what it takes to run a live event for nearly 300 people

Summary

we just ran a live event for nearly 300 people at PT Biz. here is the honest debrief.

1. long-range planning is real. the venue, the hotel block, the speaker list, the food, all of it gets locked 1 to 2 years out. anything less and you are paying a tax on every line item and praying the venue holds.

2. I should not be running event logistics. I’m bad at it. I’m bored by it. the parts I should be working on are the parts on stage, the parts where I bring value to the attendee. every minute I spend chasing a catering estimate is a minute the attendee experience suffers. that’s not humility, that’s math.

3. Who Not How, from Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy, is the rule. when you hit a task you cannot or should not be doing, the question is not how do I learn to do it. the question is who already does this for a living. hire them. let them shine. get out of the way.

if there is a part of your business you keep handling badly because you cannot let go, that is the next hire. the customer is paying the price for your white-knuckling. stop.

Transcript

introduction to the episode’s theme

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

recapping early event planning experiences

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. All right, what does it take to run an event for 300 human beings? I’m going to be diving into that today. And some of my big lessons learned from having done this for a number of years, and the takeaway may not be what you’re expecting.

So stick around. This is the Better Human Business Podcast. I’m Jerred Moon. And if you didn’t know, my company, PT Biz, we have a mastermind, and this mastermind holds two live events per year. We’ve done it in Dallas a number of times, Atlanta. We’ve done it in Colorado and Denver. We’ve done it in San Antonio.

We’ve done it in South Carolina. We’ve done it a lot of different places, and we’ve been doing this for a very long time. So you learn a lot about running events. And what’s funny is the first couple of events, when we were trying to do them in different locations, like the first one we ever did was just at my business partner’s practice.

transition from hands-on event planning to strategic delegation

Like it was just at, his name’s Danny Matei, you know, a lot of you are familiar with him, and some of you aren’t, but he’s my business partner, and he had a brick-and-mortar location at his practice, and we just set up a couple chairs, a couple tables, and boom, that’s the first event. Those were easy.

They started to get a little bit bigger. I remember I was basically responsible for one, the first one we did here in Dallas, and we did it at this ranch. And I can’t remember how many people were at this one, but I had to guess it was probably, we were probably getting close to a hundred. And that’s when we realized, this is tough, Jerred can’t do this.

But I did. I got, you know, the venue was great, but like we had to provide, I had to find all the AV stuff, like we had to run our own speaker and our own sound system, and set up the tables, and we just did so many things on our own. And the event went well. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with it, but it’s very hard to run an event as a business owner when you’re there, one, trying to interact with people, and like actually engage and have meaningful conversations, and provide value, and speak, and do a workout.

insights on long-range planning and its necessity

There are all these things at the event that aren’t even actually running the event. And so, that’s what I, you know, we all realize, the three business partners we have at PTBiz, is like, we can’t legitimately run these events anymore, meaning we can’t be the ones in charge of all the details and the logistics, it’s just not going to work long-term.

And so, I have kind of like, on that note, I have two main lessons for running an event this size. And the first one is, it takes incredible long-range planning, which is something I’m horrible at. If you left it up to me, about maybe a month or two before the event, I would start looking for a venue.

In all honesty, like that’s how my brain works, like I’m focused on business, I’m focused on like marketing operations, leadership, the things that I excel at, and what I don’t excel at, is long-range planning for a live event. That is not my specialty. It’d be like, oh yeah, that’s coming up, let’s get it done.

hiring a professional event planner and its impact

Well, when you have 300 people coming to an event, you can’t tell them two months before where it’s at, number one. Number two, it’s near impossible to find a venue for that many people that short notice. And so, it takes a lot. So, one thing I do know is, it takes very long-range planning, which, you know, I’m talking about one to two years in advance, you have to know the location, have the deposit put down, all these kind of things to be able to run the event and have a venue selected.

Now, the second thing I learned is that I don’t know how to run an event. I don’t know how to run an event. I don’t care about the details or logistics enough at all, almost to a point where it would be a bad customer service experience, but all I would actually care at for an event is that people get value.

Like you come, you interact, you get educated, you learn something, you take away that can grow your business. I’m so results focused, that’s all I really care about for an event. I don’t care about where people are staying for their hotel. I don’t care about travel arrangements. I don’t care about what people are eating.

discussing the “who not how” principle

I don’t care about any of those things. But like I said, if we didn’t care about those things, that would be bad. That’d be bad for business. It’d be a bad experience. We can’t have a bad experience for our members. I’m just so results focused. I’m like, I need you to get value out of why you’re here.

So what I learned is that I don’t know what I’m doing. So what is my main takeaway? Who can do this? So a phenomenal book we all, like all entrepreneurs need to read is Who Not How, and I think it’s so great and it’s so applicable. So we have a who. We have a who runs these events for us. She’s phenomenal at long range planning, getting the venue scouted out, going to the locations, picking the spots.

She cares about every single tiny, tiny details, how the tables are set up, how people are going to check in, what the meals are going to be. Does breakfast make sense with lunch? What’s for dinner? What’s happy hour? Like all of these things that I’m so, so bad at, to be honest, if I would have continued running events, people probably hate the events.

practical advice for applying this principle in your own business

People wouldn’t come because I’m so bad at it. Like I’m so bad. My brain just does not work in that way. So my main takeaway, and this is for not only running live events, is that I don’t know how to run an event, and because I don’t know how to run an event, I have to have somebody who does. Because we do have this person, we get a phenomenal feedback on our event, I’m able to focus on the things that I am good at, which is engaging with people, providing value at the event.

Those are the things I want to focus on, and not all the tiny details that I’m so, so horrible at. So I want you to start thinking about that in your business, because there is a certain level of killing comfort in all things and in business, right? The main reason I was running the events previously is just because it made financial sense for the partners to run it and save on not having to hire a person to run the events for us.

That made a lot of sense. But over time, it doesn’t make sense. And so I don’t want to mask discomfort and killing comfort as like, no, kill some comfort, plan and run the event for yourself. But if I do that, it actually ends up in a poor experience for my customers. So I can’t do it. I can’t be the one to run the events.

closing thoughts on business growth and operational efficiency

It’s just not a good idea. So now you start thinking about that in your business. You might be killing comfort in some area, right? You might be just like slugging along and you’re like doing the thing and you’re like, no, business is hard. I got to do it. I’m going to be the one to do it. So on and so forth.

But is that just a story you’re telling yourself? And if you are the one who continues to do it, is that going to be a poor outcome for the business or even worse, a poor outcome for your customers, your clients? Start asking yourself those questions because you doing some work in your business, doing all the work or doing everything you think you can do sometimes is to the detriment of the business, right?

It can be a detriment to the business, a bad experience for your team, for the business itself or for your clients. So what is it? What are you doing that you need to offload that someone else can handle? You can hire out. What do you need to get rid of? Because my main takeaway, if you were coming here thinking of, oh, cool, he’s going to give me logistics on how to run a 300 person event.

I have no idea how to do that. I capped out at 100 and then I could barely do that, right? Like I can’t run an event. I don’t know how someone else has to do that for me. Where can you be that person? Where can you be like, I don’t know how to do X, Y, and Z because this person does it and they do it better than I ever will and is better for everyone because they do it.

Start thinking about those tasks and go start to hire for those tasks. It’s so easy to hire people these days. You can, like finding talented people is hard. So let me correct that. I don’t mean like find, it’s so easy to hire somebody for what you need, but I’m talking about in these small, smaller roles that you, you shouldn’t be doing.

It’s generally easy to hire these things out because everyone is willing to take on fractional work or part-time jobs, all these kinds of things. You don’t have to hire a full-time person with benefits and you know, health insurance and all this stuff to get somebody to do something. You can find people in very minimal ways, but the main point is you need to stop doing things in your business so someone else who loves doing that thing can do it better than you and it will help your business grow.

But to do that, you’re going to have to try harder.