Speaker 1: I got a question over the weekend and it's a question that I get all the time and it's if you're planning your first event, your first commercial event, what would your tips be or what would your feedback be? Events are a huge passion for me. I literally threw my first one when I was 18, I've thrown loads of them and at the height of it I used to throw about 30 events a week. So I absolutely love events. I've never kind of trained formally in the space, I just dove in and I pretty much made every easy mistake the hard way. But what's lovely about that is that every bit of perspective I have or advice that I give is built on experience. And so for anybody thinking about hosting an event, the first thing I would say to them is if it's your first event, play really small. So most people when they think about events, initially speaking, they want to do something big, they want to make everybody go whoa. The fact of the matter is you are 100% never going to be able to go from 0 to 100 in the event space. There are just so many things that you need to master, so many functional things and then so many mental things actually. When you throw an event, you take responsibility for all the people you bring together and for all the people that come and that takes quite a mental capacity. And so literally if you want to host your first event with a thousand people, God bless you, you will have a bit of a nervous breakdown. So start small. Start really, really small. Not just in terms of the mental capacity, but also in the financial space. The frustrating thing about events is more often than not, and I would say literally 90% of people in their first instance lose money. And so if you start small, you will lose small, but if you start big, you will lose big. So start small. The other slight point I'll make on that is that you will make loads of mistakes in your first event and the smaller they are, the harder those mistakes are to see. The bigger you go, the much more obvious and loud your mistakes will be. So keeping things small in your first instance is absolutely everything. When it comes to the second point that I'd share is if you're looking at an event, don't get too carried away by yourself in it. So a lot of people will think very self-centeredly when they throw an event, and what's so important is to see everything from your customer's perspective and to ensure that your customer's journey is, when it comes to hearing about the event and buying tickets for the event or registering for the event, that it's really convenient to them. And that affects how you market things. That affects how you present things on site, but convenience is so important because when you're doing something, hosting an event, if it's new, you're interrupting people's normal journey. You're saying, hey, you normally do this, but you should totally do this. And if you want to do that, you need to make sure that you do it in a manner in which is convenient to the person. You really invite them in. You don't make your site overly complicated or your messaging really difficult to understand. You make the messaging around your event really, really simple and aligned with your target audience and you make the journey from that messaging to your site really simple and really, really accessible. The second thing is when you think about the event, think about it from the second your attendee decides, okay, I'm going to go. So think about the timing. Is the timing convenient? Think about the journey to the space that you're going to host the event. Is that convenient or is it really out of the way? Think about when they literally get there, if they have to park, if they're biking, can they store bikes? And then how they enter the event, how they're registered. And then their event experience. There's loads of different examples that I could give within the space, but I'm hoping this is being viewed by a really wide event organizer's perspective. So I won't go into the little examples, but I think it's so, so important to think of your event from your attendee's perspective and almost make a list of their journey. Pretty much from the second they've registered for tickets to a week after they leave. A lot of the time people only think about events in terms of when people come in the door and when people leave the doors. They don't think about sending them a mail a day afterwards to thank them for coming and perhaps asking them for their advice and feedback. People that have come are really well positioned to give you feedback in terms of what they thought of the experience, what perhaps you could do better for next time and how you could do things next time. So I think about it, as I said, from your customer's perspective. The third thing when it comes to events is not to let your ego get ahead of you and remember that you're just starting off. So again, when you're starting off, you want it to be the biggest and the best and you want everybody to be really, really impressed with what it is that you're doing. But if it's your first one, honestly the best thing is just making sure you host a successful event and that people are really, really happy with it. It's not about blowing them away. You won't do that in the first instance and to be fair, you won't be able to afford that in the first instance. So bringing your ego in check is really, really important. So you might have an idea that you want to host it in the biggest venue. You don't deserve that in your first instance. You haven't earned it. You won't be able to manage it. Taking it down to a venue that's realistic is important. You might want to have the biggest speakers or the biggest entertainers. Again, if it's your first run at it, you won't be able to manage them properly. You'll end up paying way over the odds for them. So you need to come in at a certain level and build towards whatever goal you have. That's pretty much across the board. You'll want the fancy packages when it comes to production. You'll want the best sound, the best lighting, the best all of that. You won't be able to afford it. You won't be able to manage it. It'll knock the balance of your event out of sync. So anyway, keep your ego in check. That's much easier said than done. There's huge amounts of pride obviously associated with events and there's want to do things as best as possible but frustratingly, that all has its place in its journey and skipping steps in that will a lot of the time cost you too much money and so you'll have to raise your ticket prices and it'll get to a point that it's out of balance or you'll just take on too much personal stress and crash. So it's really, really important that you keep things in check so you can manage yourself and manage the event and keep everything in balance. Those are the three wide ranging gems of advice that I'd give that even as I've done thousands of events that I actually try to keep in mind all the time and remind myself. But if this is a space that you're really interested in, feel free to get in touch. My contact details are below here. My website's just www.jamiewhite.com. On Instagram it's just at jamiewhite. And as I said, if this is an area that you're passionate about and interested in, feel free to get in touch. Thank you. Thank you.