Welcome back to The High Profit Event Show, where we bring you strategies to maximize your event success and profitability. In this episode, host Rudy Rodriguez sits down with Dr. Emily Letran, founder of Exceptional Leverage Inc., a high-performance coach, and an international speaker who has built a thriving business through hosting impactful events. Dr. Letran has been featured in Forbes, USA Today, and Fox News, and has shared the stage with industry giants like Sharon Lechter and Kevin Harrington. She is also the creator of the Action to Win Seminar, a transformational event series that has helped countless entrepreneurs elevate their brand, impact, and revenue.

Dr. Emily shares her powerful journey, from immigrating to the U.S. as a refugee from Vietnam to becoming a highly sought-after business coach, author, and speaker. She discusses how she overcame her initial resistance to public speaking and discovered that hosting events is one of the fastest ways to build authority, attract opportunities, and create a thriving business ecosystem. She emphasizes that speaking on other people’s stages is beneficial, but hosting your own event puts you in complete control of your message, positioning, and revenue potential.

One of the key topics in this episode is how to fill and fund events without stress. Dr. Emily breaks down the misconception that hosting events requires a massive budget. She shares practical strategies for leveraging sponsorships to cover event costs, ensuring that event leaders don’t bear the financial burden themselves. She also highlights the importance of structuring an event with clear objectives, whether it’s client acquisition, brand building, or revenue generation, so that every decision aligns with the ultimate goal.

Beyond just filling the room, keeping attendees engaged and converting them into clients is where true event success lies. Dr. Emily shares her best practices for maintaining high energy and participation throughout an event, from structured exercises and interactive challenges to strategically placing speakers and content to build curiosity. She explains why setting clear expectations from the beginning and making direct yet ethical offers ensures that attendees not only stay engaged but also take action—turning a well-run event into a revenue-generating machine.

If you’ve been considering hosting your own event but feel overwhelmed by the process, this episode is a must-listen. Dr. Emily provides a step-by-step blueprint for making events profitable, impactful, and stress-free. She also shares an unexpected personal story about how her journey into public speaking led her to meet the Dalai Lama—a testament to how stepping into visibility creates limitless opportunities.

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Hello and welcome to today's episode. We have a special guest with us, Dr. Emily Letran.

Welcome, Ma'am Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure and thank you for creating this platform so we can share our story and share our strategies on how to grow our business.

Absolutely, Dr. Emily. It's been a pleasure to meet you recently actually as a result of the marketers cruise and I just appreciate how humble you are as a human being you're very unassuming and very humble, but you are definitely a high-performance entrepreneur and I know you are certified as a high-performance coach and you've been on many big stages sharing stages with people like Sharon Lecter, Kevin Hardington, Dr. Howard. I was just on your website and I saw that you're the author of several books, I think five or six books, even featured on Forbes, USA Today, Fox News and you're the founder of Exceptional Leverage Inc. You have a global coaching and consulting firm and you host a signature event called Action to Win. It's a seminar that you've done in several countries around the world. So very excited to to host you here today and get to learn more about your experience leading events.

Yes, well, thank you so much. I think, to your point there, it's always important to be out there because otherwise you're gonna be the best-kept secret in your industry.

I'm glad we'll be chatting about events because I think that is one of the things that I think everybody should do if they want to grow their business. A little open hook here is a story that I'm gonna ask you about a little later. I saw that when you're connecting on social that you've met the Dalai Lama. You've also were knighted as well, so very interesting. I think you're like a red or it's a Renaissance woman? But I want to hear that story. So I'm gonna leave it an open loop for our audience here. But let's chat more about events. I know you've had a successful career in corporate. You went on to coach many dentists to grow and sell their practices as well. Then you moved on to working with entrepreneurs. When did you start to do live events? Just kind of give us a little context and how did you come to doing events as part of your business.

Yes. Well, first of all, just to give a quick synopsis. I actually came to the US as a refugee originally from Vietnam then went through struggles and everything. Then I was a well, I am a dentist, been a dentist for 32 years and during that journey, I learned a lot because in dental school they only teach you the clinical part. So you learned the business part then eventually go down that path learning marketing and learning personal growth and about 2015 is when, it's about 10 years ago, is when I felt I’m so blessed. I've been able to learn all this and I've been able to grow my businesses and it's time to help other people grow. I actually was really resistant to being a speaker. I wrote my first book and I was told you need to speak. I'm just like, I didn't sign up to be a speaker, but I soon learned that speaking is what puts you in front of people. When you're speaking people just assume that you are an expert. You gotta have something to say for you to be able to speak and the wonderful way of positioning yourself is actually to host your own event because when you're on other people's stages, of course, you're leveraging their their audience, but when you host your own event, and it it doesn't have to be real big, it could be smaller, but now you are positioning again. You gotta know a little bit more in order to host your own event. Could you have your own tribe? You have your connection and a lot of time.

What I find is when I'm on stage at my own event performing, put it that way, what I'm speaking is coaching training. I'm also in front of the other speakers. So a lot of time I find I do my own event, the speakers become my clients, the audience become my clients, and you just grow so much faster when you create your own event. Basically creating your own economy.

Awesome. Yes, doing events by default positions you as a leader. Absolutely, and people assume that you have something to say if you're leading an event.

Right. And then don't get me wrong. I'm not saying just do an event and pretend to be a leader. Obviously you gotta have that substance. You gotta have that integrity. Pushing yourself to do the event. Sometimes it's something that you're not ready. Of course, it took me a couple years to actually say, okay, I think I should do this. But I study. I had a coach who that was his main thing was to do events. He does several events a year. So we go. Then we observe how he runs the events. Then we say, okay, then I'm gonna go and do my own thing. I have my own audience, but I already learn and observe how you do it. So for me, it's always about you already doing things. You already speaking. The next step is to actually host your own event because then people actually look at you a little different. I'm a speaker is one thing. I host a seminar is something else and it does elevate you and so just have that ambition and have that drive to fulfill that ambition.

Excellent. There's great notes there. I like how you connect doing an event with leadership and doing the personal growth and the integrity is mentioned to become someone who could do it because underlying this podcast and a lot of the work I do, I have just a huge passion for leadership. I do believe that events are a vehicle. So, thank you for that. Let's chat a little bit about your experience with lab events. I know you have the Action to Win Seminar that you run several times per year in various places including, I think you have one coming up in Chicago later this year? My hometown. I grew up in the Chicago suburbs. So here's a couple of the main problems that I hear oftentimes from people either on the show or people that listen to the show or clients. They're like, hey, what do I do my event about? All right. What's meaningful in a way that's going to bring people to my event? What has been your experience when it comes to that?

Well, I think you should speak on your own expertise. I'm sure you've heard of business coach who have never had a business. Sometimes there's a problem that people do that I think if whatever your expertise is the easiest one is to do an event and talk about that because you don't have to go and learn new things. This is things that you already know. So if you're an expert in that, start with your event with that. Then it's usually the people that you're gonna help, they're gonna be the one in the same industry. They may be behind you. Like I've been a dentist for 32 years. If I talk to somebody who's been in the industry for five years, I'm sure I have a lot of pearls and wisdom to share with them. So look at your same industry first and look at who may need the help and then see where they’re gathering. That's one of your basic marketing strategies. If they are hanging out at Starbucks you probably want to go to Starbucks and invite them to go to your event. If they're hanging out at the dental society meeting, I'll go to the dental society because they already should be gathering there. I can go there and invite them. Also, look at the people who already have your audience. So I may talk to a CPA who works with dentists because he already has the dentist. Now how do I get him to come to my event and invite his clients? So I think a lot of time people make it really hard. They speak on something that maybe that's not their expertise but it may be something that is hot and they catch that trend and then now they try to figure out how to bring people to that

So I think if you stay in your lane in the sense of this is my expertise, I'm gonna speak on this. I know I can deliver the outcome on this and then look at people who can complement you. People who could be your team? So for example, as a dentist, the CPA is one of my team members of expert. An attorney could be another one when I'm doing coaching. It could be a marketing company or it could be another speaker who speaks on something that is related. These are all your team and then when you come together you can bring more people than just you saying, okay, come and learn from me. Come learn X from me. If I got a couple of speakers who speak on different things that are related to what I'm doing, I can grow that audience fairly fast.

Yes, leveraging other people's networks and yes, hosting an event based on your expertise, but also the expertise of the people that you have around you or in your network as well. Great. Thank you for sharing that. When it comes to filling your events, I know that that's actually the number one question that people ask is, how do I put butts in seats, sometimes I say, or how do I fill my event? What has worked for you? What have been your best practices when it's come to filling your events?

I'm sure you know, there are a couple ways to make an event profitable. You can make money from the sponsors, you can make money from the attendees, the ticket sales and you can make money on the back end. So a lot of time for me, what has been my experience, is because my event is not like a huge big room with hundreds of people. It's more certain qualified people in the room. For me, what I've been doing is I get the sponsors to pay for the event. So now I could be selling tickets or maybe I'm offering the ticket for free. I don't want to have to fund the money obviously because that usually is a challenge spending money to do the event. Work on the sponsors who can also serve your audience, have them pay for the event. Then you can bring people in there, could be a mix of pay attendees, free attendees, whatever it is and then on the back end have a program where you can sell to people and make more money. So I think the key thing is what is the goal? Why do you do the event? If you do the event like I do, the event to fuel my coaching practice. So if the outcome is hey, I want two clients paying me 50k each, okay, well, that's the outcome. So now I need to get so many people in the room so I can get two clients out of that and to be honest with you, a lot of time the client, the people who sign up, they are the free ticket. So it's not who pay or who come in for free. I think if you put in the qualified people, and the qualified people for my dentist event could be a dentist who's in practice for a couple years and they know that they want to grow.

If they want to grow fast and they talk to me, you're gonna do real estate and you have people who want to learn flipping houses for example, but if you're gonna talk about multi-family well, you got the wrong audience because they're not ready for that. They just want to flip the house. So try to be a little bit more qualifying your audience. Either that or if you don't talk about multi-family, then you get somebody else to talk about flipping houses. Address everything that the audience wants to learn and that comes from what you are putting out there. What are you promising? So a lot of it has to do with the clarity. Okay, I'm doing this event. It is for this audience. This is what the outcome is and then I don't want to deal with stress. I teach people how to control stress. So I don't want to get stressed out and see okay, how many people are in the room because I already reserved this room and it's gonna cost me X dollar. I get the sponsors to take care of that for me so I don't have to worry about that. Then I do want to bring the people in the room to make the sponsors happy, but I don't have out-of-pocket expenses. I could be working with a marketing company who can do the marketing for the event and then I would give them some stage time to talk so strategically. Work with people who can help you run that event and you don't have to spend a lot of money on it. Does that make sense?

Yes, interesting. Yes, just bringing people together, sponsors or speakers, that will potentially pay for the event and it can be pretty low cost and a good way to get personal clients, in your case, for your coaching practice.

Mm-hmm. Yes, it's not potentially because that's what I've been doing. Great clarification

Thank you. Okay, great, so that's how you've been working. For you it's working with sponsors and other promoters of sorts to make it low-cost and then I'm assuming you go out, you're the one that goes out or do you have a marketing agency that is bringing people to your event?

I don't have a marketing agency. What I do a lot of time is obviously when we say, okay, we want to do an event. We may have a following, a group of followers, certain people who know us. So I'm pretty active on social media whether that’s Facebook or Linkedin or in different groups. So when I'm in there, people already know me. When I announce that there's an event, those are the first people that most likely will ask about it or they show up to it. Obviously if I tell them I'm gonna do this four times and they're over in Florida, they're not gonna try to come to California kind of thing. So I do it in different cities, different parts of the country too so that'd be easier for people to get to, put it that way. But I don't so far. I haven't really had a marketing agency per se trying to bring in people to the event. I think that is certainly something that you can do. If you do that, I would highly recommend to pay on performance and/or you split revenue on the back end? So that way there you're gonna compensate them for certain things but you're not gonna just pay up front and then you don't know if they can actually deliver because there's a lot of companies out there that they may not be able to deliver what you want, your results.

Yes, so okay, thank you. So just to clarify, what you do is you're the one that goes out and promotes correct, too.

Yes, and it's not so much that I go out. It's already part of my activity. You stay top of mind to just be in front of people.

Yes, in various groups and networks that you're part of? Great. Thank you for clarifying and then they come to the event. Your particular event is like a day and a half, you said nine to five? And then the next day, nine to about three o'clock. What is your best practice when it comes to keeping engagement, like keeping people doing the work and getting the results at the event?

Yes, so for me engagement means different things. One thing that means, that they are taking notes. So before they come, when I send the email, like the reminder email, I'm gonna tell them to bring note paper so they know that I'm expecting them to be taking notes, to be engaged during the event. It's giving little exercise. It could be to turn to the person next to you and share three things that you're gonna do that has to do with clarity or energy or whatever it is that I'm asking them to do, breaking the event. Meaning you don't just have one speaker come up and talk and then you talk and then you talk. You are actually breaking people into activities. It kind of creates a different momentum when you come back from the event, from the break and really force people to do it. It's like, no you have to do it. You can go take a break and I set that intention at the very beginning. This is a working event. There's a paper there for you. I asked you to bring it, but if not, there's paper here and you're gonna be committed to yourself and to your business. So setting the expectation I think is very important. If you were promising something like let's, this part. Let's say they want us on marketing and I say, by the end of the day you're gonna have a marketing plan with five bullet points and the time, the month that you're gonna execute. Then I should be delivering that by the end of day one.

So they're not gonna say I went to that event and I didn't get anything. No, we said you're gonna have a marketing plan when you leave. You do have that marketing plan. Challenging people is a good thing. I think at one of my events, I said I challenge you to be an author in 30 days and if you do accept that challenge and you stand up, well then guess what? One of my offers is gonna be how to write a book. But the point is when you challenge people, they have to sit there and say do I want to do this or not. If they know that that is a good thing for their business, they'll take on that challenge. And you can do follow-up conversation, follow-up email and say hey, it's the 15th day. Have you written whatever? If you say you want to be an author, giving them questions to answer, asking them to engage in a little group or just one-on-one with the person next to them, challenging them. Those are some of the things that you can do to keep people engaged and like I shared with you before, we got on the call. I don't tell people the agenda. They may say they may know Rudy speaking today, but they don't know when Rudy's gonna be up. They may know that Rudy is gonna come up and talk about X, but they don't know when Rudy is gonna be up. So that way I want people to stay in the room because they don't know who's gonna be up next and they don't want to be missing anything.

Yes, hundred percent. Okay, and then ultimately, you get to the end of the event and you want to help them continue the journey with you, become clients in your case. What has been your best practice? Like what's worked best for you and has come to taking people from the event to becoming private clients?

Well, I always make an offer. So I usually kind of do a soft offer at the end of day one and then so then people may be thinking about it. Then they ask you in the evening reception. Then I will give them a hard offer. There's a deadline. There's a discount if you sign up for it right now and there's bonuses if you sign up for it right now. Then after that it would be follow-up emails after the event. I would say in my events most of the time people sign up at the end of day two. Sometimes they sign up at the end of day one if they already got a lot of value and they know why they are there. They are there because they say they want to grow their business and at the end of day one if you already deliver a lot of value they can kind of see, oh, this is what I'm gonna get if I continue this journey with you. So I think to make sure that you give a lot of value at the event where they can see if they continue with you for sure, they're gonna learn more and they'll be able to do more. Obviously sometimes financial could be a challenge and personally I'm very open to letting people do payments because sometimes that's what's stopping them. Like if you tell people, okay, need you to pay $30,000 right now, maybe they want to work with you, but they may not have the $30,000 right then and there and so even some options to make payments just to make it easier for them to say yes because if ultimately that's your reason, if that's what you want, to serve as many people as you can, then you want to make it easier for people to to work with you.

Absolutely. Thank you. Dr. Emily. I appreciate you sharing that journey of your events. This has been really helpful. Very thorough, very detailed. It's no surprise coming from you that you put a lot of thought into how you do your events and I'm curious to hear from you, kind of side related, how did you meet the Dalai Lama? Like you have a photo with you and the Dalai Lama? How did that come about?

Yes, you know, it's funny. I had this breakthrough recently. Like I told you at the beginning, I was kind of resistant to being a speaker let alone host an event, but I realized that that's what helped me put myself out there. That I can actually serve more people if I'm in that position of authority like a public figure and what that did is a lot more people know me. They may not be related to whatever the heck I'm doing. So I was invited to go into a Vietnamese movie because I'm originally from Vietnam and as the first, as an investor, and then as an advisor and in that process I met somebody who, we were talking. She did a documentary about Vietnamese refugees and I'm one of the refugees that we had. We started talking about this and then she mentioned that she has visited the Dalai Lama and I said, hey, next time you go, I got to go with you and that's what happened. Now my point of saying this is she wouldn't have known me if I weren't in that project and they would not have invited me into that project if I weren't a speaker that was out there. So definitely there was the higher force who put me there in the right place at the right time. But it's because I'm out there if that makes any sense.

So if I have it my way now, I'm kind of changing it a little bit. I'm telling everybody you should be a speaker because that's how you're out there and that's how opportunities come to you. So that's how I was able to go see the Dalai Lama. Now obviously she didn't just invite random people because she knows of me. I was a refugee. I get involved in cultural projects in the community and then obviously I do charity and all that, so it's all in alignment with the people that she brings to the Dalai Lama. Wonderful people.

Congratulations. Yes, there are no coincidences. You're so about speaking as a leader and you got invited. Thank you for sharing that.

Yes. Thank you.

Yes, and Dr. Emily, as we kind of come to a close on our interview here, like- oh! Well, let me ask you this. If our audience wants to know more about you and learn more about what you do, maybe as a high-performance coach, maybe you can support them in some way, what is the best way for them to learn more about you and what you do?

Yes, they can go to my website. It's Dr. Emily Letran dot com. So it's d-r-e-m-i-l-y-l-e-t-r-a-n dot-com. There is a high-performance quiz on there. There's something that they can download and they can also book a call with me or if they're on their phone, they can text the word Rudy to my phone. It's six-two-six-eight-zero-eight-five-seven-six-two. When they text it, I will reach out to them and maybe we can just hop on a call and see how I can help support them because again my whole purpose of being on a platform and sharing things like this is people just hear oh, is that how she does it? Because maybe sometimes they backed out. I can't do this event, how do I sell my tickets? Well, maybe go look for the sponsor and the sponsor is gonna pay for that room and pay for the meals and now you can put people in the room. You can start small and then you grow big. Whichever, whatever you want to do. It's what you want as long as you're clear. What is it that you want?

Absolutely. Yes, and we'll be sure to include the link to your website here near this video or audio in the show notes, so they can go check you out. Thank you for being with us today. Any final words for our audience as we wrap up?

Yes, if you've been doing events or if you're thinking about doing events, I say just take a moment and look at the structure. Sometimes if you keep doing the same thing and you're going to get the same result. If you want to change, sometimes it's just the messaging of what the event is for. Sometimes when you get sponsors, I forgot to mention the other thing with sponsors, besides the fact that they're going to give you money, is if you get the right sponsor it also elevates your status. So if I'm doing an event for dentists and the companies that are sponsoring me are big companies, that speaks to, oh, she's gotta be somebody important. That's why they're supporting her. So when you're looking for a sponsor, that too, you could have a lot of smaller sponsors, but look for one or two that would impress your audience. Look at that because if you could do that, then it elevates you or sometimes there's, just like a side note, sometimes I go to an event and I say, okay, I may not be learning a whole lot at this event because they may be teaching what I already know, but i'm going there and i'm going to pick up sponsors because the sponsors in that event can probably support my events. So I would go to an event as an attendee and I would walk out with three sponsors.

Interesting. Yes, interesting perspective. Okay, great. There you go. I think after this episode, not having the money to do an event is no longer an excuse. Dr. Emily gave so many ways to do it and have somebody else pay for it.

Absolutely. Well, okay, the main thing is don't get stressed. Like I hear people. They’re stressed out with selling tickets or whatever and my first thing is, why did you get that big room? Why did you want to sell so many tickets if you just started with something that you can probably do and then just get sponsors to pay for it? I think the only time that I got burned was doing it at a high-end hotel because I felt like oh, maybe I should do that and I got into one of those claws where they make you do the room block. That was the one time and I said never again. I don't want to do room block again because the event was fine but because I guarantee certain room blocks and the people didn't buy the room then I got stuck with that. But other than that, I don't think we should be so stressed out doing the event, it's more planning. How do I get the money to do that event? First conversation with a sponsor, that could be planning and if you don't know who you should talk to, go to somebody else's event because they already got the sponsor who pay for their event.

Yes.

Yeah, and whatever you're presenting it might be something that they like and then they become your sponsor. The last event I spoke at, I picked up a thirty thousand dollar sponsor.

Excellent. Wow. Okay life hack. What are those hacks you're going to an event? For one, well I'm looking for sponsors. Awesome, thank you for those final comments and great tips for our audience. It's been wonderful to have you on here as a guest. Thank you Dr. Emily for being with us today.

Thank you so much