In this episode of The High Profit Event Show, host Rudy Rodriguez sits down with Steve Werner, renowned event strategist, stage sales expert, and author of Fill Your Event Fast. With over 80 live events, 400+ virtual events, and $150M+ in stage-driven revenue under his belt, Steve brings insight for event leaders who want to maximize attendance, conversions, and impact.

Steve kicks off the conversation by addressing one of the most common and costly mistakes he sees event leaders make: running cold traffic to a landing page to sell event tickets. In today’s fast-paced, post-COVID landscape, buyers want instant solutions—not delayed commitments. Steve explains how to shift from information-heavy marketing to transformation-first offers. His recommended strategy? Use low-ticket, high-value workshops, webinars, or challenges to get attendees in momentum—and include the main event ticket as part of the follow-up solution. This switch alone has dramatically improved client conversion rates.

The episode then dives into boosting show-up rates and building pre-event engagement. Steve shares the framework he uses to push virtual show-up rates from 55% to over 90% and live event attendance over 95%. He emphasizes the importance of retargeting ads, relationship-building through virtual networking, and leveraging your sales team to make early connections with attendees. These techniques build trust—something Steve and Rudy both agree is at an all-time low—and position the salesperson as a familiar face long before any offer is made.

Another key highlight is Steve’s warning about the “dead zone” of live events—rooms with 75 to 200 attendees. This range is often the most expensive and least profitable for event leaders without the right strategy or team in place. He recommends starting with smaller, more intimate events (20–30 attendees) for better conversion rates and easier management. For those in the dead zone, Steve and Rudy stress the need for a professional sales team and strategic MC leadership to manage logistics, maintain engagement, and ensure a smooth, conversion-focused experience.

From tactical tips like the “bring-a-friend” contest to strategic frameworks for building trust at scale, this episode is packed with real-world solutions for event leaders. Whether you’re planning your first event or looking to fine-tune your seventh, Steve’s insights are both timely and transformative.

Tune in now to discover how to fill your event fast—and turn your room into a high-converting experience that lasts far beyond the final applause.

Want to connect with Steve?

Free Download: https://fillyoureventfast.com/

Website: https://stevenphillipwerner.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-phillip-werner/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/steve.werner.5667

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

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SteveWernerStories

All right, welcome to today's episode. We have Mr. Steve Werner on the line with us. Welcome, Steve.

Hey, thank you so much, Rudy. I'm excited to be here. We had a lot of fun before the show. I'm sure we're gonna have a good time on the show.

I am so excited. We had a blast before the show. I wish I would have recorded that and shared that with our audience. We had a good time, but we're just gonna have to carry some of those nuggets into this episode. Steve, I'm really excited to have you on today for a couple of reasons, for our audience's sake. One, you just published a book on Amazon called Fill Your Event Fast. And that is like one of the top questions that I hear, and I know that you hear too, is how do I fill my live event? So there you go. You just wrote the book on it.

I did write the book. It's taken me about eight months to write it. I did not use ChatGPT. We went back and looked at the more than 80 live events that we've held, the more than 400 virtual events, and took the best practices. That's what we do with our clients all the time and we put it in a written format that was something that hopefully people will find easy to follow and actually help pack the room with people that are ready to buy from them.

Yeah, awesome. I'm looking forward to downloading that book, reading it, and giving you a review on that. So thank you for investing the eight months of your life to bring that into the world for us and encapsulating your 13 years of experience, you've helped support over 80 live events, more than 400 virtual events between you and your clients, over $150 million from stage directly and indirectly. I mean, you're basically the guy who takes the weight off the shoulders of the event leader. You make it so that they can maximize their conversions by looking at their offer, crafting their marketing, make sure people get to the event. But you even go a step further and you actually go and you emcee the event to make sure that the darn thing doesn't go off the rails.

Yes, I mean, I love the Mike Tyson quote. I know everybody's heard it. Everyone's got to plan until they get punched in the face. Somebody who's holding an event, they've wrapped up so much time, their time, their team's time, all this marketing, and they get to the event and even if you have a great event planner, which you absolutely should, you're still going to be getting asked a whole bunch of questions. Hey, we're 15 minutes behind, who do you want to trim? Hey, this is going wrong in the back. Hey, the salespeople, they're out in the hallway, we can't find them. As an event host, you've got limited bandwidth. Your energy should be spent on stage serving the people because that comes across energetically, whether it is virtual or a live in the room event. If you are not 100% focused on delivery, you're going to lose sales. So I can go, I've done so many events and I love doing them. I MC the event, which we can get into, the MC is a secret weapon in the room that leads to sales because I can break false beliefs. I can overcome objections with little stories and I can craft the whole storyline of the event. But more importantly, I can make all those little decisions for the event host. So the manager can come to me, I can tell them what we're doing. I can keep everything lined up and it stops the event from going off the rails, going way over time or having things fall apart. It also takes the weight off of the shoulders of the person holding it. We did an event about a month ago and the, you might know this, you've been to a lot of events. The event host, things like, we kept them all lined up, but he was having some inner questions. Should I use this video here?

Should I go with this presentation over here? He was just really in his head. I said, hey, come with me. We went in the back. I took him through a 10 minute breathing exercise, got him back in his zone of genius. I showed him exactly what to do. I said, hey, this is what we're going to do. We're going with this video. We're going with this slide presentation and this is the time that you have. I've got you. He came up to me afterwards and he was just like, man, I was so in my head. If I would have gone on stage in that energy, we would have lost half the room. That's the thing that I can do that I think very few people even know exists, but I love doing it. I also love all the other stuff that goes into events, filling the room, the engagement in the room, and the conversion piece.

Amazing, man. Yeah, you got so much to share here. Let's jump into the talking about filling your event fast, because I feel like that is what people want to know. That's why you wrote the book on it. By the way, just so people can keep in the back of their head, stick around. Not only are you going to learn how to fill your event fast, but we got some really, like I learned a bunch from Steve in the green room here, like some statistics around common mistakes to avoid that are very costly, can be very expensive for event leaders and we're going to nerd out. We're going to jam back and forth on this, because Steve and I have both seen a lot of things when it comes to mistakes that impact profits and conversions and sales. So Steve, take us into how to fill your event fast, but also know that we're going to cover some pretty cool stuff when it comes to sales conversion on this interview as well.

Yeah, so I mean, the book has five different main pillars and then eight like really good tips that you can use. The thing that I think I'll start with is the biggest mistakes that people make. There's two of them. The first one is running cold traffic to a landing page that has an event ticket on it. This is probably the most costly mistake for two reasons. One, you're going to spend a ton in ad spend. And two, you're not going to get very many sales to the events. I just want you to put yourself in the mind of a buyer. You're going through Facebook, you're scrolling along, you see this ad, it's got like a good sexy hook to it. You're like, yeah, I really have that problem and then you click on it and it's an event that's three months away across the country or virtual, but it's three months away. What's the first thing that comes to mind for you, Rudy?

I can't wait that long.

Yeah, exactly. Oh, that's great.

It can fix my problem. I know we're going to be three months from now, so I can't plan that part out. Exact same. It doesn't have top of mind for me because I tend to plan a year out, but I can see how that would be a thing.

Those are the exact two things that are going on in people's heads. It's three months from now. I need to solve my problem now. From COVID, before COVID, you could sometimes sell events that way. Post COVID, people want answers now. We want everything now. We want our Amazon delivery an hour from the minute we push the button. That goes for our knowledge too. We also, 10 years ago, 13 years ago, when I got started, even pre-COVID, we were more of an information-based society. I need to learn about something. Now, if you want to learn something, you're either putting in ChatGPT or you're going to YouTube and you're watching some videos or you're buying a book or you're getting the book summary somewhere, information, which used to be the core of an event, you're going to get the information that we don't show anyone else, we're going to pull back the curtain, has diminished in value and now what you're actually selling people through the event is transformation. Now, I'm going to come back to how do you fill your event? You're listening to this and you're like, well, okay, so my event's three, four months from now. How do I change this? The number one change that we have made with our clients, you don't need to hire me to do this, but if you do hire me, I'll help you do it perfectly, is you want to break off a piece and sell a small course or a deliverable that people can buy right now that will get them at least into momentum in their head and give them the event ticket as an implementation piece because everybody knows they're going to need help implementing anything worth doing.

Making that simple switch will get people in your room. So you're saying, well, okay, how do I fill my event? There's three things that we use here. It's a workshop, which a workshop, my definition for a workshop is three to four hours and it's two-way over Zoom. You're usually going to sell this for a low ticket price, 47, 37, 97, somewhere in that range. It's a two-way conversation, a little different from a webinar. Webinar is an hour to 90 minutes and it's mostly one direction. It's somebody talking at the room. Using those two, and then the third one, which is my favorite, are challenges. Each one of those has its own set of rules, whether you have an ad budget, whether you have a lot of JVs and where you're at in your journey as an event host. Each one of those falls into a specific bucket based on that. You can also use all three of them. One of our other clients, we did their event a little over two months ago. She has done multiples of those. She did two challenges last year. She did more than 30 webinars and several workshops. She did at least one workshop a month. There were some months she did two. All of them selling that product. It's no surprise that we had more than 2,800 people at the event. She planned for a year out. So to recap that whole conversation, just kind of put it in a ball, the biggest mistake is running cold traffic to a landing page. What you want to do is hold small events, selling different low-ticket items that address very specific pain points, getting people into momentum and giving them the event ticket.

That's brilliant, man. Yeah, that takes so much friction off the table for people committing to an event that's down the road and we have to plan an event down the road. There's no way we can instantly pop up an event and try to fill it up one month beforehand. So it's kind of a forced problem that we have to figure out. It's like, I got to plan this event six months, 12 months down the road, but people don't want to commit or buy tickets that far out. So how do we do that? And you're addressing a great strategy. It's solve their problem now, low-ticket entry, workshop, and have the event be a support to the implementation of that.

Yeah.

Which I love. It's great. Super great. Sometimes I see that in the form of a course. Sometimes clients will have a course, solves a problem, and they get a ticket to the event. Maybe not everybody goes, but you get a lot more people interested or engaged in that way. So thank you for sharing that tip. What else you got for us? I know it sounds like there's several things in your book. Anything else you want to share with us?

Well, I'll touch a little bit more on that piece and why it's so powerful and where you actually send people to the landing page. So the first piece in that, if you're listening to this and you're like, okay, if you've ever held an event, you know, the minute you announce it, you're going to do early bird pricing, you're going to get a decent amount of sales. You're instant buyers. You're people that are like, oh, I got to get it, are going to buy. Then it drops off all the way up to like a couple of weeks before the event because then the rest of your buyers buy at the last minute. Selling something that gives them a way to consume something right now fixes part of that problem. The other piece to this that I want to, like you said it, well, they might buy something out here, but then they're not going to show up to the event. We've seen event show up rates drop off. If it's a virtual event right now, 55 to 60% show up rates are the standard. If you're running a live event, it's usually around 80% are your show ups. We've been able to move that number for live events to over 95% for virtual events around the 90% range. The way that you do this is you have to think about the event coming up. If they bought the ticket three or four months beforehand, one of the main objections that you raised is, I don't know where I'm going to be in my journey. I know I have this pain point right now, but I might change a little bit. I might be involved in somebody else's world. I might've bought your stuff, but then I got seduced by person over here and now I'm kind of going this way. So how do you maximize attendees? There's three things that I'm going to give you.

Before I do that though, I want to touch on one piece and it'll make sense. The reason that you use a workshop, a webinar, or a challenge either through JV or cold traffic ads is because you're growing your list. You now have taken one of the other client that I worked with, the one that we did the breathing exercise with, through doing this process, we grew his list by more than 15,000. That's bigger than most people's lists to even start. What happens when they're on your list? They're going to start seeing your emails. I know everyone's like, I don't know if email really works. You also, now you start retargeting them. You retarget them. I'm going to give you the strategy for retargeting. You retarget on Facebook to show them ads to your event. If they've bought the ticket, you want to show ads of specific pain points being overcome and success stories. We do four different ads for retargeting. One of them is success stories. Customer testimonials, but not the generic ones that, oh my goodness, this was amazing. Specific pain point, Steve, Rudy, whoever the person is, helped me solve that problem. This was the outcome that I've got. You want those in written and in video, retargeted. You want your story written, retargeted, or sorry, written in video, retargeted. How I earned or learned what you're going to get at the event, how I've helped support people like you that were getting started, that bought a course and got stuck, and then the outcomes that they got.

Those are two of them. The other two are a little bit more complicated, but you want to run those because that mixed with some networking events, one hour networking, virtual coffee, meetups, leading up to the event does two things. You're going to love this one because you're in sales. What's the number one? You might not say it's number one, but what helps a salesperson make the sale when somebody is at the event for a high-ticket product?

What's the number one thing that helps the salesperson make the sale? Well, that's kind of a loaded question.

Yeah, putting you on the spot.

Based off of my experience, I got plenty to say about that, but I don't feel on the spot at all. But I would say, fundamentally, it comes down to, there's only one thing, gosh. I would say that one thing is the identity that the attendee has, and whether or not he identifies himself as someone who would invest in the program and helping to make that identity shift. So I know that's the most powerful force inside of every human being, their desire to be congruent with their identity. I would say, in addition to that, I don't wanna say second to that, but in addition to that, it's trust. People do business with those that they trust, know, like, and trust and having a transference of that trust and authority from the event host to the salesperson specifically, we're referring to what helps the salesperson.

So your answer is perfect on both pieces, because it is true. You have to offer that huge identity shift, and they have to want it, and then the know, like, trust factor. If I go to an event, and I'm thinking about buying something, I see the pitch on day two, and I'm leaning forward, and then I click that button for a call, and I show up, and it's the first time I've met the salesperson, even if the salesperson is great at establishing rapport, it's a 50-50 shot, probably. If you put your salespeople in a networking event two months before the event, a month before the event, and then the salesperson texts them two or three times the month leading up to the event, you're gonna have amazing show-up rates, and the pitch just happened. You've got Joe over here that Rudy has a relationship with, and Joe knows this is the right program. Rudy knows that it's the right fit for him, because he's talked to him. If you send him a text that says, hey, Joe, did you get to see that presentation? Joe's like, yeah. Just wondering, what hit you the hardest there? It opens up the door for a sales conversation, I like to call it like a slippery slope, versus Joe having to reach out and push a button and book a call, it raises sales. So wrapping all of this into filling the event, they've either signed up for a workshop webinar, or challenge, they haven't bought a ticket, now they start seeing retargeting ads, they're getting to trust you, they lean in and they buy something, because you can sell that way, then they come to one of these networking events.

If they've bought the course out here with the ticket, and they show up to a networking event, they start to get to know their salesperson. The biggest challenge that we have with AI, and all the content that's being spit out right now, is people are lacking trust. If you build that up, leading up to the event, you will have a better show up rate, and a much better close rate. I know we just unpacked a whole lot, I go pretty deep into this into the book, but it really just comes down to how you think about the strategy. It's not as simple as it used to be, rent an event space, put some stuff out there, sell some tickets, put people in the room, and they're all ready to buy. Now everybody's been to an event, they've all seen a $25,000 or $50,000 pitch. They're looking for proof before they buy.

Yes, trust. I actually read a great book recently, one of my mentors referred to me, it was a good study, and it was all around trust by the gentleman who wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, his son.

Stephen Covey. Was it The 5 Levels of Trust, maybe? I feel like I have read that book.

Yeah, it's a good book to study. Pulling up right now, yeah, it's called The Speed Of Trust, of course. Fundamentally it just says that trust is profitable, it's profitable to have trust, because when trust goes down, costs go up. When trust goes up, costs go down. And then cost takes away from profit. An example they gave there is just like, Homeland Security is an example. We had, unfortunately, 9-11 take place, and what happened? Our trust went down tremendously, so we had to put all of these things in place, all the security in place at airports, and then as a result of that, what happened? Costs for flights went up. These little taxes when you buy a flight ticket, it basically pays for all that. So to your point, trust, and how challenging it is actually to build trust in the modern age where people have seen it already, or the AIs out there, trust is at a relative low right now. I don't know if it's an all-time low, but it's at a relative low, and anything we can do to build that trust before the event and during the event is going to absolutely improve the likelihood of showing up to the event and converting to the next event or the program. So thank you for bringing that up. I highly recommend the book, The Sea Of Trust. I took a deep study of it. It's not a quick read, but it's worth a proper study for anyone who's listening to this. One of the best books I've read in quite a while.

Nice, awesome. So I wanna bring it back to, we talked about filling the event. I've kind of broken down some of the frameworks. Something else that I think, I'm gonna give one more tip on filling, and then we can kind of talk about the event itself. But if you want the right people in the room, start with the offer that you're going to make at the event. Look at what are the five to 10 ultra-specific pain points that that offer solves. If you look at, if you've studied Ogilvy, Ogilvy is the classic direct copywriter. You have people start off as only knowing about the pain. Then they start to learn about general solutions, specific solutions, your solutions. Your journey, getting people to the event, should follow that. Lead with the very specific pain points that your offer solves. If you do that all the way out here and you build your workshop, webinar, or challenge to solve one of those, you will get the people that naturally will buy your high ticket program and are a good fit. So think about that as framing leading up to it and then there's also one last piece I'll give because the book is Fill Your Event Fast. People are like, how do I sell tickets fast? Take the people that have already bought tickets. You can do a bring a friend contest. That right there, if you've done well, if done poorly, it will fall flat. But there's a whole science to it that you can actually, we've doubled the size of events just through bring a friend campaigns, building that correctly, putting a prize behind it. It can't be like a pair of AirPods. It's gotta be something meaningful. But if you're holding a big event, if you're gonna put 1,000 people in a room and you sell 400 tickets and then you can put another 300 in through bring a friend, that event's gonna crush because the other piece with sales, if I'm going to an event and I say, hey Matt, you wanna come with me to this event?

It's solving these problems. I'm going, let's split a hotel room. It's really easy for Matt to say yes. Then when it comes time to buy the program, it's really easy for both of us to say yes because we're doing something together. This all kind of funnels back into sales. Two other really small things that I'll give that are fast ways to close people into getting a ticket. We talked about all the retargeting cycle, but the other one is just pick up the phone. Like these people, if they've come to something out here, take the people that showed up to the workshop webinar challenge but didn't buy, get them on, get them involved in something. They will lean forward because it all comes down to trust. Those are two really big, like really fast, easy ways. The last one I'm gonna give, don't have JVs send directly to your landing page for your event. Have your JVs support, there's two problems. One, you get too many speakers on your stage. I've seen this over and over. We were talking about this beforehand. Oh, like I'm the event host. I've got a lot of friends who have lists and they say, hey, I'll speak on your stage. I'd be happy to, and I'll even email for you. The event host is like, cool, that'll sell some tickets. It's not gonna sell tickets and now you've given away your stage time. You've broken up the perfect flow of the event by having alternate speakers that don't actually support your offer. People are coming to an event because they want to know how to do what you do. They want support doing the thing from you, not from 15 other people. Instead, have your JVs support webinars, workshops, challenges.

They're gonna make money on the front end and then if you absolutely want to have one or two of them speak, run it as a JV competition. All of us as entrepreneurs are highly competitive. You're gonna do a lot better with that, selling tickets that way. That's kind of the filling piece. If you have questions, Rudy, I'll answer any of them and then we can kind of move into a little bit on conversion.

Yeah, that's gonna be - running against time in jam time. It's gonna be an interesting year. But let me recap a couple of points you made about the filling the events. I'm so excited to read your book, man. I actually was on interview earlier today with a gentleman who specializes in digital marketing advertising. He runs an eight figure company doing this and he gave a couple of tips that connect the dots of what you're sharing here. He said, when you go to spend dollars on digital marketing, do it retargeting, like you said, to people that already know you, that you never had an experience with you of some sort. Don't try to do this massive, broad to your landing page campaign, because that's just gonna be a waste of money. Maybe you'll get famous, but you won't, you probably will end up losing money. Focus it on creating those experiences well before the event. I've also seen, to your point, people host these summits and they have these Jd partners and everyone's speaking for 30 minutes or an hour and everyone's supposed to mail and then no one does. I've seen that time and time and time again. It's unfortunate, it's just kind of human behavior. I mean, there are some great partners that will mail for you, but as a general rule, I tell people, don't do that as a strategist like you're saying as well.

It's just, if they do mail for you, so you are correct, 80%, 70%, and they don't do it being nefarious. They do it in goodwill. They're like, yeah, I can email for you, and then 50 other things get busy and they were supposed to send a five email sequence and they send one email. Or they look at the email and they're like, this doesn't really fit my brand, so we'll put it in as a Ps on one of our other emails. So that's the first piece against you in the battle of getting people to your event. But then the second one is, they're sending an email to sell an event ticket. If your event ticket is $297 and it's three months away and I've got to get on a plane and get a hotel, like, you've lost me. I don't care what the event is, I'm not doing it.

Yeah, there's definitely some problems with having JVs just mail for events.

Yeah, it's not, to your point, it's not because they're being nefarious or not because they didn't have the intention to but it just doesn't tend to work very well based on our experience.

No, no, not at all.

I think it's time to jam out, man. I think it's time to jam out on some great insights for our audience who've gone to this point in the interview. You're gonna share some interesting statistics that you found when it comes to avoiding the dead zone of live events and I thought this was so interesting that you shared in the green room. So when it comes to conversion and having a profitable event, what has been your experience when it comes to that?

Sure, if you're holding your first event and you're thinking about this, you're probably like, I want 500 or I want 1,000 people. Just sit with that for a second. 1,000 people in a room that you've gotta provide for. Your budget for 1,000 person event is probably on the low end gonna be half a million dollars. You're going to have lighting, you're gonna have AV, you're gonna have a huge staff, you're going to have a lot of expense to fill that room and I know everyone's got this picture, it's like that backlit picture of Tony Robbins with the huge stage. You're also going to sell less people. Conversion starts to fall off. We've tested this across hundreds of events. Conversion starts to fall off around 50 to 75 people. I'm gonna give you the why for this. We've seen rooms of 20 to 30 people hit conversion as high as 90, 95% because you can talk to each person in the room, you can know a little bit about them. We're really big on sending out surveys and incentivizing surveys before they get to the event. If you have 25 or 30 people, you can know a little bit about each person. If you take 30 seconds during a talk to call them out and say, hey Joe, this is all about your business, this will really help you. Joe is like, trust factor just went through the roof. Rapport, through the roof. So as your event gets bigger, costs start to go up and where costs really start to jump is about the 75 person mark.

If you have a room of 30 people, you don't need AV. You don't need a mic. You can probably talk loud enough from the front of the room. You can use two televisions. One of the hacks that I give people to escape from room blocks and food and beverage minimums, if you're holding a 25 to 30 person event, you can usually hold them at a coworking space, which is way cheaper. It includes coffee and water for free. If you don't know what I'm talking about, if you go to a hotel, a gallon of coffee is $100. You're gonna get hit with a food and beverage minimum, which is usually going to be more than the room and you're gonna have a room block. So the dead zone, what I refer to as the dead zone is about 75 people to about 200. You're going to lose in conversion and your cost for the event space and all the things that go into holding the event are going to go up pretty exponentially. It's a negative, it's this dead zone that it also is much harder to make sales. Rudy and I were talking about this because of salespeople. A lot of times what you see is, we've got Sam, the event host, and Sam has Joe, the salesperson, only Joe is really a coach. He's coming to the event, he's really excited, he knows the program, but he's not a salesperson. First and foremost, he's a coach. Now, if you've got 30, 40 people in the room and they've met Joe beforehand, Joe might do okay. He's probably gonna do fine. But now you have 75 people, Joe's gonna be overwhelmed, he's gonna be tired, he's gonna lose track and people are gonna fall through.

He's also not going to go out and proactively have the conversations that move the sales needle. Having a sales team is something that is necessary, I think it's 75 people. 75 people, you really need three to five people. You can throw your advice in there, you probably know this better than I do. I like to see three to five people for 75. If it's 50, I want two people minimum and they shouldn't be coaches, they should be actual salespeople.

Yeah, Steve, I'll speak to that. We do a general rule of thumb about one person to every 25 participants. So it's right around exactly what you're saying. 50 people would be two, above 50 would be three. So every 25, every time you go above a 25, you add one more. The reason being is you wanna actually be able to engage people in that environment, in that period of time and 20 to 30 seems to be a manageable number. Not easy, but a manageable number for a professional. If you go beyond that, then things start to slip. Absolutely.

It also, if it is your first event, if you're listening to this and you're like, I really wanna do an event, do something that's 25 or 30 people. You get a couple bonuses besides letting it be a cost-effective management. You're gonna sell the event out. You can say the event is sold out all over social media, which puts you on a huge stage. Two, if I'm looking at attending an event, which event would I rather attend? Tony Robbins' 10,000-person event or Tony Robbins' 300-person event? Or Tony Robbins' 10-person event? Value goes up the fewer people that are in the room and you can use that as a sales piece. You're gonna do, you're going to knock it out of the park by filling the room, and then you're gonna convert way better, which at the end of the day, if you're at, I would say, two to three million in total sales for your business, you can add. If you have 30 people and you sell 20 of them, you're doing, you can replicate that event and then build to a bigger event. If you try to hold a bigger event first and it doesn't go well, you're going to cripple yourself. You're going to, one, cost is gonna be a lot, but two, mentally, you're gonna be upset. You're gonna have a hard time overcoming that. So I always recommend people start with a smaller event. If you're already holding big events, great. We can come in, we can tweak it, we can help you move that sales number. I can help you move engagement. I mean, one of the biggest, I love MCing events. The MC is the secret weapon in the room because I go through, I'll listen to the last couple years of events, I'll know their program inside and out so that when I'm in between speakers or in between sections in the event, I can say what the main point is, I can reframe beliefs, I can overcome objections, and I can frame the next segment and I can move sales forward.

That is something I love. Like, I like that piece. Little different than the dead zone, but that's like the engagement once you get people there has to be done correctly so that people aren't out in the hallway, on their cell phone, falling asleep, out to dinner. As a caveat to all of that, don't ever hold an event in Vegas. It's the worst possible place to hold an event. Have you been to an event in Vegas?

Yes, yes, I get it.

A really fast story, when I started, I moved to Vegas because I was like, that's the event capital of the world. So I moved to Vegas, my first event completely failed, I had to cancel it, I lost all my money, the whole sob story. The second event I held, we did 80 people in South Point, we filled that. The third event, we did an event for 80 people, again in South Point. Day two, it was for chiropractors. Day two, this guy, I'm up on stage, and I look down front row, and this guy is just like, he's super sweaty, and you just knew he'd been out till like 4 or 5 a.m., he'd had way too much to drink. Long story short, I'm like, thank goodness it wasn't the pitch. I'm going along, and I see him start to dry heave, and I was like, oh no. He got up, ran, he made it to the trash can, but the whole event now is focused on this guy, and he is a doctor. Vegas is the worst place. People are out playing blackjack, they're doing something other than being at your event, and even if they're in the room, they're thinking about being somewhere else, what restaurants they wanna go to. Hold your event. Honestly, I like Denver, and I'll tell you why. Denver, the airport is out from the city, and you can get one of the hotels that's near the airport. Super easy to fly into, but they're not going anywhere. It's too far for them to go into town, so they're stuck with you at the hotel. It is better to hold somewhere that you can kind of control the environment, and they don't really wanna go outside. Iowa, Des Moines, Iowa, perfect.

All great points. I've been to events at hotels in Denver, outside the airport, so I know that contrast as well, so thank you that you made some really good points there. I wanna kind of bring it back to the conversion subject here real quick, and then we'll start to wrap up. I know we've gone a little long here, but this is a really value-filled episode for our audience. You talked about the dead zone. Somewhere between 75 plus, 75 to 200 costs start to go up dramatically. So, and you said if you're looking at 1,000 people, you're looking at at least a half-million-dollar budget. So oftentimes, the clients that I'm working with are people who tend to be somewhere in that dead zone, somewhere between 50 to maybe 200 people attending their event, and so they're at risk. They're at risk of potentially losing money, not getting the conversion they're looking for, et cetera, but we come in and we provide a full sales support system from before the event, doing a lot of the confirmation calls, similar to what you described, to increase the show-up rates and to set proper expectations, get them excited to be there, confirm they're coming, build that relationship and trust in advance, to during the event, meeting with people individually, providing individual consultations and value for them, building that relationship even before the offer's made. Awesome. That's exactly what you should be doing. Exactly and then once the offer's made, already having that next step, that next appointment set up with them, to touch base, follow up, interview them. For that offering and actually getting able to speak and meet with 80% or more of your audience while they're at the event, to discuss the offer one-on-one while they're at the event, not having to wait and try to chase them days after the event, you know, exhausted.

Because Joe, the coach, can only manage a few people or the event leader can only manage a few people. Imagine the dream scenario where you have the event leader, one, maybe you have Steve at your event, taking all that weight off your shoulders so you can just focus on serving your clients, serving your attendees, and then come Monday, and you have a team, like our wingman team, they're supporting you back of the room before, during and after, and then come the day after your event, we do a nice debrief over a cup of coffee or your favorite breakfast, and we go through all the wins, all the lessons learned, and we hand you a file full of signed contracts, and you look in your bank account, and you actually see cash in your bank account. Not, hey, this is who we think is gonna join the program, no, here, they signed the contract, and they've already paid 30% of the contract, if not already paid in full, and they're already scheduled for their onboarding call with the fulfillment team, and you, as the event leader, you can take a well-deserved break, maybe even jump on a plane and go on a vacation somewhere cool. That's the dream outcome, and I think that's what's possible, Steve, when event leaders have a great team around them, like you as an MC, and whether it's us or another team of professionals behind the scenes, behind the back of the room, professionally meeting with people and helping guide them through the enrollment and sign-up process, so I just wanted to make that point, because I feel like that ties it all together between what you do, what I do, and truly, the problem that we solve for people. It's a big problem as an event leader. It's a major risk they're taking on. They're planning a year in advance sometimes, and they can't afford to flop a year out. They need people like you to guide them. They need a team to support them so that that investment is profitable and impactful.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, I am a huge believer in live events. Live events change lives. The reason why, so what do you have to do to change a person's life? You've gotta get them to believe. How do you get them to believe? You have to get them out of their comfort zone. You have to get them emotionally anchored to a new version of themself, and events do that. I will always say live event over virtual event because you're gonna impact more people. You're gonna impact people deeper. The live events change lives, hands down, and that is what we support people in, and I do wanna say, just because I said 75 to 200 doesn't mean that you can't hold a profitable event, but in that zone, you need support. Don't try to do that event by yourself. Don't have Joe and Susie, the coaches, doing sales. Hi, Rudy. This is where your costs start to go up. Your event can be great, though. We've run several events that are in that. I mean, I would say probably a third of our events have fallen inside of that. It's not that it's a bad size, but you're going to have cost. If you're doing $3 million a year and you wanna put on a 200-person live event, you're gonna have a couple hundred grand out of pocket to hold that event, and you're going to have some risk. That doesn't mean that you can't win. You absolutely can. I know there are people that hold those events all the time, and they do great. They've done them over and over, but you're going to have some risk there. Hire the right people. Bring the right people in. Make sure the event goes well. Nothing is worse than going to an event and watching it crumble.

If I'm in the audience and I spent money to come, oh my goodness, it's heartbreaking. I'm gonna leave. I'm gonna be outside talking about it. Then it's gonna make it to social media. Then what happens? Your whole brand is under attack. This happened, there was an event in January where this literally happened, and the guy has lost, I think he lost somewhere between $200,000 and $300,000 in sales in the room, and since then, his brand has been, he's lost people that were in a 25K mastermind. He's lost people that were in a lower ticket mastermind. People have withdrawn because they don't trust him anymore.

Crazy, brother. You're right. To your point, when you're in that zone, you're taking on more risk, and when you have more risk, you should hedge that risk with support. There's gonna be more costs, but make the right investments. Hire the right people to support you because yes, it's more out-of-pocket potentially, or maybe you're sharing on the revenue, what have you, but you're reducing your risk and you're increasing your potential upside by doing so. So yeah, I think you really brought the point home. As we wrap up here, Steve, any final comments or recommendations you have for our audience?

I will say pick up the book, fillyoureventfast.com. We also have Steve.coffee. I know you're gonna drop that link. Steve.coffee has a couple different free resources on it. You can also book a call with myself if there's anything I've said here or if you wanna talk through your event. I will leave a little bit of a cliffhanger. One of the things that we do, you might do this as well, but we've been able to add over 20% in revenue after the event in the two weeks following the event through a very specific downsell process. It's something that not very many event hosts do. The people who I know that do do it, I won't do too much, like we've really perfected that process. Just adding that is something that we can help you with. If you wanna talk about it, jump on the call with me, be happy to walk you through it.

That's a great cliffhanger, I like that. I'm gonna jump on the call with you to find out. Great, great, excellent. Great final words, great words of advice. Guys, this episode and gals, this episode has been honestly, I think one of the top 10 for sure on this podcast as far as actionable nuggets to run highly impactful and profitable live events. I'm gonna invite you to one, click the link below here somewhere on the video or the audio book that call with Steve. Go to get his book, fillyoureventfast.com. The link will also be around here, the show notes and share this episode with someone that you feel would benefit from Steve's expertise. Clearly, Steve is a pro at what he does and let's get the word out. Thank you, Steve, this has been an awesome interview. Really appreciate you having on today.

Rudy, it's my pleasure. Thanks for being a great host.

Awesome, man, take care, bye-bye.