Welcome to another exciting episode of The High Profit Event Show, hosted by Rudy Rodriguez. This week, we have guest Joshua Pellicer, founder of RealTime AI. Joshua has been in the event industry for over 20 years, building a business that reached $10 million in revenue within just 12 months. He is a best-selling author and currently runs a company that trains teams on how to utilize AI to automate processes, freeing up time for high-leverage activities.

In this episode, Rudy and Joshua dive into the power of AI in event management. Joshua shares his experience in the industry, highlighting how AI can streamline operations, enhance attendee engagement, and ultimately boost profitability. From filling event seats to creating event experiences, Joshua's insights provide a guide for event leaders looking to integrate advanced technology into their strategies.

One of the key topics discussed is the dual approach to event promotion. Joshua explains the benefits of leveraging speakers to do the heavy lifting in terms of promotion versus taking on the promotional responsibilities yourself. He shares valuable tips on incentivizing speakers effectively, avoiding the pitfalls of "pitch fest" events, and ensuring that the right audience attends your events. This segment is filled with practical advice for anyone looking to maximize their event attendance and engagement.

Another major focus of the conversation is the post-event follow-up strategy. Joshua shares the importance of providing ongoing value to attendees after the event. He discusses the role of high-quality follow-up content, such as video clips from the event, additional training sessions, and personalized communication, in maintaining attendee interest and nurturing long-term relationships. His approach to follow-up ensures that the event's impact extends beyond the event, keeping attendees engaged and ready for future events.

Lastly, Joshua delves into the specific ways he used AI to reduce the challenges of event management. From creating AI-driven email systems for personalized communication with speakers to designing ticketing and check-in systems, Joshua's innovative use of AI tools demonstrates how technology can significantly ease the logistical burdens of event leadership. His hands-on examples provide a clear roadmap for event professionals looking to incorporate AI into their workflows.

Don't miss this episode filled with actionable insights and expert advice on leveraging AI to elevate your event game. Check out The High Profit Event Show with Rudy Rodriguez and  guest Joshua Pellicer, and discover how you can transform your events into high-profit experiences with the power of AI.

Want to connect with Joshua?

Website: https://www.rltm.ai/

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

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100092040254122

Welcome to today's show. We have a special guest with us, Joshua. Welcome, sir. It's been great to get to know you over the last several weeks. You and I have had the honor and pleasure of getting to actually play together in a live event just a couple of weeks ago in Austin, The World AI Summit. Congratulations on your massive success at your event, man.

Thank you. You too. And congratulations on your awesome hat. I have one right here too. Is that the same?

That's right. This is swag from the event, from the Real Time AI swag. For our guests who are joining us here, maybe for the first time just hearing about you, I wanna just hear a couple of bio points on your background. You've been doing events for quite a while in various niches and industries as far back as over 10 years ago. You've built a business within 12 months to $10 million a year. You're a best-selling author and you currently are running a business training teams on how to use AI in their companies to automate all of the systems and processes and get them out of doing the boring tasks so they can focus more on high leverage activities, which is really awesome.

It's been crazy, actually it's been probably about 20 something years since I started doing events. It's like the easiest way, I think, to start building a company is to be coaching or doing these events because you can generate, you make fire from sticks kind of situation. You can go out with just your knowledge and share it with people and then they'll sign up and pay your life's expenses so you can keep doing it. It's a great transition during events into owning your own business. If you have your own business, it's obviously a deep way of engaging with customers. There's no other way of doing it like this.

You definitely demonstrated that at your most recent event. It was a world-class experience. You brought in world-class speakers. You brought in a world-class MC. Your attendees were super excited to be there. I actually got to meet many of them and talk to a lot of them. I could tell that it wasn't your first rodeo. You knew how to bring people together and make sure they had a great experience.

Every time it feels like it's my first rodeo. But yeah, that's right. Everything's always new and wonderful and exciting. At the same time, it makes it a little bit easier to get things done when you're not scrambling all the time as well and you know how to say, let certain things go at events.

You did great at that. You did a great job bringing good people around you, competent people around you that you could trust and let them do their thing. So you focus on what you do best. And, jumping right into the content here for our audience, I know like the number one top of mind question or the pain point that people face, which we can all relate to is, hey, I have an event. How do I get people to my event? Josh, you have a strong background in sales and marketing. Love to hear from you, maybe just share recently what worked for you in your most recent events. Generally speaking, how do you go about filling your events?

So there's two major philosophies that come to this. I would say maybe three, but we'll just break into two. One is to let all of your speakers do the heavy lifting. The other is to do all the heavy lifting yourself. And that's really, the two different schools of thought make two different types of events. Those two different types of events are one that's heavily incentivizing the speakers to promote to get people at the event. I think the combination of this is really great. At the same time, I do not like a pitch fest event where everybody's there thinking that the customers are basically fish in a barrel and they're just showing up with their guns, speakers and I don't like that. I don't like being at those events and I don't like hosting those events. So I didn't want to do that myself. It makes it harder for building customers if you don't have a customer base. So let's look at those two different directions. If you do want to go the route of getting your speakers to promote and do most of the promotion, then you do have to highly incentivize them and one way to do that is commissions. Ticket sales commissions is one, but it's not enough. Getting a ticket sale commission is not gonna be enough to excite the speakers. What you need is some kind of upside of upsells or something like that that might happen at the event or after the event. So you make a deal with them, I'll give you this percentage, a good percentage is 50%. If you can pull it off of the ticket sale and then anything that happens at the event that comes from somebody that you sent to the event, I will give you X percentage.

Sometimes it's anywhere from 30 to 75%, depending on what you're selling. If you're selling a program that you don't have to personally fulfill, like an online training or something that you already have set up and you're just putting them into it and they just go through the process, then you can afford to give away a lot more and you should. That's what you should do. Because at the end of the day, we had 10,800 affiliates in my coaching company back in the day. That's a lot of people selling your product and we noticed that when we were converting well and we were doing well, it's like making sales for them, they would promote more. That's just, that's the formula. So if your stuff sells well and you have a really good upsell chain, upsell path, and you can convert people and make sales at the event or after the event, then make those deals ahead of time. The one thing I think that sacrifices whenever you do that is that you now are picking speakers based on whether or not they're gonna have a big list and that sometimes can get you really bad speakers that just have a really big following. They don't really fit your audience, they don't fit your ethos, that kind of thing. So that's something to consider, that's one side. The other way is to do it yourself. So where you do most of the promotion yourself, and that's where you will actually go, kind of like you're on a book tour, you'll go around and speak about this and you'll talk on other platforms and they'll promote it for you. You'd be surprised at how many people are willing to support you with your training events, with your live events, just to highlight you, to let people know that that's what's up. We had the news station in Austin come and interview us and stuff too, and they were there.

So there's a lot of little opportunities like that as well. But by far, the best way to get somebody to get a butt in a seat for an event is price it well, definitely, like the whole package, have an offer that they can't refuse. You price it well for that offer, you reach them where they are, you can run your own ads, things like that, that's what we did as well. If you're new to ads, you're not gonna get a lot of sales from ads, but the ones that you do get are gonna be very valuable to you. Then finally, when you're doing your own promotion and you're running around doing all that stuff, you have to consider using the assets that you currently have. That is a really big and mostly overlooked spot of value for people. So that could just mean like your phone, go into your contacts in your phone, let people know, I'm doing an event here, do you wanna come? You'd be surprised at how many people will just say, oh, cool, let's hear more. You might want a discount, that's fine. Just get the people there that need to be there. Then once you hit a certain size, a certain number of people, say it's 150 people or something like that, it starts to snowball. Then things get a little bit easier for you to fill seats. But you need to get to that spot. So whatever you gotta do to get to that spot, I would do it. So a lot of people, what they do is they think, oh, I'm gonna have this massive number of people there and it's gonna be a huge event. But I've found that with smaller events, I oftentimes do way better. Maybe we'll make more sales, we get happier people, I can focus more on the people that show up, and can price it higher. So people that show up are of a different caliber and it's less work because you have fewer heads to wrangle and fewer seats to fill.

So also people can imagine scarcity when it comes to a 30-person event. They can't imagine scarcity when it comes to a 5,000-person event. So it's a little bit easier to manage. So that's a few of the quick notes. Of course, I've had different types of events, large events and small events. I gotta say, there's definitely a sweet spot for me personally that is not too big, somewhere definitely less than 500 people, less than 100 people even. Somewhere in that space is super intimate, super fun and people do really, they walk away from it appreciating a lot and it's easier, it's different. I've done tours as well, where you go down to different countries and tour and teach there in those spots. You have a podcast. So when you have a podcast and you give value constantly, same as a social media, you have an audience of people that engage with your content constantly, those people are your lead source and just doing the work to actually talk to them and answering their questions is worth it, to get the right people in the door.

That's great, man. There's a lot of golden nuggets here. I'm taking copious notes on my end. I'll share a couple of my takeaways for our audience. Big picture, you can, one of two ways you can really incentivize the speakers to do it, both on ticket sales, as well as potential backend or you can do it yourself in a variety of ways of doing it yourself between personal reach, ads, getting out onto media and really leveraging the audience, engaging with your audience. One of my big takeaways here is that the speakers are the con to focusing on the incentives of the speakers. The tendency is to wanna go find the speakers at the biggest list that may actually not be in alignment with your event or your audience or your ethos or mission. But that's the tendency that people tend to go and they may not be great speakers, can detract value from the room itself. So, thank you for that, man. This was great. So you just hosted an event, you had them in your sweet spot about 100 to roughly 150 people there this past several days in Austin. And it was a pretty heavy topic, AI. AI business, like it's not an easy thing to grasp and some new definitions, terminologies for a lot of people, even people who are experienced it's still like, it's heavy on the brain. How did you go about once people were there maintaining that engagement with them? Making sure that they're actually getting value from the information that's coming and that they're in the room, that they're participating, that they're leaving the event being like, yes, I'm glad I went to the event.

So if you wanna speak to that, I think that'd be very helpful.

So my philosophy around this is just that if you have amazing content and you're hitting the nail on the head with what you're offering everybody, that the people on stage are giving away their best stuff, that you will get people in the seats and they will sit there and they will be there for the event. If you missed the mark on it, they won't be. Toward the end of the event, people might dip out. That's not a problem, that just happens sometimes. But a small percentage of the people will have to leave early because they just don't set their time properly. Or even better, they meet somebody at the event and they're gonna leave tomorrow and they need to meet with them and like set up a partnership or something. So they need to duck out to do that. So I don't think it's a bad thing if some of the people are missing from the seats when you have your event. However, the best hack here is just to get kick-ass speakers that agree to give away their best stuff. If they do that, then you won't be, you should never be the star of the show of your own event, in my opinion. It should be the speakers that are the stars of the event from your perspective. Now from everybody else's perspective, maybe they think that you are, that's fine. But from your perspective, you should not be doing it to put yourself in the center. You should be doing it to highlight the people who are speaking so that you can build a legacy out of this thing. No one wants to go to the Josh show. Maybe some people do, but not that many people wanna go to the Josh show. What they want though is solutions to big problems. And these are, and AI is a big question mark problem. It's not just a FOMO, I'm gonna miss out on this whole thing. It's also a complexity that needs to be simplified.

So we did that by having people speak on topics that are applicable to the business. So that you can say, hey, this is how I'm using this for social media content or this is how I'm using it for market research, for my marketing. Or this is how I'm using it for sales. Everybody had a different thing that they were using it for. One guy was making sales videos with lifelike avatars that are AI avatars. He's working with a multi-billion dollar company doing that for them. So we had some kick-ass people. These people are mostly not speaking on stage because they're busy doing their thing. They're using AI to rock things on their side. So instead of trying to educate everybody, this is how you speak about AI, these are the terms, that kind of thing. We went another route. We said, okay, we're gonna show you how to apply this stuff to your business. Even better though, because the more complicated it is, the more likely it is that people are gonna walk away with their head spinning. You don't really want that to happen either. You want people to walk away going, well, I'm gonna do that and that and that right now with my business. You want them texting people in breaks and going, hey, you have to check out this app and you have to do this thing or going up to the speakers afterwards and saying, hey, can we talk? That's what you want. If you start to see that happen, then that means that you're nailing it. So I think that ultimately that's the big long-term vision secret for an event is to, and if it's just you doing the event, it's only your content, that's totally okay as well.

But it shouldn't be you that shines, it should be your content. People should be applying the content and that's how you know that it's worked if they're actually doing it and applying it afterwards. So with a complex topic like AI, it's really easy to get lost in the, how do I look like I know what I'm talking about kind of conversation. It's really difficult to get people to give up their secret sauce because the secret sauce these people were sharing on the stage, two years ago, would have been something they would never share with anybody ever. But it's moving so fast, this industry, that I got them to actually agree to do it, to talk about it. Because they know that in two years from now, it's not gonna be the same anyway. People are gonna see this stuff and they're gonna go, oh, that person knew about this back then. I wonder what they're doing now, and long-term it's gonna support them. So, again, it's just the amazing people speaking about amazing stuff. I almost look at it like cannibalizing, that they cannibalize their greatest opportunities for the benefit of the people in the audience who are wise enough to know to show up.

Awesome, man. Give them the best stuff, select the best speakers. Ultimately, whether it's the speakers or it's you alone and your content, it shouldn't be you, it shouldn't be the you show, it should be either the speaker shining or your content shining. That's how you know that it's valuable and people are applying it. Great, man. Then people are there with you for two, three days at the event, and you and I both know that, yeah, they probably definitely got value, got a lot of new ideas, a lot of new insights. If they leave there and not have support beyond the event, life gets in the way. That's why as event leaders, we do our best to have ongoing support beyond the event. I know you offer a world-class company, team training on AI. I'd love to hear from your perspective how you go about ensuring that you can continue the relationship and reinforce the learning and make sure that they're continuing to apply and get the results beyond the event.

So there's so many ways to offer value after an event. The timing and the vacuum of the offer is also kind of valuable too. So you don't need to follow up every single day right after an event. It doesn't need to be like every single day for the rest of the year. You need to always be there following up. You can create a little space where if they don't, where they can kind of feel like you're not there, that's not a problem because that vacuum creates this realization they can't apply this without support, an area of support. So what we did is we created a members area that or just a pocket of members inside of a members area. We use Circle to do it. Circle is a great company for quick members areas, throw them up and then engage in them. We put all the people at the event. You couldn't see the itinerary unless you were inside that members area. So that's where we delivered the itinerary. So everybody could log in, see the itinerary and see what was coming up. So it incentivized a lot of people to join. So now we also have their email addresses, of course, and their physical addresses. So we worked out a deal with Ray Kurzweil, who's a well-known AI name. He's sending everybody who was at the event his new book, which hasn't come out yet. So it'll be like first the Hopper presses, brand new, cutting edge stuff. This reminds them, like these little things that remind them. If we say, the members area is another place that reminds them too. But the next piece of this, I think if you don't do this next part, you're really missing out on an awesome opportunity.

And that is send them clips of the videos from the live event via email for the rest of the year, basically until your next event shows up or until you start promoting your next event. Send them regular clips from the event. Here's this thing this person said. Also, you can promote and have guest speaking and webinars with the speakers and with a couple people that couldn't get on with you and couldn't get on stage. Invite everybody from the group who attended to those webinars. So you just keep delivering this value and don't ask for anything really while you do this. These are people who have already paid to be at the event. They're really, really high value people. Instead of sending us a message to them and saying, okay, now buy something, now buy something, that will diminish, that'll make them not want to go next year. If you keep delivering value to them and keep them in communication with you, keep delivering this content or whatever it is they're looking for, then they'll start to raise their hands and ask for more support. When that happens, you feel free to promote to them whatever you want to promote to them. But I wouldn't push, the big mistake I see is people pushing the upsell like aggressively after the event and not, there should be a 10 to one content only to upsell promotion ratio when it comes to post event. So when you get the videos, when you get the videos in, for example, of the event, when you get webinars set up for people and you want to talk to the speakers or speak to a couple of extra experts and you invite everybody in to come join, just give that to them.

Then after you do that maybe 10 times, then you can send an email or something else that says, hey, personal email, like not something that's a blast or anything like that, but something that says, hey, I want to check in on you and see if you have any questions, how you're doing applying this stuff, surveys, things like that. Those are personal. Those don't feel like sales at all. But they give you the information that you want, which is who is ready to take the next step. You'll see that a lot of people need time after an event to realize that the event glow, when it wears off, what kind of support do they actually need? Because when they're at the event, the event glow makes it seem like they don't need any support. They've got all the support they're ever gonna need ever. But when they go back to their life, they realize, oh goodness, now I need a support group here. So I'm really a big believer in high value follow-up. That is not a lot of promotion and just like little chunks, bite-sized chunks to them constantly. Every once in a while, some webinar type stuff or interview type things. Just invite them all into it.

Awesome, man. A few takeaways here. Again, another almost full page of notes from just that one section. When you do a post-event follow-up, one, actually it can work on your behalf to have them not hear from you for a little bit. So that that event glow kind of wears off where they think they can do it all themselves and they start to realize that either they can't or they're not doing it. Maybe they're capable of it for whatever reason they're not doing it right. They realize that they need help. Then the way you continue to stay and keep in the conversation is dripping clips from the event. Also potentially adding some bonus trainings with some of the speakers that people continue to come to and or surveys and basically allowing people to organically raise their hand saying, hey, I'd like to have a conversation. I'd like to learn more and building goodwill so that when the next event comes out that you promote, you've already added so much value that they're gonna raise their hand to come to the next one.

Yes, lots of people talk after events. Then when the next event comes, they check to talk to each other and they go, oh, you went last year, how was it? If they say, oh, it's a pitch fest or it was great, but then after the event, you have to make sure you unsubscribe because blah, blah, blah. You don't want anything like that in the way you want just to be glowing, amazing responses. Like, oh yeah, they're amazing. They took care of us, that kind of thing.

Absolutely, man. This is great. I appreciate you sharing your insights, especially given your most recent experience with The World AI Summit. Josh, if people wanna learn more about you, what you do for companies, what would be the best way for them to get a hold of you to learn more?

Go to Rltm.ai is our site, Rltm.ai. Then just at the bottom, you'll see a way to reach out to us or you can apply and get to know us better that way too and join the AI training group. It's a really amazing team training group. But the best way to reach out though is to do that, put their email in and then just ask us questions, contact us basically that way. We don't really do social media, not really. I mean, we have social media accounts, but we're an AI company. So you can imagine we can use AI to do a lot of stuff so that we don't have to watch it very carefully. And the other best way, if they do comment on this interview, we'll be able to see that and follow up with them as well.

Okay, great, awesome. And Josh, as a little bonus question here for our audience, you led an event and you also used AI to help reduce some of the hassle of the event so that you could focus on leverage activities. Love to hear specifically how you're using AI, how you used AI, because I know event leaders here are like, that's what I want. They're like, I wanna do what Josh did. How did you use it at your event?

There's so many things that I used AI for at this event. It would take too long to say them all, but I'll say a few of them that were just like, this was a lifesaver for me. One of them was, when I was making the sales page, we used AI to do all the research on the statistics that we put on the page. So like, what percentage of people were using AI in business? What percentage of people are falling behind with AI? What companies are seeing numbers-wise? That kind of thing. We just used Chatgpt for this. You can use Perplexity as well. We just asked to search online for the statistics that we were looking for, and then grab them and wove them into the copy for the sales page. So that was really helpful. Show notes, everything that we needed for, any statistics that we needed for notes, we did the same thing live at the event. But if the MC needed to say something that was intelligent and statistic-related to anchor something, then we had all those pre-designed and pre-written for every speaker's topic. So they could choose between whatever they wanted. But the thing that ended up taking the most time to me was reaching out to these speakers and actually getting them to promote or to mention it. That's just so people knew it was real and it was really happening. I found that that would take me an entire day. I mean, I would sit down to write those emails and they all need to be very personal and they're all from me. So what I did is instead of sitting down to write all the emails, I sat down for about an hour and made an AI system.

It doesn't take very long to build them if you know what you're doing and made an AI system that would write the emails to the specific speakers for me. So I could do all this affiliate follow-up all at once by just pushing some buttons. Then I could send the email straight within my AI system. I didn't have to go into my inbox, nothing. So that way I could change something really simple. If I wanted to give an update to everybody, but it would write a personal email to all these speakers because no speaker wants to receive a blast email at all. No one wants to, honestly, but speakers especially don't want to. They want to be treated like they're special. Otherwise they know that they're gonna get at the event and they're not gonna be treated special there either. So there was that. We did a lot of design stuff with it as well. Presentations, all sorts of stuff with it. We were going to do even more with it, even more than that, if we had a little more extra space to do that. But we had so little time. It's surprising how much stuff you need to get done in that small period of time and how many things show up and crop up for you to have to deal with. So we had these tools, a series of different tools that we use with AI that just made the whole thing actually made it possible to do it. Otherwise it would not have been possible to do this event without it. So the big thing though is really the follow-up. We also had an event. At an event you have to check everybody in and there's all these programs to do that. They're expensive and they're crappy and they don't integrate with anything. Ticketing systems, they're really bad and it's just a strange industry.

So we're like, we're just gonna make our own. So we made our own in about two hours and it was done and it was AI-ified. So if we wanna do anything special, we could totally do it. Extract something, produce it specifically for a customer, any notes, things like that. So it was a really high value thing for us in kind of empowering everybody with AI and the team. There's a few other things too, but those were to me, because I was the one doing all these things I'm telling you right now. So they were really impactful for me to do that stuff.

That's amazing, man. I'm putting myself in the listener's shoes now. I'm like, okay, now tell me, I want the masterclass on how to do everything you just described.

I was like showing people like recording Loom videos from the team being like, hey, check this out. It just felt so fun to do it. Like look at what I'm doing right now. I'm just like, I'm just doing this once and I just click buttons and it does it all for me. So pretty cool.

So cool, man. For listeners tuning in here, if learning how to use AI to grow your business, your event business or other elements of your business, doing less redundant work or focusing on more high leverage activities, helping automate your sales and marketing processes, invite you to click the link in the chat here that you'll find all the resources to connect with Josh and his team, have a conversation with them and discover how RealTime AI could potentially help you guys in your business as well. So Josh, thanks for being with us today, man. It's been a great interview. Really appreciate you, man. This is a great time. Thank you. Appreciate you. Thank you so much.