Speaker 1: Planning a retreat can be a very challenging experience and it can also be a very rewarding one. In this video I'm going to share with you how you can design, fill, and profit from a retreat. Retreats are an awesome and fun way to make a living, but they can also be kind of risky too, especially if you end up not filling your retreat and getting stuck with a bill for a venue or a resort. Following the formula I'm gonna lay out here will not only help you plan your retreat, but also fill it and monetize it. So the way that I approach retreats is to design them backwards to look at what is the outcome that I want people to experience and then from that outcome designing the retreat, getting the venue, creating the marketing, and the promotion to fill it and profit from it. So here are the five steps to planning your retreat, to planning your profitable retreat. The first step is to discover and design. Now when I say discover and design what I'm talking about is discovering your clients, your ideal audience, and to design the retreat that will attract them and deliver massive value to them. So the first thing you need to look at is your own purpose in doing the retreat. What is it that you want to create from the retreat? What's the meaning of it to you? Now in a minute we're going to get into what does it mean for your clients and for the people who attend, but first and foremost what is it that you're looking to get out of your retreat? Is it that you want to create a community? Is it that you want to have a wonderful experience? Is it that you want to gather your clients together? Is it that you want to make money and get new clients? There are all sorts of different reasons that you might want to do a retreat, but in this part of the planning process it's really important to have clarity as to why you're doing this. The second really important thing to look at is the people. The people that you're creating this retreat for. Who is it that you want to serve in this retreat? Who is it that you want to gather together? And then just as importantly as who, it's what are they struggling with? What is the pain point or the problem that this retreat is going to address? The next thing to look at once you're clear about who you're serving and what they need is to look at what's the promise that you're gonna make to these people? What's the outcome that this retreat is gonna deliver? Now this is a really critical part of the design process because so many retreats don't really have a promise. They're just like, hey let's get together at this cool resort and hang out. Whereas a retreat that has a promise is worth a lot more to the people attending. It raises the price point. It raises the perceived value of the retreat. So I've seen a lot of retreats at $400 or $500 and I've also personally invested up to $10,000 in a retreat. The difference? The $10,000 retreat promised me a very specific outcome. The next piece is to design the package and the price at which you're gonna sell the package. Now when I say package I mean the collection of goodies that you're gonna package together with your retreat. And the reason that I recommend that is that it raises your value proposition. It raises your perceived value to have more things in your retreat than just the retreat itself. I'll give you an example. When I was starting to do retreats for the first time, I first started just selling my three-day retreat. And the problem is people had a preconceived notion of what they would pay for an event or a retreat. Now when I started focusing on the outcome that obviously helped but I also created a bundle that went along with the retreat and that increased the perceived value of it. I included personality tests and profiles. I included a one-on-one call, an intake call, and I included a follow-up retreat call. Now all of those things together became the jumpstart package. And that jumpstart package had a higher perceived value than just the retreat by itself. So think about what you want to package together with your retreat. Another thing that I did was I chose to use premium pricing. Now premium pricing means that when it comes to comparing with other offers in the market, we were higher. We were higher than other people doing three-day retreats. People were doing three-day events at $200, $400, $500. And I had done three-day events at $400 and $500. I'd even invited some people for free. But when I shifted to doing a retreat model with this package, this bundle of services, I raised the price point. Now you might be wondering what to charge for your retreat. Well lucky for you I have a whole video about that that you can check out about how to price your retreat. So I'm not gonna go deep into that here. The last thing you want to think about as you're in this discover and design phase of your retreat is what's gonna be on the back end of the retreat. Are you gonna sell something else? A retreat is a perfect opportunity to enroll people into some sort of long-term back-end program. That's something that we specialize in. Now once people have spent three days or four days or six days together gathered and connecting with you and with others in the group, they're naturally gonna want to know what's next as long as you deliver a great experience. So think about what's the new problem people have upon finishing your retreat and how could you offer a solution to that problem through some sort of back-end offer. Some sort of membership or mastermind or coaching program or retainer or whatever it is. But don't miss out on the opportunity to create something long-term and deliver more value over time to those clients. The next part about creating your retreat is really deciding and committing to the date and the city. At this point you might also want to be looking at venues but I don't recommend necessarily booking a venue at this juncture. I'll share why in a moment. But at this point you do want to have dates on the calendar and you want to know what city you're gonna be hosting the retreat in. Why? Because the next thing we're gonna do once we've committed and decided on those dates and picked the city is we're gonna start enrolling people in our event. We're gonna start marketing it. We're gonna start selling it. And as you may have heard me say before, I believe in sell it first, figure it out later. I don't want you to go ahead at this point and put a big deposit down and commit to a venue before you know that people are gonna sign up for this thing. So what I would do is connect with the date and the city that you want to be in and then trust that once you have some people committed you will find your venue. This is what we do and this is the beauty of planning a retreat not a big event. If you are hosting a huge event with I don't know a hundred or a thousand people, yes it's so important at this early stage to get your venue secured. But if you're talking about a retreat for five or ten or fifteen or twenty people then chances are once you get some people enrolled you will be able to find your venue. So I don't recommend going all in and booking your venue now. At least not if it requires you to put down a big deposit. At this point another thing you want to think about is who's gonna support you in this event and getting them to set aside their time so that they can be available to help you. I don't recommend putting on a retreat and being the only person in charge at the retreat. Now it definitely depends on whether you're looking at a business retreat, a life coaching retreat, an exotic retreat in Bali, right? It's different depending on where you are. But even if for the simplest type of life coaching or personal development retreat that you do and perhaps even in your own home you will want to have some support. At least one person who's there to help you with the logistical part of things. As the person who's leading the retreat you don't also want to be the person who's also moving tables and chairs and putting up and down the air conditioning or announcing that someone left a watch in the bathroom, right? So that's where you bring somebody in to support you with that. It might be a child, like your child, not an actual child. It might be your kid. It might be your husband or it might be your boyfriend or it might be a friend. It might be a client but someone who's willing to come in and support you. The next part of this is to promote and enroll people. Now I know what you might be thinking. You might be thinking, how can I promote and enroll people if I don't have a venue? If I haven't committed to booking the venue and the amenities? Trust me that for most retreats you'll find the venue once you know that you have to deliver the retreat. I call it sell it first and figure it out later because once you've committed to your clients that you've enrolled that you're gonna do this retreat on this day then you're way more likely to go ahead and find the resources that you need. So at this juncture I'm a big believer in going out and marketing and promoting your retreat and enrolling people in it. So what that looks like is perhaps hosting preview events. It might look like promoting on Facebook, doing Facebook lives, email marketing, right? Promoting your retreat is all about gathering that audience that you already have, reaching out to the people you already know and letting them know, hey would you like to jump on a call and learn about this retreat that I'm putting together? At this point you'll want to start developing some materials to promote your retreat. Creating a website, creating a landing page, maybe a brochure. You don't need to go too crazy. I've had clients create and deliver retreats and make lots of money at them without a single website or a single brochure. That's the beauty of the retreat business model is that you don't have to enroll a hundred people. You just need five to ten really solid people paying a good amount of money to make the retreat worthwhile and very very profitable. So promoting and enrolling. Enrolling is about having enrollment conversations. One-on-one conversations with the people you want to bring in. Not just to sell them on the retreat but even more importantly perhaps to make sure that if they're not a fit they don't get sold on your retreat. One of the biggest mistakes we see people make with building a retreat business is that they end up enrolling people into their retreat that don't belong there. People who are not a fit and that not a fit person can ruin the whole experience for everybody else. The fourth step is to prepare and plan your retreat. This is the part where you actually start to put together your content. This is the part where you actually start to plan logistically. Where you secure your venue. Where you choose the amenities that you're going to be offering at your retreat. For example at this point you'll think about is it doesn't make sense for you to provide meals for people. Now one of the biggest expenses that retreats often have is the meals or is the amenities. One of the things I want you to consider is if you create a good enough promise early on in the discover and design portion of your planning then you don't need to offer as many amenities. In fact in my own situation we used to offer when we first started doing retreats. We used to offer every single meal at the retreat which cost us a lot of money. What we actually found was that people needed time off from the retreat. They needed integration time. They needed alone time. They needed away time and the meals were the perfect time to do that. Not only did they get their time off we got to reduce our budget. So I'm a big fan and believer in focusing more on the outcome you want to deliver and also giving people space and time to not be constantly there. We used to work through lunch and now we give people a 90-minute lunch break for them to go off and do their own thing. And a lot of times they'll go to lunch together and continue the conversation. Another thing you want to think about in this prepare and plan period is what we call a stick strategy. A stick strategy is for people who haven't maybe necessarily paid in full. Maybe they've paid a deposit and you need to still collect payments before the retreat. A stick strategy is to keep them engaged and excited about the retreat as they're waiting for the retreat. One of the things that we do during this period is we give them an online virtual course. It's homework to prepare them for the retreat. The double benefit of that is it also gets some of the work out of the way before the retreat so by the time they come into the room they're really ready to play. Another thing we do during this period before the retreat leading up to the retreat is we'll send personality tests out. Now these personality tests are as much for us as they are for them. Now they get a perceived value out of it because they get to learn more about themselves but it also really helps us to be more prepared about who we're going to be having in our retreat and it helps us serve them at a higher level. At this juncture you'll also want to prepare your back-end offer. Now I've said it over and over again and I have a bunch of videos about this. I'm a big believer in having an offer on the back end of your retreat and so this is where you'll actually map out the points of what you're going to be selling in that back-end offer. Here is also where you will lay out the content for your three-day retreat. Now one of the biggest mistakes that I've made and that I've seen clients make before working with us of course is overdoing it. Over stuffing the retreat with too much information, too much content. Now I know that for me where that came from was a sense of not being good enough. I felt like I needed to prove the value of the retreat and then for me the way to prove it was to add more and more and more content. The challenge with that is that it created a lot of anxiety for people. People felt like they couldn't absorb all that information. It dropped their energy level in the retreat. So I highly recommend minimizing the content and maximizing the outcomes. So what we did was we took out a whole bunch of content and replaced it with activities, replaced it with hot seats, replaced it with Q&A and replaced it with mastermind time. So instead of giving all this content, me talking talking talking all the time, I'll deliver a piece of content then I'll have them look and see how it applies to them. We'll have a conversation about it. I'll do a hot seat as an example then I'll give them time to work on it in smaller groups. So these are ways that you can have your event deliver massive value without having to stuff it full of content. Okay now the last piece of planning your retreat is to show up at your retreat ready to delight and invite. Delight and invite. Delight is about delivering your magic. It's about being energy rich and being a leader that people can enjoy learning with. It means leading the room to make sure that if there are energy poor pockets, if somebody's struggling, that you know how to deal with them and elevate them. Delighting is about delivering more value than you promised. It's about over delivering. It's about delivering an incredible experience about allowing people to to share and open up and be vulnerable and connect. The invite part of this is about inviting people into your back-end program. From a business strategy perspective this is probably the most important part of your whole retreat. Now obviously this is not just about business strategy. We're doing this, we're planning this retreat because we want to deliver value to people and at the same time if this is something that you want to take seriously as a business then you cannot miss out on the opportunity to invite people into something ongoing. So the invitation portion, I generally recommend making that invitation on the second day and then having conversations with people who are interested on the evening of the second day, on the morning of the third day and throughout the third day in order to enroll people into that program while they're still on site. And one of the things that we do in our invitation process is we allow them to apply what they've invested in the retreat towards their back-end program so they have a real incentive to take action. If planning a retreat sounds exciting to you and you want to go in even deeper then go ahead and get the Retreats to Riches Roadmap that I put together. Click on the link below, it's free and it will help you to design, deliver, fill and monetize your retreats.