In the latest episode of the High Profit Event Show, hosted by Rudy Rodriguez, we are privileged to delve deep into the illustrious entrepreneurial journey of Dr. Chris Daigle aka “Doc”. His journey, spanning since 2002, has seen ventures into online marketing, the launch and eventual sale of a pioneering SaaS company in the real estate domain in 2008, and a concentrated effort towards business growth methodologies like Eos and Scaling Up. But Chris's current fascination and focus? The integration of thousands of hours of business experience with AI, aiming to effortlessly scale businesses. Moreover, he's at the forefront of a significant shift, pioneering certifications for the role of Chief AI Officers.

Rudy and Chris take listeners on a trip down memory lane, reminiscing about their notable collaboration with Mark Moss, which culminated in a monumental event generating over 2.1 million in sales. The roots of this success lie in Mark's "Market Disruptors LIVE," an idea born from Chris's recognition of Mark's immense popularity and his genuine rapport with his audience. But what truly set the event apart? It was Mark’s consistent and impactful voice, combined with groundbreaking insights that deeply resonated with the libertarian crowd. The meticulously detailed planning, tiered access for attendees, and a curated list of expert speakers – some of whom rarely grace the public stage – created an unparalleled event experience.

Diving deeper into the inner workings of the event, it was its unique nature that stood out. Attendees were granted VIP access, allowing them to connect directly with genuine, down-to-earth personalities. Moreover, unlike many events where sales teams aggressively push for deals, this event's approach was different. They were deeply entrenched in the planning process, emphasizing the understanding of client needs, which in turn made their sales strategy feel authentic. A testament to their commitment to excellence, the event paid attention to the minutest of details - from fresh flowers to meaningful feedback sessions, ensuring Mark's brand was strengthened further.

On a futuristic note, the conversation steered towards the transformative potential of AI in event management. While AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude from OpenAI have made strides, they are best seen as enhancing human effort, not replacing it. Chris and Rudy discuss the real-world applications of AI in drafting communication materials and boosting organizational efficiency. Shedding light on the future, they emphasized the need for businesses to strategically plan AI implementation. With the media often painting a daunting picture of AI, certifications, like the one offered at chiefaiofficer.com, provide professionals with a comprehensive understanding of how best to leverage AI in their roles. As the episode wraps up, Rudy strongly endorses such AI certifications, viewing them as an indispensable skill set for modern professionals.

To truly appreciate the depth and insights shared in this discussion, listeners are encouraged to check out the full episode.

Want to connect with Dr. Chris Daigle?

Website: https://www.chiefaiofficer.com/

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

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedoctordaigle

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. Today we have a special guest, Mr. Chris Daigle. Welcome sir. Chris, this has been an interview that I've been waiting to have with you for almost two years now, man, since we worked together with Mark Moss and the tremendous success that we had together in doing that first event and doing over 2 million, 2.1 million in sales. A lot of great lessons learned and look forward to hearing your perspective on it as one of the founders of that event. But before I do, I want to share some of the bio points for our audience to know a little bit more about you. One, you've been a serial entrepreneur for many years, been around the block. I mean, since 2002, you've been doing various online marketing businesses, including launching a SaaS company and selling it in 2008. That was in the real estate industry. Since then you've been focused on growth through business architectures like Eos and scaling up, and you've taken thousands of hours of your experience inside of businesses. Now you're integrating that with AI to help prepare business to scale seamlessly with AI and also AI certifications for people to become chief AI officers, which is a really exciting trend. I'm excited.

Happy to be here. Thanks so much. I'm excited to share the huge success that we shared together in Miami at the end of 2021, as well as what I'm doing now with the AI certifications.

It's a hot trend. So can you start maybe just giving us a brief overview of your experience working together with Mark?

Sure.

And how your collaboration, our collaboration contributed to the success of the event?

So, as you mentioned, a lot of our efforts in supporting companies has been in what we call growth architecture, and that is architecting the growth plan for a company so that it's pain free and issues have been mitigated in advance and things like that. Mark was originally a client. We hit it off. I really respect what he's doing. I respect the lifestyle that he's created with his business. He is unequivocal about his positions on things, and I found his position to be very knowledgeable. If you've ever seen any of Mark's content, you know that Mark does a lot of research into questions that are going around in the world right now. So Mark had reached out to assist with that. One of the ideas that came out during that process was I've hosted a lot of live events. I've produced a number of live events in the past, and I was like, you're not doing anything here. You've got great rapport with your audience. I saw the comments from his YouTube and everything like that. People love what Mark's doing, and to deny them the opportunity to engage in a live situation, across the table from somebody. I thought he was doing some segment of his audience a great disservice. We talked him into it, and that was the genesis of what he now has as his inside line mastermind that has been extremely successful. His mastermind participants have been able to get early investment opportunities that Mark's presented with because of his position in the marketplace. I think they've had a lot of fun as well in the process, both Mark and the members of the mastermind.

Awesome, man. What do you think were some of the key factors that led to that astounding result of 2.1 million in sales from that event?

It wasn't a huge room. I think maybe 400 people around there, something like that, and to be able to realize that many mastermind enrollments from such a small group was pretty remarkable. I think that what led to the success, again, was that Mark had been true to the voice and the mark. He hadn't been somebody to jump on. Now I'm an expert at this. Now I'm an expert at that. He's very clear on the contribution he brings to his students, I guess you'd call them. And not only that, but again, to reference the comments and the feedback and that sort of thing, because we got intimately involved in the operations of his business for a while there. Mark was changing lives for sure with the knowledge that he was sharing. People were extremely grateful. I think he was giving a voice to an underrepresented avatar in the marketplace, kind of that libertarian ideal, that there's not a whole lot of libertarian masterminds out there that I've heard of. Particularly with his forecasts with Bitcoin in particular, he's been a huge student of what distinguishes Bitcoin, I think, from everything else in the crypto exchanges. Mark is, he's extremely intelligent, but he's a surfer.

So he's not the suit and tie guy. He's not stuck up. So I think that Mark's persona was very relatable and approachable to a lot of his folks. However, there weren't many opportunities to interact with Mark in a live environment other than if you were, if you happen to be at somebody else's event, Mark was keynoting or one of the featured speakers, possibly. But this was an opportunity for the event to fully encompass Mark's personality. It was Mark's show. I think that people were really excited to be able to immerse in the paradigm of Mark Moss Live. I think that had a lot to do with the success of it. Additionally, being an architect of growth and companies, we spent a lot of time planning the event and really thinking about the experience of the attendees beyond just seeing a series of speakers and learning stuff. One of the things that we did that was, I think, very effective was we created different tiers of access with the different pricing and the ticket prices. The folks that participated at the VIP level experienced really first-class treatment. We made the speakers lounge the VIP lounge. So if you were a VIP, you could go in there and it was fully catered and all set up as like a, almost like a coworking space kind of vibe. But you might be getting a snack and the guy next to you in line might be the next speaker up on stage.

So it gave those folks the opportunity to not just access Mark, but to access Mark's peer group who he referenced frequently in his research and interviews and things like that. There were a lot of starstruck individuals in there that were able to, hey, Anthony Pompliano, Pom, can I ask you a question? Like some really big names in Mark's space were there hanging out, enjoying the interaction with the VIPs and the VIPs, of course, not only do they have the creature comforts that we provided them, but they had the ability to get very specific. Hey, here's my situation. You're an expert. What do you think? And that was, you couldn't put a price on the access that everybody got to that. So those were some of the key things that I think really set the tone for everybody's experience at the event. There was no question that the list of speakers had been highly curated and definitely experts. I mean, we got people to come to speak at Mark's event that either don't speak publicly or usually charge a high honorarium, I think it's called a speaking fee. These folks were just, they wanted to be around not only the attendees, but the other speakers that we had brought together for this event. They all wanted to support Mark because again, Mark's anybody that's done business with Mark, he's got a great reputation. He's a straight shooter for sure, but there's no question of his integrity. There was just a lot of excitement leading up to and during the event from everybody, the person who bought the last ticket, who came at the last minute to the speakers that we had, some of which were billionaires.

So they were not trying to go and play the elitist game. I'm a speaker, I'm going to hide back here. We've got hundreds of pictures of the speakers coming off the stage and just hanging out with everybody in the hallway and crowds around them as is typical at an event. But rather than being rushed off by a handler, these speakers were hanging out and they were asking questions of the audience. It was a very special experience for all of us.

It was a cool event. And I agree, it was neat to have that VIP access for people to connect and get to know people and people were so down to earth. Without revealing too much of Mark's secret sauce, we know he's very skilled in business. Can you share any other insights as far as the success of the sales at the event?

It was very well orchestrated. You and I knew each other through mutual friends, but we had never worked together before. But we met on a VIP Harbor cruise at TNC. No, we didn't meet there. Somebody told me, I told them what I was doing and they were like, oh, you got to talk to my friend who was Kate, right? I think it might've been the other way around, something like that. But then Kate sent me a picture a few days later and no, it was you and I met, you told me what you did. I was like, oh, that's nice. There's a lot of guys that sell it, like a lot of sales teams out there. I know a lot of sales teams. The fact that we chose you says a lot that, I mean, like you're the best, but that's what it was. I got a picture from Kate about three days later, holding the business card I had given you and it was you two, I think maybe in Cabo or something like that. That kind of sealed the deal. Kate was also supporting some of Mark's operations as well. Once we started the process of working with you and your team, I could tell, so here's the secret for those of you who don't know, some sales guys are sharks and they're the sales, that type of sales persona, they're above all the details. They're like, just put the people in front of me. I'll close them. Like don't some of the, even very high achievers in the sales space, they don't spend that much time getting to know the product or the avatar or anything like that. They just think that they've got the gift and they can go and sell. This was not that experience. Pretty much from the start, you and your team were involved in regular communication with the event team that we had on our side, that was putting everything together.

It was a lot of dialogue between my operations people, your operations people. There was a lot of ideation and brainstorming that occurred. I think the end result of how we structured the sales at that event was masterful. I should have thought about it in advance, but I could show you pictures. I mean, you were there, but for those of you who were watching and listening to this, I could show you pictures, videos of the call to action and damn near the entire room. It wasn't one of those like old Dan Kennedy or Ron Legrand kind of running to the back of the stage with a credit card. It was the way we had structured this. I don't want to give away the secret sauce too much, but we had structured an opportunity for the individuals to get some analysis and feedback on how they were prepared for what was coming in the market and that sort of thing. So there was a ton of value. It wasn't, hey, go buy the thing. It was, hey, sit with our team to review the results of the quiz or the analysis that we asked you to complete. We'll kind of give you some pointers and we'll maybe help you see some blind spots. The way that that was positioned, it was truly an irresistible offer. There was no charge for that analysis. It was part of the event and whether or not you opted in for the mastermind or anything like that, everybody was able to participate in that. Everybody got value from those conversations and those conversations as your team does, they were conducted one-on-one. So the individuals and the folks from your team had the opportunity to discuss discreetly things that you might not want to raise your hand in an audience of 400 people and ask those types of questions. So there's no question that the value that the audience got from those one-on-one interactions was well-received for sure.

And I mean, look, the live events, a lot of times, can you make money on an event? Sure. But usually the monetization in my experience or the way that I've run events has been to get the people in the room and then offer opportunities for them to expand their experience or education. We didn't have any outside sales. There were no others. Every speaker that came there didn't sell anything, which is very unusual for the event model. They all came, as I mentioned, too. They wanted to hang out with Mark and meet all the people that Mark had brought together, whether it was a speaker or an attendee. So having that focused shoot, that there was one call to action, the analysis, there wasn't, oh, and get this and oh, sign up there and oh, a sponsor's doing this and all those types of things. So it made the, I mean, not to reduce the activity to a mercenary endeavor, but it made the sales process frictionless. There was no confusion in the messaging. There was a very direct path for those who wanted to dive in deeper with their participation with Mark and his community and what they were doing. So I think that had a lot to do with, and obviously the talent that you brought with you to support the sales efforts and their ability to prepare in advance for what we were going to be talking about and come to the table, damn near subject matter experts on Mark's body of work.

So when they sat with the attendees who had requested additional analysis of the process that we ran them through, they weren't just getting fluff. They were actually getting actionable feedback from the team that you brought because again, they had prepared in advance. They weren't the egotistical sales folks that are like, put me in a room, I'll close them all. This was very tiring for your team, I'm sure, because I don't know how many people that they talked to over a very short period of time, like two and a half days. But everything from the way that you had created the environment in which the individuals would go and meet with the one-on-one analysis. I mean, I think one of our, not one of our larger bills, but a big bill was the fresh flowers that were placed on the tables every single day. Personally, that's the type of detail and extra step that I like to bring to events that I produced. Just for clarity, guys, I wasn't the subject matter expert on Mark's stuff. I was a producer of the event. I paid for the event. I hired the teams. I put the event on. So difference in roles. So I was very much involved. I didn't have to worry about being on stage. We had speaker handlers. I was able to observe and calibrate the experience ongoing. There was no part of your operation that needed any calibration for me to produce the event at the level that I wanted to. So again, I didn't know what to expect. You and I hadn't worked before. You and I share a mutual friend that we both have a lot of respect with, Scott.

That really, that was a huge endorsement to me because I respect Scott. I respect his integrity and ethics, and I respect the level at which he operates in his field and for him to have endorsed you as well. Actually, Scott ended up being our emcee at the event. It was all very encouraging that I wasn't going to get myself in a situation where a bunch of ex-sales, telephone sales guys were beating up my customers out back, trying to get their wallet out of their pocket. And yes, that works. However, you lose a customer for life. With what we did, the way that it was conducted, I think if anything, it elevated Mark's brand with the people that were present or the people that were like watching the live stream and that sort of thing. So a truly unique delivery of the sales process in a live event environment. You guys did great.

I appreciate that, Doc. For the debrief from your perspective, it was great to hear that as the producer of the event, what you observed, what you saw on both sides of the coin. Awesome, man. Great retrospective. That was, I believe it was November of 21. Here we are as of this recording, August of 23. And how has business changed just in the last eight months alone with OpenAI and Chatgpt and all the industry that's coming out of that? It's one of the hottest topics of discussion right now. I'd love to hear from you. You're now the CEO or the co-founder of a company. Correct me if I'm wrong here. It's certifiedAIofficer.com.

ChiefAIofficer.com, just like it's spelled.

ChiefAIofficer.com. You certify professionals to become sort of chief financial, excuse me, chief AI officer either full time or part time. So you've learned a lot in the industry. I'm curious to hear from you. How do you think AI can be used to optimize live events, especially in terms of targeting audiences, optimizing, enhancing overall attendee experience? What do you see as possible?

That's a great question. Depending on your audience, they may be very familiar with the usage of AI or they may not be. There's this idea, I think, that people that aren't that familiar with it, they think that it's what in the industry is termed artificial general intelligence. It can take information from different sources without your input and come to its own conclusions, produce its own deliverable, things like that. AI is not there. So there's no tool where you can go and say, hey, I want to do a live event in November, handle it. That AI doesn't exist. Where it does contribute with the current phase of generative AI in particular numerous areas. It's not going to replace the CEO or the human in the loop. It's going to support, augment, accelerate, amplify whatever activities those individuals are doing. We produced this event prior to open access to Chatgpt and Claude and any other transformer that's out there. So we did it the old fashioned way. We hired people and we managed people and we had check ins and all that type of thing. I think that the biggest benefit for anybody that's thinking about doing an event or running a mastermind is doing a deep analysis of where they can and this is our methodology with the chief officer. We look at all the roles in an organization, do an impact assessment on understanding what this role is. Can it be automated, human augmented? So essentially, AI plus human or can we just purely outsource this to AI, depending on the level of complexity of the task?

If an individual were to do that with their current, I know I'm probably talking to a bunch of entrepreneurs. I don't even know if they have processes, some of them. But if you do have processes in your business, it's not a hard exercise. Even one process that takes somebody, I don't know, that they do daily, let's say if you were able to either automate, augment or pure AI, AI-ify that activity, it's not like AI comes in and does all the heavy lifting. It's like an elephant. It's one bite at a time. You introduce it here into this role, here into this function, here into this process. Before you know it, very quickly, a company can realize 20 to 50% in productivity gains just with the $20 subscriptions to things like Chatgpt or $9 mid-journey or whatever. So I think that where it's going to support you, it's going to, again, accelerate the team that you already have. I'm not necessarily suggesting that, hey, look for places to fire people. However, there are certain things within your business that are critical to the business, such as if you're interested in thought leadership, if you're running events, you want to be recognized as somebody whose opinion matters on that subject. High quality content delivered with high frequency is a great way to establish that narrative of I'm a thought leader. It's costly, without the use of technologies and AIs, it can be very costly, both with capital as well as time resource, as well as human resource to have a sophisticated thought leadership effort with AI.

It's training one person. Now, a lot of people think I can go into Chatgpt and I can just type in something and I can copy and paste that and there's my content. So the lexicon that's used in the industry is that the output is synthetic content. The way that we do things and the way that we advise our certified chief AI officers to do it is synthetic is the first pass. It still needs, we recommend that someone who knows that thought leader's voice or position on things will go through and massage the synthetic content. So you think, well, I don't want to do that to my clients or my community. I don't want to give them a bunch of Chatgpt output. Don't, but what Chatgpt does or Claude or again, any of those that you're using, if you have a level of prompt intelligence, as you were exhibiting earlier prior to this, showing me some of your processes internally that are AI driven, you're able to create a version of synthetic that needs very little manipulation by a human. The ability for you to create 24 tweets, blog posts, in the course of a day, even including first, second, third pass by your editorial team, or you as a subject matter expert. I mean, that would have been a week's long progress process that would have required somebody's neural bandwidth to manage that person.

Oh, they did. They missed Thursday's content. Where are you? AI doesn't do that. What it allows you to do, a lot of businesses, especially look, man, you're putting on an event. There is a discreet environment to exist in it. We planned for it to happen here. It's happening here. The tolerances are extremely tight. You can't, hey guys, we're going to push the event back a week because we didn't have our act together. Using AI as a tool for you to be able to not be playing catch up, not be doing just in time to say, hey, the events in six months, let's go ahead and create six months worth of content over the next few days. Done off the plate. That's the box that gets checked on your checklist for putting on your event. Drip sequences, email sequences for people who hit different stages of our funnel. They clicked on the page, but they didn't make it to the landing page. I didn't finish the sales video. All of the tactical applications that an experienced marketer would be looking for as areas to pick up additional registrations to the event. Wow, man, we need a lot of email written. Same process. Email is, in a way, it can be defined as content. If you've planned out as the human, the creative side of it, here's the experience. I want somebody that's on the fence about coming to the event. Here's the experience I want them to have during this email sequence. You can use tools, writer tools, AI, Chatgpt, Jasper, things that are very easily used, small learning curve and inexpensive.

You can use those things again too, hey, we need to hire a copywriter for 20 grand to write the sales letter for them. Then the emails are going to cost more. This could get very expensive. It was a deep, deep six figures to produce that event for Mark. I could have saved a lot of money if these tools would have been available to me, because not only the money, but I want you, those listening who are planning on putting on an event or mastermind, there's a lot of anxiety leading up, is it going to be done on time? Or, are we going to make the deadline? Are we going to fill the seats? If you can do things in advance and leverage AI in that process, that's a third, maybe of the event that of the event planning and execution process that no longer requires a staff that's bandwidth constrained, a bigger budget, putting you deeper in the hole prior to your event or whatever the case might be. There's so many applications, but again, if you're thinking that AI is, there's a tool out there where you can say build me a course on this, I'll be back after lunch. That's not how it works at this stage, but what we do have available to us at this stage, if intelligently deployed, the impact is most notable, let's say.

I can't even imagine what will be just six months from now with what's possible. I'm so excited for you and what you're doing and creating with certifying people to be AI officers. In the last few minutes that we have here, can you share a little bit more about what you're currently doing with that and how people can learn more about that?

I think the media has done a very good job of creating FOMO, particularly in a business case. Your business is going to be extinct. You'll either, I'm attending an event in September in Orlando, and it's run by a buddy of mine, he's a fantastic copywriter, but his headline was, in the next 12 months, your business will either be murdered or make millions. So there's a lot of that sentiment that's being expressed. The media loves if it bleeds, it leads. They love the fear element of stories. So I think that there, I know for a fact, I just came from an event in Cleveland a couple of weeks ago with 700 agencies, the event was a marketing AI conference. All of those agencies, none of them were like sitting back, just like, oh yeah, we got this figured out. They were all like, what are you guys doing? I like the lack of apparent expertise. It's not a slight against anybody there, but there were no standout experts that were like, oh, she's the person, or he's the person for if you want to get this question answered. So people are finding themselves a business owner. I got to at least figure out how to deploy this, or can I deploy it? Who do I talk to? Are you going to watch a Tiktok video? I mean, that's tactical stuff. So what we focus on, and we've seen the inside of a lot of companies in the process of our growth architecture and what I know is that most companies, excluding yours, yours is very well run, but most companies have some degree of dysfunction within their operations, whether that's laziness or poor process, or not clear really on where are we going to be this time next year.

If you were to just say, hey, go learn AI to somebody on your team and they come in and your business is dysfunctional, it's just going to create more bandwidth for you to introduce more dysfunction. Not an ideal scenario. Yeah, you're using AI, but you're not getting the true benefit of what's possible. So a big part of our certification is training the individuals on our AI business strategy and how do we develop an AI business strategy for a company? We've got a whole process. We call it ignition. We've been doing it for years. But part of that process includes once we've got a clear strategic direction that the entire leadership team has bought into, everybody's like, okay, three years from now, five years from now, next year, all the way down to this quarter, we've mapped everything out in that process. It becomes a lot easier to use AI in an intelligent manner because it's not just like, oh, let's create some blog posts. What for? Well, because that's going to lead to this step, to this step. It's a very clear path. Once those individuals have gone through certification and understand the development of the strategy, we teach them how to go from strategic development to tactical deployment. Okay. Through one of the things you guys could do or anybody listening, if you have an organizational chart, you get a list of your employees, run them through a process I referenced earlier, which it's an impact assessment. It does two things. It allows you to understand how you can optimize that role using this tech and also how much money it'll either make you or save you by doing that. The assessment that we do is we look at every role in an organization, not the person, but the role.

Can it be automated, human augmented, which is human in the loop with AI, or a human with prompt intelligence using AI, or are there tools that we can use pure AI yet? And if you were to do that for each role in your organization, you might only find, well, we can use this tool for that person, but this role, damn, do we still need it? You really make some discoveries. When you look at not only can I automate, augment, or Ai-ify, we call it, but then you attach a dollar value to it. If you do that, depending on the size of your business or your team, once you do that process, it's a big number. Relative to whatever, I don't care if you're doing a hundred million a year, or you're doing a million dollars a year, relatively, the impact will be a big number. The increase in sales and the reduction in one of the largest burdens for any corporation or business is going to be staffing, humans. So we run them through that process. They end up with a certification. We've been recognized by The International Association of Chief AI Officers as really their preferred training and testing environment for certifications. We're getting outreach from all levels of business, from large enterprises down to solopreneurs. So find us at chiefaiofficer.com If you're interested.

Wow. That's exciting, brother. Chiefaiofficer.com, go there now, get registered. My recommendation here would be for anyone listening to this, even if you're a person of one, a business of one, which probably you're not if you're looking to do an event, but I think this is one of those valuable skills that someone can develop. One of the mentors told me earlier this year, just invest 30 minutes a day learning how to prompt. And that's been a huge thing. 've been able to unlock so many productivity things within the business and even personally as a result. So there's no skill that I can think of right now that would be more valuable and probably no course that would be more valuable than going through your certification. So whether it's a business owner or someone on their team, I highly, highly recommend, in fact, I'm planning on sending a member of my team, at least one, to your certification here very soon. So thank you, Dr. Daigle for your interview today. Thank you for your insights. I'm just so excited for the future and being on the side of adaptation. They say, if you can't beat it, you join them. So yeah, let's join the AI and let's find a way to better ourselves and better others lives with more productivity and AI. So thank you.

Thank you for the invitation, Rudy. Thank you so much. I hope everybody got something out of this today.

Absolutely. Thank you. Collaboration, our collaboration contributed to the success of the event.