Planning for financial sustainability of the event series

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription: In this video let's talk about the planning of financial and personal sustainability for your events this video is brought to you by our Appy Pie’s Academy sustainability means that it's a business and event series that's financially viable for you to put on otherwise you just not you're just not gonna be able to do it anymore and it really should be fun for you to do and shouldn't be a drag it's a heavily customer-facing business your customers will immediately see if your passion isn't there and for financial viability and later in this video we're gonna talk about some a little bit more serious financials nothing too crazy but we'll get into financials and in other parts of the course I also talked about LTV improving lifetime customer value we'll talk about that and I talked about it elsewhere at the course but this is something you have to do over time for your events to make them financially viable in the beginning that's not really the goal in the beginning the goal is growth and at least some reasonable stability in terms of event quality making getting people to engage but mid a long term you do have to start to focus on lifetime customer value and increasing that as well as getting more attendees and while you're doing this all the events can become a drag so the planning for your events look at it long term in the beginning of course it's fun it's new but a year from now if you do it two years from now if you do it that's really where the event series is gonna turn into something amazing and fantastic what you have to do is have kind of the foresight to make sure is this not going to become too much of a chore do you have real passion for this and what might also happen is you might not exactly and perfectly hit on the ideal targeted topics for your event which attract the spending demographics to your events so you'll have to play around with that so that eventually you navigate towards the kind of audience that comes to your events that can freely span and the the real art of this and the real trick of this is twofold one is you have to pre as much as possible so that after you launch your events you don't have to correct course as much of course.

There will be some mistakes you'll make there's never a perfectly planned business you'll have to make some adjustments but the goal is to have to make minimal adjustments and make sure that it's financially viable sustainable you can keep the events going and it's gonna be fun for you that's important and when I talk about sustainability for your events a part of me wants to talk about dollars and cents and financials and I know you might want to hear that and I hate to be cheesy but you will have to interact with your attendees you will have to inspire them to keep attending you are the leader of this event you are the face of it in front with most of them and your passion has to be that contagious kind of passion that ignites their passion you really have to lead on that front and if you do everything will be easier it will be easier to get repeat attendance it'll be easier to upsell things it will be easier to just make people have more fun in the moment more enjoyment it will feed off to attendees and their interaction with other attendees and it will just give your events a better energy if your passion is there so because precisely because this is a highly customer facing business you really got to bring the passion it's hard to fake long term if you're not excited your customers will not be so now let's talk a little bit about the financial viability because at the end of the day this is important for a new business no matter what the business is it's really difficult to project financials usually financials are predicted for existing businesses based on previous months and quarters of growth and based on those existing businesses is more easily more accurately project future revenue and future profits for a new business if this is a new event serious this is not the case it's largely a guess it's very faulty you have a high margin of error and you have to come into it knowing that and realizing that usually what's gonna happen is after you launch even though you pre plan as much as possible you'll have to evolve how you maximize revenue you have to adjust things from one event to another event to another you'll have to make little adjustments to make sure that more people attend and they spend more money in total that's gonna be an ongoing thing so maximizing the LTV is it's an ongoing thing but you can pre-plan a little bit in financials there is a common document it's called the cash flow statement I'm not going to overkill with this statement I'm not even gonna make you write it what it really is it's in over glamorized list there's two lists there the expenses which is cash flow out so the list of expenses is not the question most of the time most of the time the real questions are the unknowns are cash flows in can you generate revenue can you generate growth that's the real question because you can have a million people attend your events you can have three people attend your events.

When you haven't started you don't know so so much depends on you so let's talk through a somewhat reasonable revenue calculation for a new event let's say you have 20 attendees per month per event and you are putting on a weekly event which more or less equates to four events that gives you attendees a month and if you charge them let's say $20 a ticket that equates to $1600 a month which in at least in the United States it's not a sustainable business but it begins to be a viable side business it's a pretty good side business is it sustainable as a stuff as a side business sure it's pretty nice but your goal isn't that your goal is to grow so let's say the same event at a hundred attendees let's say you grew that twenty attendees per event and you grew it to a hundred attendees per event at the same $20 ticket price that's eight thousand dollars a month now that's almost a six-figure annual salary and at that rate it's way over six figures in reality because guess what you're gonna be upselling people if you upsell let's say consulting services or coaching services out of the 400 people a month that are gonna come to your events that you're gonna be able to shake their hands form some sort of relationship with what's gonna happen is some of them you'll be able to upsell coaching programs so in addition to the $8,000 a month maybe you'll upsell one or two clients a month for like a $5,000 program or maybe you'll get like a few let's say you'll get ten clients a month to a coaching program that's a thousand dollars okay a month that's an extra ten thousand dollars a month so I don't know how much you'll be able to upsell again this is a total guess but you see how as you grow your event and as you grow your modernization it begins to snowball and begins to be extremely financially viable especially if it's a one-person business or a one-person business and a few hired freelancers who are not a big expense so the real money gets made long term after attendee growth and guess what once you get the formula right for these events you can have multiple concurrent events ongoing and you can hire people to put on the events and manage them for you so you can just sit at home and just work on the marketing and managing the managers who are running the actual events and you can do this in multiple cities you can and from something very tiny side hustle type of a business with a really really really lucrative long-term business that's sustainable that's putting on multiple large events every week in different places.