In this episode of The High Profit Event Show, host Rudy Rodriguez welcomes Brett Gilliland, the founder and CEO of Elite Entrepreneurs. Brett brings a wealth of experience, having played a pivotal role in scaling Infusionsoft from $7 million to over $100 million in revenue. At Elite Entrepreneurs, Brett helps businesses, particularly those with event components, overcome common challenges and achieve significant growth.

Brett delves into the critical topic of overcoming growth challenges. He highlights the importance of relinquishing control, a common hurdle for many entrepreneurs who hit a ceiling because they struggle to delegate. Brett emphasizes that clear ownership and accountability are essential to enable business scaling. He also discusses the necessity of building a solid foundation, explaining that rapid growth can expose weaknesses if the business lacks a clear purpose, values, and mission. Without these elements, long-term success is at risk. Additionally, Brett underscores the importance of leadership development. Rapid expansion requires cultivating internal leaders to prevent cultural misfits and sustain growth.

The discussion then shifts to the significance of purpose, values, and mission. Brett explains that a compelling purpose is crucial for motivating the team and maintaining engagement. This purpose should go beyond making money and deeply resonate with everyone involved in the business. Values, which define behavior within the organization, must be consistently applied in all interactions, from team members to vendors and customers. Brett stresses that hiring, leading, and firing should align with these values. A clear, time-bound mission is also vital for strategic decision-making and resource allocation, providing direction for the company’s growth efforts and aligning the team toward common goals.

Brett also covers sales and leadership in event businesses. He views sales as a form of leadership that guides customers to what they need, aligning the sales process with the company’s values to ensure a consistent customer experience. Creating a congruent sales culture that reflects the company’s overall culture and values is crucial. Brett advises proactive planning to address potential challenges in scaling events, emphasizing the importance of having the necessary infrastructure and team readiness to handle significant growth smoothly.

To learn more about Brett Gilliland's insights and strategies for scaling your event business from seven to eight figures, click the link to watch the full episode. If you found this helpful, please like and share. Let's grow together!

Want to connect with Brett Gilliland:

Website: https://growwithelite.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/elite-entrepreneurs

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

Twitter: https://x.com/EliteEntrepren5

Podcast: https://growwithelite.com/podcast/

If you'd like to be a guest on the High-Profit Event Show, click HERE.

Hey audience, Rudy Rodriguez here, the host of The High Profit Event Show, and on today's episode, I have a special guest, Mr. Brett Gilliland, the founder and CEO of Elite Entrepreneurs. Welcome to the show, sir.

Thank you. I'm excited to be here with you, Rudy. It's going to be fun.

Most definitely, and I want to share a couple of background points, so our audience gets really excited and wants to lean in and listen to this whole episode. The show title is How to Scale Your Event Biz from Seven to Eight Figures. The reason I think you're such a great person to talk on that subject is because you worked with Infusionsoft, and you helped them scale from seven million to over a $100 million.

That's right. I really enjoyed it. For those who can actually see my video, this T-shirt wall back here represents the 10 years of time I spent at Infusionsoft, and part of that was the rocket ship, and we grew really fast. I'm happy to share some of the learnings from that time with your audience.

Absolutely. Since then, you've gone off to lead Elite Entrepreneurs, and I know you've worked with many entrepreneurs who have events as a part of their business, and seeing them scale from seven to eight figures, and they've come across many common challenges along the way. I'm really excited for you to reveal some of those common challenges that people don't often think about until after they're having very successful seven-figure-plus events, or they have a very successful seven-figure-plus business, but then all of a sudden, there's all these new problems that arise. Again, really excited to have you on the show and to learn from you.

Well, thank you. I'm excited to be here. I love what you're doing and what you're providing to your audience. We talked a little bit before the show about the challenges that I've seen as businesses are trying to scale from seven to eight figures. You're right. I have worked with hundreds and hundreds of seven-figure business owners. I've seen this pattern a lot. We're talking about event businesses today, but just about any business where people are involved, there are these similar challenges that happen. If you want, I can just rattle off those three challenges or we can talk about one at a time and how would you like to do that?

Maybe just say all three off the top and then we can go a little deeper into each one.

I would say number 1, and this shouldn't feel new to anybody, but I just got to call it out. Many, many entrepreneurs, many founder business owners find themselves in a place where they grow their business to a point and then they just start hitting a ceiling. It's not related to sales or customer acquisition, it's around their ability to relinquish control. The first thing is they become the bottleneck. They don't know how to make the transition from scrappy, gritty founder who can throw it on their back and will this thing forward to capable leader and business builder who now has a team and they gotta bring that team together and build a solid team on a really good foundation that they're working together and they're taking the weight off the entrepreneur's shoulders. That's the first thing is when the business owner becomes the bottleneck and they really have a hard time relinquishing control. The second challenge would be that they don't when their business starts to take off and they haven't really done the good foundation work on which to build that business. When I say foundation work, I'm talking purpose, values, mission, getting that clarity for everyone involved and having perfect alignment together as a team to move forward. If that foundation is missing, you can grow revenue for a time, but at some point it's going to be on that shaky foundation that can all come crashing down. That's the second challenge I see. The third one is based on the experience we had at Infusionsoft. In one year, we hired about 200 people and we were growing so fast that we could not develop leaders fast enough.

If we needed leaders, we had to go outside to get them. Having an influx of leaders from the outside really did some damage to that core foundation I was talking about earlier. It's related to the first one, but most of us aren't thinking as we're looking to grow our event business, we're not thinking, man, I got to invest in leadership development. We're not thinking that way. We're just thinking about growing revenue, we're thinking about getting more customers, getting more sales, and all of a sudden, we'll find ourselves in a situation where we don't have enough leadership going on in the business. We start to look for those and we bring them in from the outside and it starts to create a bunch of chaos. Those would be the three challenges. I know you said briefly, but you're going to get to know that I have a hard time being brief, Rudy.

No, that's perfect. I know in a moment, we'll go a little bit deeper into those three. One of the things I want to mention up front here is why I think it's important to think about this now as a listener on the show. I've had multiple clients in the past who had very successful events. I remember one client specifically, many years ago, whose events were right around the $200,000 - $300,000 mark per event. They had done it for seven years running. Then the next year, we were working with them. They got the event up to $700,000 and they were really happy. They more than doubled the revenue. Then the following year, it was a million dollars in a single day and the event closed out over $2 million. All of a sudden, they were happy right there and then, but also they had a whole new set of problems. A whole new set of problems that came as a result. They had over 100 customers, they were paying them over $20,000 a piece to work with them on average. Now, they were missing the infrastructure, they're missing the team, they're missing all sorts of things to be able to fulfill and earn that revenue. That actually happened also for another client just about a year ago. It was their first event and they were hoping they were going to do a million bucks, and they did over $2 million on their first event. They had a team, but the team wasn't ready for two million in revenue. They weren't million, they just weren't ready for that. There were headaches and challenge points that resulted. But I think what you have to share here are the important points that people don't think about until they're in it. Hopefully, our audience will lean in and learn some points from you here as you're going to go deeper and be proactive about avoiding.

That's the thing. I love that you mentioned that proactive word because it's hard in business. We only have so much time and money. Everything rests on where we can invest our time and where we can invest our money. The tricky balancing act here, one of the tricky balancing acts in business is investing enough right now in future enabling work. If you come along and help one of your clients triple or 10x the production out of an event and all of a sudden the infrastructure is insufficient to handle that. Well, I think if I were the business owner in that case, I'd be celebrating the sales and then I'd be having one of those, Oh my goodness moments like, what are we going to do? How are we going to fulfill on that? They'll scramble and they'll figure it out and they'll do their best and they'll get their way there. But there are some things that you could start doing now that would really smooth that transition. Even if it was unexpectedly high in sales, you could still have a smoother path towards successfully delivering on that if you were to do some things in advance. I think we have an opportunity to share some key points that would help any business owner who's looking to grow in the future, get ahead of some of these things.

Absolutely. Thank you, Brett. I'll turn it back over to you, man, if you want to go through those points a little bit deeper.

On the first one, on the inability to relinquish control. Let's talk about that. Most business owners I know, and I'm sure this will ring true for you as well, Rudy. Most business owners I know, they learned as they went. They've had to figure out how to position their offering or their product or put their event out there in a way that the market would receive it. They had to figure out how to put people in the seats, and then had to figure out how to do stuff that made those people in the seats excited to be there, or think, wow, this is valuable for me to be here, and get them ready to say yes to an offer. All of these things, the entrepreneur has to figure out as he or she goes. Well, who do you trust in the moment when it's go time, who do you trust? You trust the person who had to figure it out all the way there. In a business owner's case, they're looking at that person in the mirror. They're saying, well, I figured out how to do that, and so I trust myself to do that. Then they hire help to take some of the task burden off of them, but they have a hard time really trusting people to take stuff that they created as the business owner. It's really hard to hand that baby off to somebody else. You went through all the trouble to birth that, there was a lot of pain involved. Here's the baby, now I'm going to just give that to somebody else and hope that it goes well. New parents could appreciate that analogy. It's really hard to really trust the babysitter or really want to give that baby over to the grandparents for the weekend. There's this thing like, I don't know if I can do that. Business owners are notorious for not being able to let go of certain things because they believe nobody else is going to be able to do this as well as I am.

How do we get ahead of that? If you're looking to really grow your event business, you need to be thinking now, you need to be practicing, not thinking. You need to be practicing the art of relinquishing control. Here's what it comes down to. It comes down to getting really clear on the work that needs to get done and the measurable expectations that go with that work. What is the ownership that I'm giving to somebody? Clear ownership comes with accountability. Rudy, I've heard more times than I can count. I wish I could hold my people more accountable. I wish my people were more accountable. That's not the problem. The problem is, I'm sorry to tell you, Mr. or Mrs. Leader, the problem is you haven't given clear ownership to somebody. The moment you give clear ownership to somebody, automatically the accountability goes with that. So we all have to get better now at getting really clear, key, we call them key results, we can call them activities. They're a combination of results or activities, but I'm not talking about 10 or 15 bullets. I'm talking about the three key responsibilities, measurable things that I'm going to give to somebody as ownership. Once I'm clear and that person's clear about what's expected, how it will be measured and how it aligns to our company goals, now I've given ownership to somebody and I can relinquish control and not feel that weight on me anymore. I know that so-and-so has it. I know that Sally has that because she and I have seen eye-to-eye what's expected, how it will be measured, how it aligns to company goals, and I've given that ownership to them and they're accountable for it. That's the easiest way I can describe in a short amount of time, Rudy, what it means to practice that discipline of relinquishing control.

So it's about organizing work, it's about getting really clear, and it's about giving clear ownership to a person that now owns that. Then you don't have to, you can go work on higher value things, or you can work on scaling the team. To go handle all the growth that's going to come. So that's my first one. Do you want me to go ahead and roll into the second one?

That's perfect. Actually, I will make a quick comment on that. I can relate to that completely. I know it's still something I'm working on. For the longest time, it took me a while to just get an assistant and to allow for someone else to do things that I thought I could do better myself, or do faster myself. I found that once I started actually relinquishing control, things just started to work a little bit better for me. So I just want to make that quick comment for our listeners, but we can move on.

Well, I want you to comment like that, because it's one thing for me to share my own experience with it, or to share what I've seen in helping hundreds of business owners do this kind of work. But it's another voice. I've experienced that myself. So I appreciate you saying that.

So one more quick note, I'll connect it to something relevant to the listeners, is where it matters to them when it comes to an event, relinquishing control. We're a company where we come in and we basically take over the sales processes at events for our clients. It does take a skill on behalf of the client to be able to communicate the responsibility. it's a co-creation between us and the client, that the goal is for them to be able to relinquish control so that they can focus on what only they can do and what they can do best, which is oftentimes hosting the event and teaching and all of that, and truly being able to relinquish control of a sales process so that we could produce the best result for that client. So it's a really relevant topic when it comes to that.

That's a super great example too because you're right. If I'm putting on an event, I want to focus on the experience for the people who are in those seats. It took me a lot of work to get people in seats. Now that they're there, I want them to have an amazing experience and you know how much time and attention it takes to have a well-thought out plan around the sales process and how the conversion is going to work and how the, like all the setup to it, the closing, the follow through afterwards, like all of that takes a ton of time, energy, focus. If I'm, as the business owner, if I'm focused on the sales piece, which I really care about, I can't give enough time and attention to the experience itself and just enjoying the people that are there and making sure that they're getting value. That's a great example. Perfect. Let's go to our second obstacle that I see or the challenge. It's not an obstacle. Let's just call it a challenge. That is when you start to grow really fast, let's say you have these successful events because you do the things that the guests on this podcast are teaching and recommending. Now your sales start to go through the roof and you have that problem where you don't have enough team behind it. Well, you can go out and start pulling in contractors and hiring temps and like hiring full-time people to staff all the work that needs to happen. But if you don't slow down enough to really build a solid foundation, you're going to be building on sand. You're going to have, and I know this is a biblical reference, but if you build the house on the sand and the rains come and the floods come. The rains descend and the floods come up, that house gets washed away. There's a reason.

There's no solid foundation. So if you're building, it'll feel like you're building a house of cards if you build it so fast without really doing the intentional foundation work. So when I talk about this foundation work, you all can do it now. You don't have to wait till all the sales come. That work looks like getting really clear on the purpose of your business. And you say, yeah, my purpose is to get a bunch of events or to get a bunch of people at my event and convert them into my high ticket items. Well, we all want that, but that's not the why behind your business. The why behind your business needs to be compelling. It needs to elicit the sense of passion in you and the rest of your team. Nobody should be involved. Nobody should be on this bus of yours if they're not extremely passionate about why you're doing this work. If it's just to make a buck, I promise that's not gonna keep people engaged very long. That's exciting in the short term. Hey, we can make some money, but for sustainable long-term engagement levels that are off the charts from your people, the kind of stuff where they start telling their friends and other people, hey, you need to come be part of this because it's so exciting. You need to have a compelling purpose behind that. So purpose is a core part of the foundation that needs to be built. You can all start doing that work now. Values is the next piece. I know a lot of people talk about values, but they miss the punchline. The punchline on values is the behavioral things, not just the statements of belief about how we should act with one another, but it's actually how we behave with one another consistently.

Not just one another in the building, or in the team, but one another with our vendors, with our partners, with the event venue, with the customers. The prospects who come to the event. We behave this way with everyone. So we don't have to put on any facades. We don't have to say today, I'm talking to Rudy. So I got to put on my Rudy filter and speak to him this way. Today I'm talking to my team members. So I got to, now I'm different from my team members. We get to be us when we define who we are and what our values are like. Then we hire, lead, and fire to those values. We get very zero tolerance, like no tolerance around people who don't live these values. You don't want to fill your life with people who don't fit your values, but you have to be really clear about what those are. So purpose and values are at the core of this foundation and it represents the identity of this team or this business, and we hire, lead, and fire it. So I can go on to the next challenge, Rudy, unless you want to make a comment on that one.

I'll make it brief. I think it's actually the most important thing is values in culture, my experience. And not just my experience, but research has shown that culture is the most important thing in a business. It eats strategy for breakfast, I think the saying goes. I can give all sorts of quotes on that, but I agree with this a hundred percent. Where I find this to be relevant when it comes to sales and events and enrollments is what is your sales culture?

Yes, I love that you're bringing that up. You don't show one thing throughout the whole experience and then you have this totally different sales thing that happens. The sales culture is congruent, consistent with everything they've experienced with you up to this point. It's not a record scratch. Can I even make that reference anymore? It's not a total change. It's not whiplash, wait a minute, this doesn't feel anything like them. No, it's totally consistent with your brand, with who you are. That comes from those values.

A hundred percent. I've seen it too, where all of a sudden it comes time for the enrollment process. Literally it's like, okay, now we're gonna pull up the PowerPoint. Even though we haven't used PowerPoint in all this entire event, now we're gonna pull up the PowerPoint. Now, instead of being high energy and positive, it's changing. It's like talking one way to one person and talking another way to another person. You're saying, no, it's about defining who are we being? What are our values? What's our mission? How do we be congruent to that all the way through to vendors, to partners, to customers, and maintaining that congruency all the way through and to include the sales process. From the minute they show up to your event to the minute they leave, the entire experience is congruent. To be fair, life happens, life gets in the way. It's important to have feedback making those in the place where when that mark is missed, we can actually do something about it through something like NPS course, which I know Brett, you and I are both big fans of. So we could do a whole probably 20, 30 minutes on this one subject. I mean, it's the most important thing in business.

It is and people get it. We're in 2023 now and most people understand, yeah, I gotta have my values. I think people miss on the purpose thing. So I'm kind of passionate about getting purpose-driven. Be a purpose-driven values-based company. People understand the concept that it's important for us to do values, but they don't drill at home behaviorally in everything that they do. In their hiring process, they should be hiring to the values. In the onboarding process, they should be preaching and reinforcing the values. Their ongoing leadership of team members, it's values, values, values all the time. Then it shows up in spades wherever your people go, including at your events. It shows up. Your prospects and your customers experience those values, that way of being. I love that you use that phrase, Rudy. The way of being is the living of the values. When everybody can feel that and touch that and go, that's their unique way of being. The other side of culture, the culture coin is the brand. I mean, culture and brand come right out of this values thing. When it's congruent throughout the way you described, it's a beautiful thing. So I could go on and on on that. I'm a little passionate about it, but that foundation of purpose and values, there's one more component that I didn't touch on that I will briefly now is the mission. I don't mean this broad, like we exist to make these widgets or provide world-class service and whatever. Like there's these broad statements of mission that just kind of make me sick when I see them. I'm talking about a very destination oriented, we will do this by this time period.

So by the end of 2025, we will have grown our event business to a thousand attendees or whatever. So a very specific mission that the team can rally behind and will guide our strategic decision-making about how to invest our few precious resources, the time, the money we have, how do we take those finite resources and say, where do we put that to best serve what we're trying to accomplish? Well, what are you trying to accomplish? Oh, our mission is this. Now I know how to invest. All my time can be aimed towards that. All of our funds, our available funds can be aimed towards that. We can do real strategy work when we have a clear mission. Anyway, that foundation of purpose values mission is often overlooked in the pursuit of growth. Then the growth just kind of comes down because we don't have those solid things in place. So that's the second thing. The last thing was that we, again, I mentioned our growth at Infusionsoft. That company's now called Keap. Same great company, great people. I was just talking to the CEO yesterday. His name is Clayton Mask. He's a fantastic, passionate advocate for entrepreneurs. What we were talking about had to do with how he's going to get out and spend more of his time sharing his passion for entrepreneurship. But in our experience, when we grew so fast, 200 people in one year, I mean, just think about that. That's a lot of people. We couldn't invest fast enough. We couldn't develop leaders quickly enough to meet all the needs. I'm not talking about executive leaders. I'm talking about any level of leaders. We didn't invest enough in leadership development. Eventually we had to bring all the leaders in from the outside.

Then we had this big cultural wonky thing that happened and it stopped our growth. It literally stopped our growth. So yes, product, yes, marketing challenges, like all of those things matter. But at the end of the day, if you mess up how people come together and pull together, you're not going to figure out product problems. You're not going to figure out marketing problems. All of those things are going to be harder to work through because you don't have the leaders in place that our culture fits, that bring everybody along to solve problems together, to innovate together, to deliver an amazing customer or member experience together. Like all of that is slowed down when you bring in a bunch of cultural misfits in the form of leaders because you didn't develop leaders fast enough. So that's just from my experience. You will likely find yourself needing to have more leaders than you have available. I would say, start developing your people, even if they're not going to become a quote unquote manager or a quote unquote director or whatever, you can develop leadership skills in them that will enable them to own more of the things that your business needs them to own for you to continue to scale.

Excellent, thank you. Thanks for sharing that. Leadership is the most valuable asset. I'm thinking, how do I make that relevant to events and event sales and enrollments? I mean, fundamentally, I believe that sales is a form of leadership.

And so... To what they need.

Exactly, so whether that's for the front of the room or for the managers in the back of the room or the individual sales representatives who might be doing consultations, follow people. People don't buy programs, they buy people, I mean, realistically. And I agree with you, consistently developing people, whether that's by developing your sales team, as an example, or bringing in a team that has been developed, it's an investment. You have to take that into account. It's not easy just to find great salespeople that can do back of the room type sales thing. It takes a significant amount of effort, training, work, development, reinforcement, all sorts of things. I mean, it's a six-figure plus thing to do that. So I just wanted to make the point that when you think about sales, you have to think about leadership because sales is leadership.

I love that. If we go back to the, just quickly, we go back to the experience you shared where you helped the client go from $200,000, $300,000 event to $700,000 to $21 million or $2 plus million, let's say that that $700,000 year, they had a team of, they went out and got a team of five people to go fulfill on that or four people or whatever. You tripled the revenue next year. If you have to triple your staff to meet triple the revenue, you're not doing the right work to develop your people. So if you took those four people to deliver the $700,000 over the course of that year and you developed them, now maybe it takes four people to deliver on $1.2 million instead of $700,000. You've grown the business through those people without adding any heads. The next year when you have the $2 million problem, maybe it's a million dollar problem now instead of a $1.3 or $1.4 million problem from a staffing standpoint. Maybe that example got a little convoluted, but the point is you can either hire more help or you can develop the current people to be able to do more or a combination of the two. Those are your sourcing or your staffing solutions are either to grow the people you have, bringing people from the outside or some combination of the two. The better you get at developing your team, the more your business will be able to grow without bringing people in from the outside.

I agree 100%. So, Brett, you made some really great points on the things to avoid and things to do to scale an event business from seven to eight figures. If people wanna learn more about you and your work, what's the best place for them to go to?

Thanks for that, Rudy. So our business again is called Elite Entrepreneurs. That's a horrible website. So URL, don't put entrepreneurs in a URL. So our website is Growwithelite.com. I would just have people go to Growwithelite.com. On that site, if you wanna do some of that foundational work, that really important purpose, values, mission work, there's a program we offer called Elite Ignition. That is the place you wanna go if you wanna do that really good foundational work with purpose, values, mission, get the clarity of the intentionality, get the alignment with your team where you co-create that with them, super powerful. That's a really great place to start with us. You also see a ton of other free resources that we have on our site, and I just hope to be able to help whoever needs it. So Growwithelite.com is the place to go.

Awesome, thank you so much for that, Brett. I actually checked out some of those resources before this call, and they seem pretty handy, a few different subjects on there. So highly recommend our audience go to Growwithelite.com, download some of those free resources to be proactive and make sure that you're trying to address or solve the problems before they happen when it comes to growing your event business. There's so much to unravel here in this conversation. It's such a big conversation scaling, from seven to eight figures in leadership and culture, so much there. But Brett, I think today's episode was a great first go at it. Maybe we can have another episode, we go a little deeper on some of these topics. I think this is a really big topic, quite honestly, to expand on. So thank you for being a wonderful guest on our show. Do you have any final comments for our guests before we wrap up?

Just, I would say, don't be discouraged. When Rudy and team and all his other guests help you grow your event business and the headaches start because the business has to grow with it, don't be discouraged. We all have to figure out how to grow through those stages, but there are stages and they're well-known and the solutions or the keys to success are well-known. So don't go it alone, come get some help, stick with it. You guys are out there creating a ton of value in the world, keep doing it.

Awesome, thank you so much, Brett. Appreciate you being on.