus doing everything, but what they didn't realize is they were in a phase of business that wasn't going to support them in hosting events right there. So what I've come to realize is there's actually five phases of events to scale and leverage when you should be doing certain events at certain times in your business.

So I'll run through them real quick. Phase one is you are literally not doing any events. You're getting clients, getting them crazy, awesome results until you have about five, I'm sorry, eight to 10 paying clients. Then you move into phase two, which is your visibility, where your goal is to get more visible, use the free platforms, be guests on other people's stages, other people's webinars, podcasts, summits, and start sponsoring events to the point where you're reaching about 5k a month consistently. You then move into phase three, which is growth. So you keep growing your visibility, create your own stages now. So now you can host the masterclasses, the webinars, the summits, and obtain larger speaker sponsorships to the point where you're making about 10k a month. Then you move to phase four, which is scale. This is where you start to really start scaling your conversations and looking at going from one-on-one sales conversations to one-to-many with like a one-day enrollment or a retreat or a workshop, because you now have the income of having a team and having somebody like myself come in and support you and look at the strategy of actually making it happen. Then phase five is where you are completely in your zone of genius. You're continuing to grow your client base. You're delegating everything else to your team. You're starting to establish those systems to leverage your time. You're really utilizing those three-day sales and enrollment events to create a community of raving fans so that you can just offer your program in that one-to-many model, be done in three days, and then just fulfill upon it. So it's kind of like a stair-step way of where you're going from the beginning, working out your offer, making sure that it's actually something people will buy. Then you go out to a larger stage, a larger stage, a larger stage until you're hosting your own and really utilizing it as an opportunity to leverage your time, money, and your team.

Wow, that's cool. I like how you share the progression of stages of businesses where people are at, and it is a progression. I can definitely relate to the whole shiny object thing and wanting to do exactly what everybody else does, skipping steps. And great to have someone like you in the corner who knows the patterns, knows the stages, and can identify them and help guide where the best area of focus is when it comes to an event. That's awesome. In Ease And Grace Productions, you're known for your unique monetization strategies. Can you maybe expand on that a little bit more and just talk about how you help a client create a monetization strategy for their live event? Maybe give some examples. I think that'd be very helpful for our audience.

Absolutely. So when we're looking at events, there are so many things that people are like, how do I just enroll people into my programs? Well, it goes a lot deeper into that. So when we're looking at monetizing, we're taking a look at your audience, we're taking a look at your sales, we're looking at your revenue streams, and we're looking at your event budgets. These are all different, what we call power plays, that create a high profit event. So when you're looking at attendance, people are like, how do I fill my room? How do I sell more tickets? How do I get people to show up? That's probably the biggest question I get all the time. Then in terms of the sales piece, it's okay, what is your offer? Within your offer, one, is it the right offer? So for example, one of my clients came back to me, we've done three day sales and enrollment events for them. They came to me and they said, we want to go ahead and do a summit. I'm like, okay, great. Tell me more. What are we offering from this summit? Because you always start with the end in mind, and then you reverse engineer from that. What is the goal and intention? What are we trying to do? Because that will determine the type of event we're using as well. She said, well, through the pandemic, we pretty much loved on our audience so much, we need to bring in more people into our space. Okay, great. A summit's a great place to do that. It's a lead gen, building your audience type of opportunity. They wanted to bring in 1000 new leads onto their list. Great. Summit's a great thing for that as well. What are we offering? What is this leading to? She's like, oh, we want to offer our $20,000 package. I said, that's not going to work.

And she's like, okay. I was like, when you're doing a summit, we need to stair step them, you can't go straight into a 20k offer. So they went back and they talked to the team. They said, okay, this is what we want to do. Oh, the other thing is they wanted to do it for very super high level CEOs. I said, super high level CEOs are not showing up on summits. They won't listen to them. So that's not going to work. Do you want to stick to a summit and do your authors and your speakers in the personal development route? Or do you want to go CEOs? So they came back and they said, okay, we do want to be with our personal development group. Okay, fantastic. We want to make an offer into our 8k program. Okay, I can work with that. So from there, we ended up taking a look at who are the guest speakers that they want? Are we making any offers during the event in terms of strategy sessions, you can't offer straight an 8k program directly from a summit because you haven't built enough rapport and relationship with them. So what we're taking a look at is how does it actually fit into that client and customer journey? When it comes to the sale and your offer, that's going to allow you to convert more people. We also take a look at the price point so that you can increase your sales. So in the end, with that summit, we ended up having it was completely virtual, it was completely pre recorded, they ended up having 1500 plus people added to their list. They had a $97 VIP upgrade, which also gave them a boot camp. For those that didn't want to be VIP, we ended up having a downsell for people that just wanted to do just the boot camp and not get all the other VIP goodies for $47.

In the boot camp, they ended up making an offer into their program. They also offered strategy sessions during the summit as well. So in the end, they ended up making about $90,000 at the end of the summit. Then we looked at their follow up plan, which then was going to support them in bringing on probably another 2025 people into their program. Which you don't really hear people talking about in their summits. There's a system, there's a whole way that we monetize this, and we have to look at it from the very end, and then backtrack everything from there. So that goes into the sales piece. In terms of our revenue streams, we're looking at sponsors, VIP upgrades, downsells, live stream versus in person versus hybrid, all of the different pieces that we can monetize the event. And then from the event budget standpoint, we're really looking at how do we reduce the cost? If you're in person, you're paying for room rental and food and beverage and room block, how do we make that reduce cost? In our negotiations, we're going through a ton of different things to make it so you don't have to pay everything. We get you the best rates on the hotel and the venue, and we hire the AV team so that you're not using somebody from the hotel that's union and doesn't know what you need to do, and then you're charged extra and so on and so forth. So those are kind of like the power plays and the ways that we monetize when we're doing consulting with our clients of like, where are we at and here are the big blocks that we need to address when it comes to your event and frankly, when it comes to your business as a whole.

What I'm hearing from all that, Shay, is that you start with the end in mind and you get clear on what is the outcome of the event, who are you speaking to, what are you offering, and making sure it's the right event fit because I heard, it's true, like high level CEOs are not going to sit on a free summit and you got to know your audience and your medium and your offering. It has to be a match between all three. Brilliant, I love that you do that. Another thing that took away from what you shared is this idea of, when working with a hotel, managing the hiring of the AV team. I've heard so many nightmare stories around that, specifically on, like you said, they hire a union group that is just very resistant and they don't know exactly what you need. So cool that you as a producer actually can take charge of vetting and finding an AV team that can fit the needs and the objectives of the event. That's really awesome.

When you're doing an event, you're not doing like a nine to five. It's like you're there setting up the day before, you're there in the morning doing tech checks, you've got guest speakers coming in, they've got all their tech checks, you've got a team. So they end up being 12, 15 hour days sometimes. When you're working with somebody that doesn't understand that on the AV side and doesn't understand like, oh, well, that wasn't in the spreadsheet, but really understands, oh, you mentioned something on the stage about how you love, I don't know, a certain song by Pink or something. The AV person's able to go, oh, I got this song and starts to play it during the event. Like that just adds extra juice and just community relationship and building and like everybody's in it together. It's that experiential part that you're just not going to get from somebody that doesn't understand our world.

Wow. So cool. On that note, I know you mentioned it before, I just love to touch on it, getting people to attend the event. I know that's one of the biggest things, whether it's virtual and getting to show up on the Zoom or even in person and they have a ticket to get them to actually get on a flight, get to the hotel. What are some monetization strategies or tips that you can give around increasing show up rate to an event? Because I know that's a very top of mind challenge for our audience.

Exactly. So depending on the type of event this is going to be a little bit different if it is a masterclass versus a three day event. But regardless, both of those opportunities, you can utilize this strategy, which is when somebody registers, what happens to them afterwards? What is the client nurture journey? So we send a thank you. That's like, I'm so excited. Can't wait to see you. Let's do a three day event that's in person for this example. Ok, so we're going to go ahead and nurture there. We're going to send them emails. We're going to send them reminders of when they need to get their hotel and what they need to bring with them, depending on how far out we end up selling the ticket, because you can be selling tickets three months out from the event. We might end up doing another smaller event leading into the bigger event. So if you had sponsors or you yourself as the event host, you can host a virtual event that's just an hour. Zoom has kind of a master class type of thing that would get them ready for the event. Or if you had sponsors, it would be introducing the sponsors and this is who you're going to meet and this is what you're going to learn from them or your guest speakers. So it's dropped in there because the reason a lot of people don't see very good show up rates is because they forget to ACE. ACE stands for attract, connect and enroll. So when they say yes to purchasing a ticket, whether it be a free ticket or an actual paid ticket, they're saying yes to registering.

They're not necessarily saying yes to showing up. So we have to, once they say yes to that, we have to ACE again. We have to attract them, connect with them and enroll them to actually show up. So going back to our in-person event, we actually do welcome calls. Like we suggest all of our clients to pick up the phone and reach out to the people that have bought a ticket. Yes, it's more work. Yes, it's more labor intensive, but it gets results. We all want this human connection. So if you want a higher show up rate, you have to put in the work in order to get them to show up and feel connected to you and your community. So it doesn't necessarily have to be you, but it can be your team or it can be your sales team, which is even better because it allows them to go ahead and get to know the team and the sales team knows what's going on with Rudy. Why is Rudy showing up? What are you hoping to get out of this event? Rudy, what can we add into our run of show to make it even better for you? Like do that mining for gold to support them and going, oh, okay, they hear me, they understand me. They're actually going to deliver upon the promise that they said what I was going to get out of the event. So that's one of the biggest pieces for show up rate is to actually call and reach out and do the DM’s and find out why they're showing up in the first place.

I couldn't agree more. I love that acronym ACE. That's a great acronym. One of the things that we do when we do engagement with our partners is we have a pre-event engagement process where we're emailing, texting, even interviewing a segment of the audience to do exactly that so that we can take that track and improve the experience for the clients and also craft the the offering and messaging and the sales process. So it goes along. I think that's the secret sauce, honestly, I think event leaders who do that come out way, way further ahead than event leaders who don't do that.

And I think it makes more sense to have the sales team do it than you personally doing it as event host because the sales team are the ones that if it's virtual, they're in the chat, they're in the coaching rooms. If it's in person, they're going to obviously be in the room. They're already starting to build rapport and relationships. That's what you need to then support them and go, oh, okay, yeah, this is the right next step for me. I've already had this relationship with Rudy. Rudy already knows my situation. Rudy, like, help me out. How do we make this happen? Because I'm not seeing it. Then you come back and you go, yeah, I got you. What if we do that? And you're like, oh, fantastic.

One hundred percent. Awesome. So for some of the people that are out there that maybe they're just not quite ready per se to have someone like you come in and do everything for them one of your key aspects, I understand that you do some consulting as well. Can you talk to us a little bit about the consulting aspects of your business?

Absolutely. So I have a couple of consulting peeps that are like, I don't necessarily need you on site. I'm going to be doing a smaller event. It's like 20 people. But I need these four pillars that you were discussing earlier. I need to make sure that I know how my audience is going to show up and I need you to walk me through what a ticket map would look like and how I can sell more tickets and how I can get them to show up. What is the game plan for that? I need you to take a look at my offer. I need you to take a look at how I can have additional revenue streams or take a look at my budget. And having my eye on it. I kid you not, Rudy, I ended up looking at somebody's hotel contract and there was a clause in there. This was before they signed, thankfully. But there was a clause in there that would have made them pay an additional $15,000 for no reason. Just because the hotel was going, oh, well, that's just in case, we're just going to put that on there just in case you go over your food and beverage. We already have the money. I was like, no, no, no, you don't need that. Take it out. So saving them money is a huge thing. There are so many vendors out there of step and repeat banners and pop up banners and print and stuff, AV companies. I can take a look at anybody's and I can go, okay, yes, you need this. No, you don't need that. Why are they charging you for this? So on and so forth just to help reduce the cost. So that alone, saving $15,000 on a hotel contract, saving $5,000 here, $10,000 here pays for itself and then some.

We can do that all from just a consulting perspective. If you have a team already that can support you on site, we can help you take a look at what are the key pieces of those four sections, what's most coming up for you right now and then dive in deep into those pieces.

Sounds like a winning proposition. Oftentimes what costs us more money is the mistakes we make rather than the gain at the end. It sounds like working with you and your consulting can help avoid the pretty costly mistakes that you've learned over the last 10 years.

Just a few.

Just a few. So you generously put together a really special gift for our audience today. I'm really excited to share that with our audience. Would you mind going through that with us and how they can get that?

Absolutely. So it was actually in conversation with you that we designed this specifically for your audience. So it is the high profit event playbook and it goes into the four different power plays that I mentioned earlier. So taking a look at the attendance and listing out all the ways that you can sell more tickets and how do you get people to show up, taking a look at the sales, where your offer is and how do you convert more people and the price points, the revenue streams, the event budget. So as we're rolling this out, you can keep going back to highprofitevents.com and we're going to continue to put different PDFs on there on each of the four opportunities. The first one's already done, the attendance one, because I know everybody has questions about attendance. So you can go to highprofitevents.com, you can click on the attendance one and then see all the different ways of how you can sell more tickets, get more people to show up and some other resources to support you along the way.

Awesome. Thank you for sharing that. We'll be sure to include that highprofitevents.com here in our show notes as well to go along with today's recording. So, Shay, as we wrap up here in the last couple of minutes that we have, any final words or comments you want to leave with our audience?

I think it would be to make sure that you are taking a look at the numbers. So I was connecting with somebody on social media just earlier today and I'm like, okay, tell me what are the numbers anytime you speak to somebody, what is your conversion rate, so on and so forth. If you don't know your numbers, then we're not building business based on the numbers and it's all a system. If you have the numbers, it allows us to then reverse engineer everything else so that we can go ahead and step in and support you so that you can stay in your zone of genius. Then we can take over how we can 10X your numbers from there.

Awesome. Know your numbers. So I'm taking away, you got to know your numbers. Couldn't agree more. Well, thank you, Shay, for being a guest on our show today. For our listeners, be sure to check out Shay Wheat and her company if you're having an upcoming event. Also definitely go download those free giveaways at highprofitevents.com, which will be here in the show notes. Thank you again, Shay.

Thank you so much. Appreciate you.

Great episode today. Thank you.