Liam Martin 0:00
I don't know how everything's going to work out for hybrid. Like I think honestly, if I'm going to be completely honest with you, this is a test here to be able to say, well, how much revenue do we generate from hybrid? Is this something that we want to continue to do? We know that in person does work, because we have, we've run successful events in the past, and the sponsors are really excited about coming back to a physical event. So we do know that that works. And we just have to figure out whether or not the hybrid component of it works. And I understand probably people hearing me right now saying, well, your conferences about remote work, it's called running remote, you should totally be doing a hybrid event. But listen, it's it's the reality is that you have to number one, go where the money goes. And more importantly, actually, even inside of remote teams we have in person events that we go to. And we really make sure that everyone shows up in that physical space because you have a lot more interaction effects. You know that the conversation is deeper for that particular moment, and then everyone can kind of break and go back.
Sarah Fejfar 1:08
Inquiring minds want to know, how are entrepreneurs like us daring bravely to build a stage ditch the sweat pants, and step up to the mic? How do we create our own transformative events? So we can get our message out into the world in a bigger way. It's not only profitable, but it's actually something we can be proud. That's the question. And the answers are inside this podcast. My name is Sarah Fejfar. Welcome to Green Room Central.
Sarah Fejfar 1:43
Hey, it's Sarah, I have an invitation for you. Right now, you can join entrepreneurs from across the globe who share a passion for hosting their own events, become part of the community that inspires and cheers you on over at greenroom central.com.
Sarah Fejfar 1:59
Today, I brought in the greenroom central studios Liam Martin. Liam is a serial entrepreneur who runs Time Doctor and staff.com, one of the most popular time tracking and productivity software platforms in use by top brands today. He is also a co organizer of the world's largest remote work conference running remote. A conference in its fifth year focused on providing aspiring remote business owners real world best practices from industry leading remote first and hybrid companies come to greenroom. Central studios say hello to linchpin, nation,
Liam Martin 2:38
hi linchpin nation, how are you? I doing fantastic myself,
Sarah Fejfar 2:42
I just want to dive right in with I think kind of a little bit of a heavy hitting question for you. This is a standalone conference business that you're running here. And that in and of itself isn't the most profitable business model. And, and I happen to know that you're a very smart and savvy businessman. And so what I want to know is what gave you the idea to host a conference? And then kind of the second part of that question is, what is your monetization mindset and strategy?
Liam Martin 3:13
Boy, that is a hard hitting question right off the top. So yeah, let me let me kind of roll back just to kind of how running remote started in the philosophy that we had for it. So about five years ago, we were at our company team retreat. So I run a couple of companies.
Liam Martin 3:31
But inside of all of those companies, we have a remote first mindset, we have team members across 43 different countries all over the world. And what remote first companies did, at least before the pandemic is we would have these team retreats where everyone would come to one particular place and have like a little mini conference about the company. So at this conference, we were really trying to figure out, how do we really take our company seriously and vice?
Liam Martin 3:57
Seriously, I mean, billion dollar valuations, you know, 1000 plus employees, how do you build a remote first company to that level?
Liam Martin 4:05
So we started googling that, and we found almost no information about that particular subject, there was a lot of information on how to hire a virtual assistant, or how to outsource to the Philippines or how to be a digital nomad. But there wasn't any actionable information on how to build and scale billion dollar plus remote first companies. So I had a ready fire aim philosophy, which was I literally just booked a venue. And I don't know if you know, Pareto Principle, which is work expands into the time that you have for it. So we just said, Okay, here's the venue. Here's a date, I spoke to a couple friends of mine. And I said, Listen, would you guys like to come and speak? I'd really like to hear your insights. And I thought to myself, If we lose money at this conference, at least then I'll have learned something and maybe I can take the business from we were at about 100 people there to you know, 500 people to with 1000 people, thankfully, we didn't lose money, we actually made a very small amount of money the first year, we made a slightly larger amount of money the very next year, we're very open inside of the running remote conference. So I actually published the p&l, every single year of everything, all of our costs, everything that we paid, how much money we made, where it came from.
Liam Martin 5:22
And you can look that up on our YouTube channel, youtube.com/running remote. But then the third year, we were actually in really fantastic spot, we had built a community of people that were interested in our conference, we had, we had really kind of locked into a fantastic committee, we had about 750 people for the second one. And then the third one was going to actually be in Austin, Texas and the US market, things were looking great.
Liam Martin 5:52
And the conference was supposed to run in April of 2020.
Liam Martin 5:57
And everyone knows what happened in March of 2020.
Liam Martin 6:01
And then it's quite possibly the very worst thing that you can do for a physical event. Because as you probably know, all of your accounts receivable have to come in, right. So I have to pay the caterer, I have to pay the venue, I have to put all these down payments down. And in March, everyone was melted. Everyone was melted. So we lost about 250 grand, we did get some of that back. But that was a major hit for us. Thankfully, the community, both the sponsors and the attendees. I think we lost about 10% of our attendees and our sponsors, in terms of people asking for a refund, and we said anyone that would like a refund, we'll get it. Absolutely, I'm going to refund everyone personally, even if it has to come out of my own pocket. But thankfully, no one really wanted their money back. They said don't worry about it. Let's just push it towards the next one.
Liam Martin 6:56
And then we immediately pivoted to virtual. And I full disclosure, I'm an investor in hoppin, but the I went on to work with hoppin when they were completely lay there a very, very small company. And Poppins I think of $8 billion valuation company at that point, that point or now, but at that point, the running remote conference was the largest conference that had run on hoppin. So everything was breaking, we had about six or 7000 people for that event. And it kind of blew up from there. And we ran four or five virtual events. But now we're going back to in person for a multitude of reasons that we can probably get into.
Sarah Fejfar 7:39
I wish more people had the mindset that you did at the beginning, where you're like, let's just book a venue and go, there's so many people who sit on the sidelines and just wonder and worry and like forget the the part that has made them so successful so far in business, which was take action.
Liam Martin 7:59
Yeah, my business partner, who is a fantastic man, but he knows exactly how to push my buttons, Rob, he, when I pitched the idea of doing a conference, he's like, Dude, you're not going to sell 20 tickets to this thing. And that was exactly what I needed to say, I don't know if I can swear on this podcast. But basically, if you I am going to go and knock this out of the park. And got I think we got 300 people for the first event. That was fun for me. And I think that you just have to go out, try it. I mean, I would probably say to anyone that isn't too sure about this, the big thing that you need to do is get yourself 123 A level speakers in your niche. That's it. So if you can acquire 123 A level speakers in your niche and I can tell you, for us, it was Wade from Zapier, it was Joel Gascoigne from buffer. And it was Amir from Todoist. So and then also, we had the co founder of GitLab as well, that ended up coming on but he ended up coming on afterwards, when he saw the caliber of speakers that we're going to be presenting as well. So you get those 123 A level speakers. And then a lot of the other speakers will come in and say Oh, well, if Liam's gonna be there. Yeah, it's legit. I'll come you know, and I'll speak at this conference. And that's the core piece that you need to do and then you need to get a venue and that's funded and make sure that the food doesn't poison anybody. And you make
Sarah Fejfar 9:34
sure the food doesn't suck a number one yes, you will be amazed how many people complain about the flipping food and that just tortures their experience are all but I want to go back to that thing you said about a level speakers. Do you leverage your speakers to help you fill your event?
Liam Martin 9:52
Oh, absolutely. I mean, we reach out to them and say hey, would you mind tweeting it out? Would you mind putting it up on social Would you mind doing An email blast for us. And there are a lot of people that will say, yeah, no problem. It really depends on the situation, I think we're, we're at a point where, at least for me, we are really focused on operators, as opposed to professional speakers. So inside of the running remote community, again, it's for people that want to build and scale their remote teams. So we don't necessarily want the like Simon Sinek type of person to come to the conference, even though I would be very happy to have him if he would be willing to come. However, he probably costs 50,000 to $100,000, to be able to have him attend. But our community really wants the co founder of GitLab, or the founder of WordPress, or the founder of Zapier, those are the people that they really want to learn from. And those people who are billionaires, you can't really buy them with money, unfortunately, you'd say, well, listen, I can make a million dollars sitting in my office over the weekend. Why would I, you know, why would I go for $10,000 As an example, or $5,000? So we really had to figure out a new strategy, which was, listen, do you want to be co associated with a brand that's really focusing on this particular, you know, market segment? Or more specifically, you need to hire another 800 People next year? Right? Yeah, well, you know, coming to the top conference on remote work, since you are working remotely, and you need to hire these 800 people, it would probably be pretty valuable for you, and getting five or six, those hires could definitely make you more than a million dollars in a day, for sure.
Sarah Fejfar 11:42
I love that strategy. Back to the conference, you saw success right out of the gate and some business owners, and I happen to think they're wrong, assume that they're going to lose money the first few years, I want to know, what do you think, has been different for the running remote conference, it wasn't just your mindset of wanting to prove your business partner wrong.
Liam Martin 12:08
Maybe Maybe there was a little bit of that haterade inside of me that was just like, Oh, I'm gonna do it. From what I understand. Your first year, you lose money at a conference, the second year you break even in the third year, you make a profit. And that didn't necessarily happen for us, I think we we, we made a very small amount of money our first year, we made a smaller, we made more money the next year, but not all that much. And then the third year, obviously COVID kind of blew some tires out of that entire system.
Liam Martin 12:39
But this year, we're probably going to do okay, I think we're probably going to get back to a break even point to be completely honest with you. But there are some other advantages outside of obviously, just kind of running the event, I think there is the thought leadership component, the if we're, at least for us, we run other products that connect to remote work. So if we are a part of the remote technology stack as an example, you would then say, well, you know, running the biggest conference on that subject is probably valuable.
Liam Martin 13:15
But the ROI for that is not direct. And it really has to be something that you assess outside of the dollars and cents, particularly because attribution right now is just so difficult. But one of the simplest things that we do is we figure out how many of our alumni guests ended up purchasing one of our other products. And I think we ran that calculation for our second event. And we ended up making, I think it was an extra million dollars of customers off of the main event. So maybe the main event we made like $50,000 in profit, but we made a million dollars in lifetime value off of those customers that purchase some of our other products. But they that was a way to be able to get them in the door.
Liam Martin 14:00
And it's much simpler to be able to invite someone to the running remote conference, then a conference that's more directly connected to your brand that is kind of like your software company brand as an example. I personally would not suggest that people do that. I know that everyone is really scared about building out a separate brand, but it allows you to go in different directions that you wouldn't have otherwise done. We've had our competitors speak at our conference, because if we really do believe that our mission being we want to empower the world to transition towards remote work. If that is true, then a lot of our direct competitors are engaged in that mission as well. And you should have them speaking at the conference. But at the end of the day, if you control the conversation, you're going to get value those activities,
Sarah Fejfar 14:46
love your mindset. I want to talk a little bit more about the pandemic because that was such a gigantic challenge that you kind of came up against in your third year you were an in person event and so just tell us a little bit about more about how you navigated that and how that still shaping what you're doing today,
Liam Martin 15:05
even today. So our event is in Montreal, Canada, there's such a divisive political environment right now, I'll tell you 50% of the emails that I get are weather better be path COVID passports and masks? And then the other 50% of the emails that I get? Are, There better not be any masks or COVID passports? So I'm in a really difficult situation, which is, which direction do you go, and that's definitely going to impact your overall numbers for in person, I would probably project based off of the other. You know, and maybe you'd give me better insight on this off of the other conference organizers that I've spoken to about a 40% reduction, all things being considered all things being equal for in person as it stands now.
Liam Martin 15:56
But I think you also have to figure out well, if not now, then when, and we have to be able to start to set everything back up. The other part that's been incredibly successful, is sponsors are just throwing money at the screen, they really, the sales process has been incredibly easy for us, we should have actually set our prices significantly higher than we did, because they're just chomping at the bit to be able to get some face to face time with attendees and starting that process of building new deal flow into into their organizations. So to me, that's definitely one of those things that you have to kind of measure both of those against each other and say, Well, let's try to sponsorships are basically easy, I think are currently easy for 2022. Attendees are more difficult. What can you do to be able to make sure that attendees are happy. And and then also to to a degree, actually, speakers have been a little bit more difficult. If I'm going to be completely honest with you, a lot of them are saying oh, well, you know, I can only come in for like an hour and a half. I'll fly in for an hour and a half.
Liam Martin 17:12
And then I'll leave because you know, the company is still a little iffy with regards to COVID mandates, that type of stuff. So those are the new realities that you've got to deal with. Also, I would say honorable mention is you should start chopping your conference around, even if you've got 500 attendees, to different cities, because they are all trying to go after those tourist dollars. And I don't think I can say anything, because we have a nondisclosure agreement that we signed with the City of Montreal, but they gave us a very good costing on each attendee. So they're literally going to pay us to get an attendee to walk into our conference, and significantly higher than what they would have offered before because, you know, the hotels and in the tourist industry are hurting pretty badly. They
Sarah Fejfar 18:09
are, they are. That's so interesting how you just simplified things, sponsors are easy. Attendees are hard figures are hard cities are easy.
Liam Martin 18:20
And that'll probably change in a year. Like that, it'll flip the other direction, I think attendees will be very easy, because everyone will just be like, Oh, COVID over, right, knock on wood. So then, but then at that point, the sponsors will have spent they're big, huge piles of cash they've been sitting on for the past two and a half years. And they'll say, Okay, we've tried everything. But what are we going to do with you know, where's our row as coming from? Where's our return on adspend? So I think it's actually going to flip the opposite direction for 2023.
Sarah Fejfar 18:52
Take advantage of it. While it's here. I want to get into a little bit of like the brass tacks on the guest side. Yes, it is hard to get an in person guests but they are coming to conferences and and your conference might very well be the first in person like large scale event that someone is going to since the pandemic started, just shared what what your emails are sounding like very split down the middle of how people are kind of thinking about the experience they're entering into? What special considerations are you and your event team making to ensure that guests feel comfortable and safe at a large conference like this, as we're opening back up,
Liam Martin 19:34
at least in the current jurisdiction that I'm in, which is Montreal, Canada. There, as of tomorrow, they are removing testing for flights coming into the country, which is actually a huge advantage for conference goers, because that's an extra $200 cost that you don't necessarily have to pay, which is great. But then that also creates a bit of a problem which is that was creating a barrier to say everyone who's Lying in is COVID tested. So that's that's one of those issues that you have to take into consideration.
Liam Martin 20:05
Masking is voluntary. However, we do encourage it. And then we make sure that we have social distancing, we have all of our disinfection stations set up, and everything that the government has basically told us to do. But more importantly, actually, the government is providing this free of charge, which is really great. For us. Again, that means just working with a country in a city that's synced up and is really excited about working with you. We also have half of our state half, we have two stages, and we have a sponsorship area. And two of those areas are open air.
Liam Martin 20:43
So that's another big advantage as well, particularly in the spring in the summer, when you can actually have events that have proper ventilation. But outside of that, I mean, it's like there's risk going to an event like this. Undoubtedly, we do require that everyone is vaccinated. So it's just one of those things that that's aligned, and we have lost attendees due to that. But for us, it number one lowers our liability insurance that we have with, with the venue which has gone up pretty significantly.
Liam Martin 21:20
It text from from one year to the next because it was definitely one of those things that people were like, listen, there could be someone that Sue's you because they got COVID at your event and and ends up you know, and maybe they got seriously ill. So we also have a protocol that we put in place, which is everyone, by buying a ticket states that they do have travel insurance, which is something that we had not done previously. But that's a requirement from our attorneys to be able to make sure that we're as safe as we can be, because you need to be able to really control your, you know, the legal liability side of the table. And we had never really thought about this as deeply as we are currently thinking now about this because you could have that point 1% chance of let's say someone who's in their 80s that's attending the conference, and they become seriously ill due to your conference.
Sarah Fejfar 22:23
Hey, I don't want you to miss out. Did you know that this conversation always continues inside the linchpin nation community. It's a free modern discussion forum exclusively for greenroom central listeners that will have a profound impact on the way you look at events in your business. Get answers to your biggest questions here behind the scenes nuggets from event leaders and get access to helpful templates, guides and checklists. As you start and scale events in your business. Be part of the daily discussion with entrepreneurs just like you, you can join for free over at greenroom central.com. I'll see you inside.
Sarah Fejfar 23:02
Yeah, it's made us think so much like you said so much differently and more deeply about the ramifications. And glad to hear that it sounds like you've got a strong legal team supporting you and guiding you through this. It's not easy. Also sounds like you've put a lot of measures into place for safety purposes. I was talking with a friend who's just at a large scale conference in San Diego recently and speakers were you know, as traditional for a speaker to want to do trying to tell people because they were all spread out throughout the ballroom there's 1000s of people and but they were really spread out come on up closer on stage get closer together. And it just created this awkwardness in the room. That used to be okay, and people would listen and move but now it's leaving be if people want to sit Yeah, 10 chairs away from him, buddy, let him well, you
Liam Martin 23:49
also need to know the local laws as well. So in Quebec as an example, dancing is still illegal here. So you can stand you can walk around, you can interact, but you can't dance. That will change in the next two weeks. Again, this is how kind of detail oriented that we're getting with regards to the rules that are in place. But you can have a municipal bylaw officer, walk into your venue and shut it down instantly. I mean, I've seen that happen. We had a completely separate issue in Bali, when we were running our previous events, which is if you're a speaker, a foreign speaker at a conference in Bali, and you don't have a business license, someone from the government can come in and shut it all down. Now that we're not going to do events in Bali. I can kind of talk about this, but we had to effectively buy off the King of Bali. The king of Abood because we came we came to him with an offering of a couple $1,000. And in exchange, the king of a boot made sure that no one would bother us from the government. And those are things that it's effectively Actually money, to be honest with you. But you know, when you're running a conference in a third world country, you need to be able to think about those types of things and get off of your perception of how the world should work, and really focus on pragmatics.
Sarah Fejfar 25:17
And so there's gonna be people in linchpin nation right now listening, going, Okay, how did Liam build up this support team around him? That is advisors who would help you navigate this kind of stuff? And what would you say?
Liam Martin 25:32
So first off, is, I think that no one should run an event without someone on the ground. So in Bali, we had Igor, who is effectively the CEO of the running remote conference, he runs everything connected to it. And he lives in Bali. So it was very easy for him to be able to teach us the laws of the land very quickly. Next person that I think you really need to get is operations. So I would probably hire a. And if that's you, that's fine. But a, I'm going to run the conference, I'm going to be the CEO of the conference, the very next person that you should be hiring is operations. Because, as I said before, making sure that those speakers are happy, is absolutely critical, sometimes, in my opinion, more critical than making the attendees happy. Because if you have amazing speakers that come back, I can tell you, dozens of times, we've reached out to people to have them speak at the conference. And then they've simply emailed one of the other speakers that were from previous years saying, hey, is this conference legit? You want them to say yes, and it's great, and you should come.
Liam Martin 26:42
And you should, you should never have a it was actually a disaster, because there are a lot of those conferences that ended up being like that. So making sure that those speakers are super happy is critical. Having the operations person in place to be able to do that booking the venue, you know, making sure that the experience is great. I know for us, we have a philosophy, which is everything that we do should be a one of one. So our venue was a one of one the experience that you're having as a one of one we will never run a conference and a Howard Johnson's, you know, conference room as an example that, you know, when you close the door, you can't tell the difference between that conference room and the other 20,000 that are across planet Earth, we focus on something unique, because our attendees come from all over planet Earth.
Liam Martin 27:28
They are remote first, founders. So they have a bit of a they're definitely travelers and they look for these types of unique venues as well. But once you have that operation place person in place, the next thing person that I would hire is sales operations. So getting someone to work on the sponsorships, because as you scale, you're going to have sponsorships become a bigger and bigger part of your p&l. I would probably say right now, like a spa, a conference that's more than 1000 people in my experience is about 80% sponsors, 20% attendees in terms of revenue, and then a smaller event would actually be the reverse. And you can't get big sponsors. without actually having a lot of attendees. It's kind of an interesting chicken and the egg issue, which is we had a very, very large tech company that approached us. And we sent them our rate card.
Liam Martin 28:31
And they said, well, we don't start on anything below $250,000. And we didn't have an option for $250,000 on our rate card. So I turned the $100,000 option into the 250 option. I was like, well, here you go. And they're like, listen, let's just wait until you're you've got a couple more attendees coming. And so you need to build that base of that tribe that will then purchase, whatever you put in front of them, well, maybe not whatever you put in front of them, you really have to be mindful of making sure that this is something that aligns. Obviously, with the brand, I would probably say no to one out of 10 sponsorships right now. Because it's not the right fit for the conference.
Liam Martin 29:16
And we know that it's not the right fit. And if we put this in front of people, then we're going to degrade that attendee feedback loop that you want to be able to build. But once you're past 1000 people, then people will convert sponsors will effectively pay you for brand impression, which is the mother of all sources of sponsorship and advertising for you. Because you don't have to have direct requests. You don't have to say, well, I got 73 leads those 73 leads turned into 28 conversations with sales and those 28 converse, conversations with sales turned into half a million bucks. Because companies like Google, as an example are just like, Listen, everyone uses Google already. We're just going to put up What
Sarah Fejfar 30:00
would you say is your secret to building that base of the tribe? So you can get your numbers up?
Liam Martin 30:05
Start small, very, very small niche. So how small can you get? I mean, I would go to 1000 people, if you could possibly get to it. So like, remote SEO specialists, as an example, could be a sub niche, underneath what I'm currently doing, we could run a conference like that we're not going to but when it was back in 2018, we had the the remote work community, it was very, very small. It's a bit of a cottage industry. Now it's obviously exploded. But even in that, you could get 300 500 1000, maybe 2000, people at full max capacity, I think, pre COVID. Inside of that community, it's expanded at this point. And this obviously, also opens us up to competition. So we are the largest conference in this space right now. But there are other conferences that can come in, and probably either they can produce other conferences to directly compete against us. But even more importantly, for us, it's much larger conferences that are building a remote work arm inside of what they're doing. And they're saying, Well, why would I go to your conference when I can go to South by Southwest, and they have 40 talks
Sarah Fejfar 31:23
about work, start niche,
Liam Martin 31:24
love it very, very tight, as tight as you could possibly get. And, and obviously, to have a community that you're really passionate about, right? Like, if you're not an accountant, and you build a conference for accountants, you're going to hate it. So I started with a community of people where a lot of them were my friends. And I really enjoy like, well, I don't really make money at this conference, or not money to the degree not directly from this conference. But I'm still really passionate about doing it, I invest a lot of time in it, because I enjoy running this event, and no one else was going to do it at the time. So make sure that you really love
Sarah Fejfar 32:08
it. Where does that enjoyment come from? Lamb.
Liam Martin 32:10
I love interacting with at least pre COVID. And we'll see how it's going to happen in the endemic phase of, of where we're at right now, there was this kind of small group of people that were really I feel winning at life. Like when you think about the freedom of entrepreneurship, remote founders of remote first companies have the most freedom out of any other entrepreneurs that I can, that I can see, we travel wherever we want, you know, we work from a laptop, we don't necessarily have to get pulled into a lot of the politics of running a business remote first, businesses are a lot more calm. And they also make money much more efficiently than on premise organizations. And there was a small little community. And I thought we all had this great little secret, and I wanted to learn more about it. So that's why whenever I go to these events, it just really energizes me because I'm able to interact with these people that I still think have this awesome secret that I want to learn more of,
Sarah Fejfar 33:20
I see your eyes light up, when you talk about it. Clearly your your guests of this conference are are definitely pulled in, because they can feel that passion that you have for it. And they they share that and they want to be in community connecting with those those same types of people.
Liam Martin 33:37
But another thing I would add, by the way is and this is something that I think about with regards to Steve Jobs when identifying a market, identify who you do not serve. So who are not my customers is really, really important. So I'll tell you for reading remote, our conferences are not digital nomads are our customer is not someone who wants a job, both of those two groups of people, I mean, you can buy a ticket if you want, it would be pretty stupid for you to do it. Because you're not going to get any value from the event. But we have refunded people I've explained to them, Hey, you know what, I don't think you're really gonna get the value out of this. And that also allows you to really focus on who your customer is, and focus your marketing efforts on them specifically, and not necessarily saying well, I'm for everyone in you know, I'm a tech conference, like South by as an example. Right, which is just this behemoth of a tech conference. And I remember going, Man, I think the last year that I went was 2019. They just started it recently again. And I kind of feel it's it's so big that it's kind of about nothing. It's where everyone goes. That's kind of connected to Tech and then by extension, I don't really get much value out of it because it's 200,000 people. And I really only want to talk to about 1000 of them. So at something like running remote, where you'd have 1000 2000 attendees 500, those people are proud of the 1000 that I really want to talk to are at the conference, and I can talk to them right then and there.
Sarah Fejfar 35:18
I'd hazard a guess that some of linchpin nation is sitting on the sidelines right now kind of wondering, should I do hybrid? And if so, what do I need to think about to make that a reality. And I for one, kind of instantly, think about how you're now serving two masters, you know, you've got your virtual guests, and you've got your in person guess I'd love for you to share, because you're doing it hybrid this year, what kind of team have you pulled together to make this first ever hybrid running remote conference a reality.
Liam Martin 35:47
So biggest costs that have gone up as AV, so the firm that we've hired, has experience in doing virtual and in person very, very difficult to be able to get a producer and a director in the back, you know, like we our main stage is eight cameras. So it's somewhat TED Talk ish. And having someone editing that live, and then making sure that it gets out to the virtual community is important to having a virtual MC as long as as well as an in person MC is important. And just generally, it makes the person running operations, it makes their lives significantly more difficult.
Liam Martin 36:30
I don't know how everything's going to work out for hybrid, like I think honestly, if I'm going to be completely honest with you, this is a test here to be able to say, well, how much revenue do we generate from hybrid? Is this something that we want to continue to do, we know that in person does work, because we have, we've run successful events in the past, and the sponsors are really excited about coming back to a physical event. So we do know that that works. And we just have to figure out whether or not the hybrid component of it works.
Liam Martin 37:02
And I understand probably people hearing me right now saying, well, your conferences about remote work, it's called running remote, you should totally be doing a hybrid event. But listen, it's it's the reality is that you have to number one, go where the money goes. And more importantly, actually, even inside of remote teams, we have in person events that we go to. And we really make sure that everyone shows up in that physical space, because you have a lot more interaction effects, you know that the conversation is deeper for that particular moment, and then everyone can kind of break and go back to what they're doing throughout their, their, their, I guess their work here, fundamentally, we think of this running remote is the same sort of animal. But I wish I could tell you, I will probably know for sure by about June 15, whether or not we should continue on with another virtual event. I think I'm kind of on the bubble,
Sarah Fejfar 38:00
I'll be anxious to hear what your verdict is. So essentially, you you're creating two teams, so you're creating a team that's managing the virtual side of things, and you're creating a team that's managing managing the in person stuff.
Liam Martin 38:12
Yeah, and the biggest thing is the AV team, which is really going to be hybridized, between those two worlds. And, you know, if if I'm on the, if I'm at the physical conference, I can't really manage the virtual environment that well, so we'll have someone obviously at the conference that's helping with that. But you know, if even the internet going down, right at the venue, well, then we're screwed, right? Like, we don't have any backups for that. It's one of those actually have backups for that. We just purchased backups for that. But it's one of those things that it's just adding a lot of extra costs inside of what we're doing. And it goes back to my philosophy, which is do less but do it right. And we're trying this, but we shall see whether or not we can actually execute on it. I would probably say for me, you know, if I ended up having 1000 attendees at the physical event, but then I have 200 people coming in virtual, it's a very clear, no four hybrid moving forward. If I have like 2000 people virtual versus 1000. In person, then maybe I'll do it and the other part that actually creates a lot of attrition damage. Is everyone asking, oh, is it virtual? Is you know, is there a virtual option? Well, there is but we're not allowing anyone to buy it right now. Because that directly impacts the in person ticket sales, which are higher.
Liam Martin 39:45
So we're we have everything ready. But we're effectively going to pull the trigger about two weeks before the event starts on virtual tickets. Just because we know that there are people that say Oh, well, you know, I maybe a quarter of those tickets that are going to virtual would have gone to in person. And we want to be able to make sure that people buy $1,000 tickets and not to ones who are pricing them differently. Yes, we are. And again, who knows what the heck is going on, you probably have a better idea of this, then then I would at least from a sponsors perspective, they are interested in the virtual, they want that to be part of the package. We didn't want to put it up for free, because we thought that that would be problematic, and somewhat actually disrespectful to the people that are paying $1,000 to be able to come to the event.
Liam Martin 40:36
But I don't think someone's going to pay the same amount of money to see something virtually as they would in person. The other thing for us too, is our event. The core mission statement is we're trying to empower the world's transition towards remote work. So after the event is over, we publish all of our talks up on our YouTube channel for free. And it would be an even further problem, if we were charging a full $1,000 for a virtual event, but then, you know, in the next two to three months, they would see all of those videos on our YouTube channel, I'm a big
Sarah Fejfar 41:09
fan of the tickets being the same price. If you're rolling things in amenities like food and beverage into the ticket price of the in person event, it makes it much easier to justify a difference. But I also think that that helps in selling the in person if the virtual is the same price, it makes it because you naturally have to spend so much more to go in person anyways, it is a savings ended up itself to be to be going virtually
Liam Martin 41:34
Sure. The other thing too is the platforms to launch all this stuff are incredibly expensive. I can't remember the price that we have for for hopping, I do pay for it. It's it's very, very expensive. And that's another thing that kind of works in to all of these prices, as well, I think you have to take into consideration you can run something on Zoom, but like I just you need as particularly for a conference that's 1000 plus people, you need a platform in place that's going to be able to do all that stuff for you. And we've tried a bunch of them. And we keep coming back to up and
Sarah Fejfar 42:16
I'm a big fan of zoom and zoom farms, as they're called. Alright, so before we wrap up, I've just have a couple of rapid fire questions for you. What's your best tip for filling events,
Liam Martin 42:27
get great speakers,
Sarah Fejfar 42:28
what's your favorite moment at events that you host
Liam Martin 42:32
When businesses are created. I can think back to this directly. There have been businesses that have been created at previous events that are now worth billions. And I should have invested a lot more money in those companies when they first popped up at a dinner.
Sarah Fejfar 42:46
What's the best thing about hosting your own conference,
Liam Martin 42:50
you control the package, you control the messaging, it's your experience, and you can do weird stuff that you wouldn't have otherwise done. One of the things that we do is we give everyone we have a tool called a printer, which is basically a tattoo gun, that will give you a one month tattoo. And you can get your you can get your tag. But you can also get a tattoo and you'd be blown away at how many people opt into that. And it's super fun to be able to have people that kind of have a piece of that conference with them.
Sarah Fejfar 43:28
Awesome. I need that. I want to know what you're reading right now.
Liam Martin 43:34
I just finished this again, actually, which is remote office not required by the Basecamp. Guys. So this is the most definitive book and remote work. And for anyone that has experience in remote work, it's probably a little bit, you know, on the basic side, but at least if you're not, if you don't really know anything about remote work, this is a fantastic book to field. A little
Sarah Fejfar 43:59
birdie told me that you also have a book coming out that's going to be about remote work, would you share it with us. That's true.
Liam Martin 44:05
So it has the same name as the conference running remote. And if you just go to running remote.com/book, you'll be able to check it out. If you just go to reddit.com we have all of the different things there that you would want to check out connected to the conference. And if you want to talk to me in person, obviously you have to come to the conference to be able to do that. But if you want to interact with me directly, best place is youtube.com/running remote as I had said before, all of our talks are up there for free. And we've got some fantastic pieces of information. So if you can't afford a ticket, you can get the and I will
Sarah Fejfar 44:39
second that I've been poking around on lands YouTube channel and have been educated and also had some fun along the way. So I highly recommend it. And I'll link all of that up in the show notes. We I just want to really thank you for being here today. And this has been a joy to learn about your conference and how you're thinking of about bringing these remote workers together in person, anything else that you'd like to share before we wrap up,
Liam Martin 45:05
I think that remote work is not a nice to have any more. It's something that you have to do. And you really have to figure out how to be able to do this, even in the event space need to be able to figure out how to be able to manage people remotely. So you know, you don't have to consume any of this stuff that we're doing, but definitely get yourself educated on the subject.
Sarah Fejfar 45:25
I couldn't agree more. Thanks, Leo. Take care. Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening to the greenroom central podcast. If you love this episode, then please take a screenshot on your phone and post it to Instagram. And be sure to tag at Sarah Fejfar. And let me know why you liked it. And what you'd like to hear or who you'd like to hear from in the future. That'll help me know what to create.
Sarah Fejfar 45:51
Also, I know you've got one solid gold nugget of advice on filling your events from Liam today, but if you'd like a few more 107 To be exact, then head over to filling events.com Right now I want to help you quickly master event marketing and fill your events. Even if you've never done it before. I've scoured the online business world and found 107 of my very favorite strategies working right now. To fill your next virtual or in person event. I want you to create the event promotion plan you need from these easy to implement customizable strategies at filling events.com
Sarah Fejfar 46:35
On average, I spend about an hour a day reading every month of every year. If you love learning on the go as much as I do go to greenroom central.com to get a free audiobook and a free 30 day trial of Audible, my audiobook platform of choice and a sponsor of grooming Central. I just finished here on a mission by Donald Miller and recommend it highly. Perhaps give that one a try or even remote office not required by Jason Fried. Like Liam just finished.
Sarah Fejfar 47:07
I appreciate your commitment to leveling up and learning the mindset and strategy of live events. Keep going, keep learning. If you want more head over to greenroom central.com For show notes and all the links from today's episode.
