489: The Most Important Strategies To Grow Your Business This Year With Phil Taylor

You're listening to the MyWipeKitter.job podcast. The place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into what strategies are working and what strategies are not with their businesses. The day I'm thrilled to have Phil Taylor back on the show and Phil is the founder of FinCon, which is the conference that literally launched my speaking career and allowed me to meet so many awesome entrepreneurs who I now call my friends. And I'm actually speaking on the big stage at FinCon this year in New Orleans, so if you happen to be there, I'd love to hold a meetup. And in any case, Phil and I are going to discuss the single most important thing that will grow your business this year. But before we begin, I want to give a quick shout out to Chase Diamond for sponsoring this episode. Chase is my go-to guy when it comes to email marketing and he runs a successful email marketing agency over at Structured Agency, which caters to many eight and nine figure e-commerce brands. Now for those of you who can't afford to hire an agency, Chase offers a pretty good email marketing course if you want to learn how to do email yourself. And this course can be found over at mywifequitterjob.com slash Chase. That's mywifequitterjob.com slash C-H-A-S-E. I also want to thank Emerge Counsel for sponsoring this episode. If you sell an Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Stephen Weigler and his team from Emerge Counsel to protect my brand over at bumblebeeLinens.com. Now what's unique about Emerge Counsel is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. For example, if you've ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself. And the students in my class have used Steve for cooperating their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult. And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you'll get a $100 discount. That's EMERGECOUNSEL.com. Now on to the show. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Welcome to the MyWifeKitterJob podcast. Today I have a very special guest on the show, Phil Taylor. That feels a long time friend and he's been creating content about personal finance probably for over a decade now. He runs the Popular Conference Fincon, which is one of the largest financial influencer events in the US, where I had my very first speaking gig. And Phil took a chance on me as a speaker and I'm extremely grateful because that experience actually made me super excited to speak on stage. And at Fincon, I also met my mastermind group who is instrumental in helping me grow my blog to where it is today. And as a result, I owe a lot to this guy, man. And I'm thrilled to have him back. What's up, PT? Oh, a lot to you too, Steve. It's good to be on with you, man. So the last time you were on, which was 10 years ago, I want to say Fincon was not nearly where it is today. And I'm just curious how it's evolved over the years. It's been like 10 years, right? The event? We started in 2011. So what is that? 12 years? Yeah, 12 now, crazy. Yeah, no event in 2020, unfortunately. We did digital one that year. But yeah, I think this will be our 12th or 13th. Oh, I'll stop keeping count. Oh, past 10, it's like, who cares, right? I'm not there yet. I think I'm at year eight. And that pandemic year was really tough for me too. But let's not talk about that year. Yeah, so a lot has changed. We started in 2011 with 200 people. It was a side hustle for me. I didn't know anything about events. But I had friends who knew about it. And I'm better, better. More importantly, I should say, I had a community of people who were ready to get together. And if you go back and listen to the first podcast, I mean, that's the first big nugget that I'm going to give you back then, is if you're going to be in events, have people ready that want to be together. That's the easiest way to do them. And I knew that. I knew that it was a great community. Started with about 250 people that first year. And yes, we've grown it to a high water mark in 2019 of around 3,000. And which is nuts. Yeah. It's a great run there. We're sort of post pandemic now. And growing things back, we hope to reach back up to around 2,000 mark this year. So we'll be in New Orleans for our 12th. And that's in October. And we've done a lot of iterations through the years. I've tried to evolve with the industries. We can talk about some of that. We've got a fantastic community that we tried to shepherd through the years. But how has it changed? I would just say, the biggest probably change we've had is me moving the event from just bloggers. Because initially it was called the Financial Blogger Conference. I only know if you remember that. So someone like you sort of was on the outskirts of that community to a degree. And so you might have perceived it as necessarily not for you. But you knew it was for someone, specifically, which helped us to grow it. But then we quickly expanded sort of the umbrella, the tent. And it became Fincon, which really stands for a financial content expo these days. And that could be a blogger. It could be a podcast or a YouTuber. Anyone really creating content around the idea of improving your financial life and that can expand into business and real estate. So that's the biggest change. I guess is the growing scope of it. And then continuing to change that as we're entering sort of this creator economy, where everything is really sort of podcast and YouTube driven. We really want to move the conference and that continue moving in that direction. So just trying to evolve the event from a scope standpoint. Yeah, you know, I think I missed the very first year. I came the second year and I haven't missed one since. I don't think. And what I noticed is like, it basically replaced blog world. Do you remember blog world? That was a great event. I loved that event. Yeah. And all the sessions were about how to content and everything. So I want to feel like Fincon has replaced blog world. In a way it has, I saw it initially as a niche down version of blog world, right? So, but what we ended up doing because the Fincon community was so great, was just making a fantastic event that even people from other niches were excited to come. So we started having people from travel, from the entrepreneurship side. I mean, just really people were attracted to the community and this cool event that we created. And yes, I was a huge fan of what Rick Calvert built with blog world expo. I think the last year he called it new media expo or something like that, he was trying to make that scope change as well. I don't know the details of why he shut that event down, but I know that for me it was finding that niche. And so even having created Fincon, I now see other event owners create niches within our community and spin off events. So it's just a natural evolution of gathering people. The bigger that gathering becomes, the more likely it is that a group within that group is going to then peel off and find their own thing too. So that's just kind of how events work. So what's funny is you were pretty instrumental in helping me start my event. I have chosen to keep my event small just because I miss, you know, just small, I like small events over large ones, but I am curious, how does one grow an event to 3,000 people that just sounds ridiculous to me? Just the logistics, give me a headache actually. How did that happen? So for me, I was, I didn't necessarily want to have a big event just to have one even though that does improve the margins of the event and makes it more profitable. Yeah. But I always perceived that as our community needs a bigger event because our industry continues to grow. And so I'm not the personal stage, give it rolling out the advice, you know this. I, you know, get guys, smart guys like Steve to get up there and talk about what they're great at. And that's what makes the event great. So if I'm not the talent, then the community is bringing that talent. But more importantly, the community wants a place to come and do deals. They want a place to come and do business at the event. And so financial creators are looking for brands to work with on a regular basis. And so this gives them a chance to work with those brands face to face, you know, be at a party together and sit down at a meeting table together and talk about like how their content could work with their brand and strike up a real deal face to face. Not this cold emailing, you know, trying to hit people up on Twitter if you're a new creator. So the idea for me has always been about like creating these partnerships. And so if we want to create these partnerships, well, then it kind of matters that we get all the right people that we need the industry there, from a brand side and then from the creator side. We need sort of need everyone there. So that's been my natural push to grow it. And yes, you should be strategic and intentional about whether you want to grow it or not and sort of understand that that's what you want. So for me, it was all about growth because our industry was growing. So how did we grow it? I wrote an article, folks can go check it out on ptmoney.com. It's essentially seven ways to grow your business. And I sort of tried to apply this to any business, but the examples I use primarily were how we grew FinCon. And so if you want, just go through each of those points and we can hit them and kind of kick them back and forth. Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's do that. And I'll post actually the link to that article below. One thing I just wanted to say was, I remember I was just getting started blogging. And I wasn't even writing about personal finance. I was writing about business. And I walked into FinCon and I think I secured a bunch of sponsorship deals like right on the bat. So I got, I think, hostgator to sponsor my, I can't remember what the hosting company was, to sponsor my podcast. And then I got like a couple of banks to, to pay me to, to just promote their bank. And I, yeah, it's like a great place to monetize whatever you're trying to do. So I really appreciated that. Well, that's good to hear. That was definitely the goal. So cool. So number one, number one way, it just more context during the first seven years of FinCon took it from around $100,000 in top line revenue to over a million. So it was seven years to a million dollars. And so then adhered these seven points. I'm going to give you perfect, right? Okay. The first one is make the product better. For us, we were, we had the, we had the posture of continuous improvement with our vet. So every year I wanted to improve it. And the challenge you think with events is that you have to kind of wait 11 months to kind of improve it or show the improvement. But that was the goal. Every year just make it better, just make it a little bit better. So as you think about your business, have that growth mindset, have that mindset of trying to improve upon what you build before you go expand into other things. Just take this one thing you're doing and try to make it as good as possible, right? And how do you get those ideas to improve it? How do you understand what you need to improve? It's because what is good, right? The way we did it is from user feedback. So we actually pulled regularly, pulled our attendees, post conference, sometimes free conference to try to understand what they want out of the event, what they're getting at it, how they're liking certain aspects of the event. So I think it's Sam Walton who said something like the boss, there's only one boss in your business and it's the customer, right? And so I think that's a good posture that we tried to take was this community is going to help us drive this event forward and make this product better. And so that's just the posture. We took, how did we do that with our event? We did it by trying to get better speakers, trying to get cooler locations, a better hotel. They wanted better parties, they wanted more networking opportunities. We hear up here in the initial outset. It's like too many sessions. We just want to be able to talk with each other and do business, clear communication, leading up to the event. So these are all the things that, again, that our users told us. So as a business owner, it's important to discover that feedback mechanism that you need to get and not be afraid of that. So many business owners I see are afraid to hear what their customers actually think of their product. And that's such a, there's insecurity in that and I have that too. Sometimes you don't want to hear those negative things, but and there's so much gold and opening that conversation up with your customers. So yeah. Let me ask you this PT. What are some of the biggest challenges right now that people are asking for in the financial creator community? So just in general, sort of doing business in that community. How do you get a hold of brands to do deals? Because a lot of them are a little scared right now to work with creators because of 2022 and sort of the FTX blow up. Oh yes, that's right. Yeah, sort of a negative perception. I think sometimes with financial creators, especially YouTubers, that overcoming that hurdle, overcoming the hurdle of sort of burnout is very common amongst this crew because you're just a content creator and it seems like an endless project that you're working on. There's no stop and start to it. Yeah. Other, I would say also one of the biggest that our business straight up solves is the fact that it's kind of lonely being a creator, right? So you're sort of doing this editing behind the camera, behind the mic and eventually it's just like, man, I wish I had, or my wife's tired of hearing me talk about this thing. The neighbor, he's an insurance so he doesn't relate to actually what I'm doing. So how do I find this group of people that kind of understand me and I can relate to and kind of share ideas and move forward with, you know? I'm curious what types of content are working right now? Are those the people blogging or is it TikTok, YouTube, Instagram? Like what are people asking for right now? Yeah, I think you should think about your content like this and good creators out there like yourself are already doing it. They're starting with some type of video script either scripted or interview based, right? And then they take that and that conversation or that monologue then becomes a blog post. It becomes short form video that they can put into the feed of what everyone's really doing, which is just flipping through their phone on these Instagram stories and YouTube shorts and all this stuff. But you gotta have that out there to get people into the deeper stuff. But this deeper conversation is where the real contents being created and real relationships are being formed and people really get to know you and feel intimate with you and kind of understand your brand and really fall in love with you. So that's kind of what I see the best creators doing right now. They start with this either a conversation or that monologue that that becomes a blog post and then it's chopped up into social media bits to go out on all the different channels where people are actually watching to attract them into the long form stuff. I guess what I'm asking is you know the brands that go to FinCon. What type of sponsorships are they offering? Are they looking for blogs, videos, shorts? I mean, what's the trend? I think it depends on who you're talking to, affiliate marketers are still very comfortable with blog content because it's evergreen and it's richer to a certain degree or can be. So any affiliate performance market you're going to be talking to just like that sort of static web organic SEO-based traffic. Campaigners typically are more comfortable with a video. So someone who's really charismatic on video doing really having a good conversation with their audience tends to do well with campaigns. So sponsored campaigns, pay per video, pay for podcast, episode, that kind of stuff. And I think the context of it matters too. So if you're a military finance show, I mean, there's a handful of advertisers that are perfect fit for you and they're going to be more interested in working with you regardless, really, of the size of your show. And so I think you're seeing a little bit more of a niche down with advertisers. They're not just kind of throwing money at the Jake Paul's of the world, even though that still does happen with big brands. They're more interested in what you consider like a micro influencer or creator who is really targeted. So think about that. If that's the kind of advertiser you want to attract then get more targeted. Yeah, I remember when I was first starting out, the main advertisers that I was attracting was very e-commerce specific. And I was surprised at how much they were willing to pay because the audience is so focused. So I would imagine the more you niche down and you find that perfect advertiser, they'll probably be willing to pay you a decent amount of money. I think so. If you haven't picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, the family first entrepreneur yet, then now is the time. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn't require you to work yourself to death. After all, most online business gurus constantly preach that you have to hustle, hustle, and hustle some more just to get ahead. Well, guess what? It turns out that you can achieve financial success without being a stranger to your kids. 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Just to close the loop on one, a great book to continue discovering sort of what your customer wants is asked by Ryan LeVec. So that's kind of my second resource I'll drop in there. Okay. It's sort of helping you understand like how to have those conversations with your customer. The second is once you feel like you've perfected core product, then it's time to innovate with new products. And this doesn't have to be done in a big splash all at once. You can take sort of the lean startup method, which is to pick these little elements of your event to expand upon or kind of introduce something new, right? And the key here is, well, two things. One, it allows you as an entrepreneur who is a creative to come up with something new without completely abandoning the thing that's your bread and butter at this point, right? So you know how it is. You're a creative guy. You're kind of chasing these shiny objects and all over the place and it's like, oh, I could do this new thing. So with an event, you don't have to necessarily go create a new business. You can sort of just iterate within the event itself. The key is not being married to them. And just in using almost as like, figure out how to test them, right? So come up with these small innovations within your event or whatever business you're running. And then test them instead of sort of going full bore down that road. And if one pops, then you know, you've got sort of a new product line or you've got this new sort of benefit attached to what you're doing. So that's kind of the perspective to have, I guess, when you're thinking about new things to create. So having been to every FinCon, give me an example. Yep, we expanded what we offered sponsors. So that was some of the, we sort of iterated on that every year. We come up with something new, we can offer sponsors for them to pick up. Whether that be a new party or a new sort of mastermind element to the event or this new meetup thing we're doing, or for instance, this year we brought on, we made our own video recording booth at FinCon this year. So FinCon just put one up. We have one and you can buy time in it and bring an influencer and do stuff in there while you're there. So we're just kind of come up. Yeah, we're just coming up with these all kinds of new things, new tracks, new ticket, something we did really well was created the pro pass. So I resisted in the first couple of years because I wanted it just to be so accessible. I said, we needed $99 ticket. This was the first couple of FinCon. It was $99 to go to our conference. And I was so stubborn about that. Everyone told me, that's so stupid. You need a more expensive ticket. You need to make some money off this thing. It took me too long to figure this out. But essentially, I said, OK, how can we keep that low but still make a little more margin? Well, let's offer some more advanced people this more premium valued ticket. So we put them together and make it easier for them to meet with brands, give them some extra swag, make it a extra party for them. Not to create a VIP status at our event because I'm very anti that, but just to give people more value and we can charge for it. So creating a second ticket here was a big part of sort of expanding what we do with our event. I thought that was ingenious, by the way. I just thought I'd mention this. And it's unique to your event because the people who attend are actually creators who actually want to get brand deals. And the best way to do that is to get the propast to facilitate that. It's almost like, unlike any other conference that I've been to, I don't think anyone else could pull that off. Yeah, yeah, we're... It made sense. So you got to figure out, so with your event, you got to figure out where is the deeper value for your attendee and the sponsor, right? And then marry the premium ticket to that activity. And then you found this out just through surveys from the attendees and that's where they're going to get. Yeah, and that you knew that, yeah. And my own inclinations because I am, I was a creator at the time in the space. I'm less and less so these days, but I was definitely like a member of the tribe and so these were my needs, too. And to give credit, we're credits, too. Blog Road Expo did have something similar. Yeah, okay. So I did see, and somewhat of an example that Rick was doing over there. And you could say, I stole that idea a little bit, but still like an artist, right? Cool, I like that. Well, I'm asking you now for selfish reasons, really. I do like that booth because sponsors always want influencer content, right? And just casually pulling someone over to just record a quick testimonial video seems pretty easy. Yeah, it just gives them a space to activate. Now, it's our first year doing it. And to be honest with you, I'm not sure how successful it's been in selling it. And it may be one of those things where once we introduce it, the brands get there and they see it in action, then it makes more sense. So there's probably a better way we could have introduced it where we had more intentionality around it. For instance, maybe we made it free for the first year, but you had to sign up for an official time slot. That made it created more activation for it. And then next year, we actually started charging for it. So yeah, think about these things as you do. You make some mistakes along the way. But again, don't marry yourself to these new ideas. Just throw them out there within the umbrella. Don't spend all your resources or time on them. But if one pops, then you know, you got something else great. So yeah, awesome, great advice. Yeah, man. Cool. Number three, you want to go to three? Yeah, let's do it. OK. Number three is creating content and social media. Obviously, this was a no-brainer for us being a financial content expo. We had to be sort of, yeah. But content can be scary for a busy entrepreneur. How do you get this done? For us, we reached initially into our attendee community. And said, is there anyone who can write, you know, or actually, we asked for guest posts initially. We started our blog at FinCon with guest posts. So we just asked people for the community if they wanted to contribute something. And then we had the idea, hey, instead of just a conference pamphlet, we give people when they walk up, what if they had articles in it, too? So we make this little magazine that you could get when you showed up to the conference. And it had these articles that these folks had contributed. So not only was it sort of a community building exercise, but it was user generated. So it didn't necessarily take us a lot of time to do it. We iterated from that into a podcast, the financial blogger podcast, where I interviewed speakers and sponsors who were coming to the event, leading up to it. We did that for several years, just like in the last six months before the event, which is a perfect vehicle to talk about the event, but also hear from the people who are going to be there, get the audience comfortable with, you know, certain speakers and sponsors, and do the work of promoting the conference as well. We got into newsletters in 2019 and did a really good community newsletter. But frankly, we're slipping in the content game. And so we're going to bring that back in the next couple of years to do a better job of that. But, you know, walk me through that, actually. So as you're considering what content to create, I know you mentioned a podcast, you mentioned the blog. What, where's your focus? Is it going to be on video? Is it going to be on blogging podcast? We have great resources and assets already available. We have all the pictures from the event. We have all the videos from the event, including all the sessions. So my big push going forward with the team is going to be to suggest that needs to be what's our YouTube channel. It needs to be all those sessions. And then those need to be chopped up into smaller bits. It's embarrassing that we're not doing it already. But we're just, we're coming out of the lean years of the pandemic, we got through that. And now we can start spending some more money on marketing to do it right. And we just have all the assets, a year's worth of video and that becomes short form, those can become blog posts. We don't have to create anything new. But I am excited about one new thing. So another idea that I had in terms of the content. And this was sort of after seeing what the starter story, it, well, starter story is a good example where he builds essentially a database of businesses. And then he uses that database to sort of create lists and create like bigger content ideas. And so when we sign people up to the event, we ask them all kinds of questions about what niche they're involved in, whether from, how many Fincons they've been to, what media, what platforms they're on, all this information that's very rich and valuable, which should be shown to the community, to give them perspective and to help them sort of understand the trends and what's working. And also to highlight people who are doing good work. So this user data that we have from registrations is something that I'm touring around with, playing around with, creating a database of sorts. So then we can take that database and use it to create lots of content ideas. You started to see me do it already with, I think I did a list of top affiliate programs for personal finance creators, top personal finance journalists. So I'm sort of, there's tons of content ideas based on just the data we have. So the assets and the data are the things that are gonna help drive the content generation forward. It's not gonna be me doing sort of a 101 deal. It's gonna be sort of expanding all that information that we have. Yeah, I mean, I'm just thinking about the size of Fincon in the number of sessions, do you have enough content for years without having to do anything? Yeah, and we've been somewhat foolishly putting it behind a paywall to see if we can get people to pay for that content. And we do, but I think it would be better served if just the community had it on a free basis. And we figured out another way to offer premium content down the road if we wanted to do that. Because I'm in kind of the same boat. I've got like eight years worth of content that isn't even really behind a paywall, actually. It's just behind a wall. That's not getting paid. Yeah, I've never seen one of your sessions from your event, except maybe a keynote when you one time. Yeah, yeah, I published the keynotes, but yeah, because we sell the virtual paths during the event, but the value of the virtual pass kind of declines over the years, right? Yeah, so even if we just started, let's say three months post event and started publishing it on YouTube one at a time. It's not like everyone's getting this big data dump. They're getting it slowly dripped out over the years. And there's so much stuff we already have in the back catalog that's evergreen we can release. So it's a matter of distribution. Yes, great idea. And I'm sure people listening, probably have gold mines of content somewhere, whether it's something you've done for work or whatnot that you can just break apart and start creating content to promote whatever you're selling. And if you don't have it, start collecting it now. Yeah, four. All right, well, we had number four, create or foster or community. So the big thing we do here is we let the community sort of help form the event, right? So we're in a posture always of, this is four of the creators that are there and it's by them. So they help us, it's open speaker submission. So we get over 500 speaker submissions every year to the event, which is great. And we publicize that. We almost run ads for that because I just want as much coming in as possible. Because again, that gives a, I say that I shared this in our previous episode was it's just like ownership. You've got to give the attendees ownership in the event, right? You've got to make them feel like they helped craft it, right? So that's what we do as much as possible with our community is we empower them to help us build this event. New ideas, some of the new innovations we've done with the event have been things that the community has contributed. And so we sort of have this open posture toward open sourcing the event itself. And then for community sake, we do, we do Facebook groups. We're still stuck in those. They're not ideal. We're about to move away for them, I feel like. But through the years they've been a tremendous tool to bring new people sort of into our tribe when the event is not going on or being promoted. And then for them to have conversations 24-7. And that's sort of... If you're moving away from Facebook, just curious what platform you're considering. I'm looking at school. That's probably the one I'll end up with. There's also circle. And then what's the other one, Mighty Networks. So it's sort of amongst those three. But I really like what I see at a school. I know I like the founder and I like he's sort of taking a slow growth method with the platform, very intentional. And I've been in some communities on school before and enjoyed it. I guess the problem with that is most people don't even know what it is or have the app or whatever they're not logged in, right? Right, that's right. And yeah, so that's a hurdle is getting... But half our audience is not on Facebook anymore. So we're going to lose them either way. Yeah, that makes sense. So I think community is important. We also did local meetups for a while. We still do a few of those. So we encourage people in cities all over the US and the world to get together on a quarterly basis. We give them funds. We create a community leader. Then we give that community leader some funds to throw the meetups, the happy hours, get some appetizers, that kind of thing. And they all gather together. And I do that personally when I go to places, I go to other events. It's a community building exercise. For instance, I just got back from podcast movement. And my whole deal there was to connect with every financial podcaster there was at the event. And how do I do that? I throw them a big meetup party by drinks. And then we have a podcast booth in our booth where they can come and do their show. They can kind of hang around that area and meet other people. So being that community builder with your business, just continuing that throughout all you do is important. I love it. Yeah, community is tough, man. You've done a great job. It really is tough to foster a community. It is. And yeah, it's easy to screw up too. But in your heart and soul, you're really value like trying to help these folks. Then over time, you'll be able to build that. So I am so thankful for the community. And again, that goes back to posture. I think it's important as a business owner to see your customer as really the most important piece of this whole thing. And if you put them in that position, then you'll treat them appropriately and build a community. All right, number five, charge more. This is hard for me because I'm a frugal guy and I don't like paying for stuff myself sometimes. So it was hard for me to increase prices at the event. But we were able to do it through not necessarily charging the loyal customers more, but just everyone's sort of after that point. So we introduced price increases post, what do you call pre-launch, you know? Another thing we did was I sort of talked about the one ticket new created, but ultimately, we landed on three tickets that we now offer. And so it's the rule of three, right? So you can see the three prices out there. A sense that you had a question, Steve. So. I was just gonna say, I've always thought that the ticket prices were ridiculously low for you. Like if you look at how much I charge for mine, I mean, yours is like easily less than half or a third. And I've always wondered, yeah. It was just a no-brainer, I think, because you give so much value for the ticket price. How much is it now? It's still probably pretty cheap, I guess. It's essentially less, we try to keep it less than 300 for the entry. Exactly, crazy. And then we do around 600 for what we call the pro pass. So it's a double price for that. And then we offer a brand pass. So if you're coming from the industry, sort of not necessarily in that creator avatar, if you're sort of someone they're doing business and you're not sponsoring or you're not exhibiting with us, then you're gonna pay up the biggest premium. And that's a thousand dollar ticket. So that's how we structure. And man, by having that brand pass up there, those ones, we don't sell that many of those, but having that thousand dollars up there makes that $600 ticket look really nice, for the creator. And so we could see it as soon as we launched the three options. Man, people moved toward that second option so fast. I mean, that's just how your mine works, right? I can't do three, but I can do two, you know, that's just how we think. So, and there's real value in that. It's just not there's not trickeration going on, but when we structured it that way, we saw a big increase in the second option versus just having two tickets up there. How do you get that number six? I'm sorry, what? How do you get that price right? That's a challenge. And I think, I do think it's important not to discount and I've stopped offering as many discounts through the years, but my people are just financial nerds and they live and die by the price they're paying for something. So, you know, and again, I told you my main goal was to make it a place where everyone's there. And so we make it accessible. Yeah, for sure. It's actually, I mean, just look at all the events, PT. I think yours is like one of the least expensive ones out there. It really is pretty ridiculous. Well, maybe I'll raise the prices. No, but just for the other event owners out there, we do graduate our prices. So by the time the event gets there, I do believe it's more than 300. And we had started like 225 or something. So we graduate our prices, gives us something to market off of and also incentivizes people to join us really early. So I would definitely do that. I mean, everyone needs a sense of urgency. So we always have a cut off where I say, hey, prices are going to go up next month or every month or every two weeks from here on out. That's what I do. Yeah. My next one is grow through a talented team. And so I've been able to do this by, you know, finding folks in my life who were specialists at event marketing, event organization, and event branding, as well as the AV side of things. So those four areas are so key when you want to make an event attractive but also make it financially successful. Having those team members is so important. So someone to organize it. I'm more of a visionary community builder, but I need someone to sort of hold down the details. And that was Jessica. She was a college buddy who was actually my VA at the time with my other business. And I said, you're perfect for this, you know, you should help me organize this event. Now she's the CEO of the event and runs it by herself. So she's amazing. She is amazing. She is. She is amazing. And the community is very lucky to have her kind of running things. So thanks for saying that and you're right, she is. So for me with her, she wasn't an experienced big experience to the event planner, but it was someone I could trust, you know, and I knew she was a detailed person. And so I think it's important, your first hire needs to be someone who complements, you know, what skills you have. So I was good with the community. I was good in sort of casting this vision, wrangling the troops. But she was so good with the details and filling in all that stuff. So recognize yourself if you're gonna bring someone on what you need there and someone you can trust is so important. We share a lot of values. And so that's how I knew she'd be great for that role. On the AV side with events, it's so important. You need a bulldog, someone who can negotiate on your behalf with the hotels and the venues. And I certainly had that in Jessica's brother, Justin, who has come to the event every year. And at one point, he was an employee. He was a contractor, then he was an employee. And then I fired him and said, do you need to go start your own business? And then I'll be your biggest customer. So that's kind of the situation we have now that he has his own AV company. And that's, and I'm his big customer. So he fights for me every year with the hotel and with other AV companies to try to get those costs down because he understands them. I don't understand them. He does, he makes those negotiations, makes this be successful. Thirdly is on the, I would say, the third key there in terms of hiring with events is the look and feel of the event. And that's been Libby, who we brought on in year three, who is fantastic in making the event look professional, feel like a fun event, and just look very attractive to both partners and attendees. And you've got to do that. I mean, the first couple iterations were me designing some things along with some buddies. And we tried our best, but it was a little janky. But once Libby came aboard, she made us look professional. And that goes so far with an event because people are spending time, money, travel, to get to your event. They need to know that it's going to be run well. And they're not coming into some fire festival type situation, you know? Yeah. So yes, those are the, those are the three big hires for me. And I would encourage folks to do that. The visual piece, man, that's guy rocketed the value and perception of our event. So I would go hard on that piece of the event if you want to go. I do notice you have all these displays out, you know, as you're walking into the event itself, they're pretty elaborate. Yeah. Yeah, she did, yeah. She does a great job. That's what you're talking about, right? Yep, that and just online visually. So if you look at all our social channels and our website itself, she does a fantastic job. And so that means investing in a good photographer at the event and a videographer at the event. Those are two great investments for you. So that's, that's, we've used hiring to grow it. And then finally, is our last point here is acquisition. Until in the event industry, the fastest way you can grow is to buy other events. And that's what you see the biggest event conglomerates doing is they don't waste time on trying to like grow the particular event they've purchased themselves. They just go buy another one. That's how they grow. Because you have to wait a whole year, typically for an annual conference or trade show, to grow the darn thing. And so this is a slog. I mean, I've spent 10 years, 12 years now, you know, iterating 10%, 20% growth, 10% 20% growth. And like, finally, you get there. But if you want to do it faster, just acquire events, you know. I don't have experience in that until now, I just actually made my first acquisition. I did not know that. Which event did you guys acquire? When's this going to come out? Good question. Whatever you wanted to come out. Probably soon, probably within the next three weeks. I'll go ahead and share it. We've purchased TravelCon. So, so another creator event outside of the finance space, obviously, but a creator event nonetheless, that's very similarly modeled like FinCon. In fact, Matt Keppness, who created and runs that event. He and I, Matt Matt, he and I go back away. We've chatted through the years. And whenever he started his event, the first time, he sort of leaned on me for advice and suggestions. And I actually kind of pushed him into that. He has a successful business with travel business that he does. The event, for whatever reason, didn't work out for him. And so, we are honored to take that event over, which I think he's created an amazing brand loyalty and just a great look and feel as well to his event. So, we were going to get into the travel space with creators there. And so, that's kind of the next phase of growth for us. But I would encourage everyone to be looking in the event space for opportunities, especially right now. Oaks, it's hard. The event business is tough. And so, there's oftentimes people kind of coming out of it where it doesn't make sense for them anymore. And that might give you an opportunity to grab up an event and try to make it better. I will say this. So, the first year post pandemic, the, at least from my event, it was just so, so people were just starting to come back. But this last event that we had in May, full strength. The pop. Everyone's just eager to get out and interact with. That's good to hear. That's good to hear. Yeah, we're excited about this event too. And then we're excited, in general, about the creator economy. I think it's only going to continue to grow. And with our experience with growing the community at FinCon, we know it can help grow the travel creator space as well and support those people and help them to make more deals with brands and just grow their businesses. So. And I will say this for anyone listening. I am going to be speaking at FinCon and I will be trying to do a meetup of people in the class or, you know, if you just want to hang out. So definitely be there. As I mentioned before, the ticket price is very inexpensive for what you get. I guarantee you'll meet a ton of cool people who might be members of your mastermind group someday like mine. And like I said, I'm just grateful for you, PT, for giving me my first speaking opportunity ever. And I was shivering, I was nervous. You were. But then you asked me back and I spoke again. So started my speaking, I don't want to say speaking career, but it sparked my love for speaking. So well, thank you. You're welcome, man. You certainly, and we were lucky to have you. I'll just leave it at that. And we've always been blessed to be able to work with you, Steve, and any event we put on. So thank you for being a part of this year as well. I look forward to seeing what you have to say on stage and just having you and your folks there at the event. So. And more importantly, where can people find out more about the event and all the different options and everything? What, what the sessions are, are they, are they all listed yet? The sessions are listed. We've got all our speakers up there with the exception of a few main stage folks like yourself who we haven't announced yet. So some surprise, surprise announcements coming up. But you can go to FinConExpo.com and see the list of speakers, see the agenda, sort of understand what the offering is, and just get excited about, you know, being a part of this community. So love to have you join us. Cool. Hey, thanks, Pete. We're coming back on, man. You've been great. Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now, like I mentioned earlier, I'm going to be speaking on the big stage at FinCon this year. So if you want to meet up, go to the FinCon website over at FinConExpo.com. More information about this episode, go to mywifecutterjob.com slash episode 49. And once again, I want to thank Emerge Council for sponsoring this episode. If you saw an Amazon FBA or your own online store and you want to protect your intellectual property from theft and fraud, head on over to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult. Just mention my name and you'll get $100 off. That's em-er-g-e-c-o-n-s-e-l.com. I also want to thank Chase Diamond. Chase is my go-to guy when it comes to email marketing. And if you want to learn how to run your own successful email marketing campaigns, check out his course over at mywifecutterjob.com slash Chase. That's mywifecutterjob.com slash C-H-A-S-E. And if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifecutterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini-course. Just tap in your email and send it to the course right away. Thanks for listening.