In this week’s episode of The High Profit Event Show, host Rudy Rodriguez shares powerful insights drawn from his experience at the World Class Events Mastermind with Eben Pagan and Alex Moscow. With years of expertise in helping event leaders and entrepreneurs run profitable and impactful events, Rudy delivers actionable takeaways that can transform the way you design, market, and measure your live events.

Rudy begins by challenging the common myths and fantasies many business owners hold—like the idea that you can build a business only doing what you love, or that you’ll never have to trade time for money. While attractive, these mindsets can actually stall momentum. Instead, Rudy emphasizes that structure, clarity, and systems—not wishful thinking—are what ultimately lead to success. As Keith Cunningham puts it, “Business opportunity without structure is chaos”.

One of the central themes of this episode is attention. In today’s crowded marketplace, event leaders aren’t just competing with other experts—they’re competing with AI, social media, and a flood of distractions. Rudy introduces the AIDA Framework (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) as a practical model for capturing attention, holding it, and converting it into meaningful outcomes. Through examples, he explains how to use unexpected hooks, relatable stories, and clear calls-to-action to move your audience from curiosity to commitment.

Another key takeaway is the importance of partnerships in filling events. Rudy highlights the Dream 100 strategy, originally developed by Chet Holmes, which focuses on building a targeted list of potential partners, sponsors, or clients who can help drive attendance. He even shares how tools like Clay.ai can streamline the process of identifying opportunities. For Rudy, partnerships aren’t just helpful—they’re essential for scaling impact and filling seats.

Rudy also stresses the significance of tracking metrics and making data-driven decisions. Drawing on lessons from military flight training, he explains how performance often regresses to the mean. This makes consistent measurement critical for understanding true performance over time. Whether it’s ticket sales, event attendance, or conversions into programs, knowing your numbers equips you to make smarter decisions and grow with confidence.

To close, Rudy encourages event leaders to reflect on the bigger picture—not just how to run successful events, but how those events can shape the next 18 to 24 months of their professional and personal lives. For him, live events are about more than profits; they’re about creating transformation, inspiring change, and designing experiences that impact both audiences and leaders themselves.

If you’re ready to take your events to the next level, this episode is packed with wisdom, strategies, and practical tools to help you get there.

Want to connect with Rudy?

Rudy@wingmancoachingllc.com

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/

If you're running live events, whether it's your first one or your 50th, this video is going to save you some time and money. I actually just got back from a private mastermind called World Class Events Mastermind with Eben Pagan and Alex Moscow, who are some of the best in the game of live events and enrolling people into high ticket programs. If you're a coach, an event leader or a business owner that wants to host a profitable and impactful live event, I highly recommend tuning into this. I'm going to share some of my quick takeaways and actual items that you can go off and use right away to make more money at your next live event. So first and foremost, a couple of my takeaways are one, open up with Eben mentioning this idea of myths and fantasies that people have when it comes to business in general and how most of us kind of get stuck believing these fantasies. Oftentimes it's the gateway to the reality of the situation. But people get stuck in the idea that we want to have a business where we only do what we want to do. But that fantasy actually ends up killing momentum. Also this idea that we never have to trade the fantasy of never having to trade time for money and focusing on high leverage systems instead. Again, it's a good idea, a good ideal. But in reality, it doesn't actually happen. I think taking time away or trying to believe that and not working on the business or in the business because you can either work on the business can be a big challenge. Also in order to fill events, you got to have systems and clarity, not wishful thinking. One of my favorite quotes from Keith Cunningham is business opportunity without structure is chaos. So the number one thing that we talked about here at the event that I think is the most valuable is this mental model that Eben discussed around attention.

And this idea that there's 120 billion hours a day in the world of free attention, if you take 24 hours a day times the number of people roughly in the world, that's how much it is and you as an event leader are not just competing with other experts, you're competing with AI, like Grok and Openai, ChatGPT. Our one job, our sole job is to get attention and to keep it and to convert it into some form of action. So Eben talked about a very specific formula that he uses when he thinks through all of his content and material that he uses to get people's attention for his material. So this strategy is called AIDA, which stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. I'm going to give you just a quick couple of examples for each of these. So one, we got to get people with unexpected hooks. I'll use a specific example that he gave. He built a dating advice business to over $100 million a year in revenue, and he discovered that the thing that gets people's attention, specifically men, because dating advice for men that got people's attention was pickup lines, and he learned how to use pickup lines as a way to get people's attention. Or he knew that men were looking for pickup lines, so he would speak to that. Two, the I is Interest. You want to get their interest and tell a story that communicates that interest and the example that he gave was, as a guy who gave dating advice, he told the story of the first time where he was struggling with dating, and he went out with a friend, and his friend walked up to a girl and quickly got her number, and set up a date from there and for it to him, that was a miracle, didn't know how he could do that.

He tells a story of how he went on to learn from that friend and not only be able to learn how to get numbers himself, but created a system that he was able to teach to other people, and then that system is eventually what he marketed, which leads to desire. Desire is being able to show the system or the outcome that someone has interest in and getting from you, and ultimately action, inviting them to take the next step, whether it's opting in or an order form, in our case, event leaders registering for that next live event. So the process is called AIDA, again, attention, interest, desire, and action. One of the other takeaways that I had from the mastermind is this idea that if you're not getting three or 5 % of the people that you're inviting to come to your event or join your back -end program complaining, we might not be asking boldly enough. We may not be clear enough. So that's a reframe to have me rethink that, hey, pushback means that the message is landing a bit and hitting that edge of what people want. So one of the things that I took away is knowing that, hey, if I'm completely vanilla and not getting any feedback of that sort, that I may be missing the mark on the called action that I'm offering. Another big idea that we talked about at the event was this idea of filling the event using partnerships and creating a dream 100 list of people that if I partnered with them, even a few of them would lead to that next big breakthrough with filling the next event. The dream 100 list comes from, yeah, the idea comes from the late Chet Holmes who wrote extensively about it.

But the notion is that you identify the 100 people, right? That would be ideal for you to partner with, or it could be ideal clients that you would want to bring to your event if you're keeping a smaller event, et cetera. In fact, he actually recommended a tool, an AI tool that I played around with and I found to be very interesting. It's called, I'm looking up here, excuse me, clay.ai, recommended I play with the free version for about 10 minutes and I was able to come up with a list of about a thousand potential partners that I could connect with and I used it on the free platform. So I'll put a link somewhere around this content so you can check out clay.ai. I highly recommend playing with it. I haven't gone through it extensively, but I do recommend it. One other thing that I would mention here on the subject of attention and getting people's attention quickly. There's a new technology that's hit the scene recently called the Veo three. It's just been out for a couple months now, was released by Google. And some people would say that it's probably been the most revolutionary technology with video and AI in the last 12 months. And it's a crazy killer way that you can craft videos to get people's attention that are quick eight second videos that are super powerful and super professional. And you can do them very quickly. I'm actually starting to play around with that with my team. And you may be starting to see some of these videos come up. If you're following me on Instagram or on our YouTube channel, you'll start to see some of these little eight second clips are to come out to talk about the podcast and to promote it. So I do recommend checking out VEO3. It's a super great tool. And then clay.ai. All right. Let me take a look at my notes here. So you may not need 100 partners necessarily for your next event, but think about who are the 10 dream partners or dream people that could sponsor my event that would make that difference for filling your next event.

Next metrics. Eben talked extensively about metrics and knowing what is that key driver that you measure regularly drives your business. I found it to be really, really interesting because he told a story. The point of the story was he recommended a book called name the book. The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis. It's a great book. I'm reading it. I'm in the middle of reading it right now, but he talks about training for the Israeli army or streaming The Israeli Air Force fighter jets, which I can relate to. I was a Navy pilot. And what they thought was the case that if they have a pilot who did a great job on a mission and they came back, they got praise that would have them do well again in the future. And they thought that if a pilot didn't do as well as they were meant to, and then they got criticized or chastised that they would turn it around and do better the next time around. They ran a bunch of statistics on it to basically figure out that regardless of whether they're being praised or punished, what was actually happening as the pilot would was reverting to the means. So if they did well on one flight over time, they would have a bad flight and they would kind of they did poorly. They would have a good flight and they would just kind of revert back to the means. The point in business, especially when it comes to your live event, is knowing what your numbers are so that if you have a bad webinar or a bad challenge or a bad promotion with your ticket sales, or you're at your event and you have a poor conversion for whatever reason at your events, knowing your numbers and knowing the average of your numbers over time is what will allow you to make informed business decisions. I know this is kind of 101, but talking about it there and a couple of examples really hit home.

And for being an event leader, clearly knowing how many people are planning to attend your event for some people come to your event, knowing people attend your event, how many people sign up to your next program, et cetera, et cetera. Those are really, really critical numbers and if you don't have them on a dashboard, I would just invite you to consider doing that and I see I'm taking quick more notes. So there's several key things here, but I'm going to start to wrap it up here with something to reflect on. I thought it was a great question and it actually comes from Dan Sullivan, the guy who runs the company Strategic Coach. He says, what has to happen in the next 18 to 24 months looking backwards so that my, the next chapter of my life or event is extraordinary. Really thinking about that professionally and personally, and it's just a great exercise in going to the future and reflecting back and I found that to be very helpful and insightful around the types of events I want to do that inspire me and how that impacts my life personally, because we're all doing live events because we want to help people. Also we want to benefit our own business and our own lifestyle. So in recap, the number one problem and challenge that we face as business owners and event leaders is getting people's attention. The AIDA process is a great tool and I recommend checking VEO3 out as a tool you can quickly use to start to create quick videos, to get people's attention for your events. If you found this valuable, please go ahead and write a review for this episode and subscribe to our podcast. Also if you know someone who is an event leader that would be a great guest for our show, please do an introduction.

I'd love to meet them and have them as guests on our show and also share this episode with someone who you think could benefit from this would really, really appreciate the share. Appreciate so much and hope you had value from this. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.