SPI 892: What’s Working in Hosting Live Events Right Now

SPI 892: What’s Working in Hosting Live Events Right Now

Pat Flynn: Three years ago, I stood in front of 2,500 Pokemon fans at my very first Card Party event in Anaheim, an event that I threw for the Pokemon community, for this new YouTube channel that I had built. And I had seen it firsthand, strangers becoming friends over Pokemon, sharing a passion. People from all walks of life helping each other out, no devices at all, people with their binders open.

It was an incredible experience. And now in 2025, we recently hosted our third one in Tampa Bay, Florida for 5,500 people. And by the time this episode comes out, we will be about a week away from our second event this year. This will be our fourth total Card Party, and that is gonna be in Seattle hosting about 6,500 people if our estimates are correct. We always have a lot of people buying tickets last minute.

Now, contrast this with last month, me sitting in a small coffee shop in downtown San Diego with 12 entrepreneurs having one of the most meaningful business conversations I’ve had all year. A month before that, sitting in a room with 50 people live, talking about books.

All of these events change lives no matter how big or small they might be. They all build community. They all strengthen our brands. But here’s the thing, one cost me six figures to produce and another one that I hosted cost me $47 for coffee and pastries. If you’ve been thinking about bringing your audience together in person, but you’re overwhelmed by the idea of event planning, logistics costs, well, this episode is for you.

Today, I’m gonna break down everything I’ve learned from hosting events ranging from 12 people in a coffee shop to 6,500 people in a convention center. And I’ll show you why live events are the ultimate community building tool. How to start small and scale smart, and the real numbers behind what works, including which events made money, which ones lost money, and why I keep doing them regardless.

Whether you wanna host your first meetup next month, or your dreaming of your own big conference, by the end of this episode, you’ll have a clear roadmap to bring your people together and create experiences that transform both your audience and your business. So if you’re ready. Let’s dive in.

Let’s talk about why live events matter more than ever. There is a crisis happening right now in the world, the human connection crisis. People are craving real human connection, especially in this AI driven digital world. You know this, you feel it. You have an urgency to connect with your fellow human, yet a lot of times we just don’t have the opportunity to do so, which is why it’s important for you to understand that you can step up.

And be that person, like I talking about in my book, superfans, become the facilitator of those interactions, not just between you and your audience in person, but rather your audience with each other in person. Virtual fatigue has made in-person experiences and absolute premium, and people are paying to get access to other people, their people, people like them, and people like you.

Your audience wants to meet you and each other, and events create memories that social media posts. Cannot, no matter how great your video is, no matter how funny, relatable, emotional, anger driven, confusing, all the emotions, nothing compares to in-person. Having an in-person event accelerates the super fan effect.

It allows for people to connect with your brand faster than really anything else. Yes, there are ways to connect. In real time online. There’s live events or live streams. Those are great live broadcasts. Social media, yes, can do that in a more asynchronous matter. There is a super fan effect there because of the real connection.

But imagine a connection that happens in real time the way it was meant to be. The whole thing that’s social media is trying to mimic, allowing your community members to meet each other, strengthens the community in whole. Again, you can be the person who steps up and your brand is the one that people can come to to feel safe at, to nerd out with.

Then your brand and everybody within it and your partners, your colleagues, the other speakers, the other creators who are there with you all get to benefit. It is of benefit to the entire community. To do this, you can create stories and memories. That bond people to your brand. There are specific things that I remember happening in Anaheim in 2023 moments on stage where people came up and opened packs of cards and craziness happened.

There were world records set. Shout out to Chris Gibo who created an old school event that I once attended called World Domination Summit or WDS, which happened in Portland. And this event was so special. It’s where a lot of us connected with each other in the entrepreneurial space, but we also have shared memories and experiences and it’s where I can give credit to the idea of having a group world record.

’cause Chris would do that every year. I did that my first couple years at Card Party and it’s still something people talk about and. In addition to all of that, it’s a content goldmine. You can, through one event, create months of content and have loads of testimonials from people who are there in real time, feeling the energy, who can then share that energy with others who aren’t there and wanna make them come.

These are the creators who also come to your event to film. This is you setting up a camera and capturing all the moments, not just of you on stage, but of your guests and your speakers, stuff that then you can share on social media, both in long form video and short form video format. You have higher lifetime customer value from attendees because not only are your people purchasing things that are perhaps digital, but they’re gonna come and experience this in-person event with you, and they’re gonna be more likely to come back both for your digital stuff and your in-person stuff.

There’s gonna be increased word of mouth marketing. Flash forward to Card Party. We have never, ever spent a dollar on marketing. It’s always been of word of mouth, thanks to the creators that have come to the event that we’ve invited, and of course my own channels as well. Fun fact, it is the smaller creators who we invite to the event who do get their name on the website at Card Party who do get featured on stage, they are the ones that happen to bring in more people, although they might have a smaller audience.

The larger percentage of that audience is definitely loyal compared to bigger on bigger brands. You can create new partnerships and collaboration opportunities. If you have sponsors come on, this is a great way to lean into them and also provide value to them by bringing a paid audience to their tables and vice versa.

And there’s premium pricing power for sure when it comes to events, because these are the in-person experiences that, again, people will pay for. There are industry influencers and thought leaders who you might be able to bring to the event. A lot of people are always looking to come up on stage and no, you don’t always have to pay them, although you should definitely provide value.

Many speakers, especially a-list speakers, will require some sort of payment or at least having their travel expenses paid for. However, there are many, let’s call them b nc and maybe even. D list creators out there and influencers ones who, again, don’t get a lot of recognition, who would love to get recognized, who can, yes, help you with that word of mouth, but also do their best on stage to bring something new and fresh.

And that’s an opportunity for you to see an opportunity in them and have them wanna pay it forward after they have a great experience. And I know that I felt the same way when I got. A chance to speak at FinCon for Philip Taylor. I’ve just come back from FinCon 15, the 15th year anniversary. I spoke with the very first one, and I’m still a fan of it.

I still talk about it all the time and promote it, but I made friendships. There were a lot of people there from Paula Pant to Philip Taylor, JD Roth. I even met Ramit Seti there at that first event in 2011. So many opportunities for me as a speaker to come in and, and get value that I wanted to, and still continue to give back.

And of course finally your biggest fans will show up. These people become your brand ambassadors and if you provide an even better experience for them in person, I mean, they’re gonna continue to come back and wave your flag very, very high for other people to come in and see. So now that we’ve talked about the benefits of hosting an event like this, and again, it could be a small event, 12, even five people at a restaurant all the way up to 5,000, 10,000.

I know some people who threw events for 20, 30,000 people. I haven’t gotten quite there yet, nor do I feel like I want to because at a certain point you start to feel disconnected and we found that at least for Card Party 5,000 people was sort of the max. We’re giving it a shot with a little more in Seattle so we can get more.

Buyers and sellers and traders in there. But the stage for the evening shows are always full and and super fun. So we’ll see what happens in the future. But let’s talk about some small events that you can hold and the style of them. So we talked about coffee shop meetups. It’s sort of the primary one, the easiest one, because who doesn’t love a cup of coffee or some sort of refresher while you are sitting down at any local coffee shop and you have a meeting and you just kind of.

Shoot the breeze with each other and you can offer to pay for their coffees. And in many cases people won’t allow you. But it’s more just to gather. I would recommend paying for coffee and pastries and having that be a part of the deal so that you’ll get people to show up. But that’s the easiest. And these could be more mastermind like in terms of format, A person having maybe 10, 15 minutes to speak about what they’re doing, what they might need, help with the whole group kind of chiming in.

You have time to do that. When you have 10 or less people or around 10 people, you could do workshop style sessions, not necessarily at a coffee shop, but perhaps you rent out the back room of a restaurant or you are in a small room in a hotel, not a hotel room, but you know a meeting room, or you know somebody who has an office space or a conference room, or you can come in and host a workshop.

Right. You don’t even need to necessarily pay for those things, although you could, and if you have something like a coworking space, like a WeWork or something like that, you might be able to rent a space out and bring people in for a similar sort of workshop style session. Mastermind gatherings, like we were talking about, book club meetings are always fun.

That’s a great way to hold people accountable and have them continue to come back with this theme of the book in mind every single month or two or skill sharing sessions where once a month a person comes in or maybe you bring in a guest. From the outside to host for these 10 people, 12 people to learn something.

And the pros of this, of course, is that the cost is low. It’s very, very intimate, relatively speaking. Everyone gets FaceTime with you and each other, and there’s minimal planning required for those styles of live events. And you can immediately profit, let’s say you charge $50, right? For a person to come for three hours to spend with you and learn from each other about a particular topic, right?

$50, you get 10 people. That’s. $500 and you pay for all their coffees and some snacks that might be a hundred bucks and you profit 400 bucks in a single day’s work. It’s not bad. Plus, there’s low risk, right? If it flops, you haven’t lost very much. It’s a, it’s a good experiment too. Something that could grow into something bigger later, and it’s easy to pivot or adjust on the fly.

There’s not like a stage hand with very set in stone itinerary with all those kinds of things. This is just like, we’re, we’re just here, let’s just, it’s flexible right now. Of course, the cons are, it’s limited reach, so you’re not gonna impact a ton of people. But again, it’s a great thing to test out first before you go and scale up.

It’s time intensive per person, right? It’s high touch, but it doesn’t scale. The venue. You are maybe limited to find the perfect intimate spaces like that, but you just have to look around and you know, if it’s outdoors, maybe the weather might not lend itself to that. If you meet at a park or something in the winter, you might wanna be on the West coast in Southern California.

Yes, maybe you can do that, but if you’re a New York. It might be different. So yeah, I mean the revenue is real. My good friend Chris Ducker and I, recent author of the Long Haul Leader, if you might remember from a few episodes back, we hosted an event for 25 people. This was an eight hour workshop called The One Day Business Breakthrough with Chris Ducker and Pat Flynn, and I think we charged for the first one, like 500 bucks.

So 25 people times 500 bucks was $12,500 in revenue, immediately profitable. I mean, it only cost a couple thousand dollars to run out the space and treat everybody to a very nice dinner and also some coffee. I mean, we both took home several thousand dollars and we were able to work with everybody’s business for 30 minutes or 20 minutes each throughout the day.

Eight hours. It was amazing. I also hosted a monthly San Diego meetup, and this one was a free event actually, but it did generate leads, it built relationships, and it created brand awareness for myself in the city, which was really great. So that, of course, is worth thousands over time. I’ve had many of those people.

Join me in my courses because we’ve talked about them during those meetups, and those were hosted in the outdoor area of a WeWork, and I just worked with them to bring people in. They liked bringing people in because they wanted potentially people to come see the space and become clients. It was great.

So this testing new content or formats, that’s what it’s great for building an initial community, a small group that can scale up later. You can do high ticket service providers that way, maybe you can charge a little bit more and these people can get immediate results from the work that they do. This is great for local market penetration.

That being said, I also hosted one, I remember hosting a 10 person event, and this was a higher ticket item, and this was a $5,000 two day. Workshop to start your podcast and this was hosted at a local golf club. ’cause I was a member of a golf club not too far from here. So I had access, in fact, very, very cheap.

It only cost like $500 for a weekend to use the meeting space in the clubhouse. And I generated a lot of revenue, but we helped. A hundred percent of the 10 people start their podcast. So it was really cool to see that much of a success. And then that was a workshop that we did prior to COVID and it never came back, but it was really great to have people in person.

We had a really nice dinner. It was all in one spot. People stayed at a hotel nearby and then came back the next day and then went home with a podcast ready to record. It was awesome. And of course those intimate moments, those relationships that were built have continued on. Andrea Davis, who is one of our star students who started with us at Smart From Scratch, which was our beginner course, she came into a podcasting course.

She then came on to a How to design your Online Course Course. And she’s since now gone on to be a very well renowned public speaker in the space of digital devices for your children and Screen time, better Screen time is her. Website if you wanna check that out. And she had gone to those workshops and is a very, very amazing person who spent a lot of money with us, but also has gotten a lot of return for that investment.

So thank you, Andrea. Appreciate you for all that you do. Now, let’s talk about medium-sized events. Let’s say anywhere between 35 to 200 people, right? This is the kind of the scalable sweet spot for most creators because you can start out a little bit smaller and more controlled and then test things out and then scale it up, but kind of keep the same programming and keep the same semi intimate opportunities for your audience.

So this is in hotel conference rooms, right? We work event spaces, community center workshops. Country clubs, like I said earlier, and corporate training sessions in offices. If you have that opportunity, you can scale the intimacy here, which is really cool. It’s still personable, right? But it reaches more people.

You’re gonna need some sort of. Itinerary though, right? Like a agenda for something probably longer than, you know, a couple hours. It’s gonna be a half day, if not a full day’s worth of work with that many people involved. And you’re gonna want some sort of agenda that people can understand what to follow when and also what they’re gonna get out of it.

Of course, people are paying for an outcome in these situations, usually more than just the. Networking that can happen. Although the networking part of this is a huge pro, for sure, you’re gonna need some level of, likely a stage, or at least some proper AV audio visual to get a microphone in there because you can’t necessarily, if you get a bigger room with like a hundred people, you know, tables and things like that, you’re gonna need some space.

So, you know, the revenue potential here is actually much bigger, right? Anywhere between 10 and $50,000 in revenue depends on the costs, and of course, the price of the ticket and who’s it’s for. It’s complex. Yes, but it’s not overwhelming. We’re not quite there at overwhelming yet when it comes to these things.

Right? Just one or two days. It’s great for filming and documentation. Having that audience there and you speaking in front of it and your other speakers speaking in front of it, and there’s good sponsor opportunities here. This is where sponsors can come in because there’s a much larger number of people that would be worth their time.

Now, let’s talk about the cons. A little bit higher of an investment. Anywhere between 2000 and $15,000, depending on the location, the atmosphere that you’re creating, the team that you’re spending money on to help with the logistics and check-in and ticketing, all those kinds of things. There’s more complex logistics like AV catering.

Potentially if you are hosting it in a hotel, you might need to spend money on food and beverage. There might be a minimum, so look out for that. And it might be harder to find perfect mid-size spaces. There is a pressure at this level to break even, right? If you don’t have good attendance, then it’s gonna be not as profitable, if not profitable at all.

So you’ll have to wanna make sure you sell these tickets, and if you need to pre-sell it, I would still research venue and all that stuff, do all the calculations. But you could pre-sell it and say, if you get to a certain amount, maybe it’s. When you break even, then it actually is gonna go through or a little before that if you kind of have a sense that it will, it might be something you wanna run some sort of quick q and a or feeler out for your audience, Hey, who would wanna get together and talk about these things in person?

Again, the hard part about this is it’s in person, so. Just overall and in general, it’s easier to hit the local crowds, the people that are within driving distance away. Sure. But once people have to start to fly in and then stay at a hotel, I mean, it just adds that much more headache, logistics, and friction for people to sign up and it costs more for them.

Right. So keep that in mind too. So for team, again, you’re gonna need some help, maybe two to four people, but pricing will depend again on what it is that you’re teaching. But I’ve seen events like this go from a hundred dollars per ticket to 500, sometimes even a thousand, depending again on what the value that is provided.

And. You’re gonna typically need about 60 to 70% of capacity to cover costs. Profit margins are, you know, anywhere between 20 and again, 50% if well executed. And these are best for established creators with engaged audiences. So if you are starting from scratch and you don’t have a following whatsoever, that’s gonna be a little bit more difficult to fill.

Yes, you can utilize. Some group of speakers and partners for the event who maybe will be the ones responsible for filling in those seats, but maybe you attach some sort of affiliate program to it to encourage them or some sort of headhunter reward for anybody who who comes and puts butts in seats, that kind of thing.

But it gets, again, a lot more complicated. This is a good time to remind you about the perfect question to ask whenever you’re building anything, and that is, if this were easy, what would it look like? Again, if this were easy, what would it look like? Keep that in mind. Okay, so now let’s talk about the larger events, like I’m talking 500 to a thousand people.

So I hosted a 500 person event in 2019. This was at a hotel. In San Diego, it was a Hyatt in the La Jolla area, and it was very expensive to rent out a hotel ballroom. We had it for two and a half days. We had to sell a certain amount of hotel blocks. It was just, I mean, we did not make money. We lost probably around $70,000.

That’s how much we were under. Now, that is the sort of immediate negative profit that we experienced. However. That’s not the long-term play or it wasn’t the long-term play. The long-term play was to have more events happen and start to nail down the pricing and the sponsorships. Sponsors are more likely to continue to come and come bigger.

The more proven the event is, they often will try to make different kinds of deals if they are interested in coming on that first year. Ones that don’t require them to spend money, but rather kind of provide some other value adds for you. In exchange for getting into the space. But yeah, we weren’t profitable at all, but of course we had people join our courses and we had other things in their affiliate revenue for some of our partners who spoke on stage.

So we were able to recoup some of those costs. But the idea was to continue that event year over year. And then COVID hit in 2020. We actually delayed it one year, then we delayed it another year. And then I just said, you know what? This isn’t gonna work. And thankfully the hotel gave us our deposit back because it was in the contract that if it was like an act of God that prevented the event from happening, that we would’ve gotten a run back and kind of, it was the only way it was gonna happen.

So. That kind of worked out. Now, once you start to get into the thousands of people, you’re gonna have to start looking at convention centers and things like that. However, there is a hybrid, if you’ve ever heard of the Gaylord, there is a company called the Gaylord that has multiple places around the United States.

I don’t know if they’re outside of the us, but they have these Hotel plus Convention Center combos, and we’re actually looking at hosting one of our card parties there next year in Dallas. In 2026 to kind of test that out. And I imagine that it’s gonna be really awesome because everything is all in one spot.

All the restaurants, the hotels, the convention center, everything is just included there and people don’t need to leave, which is kind of cool. So we’ll see what happens. Having a trade show inside of a larger event can work as well. This isn’t just like the expo floor with sponsors, it’s just like. Much, much bigger, right?

This is what Card Party is. There’s a trade show and there are hundreds of tables that are buying, selling, trading cards, and a lot of buyers come in and they spend most of the day going in there and looking for cards and completing their sets and adding to their collection. And then we add in at Card Party the sort of entertainment piece on top of that, not just during that part where there is a stage on the expo floor and the trade floor where their favorite creators are there and they get to meet them, all that kind of stuff.

Meet and greets, et cetera. But we have like a night show similar to like a keynote except. We’re playing games. It’s like a game show price is right. Family feud deal or no deal. But instead of grocery items we’re using. Pokemon cards and it’s super fun. The audience gets involved. We do a lot of things that are very camp like.

Camp is like a big inspiration for Card Party, right? You come in and you get put into essentially a team. It’s sort of like Harry Potter, right? You get put into either Gryffindor or Slytherin or all the, all the others, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and you earn points for your team and the winning team by the end of the event.

The end of Card Party gets a trophy card, and that’s a sought after card because it’s designed by a community member. It’s usually shiny, all this kind of stuff. Anyway, we’ve added a lot of fun things in there. The pros of a large like a massively large event is that you can transform a lot more lives, right?

I mean, hopefully you’re creating these events to create memories and experiences and have people kind of enjoy themselves, and you can do that with a lot more people. Of course, if there is more room and you are selling more tickets, it definitely will position you as an industry sort of leader. Or at least a major player in the space.

When I created Card Party, it really put me on the map as like, oh, like he’s serious about this community he’s building. He’s created an event that all the top creators are coming to, and all the vendors and sponsors that we know are going, he must be a big deal. Right? So a lot of people. Do know me, not just for Deep Pocket Monster, but for Card Party, which is kind of cool.

Revenue is much, much potentially higher, but it’s not gonna happen right away with these larger events in most cases. From the research that I did, and I did a lot of research because our first year in 2023 was not profitable. I mean, we lost over six figures. I’m just gonna be straight with you. But most of that was a result of the hotel block not being sold because we didn’t really promote it as much as we thought we needed to.

A lot of people kind of drove in and drove out each day, which is what most people do at these other trade show and expo events for cards, but they didn’t know about the entertainment piece and staying in the hotel room, trading in the at night, hanging out at the bar, all these other things. For the sort of adult investor and collectors that come to card parties.

So we were much, much better with that. The second year we almost broke even, and then third year finally at Tampa we turned, you know, a profit, which was great. And so hopefully we can continue to invest into the event and making it better and better for everybody who comes. And. Who knows where it’s gonna go, but honestly, it’s the most fun thing ever.

Having that many people come in and enjoy each other’s company and enjoy the show. It just kind of is getting easier every year. Even though we’ve gotten two and a half times, three times bigger than the first year, it’s getting easier because we’ve done it multiple times. We have systems and standard operating procedures in place.

We’re familiar with what works and what doesn’t, and every single time we get up and do it, we remove the things that didn’t work and we just kind of lean into the things that did, which is pretty cool. Now, I will say the larger events take like a year long to plan. They take several more team members.

They are very overwhelming. I was lucky enough to partner for Card Party at least with an event company called Podcast Movement. You might have heard of Podcast Movement. Dan Franks, one of the owners of podcast movement. He asked me when COVID sort of was leaving and there were more opportunities to get up and stay, you know, get outside and get up on stage again.

And then we partnered, we created a separate company where he owns half and I own half, and we. This is Card Party, Card Party, LLC, and he takes care of the operations, the creating of the events. He’s created, I don’t know, over a hundred events over the years I’ve spoken and have keyed many. Podcast movements and he has a lot of other events that happen in all kinds of different industries, and he’s come in to help me with creating the shell of the event.

And I bring in the talent, I bring in the cards, I bring in the, the people and the sponsors and the entertainment, and it’s just a perfect. Kind of partnership, which is pretty cool. So that’s kind of my event team. For the event that happened in 2019 for entrepreneurs, some of the expense was hiring an event team, and that was nice.

It was almost like a wedding planner, right? The person who knows what’s going on and when and who goes where, and why. That person is, is worth their weighting gold. But they do cost a lot of gold, if that makes sense. And if you don’t have a lot of attendees, right, if you plan for this thing and you don’t have a lot of people show up, it is just not gonna be good.

It, that has a big risk. There are big losses, right? Because you’re not having, not just tickets sold. Ticket sales can help you with a lot of the cost, obviously, and maybe turn a profit. But it’s the sponsorships that over the years, once people start to come on for longer term and start to put more dollars into it, you start to get more people.

That’s where a lot of the additional revenue can come in is, is through sponsorships. But if you don’t have a lot of people and not a lot of sponsors are gonna come in the next year, it’s going to not be a great experience. ’cause it’s gonna seem like. The space is bigger if you plan for more and not as many people are coming.

There are some strategies, yes, to sort of close rooms and pack people in tighter and those kinds of things that I know some others have done, and that could be great because whatever the size is, you want people to feel like it’s a crowd. But I’ve also been to events where it just seemed like there wasn’t a lot of people there.

Things were too spread out or just there wasn’t a lot of community interactions. Right. One thing I’ll let you know about though. I remember in that 2019 entrepreneurial event in San Diego that I hosted for about 500 people, we ran a survey after the event and the survey basically asked, what were your favorite parts of the event?

Who were your favorite speakers? All those kinds of things. The number one thing people said they loved more than anything were the conversations in the hallways between all the stuff we planned, meeting other people just like them, not the speakers, not me on stage. It was the stuff in between. So. I was grateful because I knew that that was likely gonna happen.

’cause those are my favorite parts too, when I go to events was just meeting people after each talk. At this event, we scheduled an hour and a half break till the next one so people could go in the hallways. I loved the schedule of it, right? We had a one and a half hour session in the morning, one and a half hour session break, another hour presentation, and then lunch.

And then another hour presentation, and then another like two hour break for people to decompress, to absorb and digest everything that was just shared, not just go from one talk to the next, to the next, to the next. It was just one track. By the way, there are other events that I’ve been to that have what’s called multiple tracks.

That means. Maybe there’s a keynote where everybody who is in in attendance is there watching that keynote, but then after that there’s breakout sessions. There might be three concurrent sessions that people have to choose from. That’s how social media marketing world is. That’s how crafting commerce is sometimes, but to a smaller scale.

There’s only two versus other events I’ve had, oh gosh, what was. I think it was Traffic and Conversion Summit, which no longer exists in social media marketing world pre COVID when it was nearing 10,000 people. The year that I did the keynote, I think it was 2018, I remember there were like 10 concurrent sessions happening throughout the day for two days.

So a load of speakers, but a load of things to choose from remove is almost overwhelming. Speaking of overwhelming, these larger events can definitely be overwhelming to manage. So keep that in mind. And it might take two or three years for you to actually turn a profit, but it’s the long game, right? The long game.

We’ll see where Card Party goes. I’ve already had people tell me that what we’ve built with Card Party, with the ip, with how it’s run, it’s so different than anything else. A couple people who are experienced in the event space had said that this is a multi-million dollar business. We have not seen a multi-millions of dollars in profit.

But you know, as far as like what it could be worth and potentially if this thing were to be sold one day, maybe, I don’t know, it could go for a lot, but we’re building something for the community and it’s. Basically built in the way that I would want an event to be built that I’d wanna go to. Right. I, that’s what I did.

I remember we had Noah Kagan on here once a long time ago, and he said that he ran some of his own events and he said, I just made the event that I’d wanna go to, and he charged for that. He doesn’t do those anymore, but I remember that always stuck with me. He just made the event that he wanted to go to.

Card Party. I just made the event that I’d wanna bring my family to with Flin Con in 2019, the entrepreneurial event, I just made an event that I, as an entrepreneur would want to go to. So this larger event in the multi, multi hundreds, if not thousands. This is really, really good for established brands with engaged audiences, industry thought leaders.

Long-term brand building strategy is at play here, right? This is a multi-year thing. You don’t just wanna do this once, hopefully you don’t plan to just do it once, and there are multiple revenue streams. Within this, right there is the, of course ticket sales. There’s the sponsorships, there’s affiliate sales for anybody who might be on stage if you were to do it that way, you don’t have to, and I wouldn’t recommend having people sell their thing on stage, but it could be, you could do it that way.

I was at Chalene Johnson’s Marketing Impact Academy, MIA, which is where I spoke and pitched Power Up podcasting for the first time. That was my beta launch actually, and that changed my life, and it changed the lives of many of those students as well. She taught me how to do it right, which was really cool.

So those are some of the sort of kinds of events and the pros and cons for each. And I wanted to just plant that seed for you that an event is not that far out of reach. You could have a very small event and have it become something that maybe happens a little bit more often and start to scale up, and then you turn it into something a little bit bigger and then bigger and then bigger.

Right. I think it’s really, really important that whatever it is, you get clear about what the outcomes will be. This was what made Flynn Con work, the networking opportunities, the ability to see certain speakers on stage and connect with one another As entrepreneurs, this is what made those coffee shop meetups work that I still continue to do every once in a while where we have a certain number of people just kind of meet up.

And this used to happen virtually during COVID, but you know, we’ve been doing it in person now and it’s been great and we just talk shop and very informal. I don’t charge for that and actually won’t be doing one for the rest of the year because of how busy I am. But hope to start that up again in 2026.

And so before we finish up here, I want to give you some thoughts around your first event. Start small. Think big approach, right? So how to launch your journey into events without massive risk. So this first month or two, I want you to see how you might be able to do a little coffee shop meeting, right?

Validate interest and test your event hosting skills. See if you can get people to even show up for two hours on a particular day. That’s it. Two to three hours casual setting. Your investment’s gonna be under a hundred dollars. And just focus on connection and conversation, not presenting at this sort of coffee shop thing, right?

So that’s gonna be in month one or two, three months from now. Try to add some structure and value to this, right? Move it from the coffee shop. You can invite some of the same people, even have some of them. Show up and get up in front of the audience and host a workshop, maybe even with a couple partners there, kind of go in on it together.

So the investment for something like that might be five to $1,500. And this is where you start focusing on teaching a skill, right? Skill building with some networking, right? You have moments where people can kind of workshop with each other, similar to like a breakout room in a zoom room, but in person.

That’s the whole point of a zoom room is to do just like what you might do in real life, not the other way around. And then kind of month six. Maybe a year from now, think about your signature event. Something repeatable, something that you could scale up if you wanted to. Something for 50 to a hundred people, right?

One full day. Maybe it’s multis sessions, maybe it’s multi-day, but I think one full day, 50 to a hundred people with an investment of about 3000 to maybe 10,000. Depending on the location, depending on how much you charge and, and the value, include some sort of dinner or food experience. Remember, for this kind of event, schedule out the day, have multiple experiences during the day.

And really get into the calculations of the revenue and kind of the outline of, of how that’s going to work for you. Because the last thing you wanna do is just plan an event and then realize that it was not gonna be something that could ever be profitable in the first place based on the math. So think about that.

I challenge you, in fact to think about your very first event, if it’s a smaller one or a big one, whatever it might be. Think about that and try to actually lay it out. And start to ask people within 30 days from now, outline your agenda, whatever. This is how you’re gonna reach out. And I think there might be a easy way to do this, right?

If this were easy, what would it look like? Don’t overcomplicate it. I remember when I started running the one Day Business Breakthrough Events with Chris Ducker, we immediately started to overcomplicate this thing. And then we just said, okay, well what if this were easy? Well, let’s just rent out a coworking space and let’s just ask people on our list to sign up and we will work for eight hours and we’ll have a dinner after.

We’ll have coffee there and pastries in the morning. When they get there, we’ll have lunch like Chipotle delivered. Yes, we had Chipotle and people got the put in their order ahead of time. This was when Chipotle was good though. I don’t know if Chipotle is something I’d want in the afternoon in an enclosed room.

For everybody, if you follow my drift. Anyway, I hope this is inspiring for you. There are opportunities for you to bring your people together in person, and again, even if you do it small, it could be huge for your business. You can learn a lot from the people who are there. Don’t be afraid to create opportunities for people to meet in person, because a lot of times you might worry that, especially with, with these smaller ones, it’s like, oh, they’re there for me, and they’re not.

They’re not there for you. They’re there for each other and you. Community. I remember in 2013, I hosted a small kind of gathering at FinCon In 2013 in St. Louis, I rented out a pizza, joint pizza and beer. So I bought pizzas for everybody and people showed up who were at this event. By the way, if you ever go to a conference, hosting one of these things at an event where people are already at is a really, really smart thing to do.

So I, I did that. Bought pizza, tried to kind of go around and meet everybody, you know, and we were walking back to the hotel after I remember, because I remember seeing the arc when this happened in St. Louis. There was a woman there who I hadn’t met all night. I didn’t even see her and I felt bad. So I went up to her and I was like, Hey, I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to speak to you.

And she goes, pat, don’t be offended by this, but I didn’t come here to see you. And at first I was a little taken aback by that, but then she started to explain why, and she said, you know what I, I hear your voice every day on your podcast, pat, but I never, ever get a chance to find other people like me, entrepreneurs who are just in the middle of it and can’t speak to my family about this stuff.

’cause they have no idea what I’m doing. They all think I’m crazy, but. Here are my crazy people and we’re all in this together. And I was like, oh, you aren’t in this here for me. You are here because you found your people and you listener. You have people too. People who feel lonely, who feel isolated. You probably feel the same way too, and, and it is of huge benefit to try to find a way to connect these people together.

You will not regret it. Let’s go out there, make it happen. Focus on connection over perfection, and every event that you do will teach you something for the next one. So go out there, make it happen. Peace out everybody. Thanks and best of luck to you.

And speaking of Deep Pocket Monster, which I’ve talked a lot about lately, I haven’t done a full update in a very long time of the business and the brand. Everything from Card Party all the way to YouTube and merch and everything that’s happening, just kind of giving you a behind the scenes on the brand and kind of where it stands. Well, that’s coming next for you, so don’t miss out. It’s gonna be a lot of fun. And I look forward to serving you in that episode, so make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss out because it does speak to a lot of the stuff we talked about today, especially bringing community together, super fans, and it is doing very, very well.

And I’ll share how in the next episode. Peace out everybody. Thank you.