Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the Solarpreneur Podcast, where we teach you to take your solar business to the next level.
Speaker: My name is Taylor Armstrong.
Speaker: I went from $50 in my bank account and struggling for groceries to closing 150 deals in a year and cracking the code on why sales reps fell.
Speaker: I teach you to avoid the mistakes I made and bring in the top solar dogs of the industry to let you in on the secrets of generating more leads, falling up like a pro, and closing more deals.
Speaker: What is a solopreneur, you might ask?
Speaker: A solopreneur is a new breed of solopro that is willing to do whatever it takes to achieve mastery, and you are about to become one.
Speaker: Hey, what's going on, Solpreneurs?
Speaker: We are back with another episode and we just wrapped up our first live event.
Speaker: I'm going to be talking about some lessons learned, little recap of the event, and just really appreciate all those that were able to join us.
Speaker: It was a great event and I'm going to tell you all what you missed out on.
Speaker: So let's jump into it.
Speaker: My name is Taylor Armstrong.
Speaker: We're here to help you close more deals, generate more leads and referrals.
Speaker: And hopefully have a much better time in the solar industry.
Speaker: And I apologize up front if I sound a little out of it.
Speaker: Because we just got done with our live event.
Speaker: We just got done with SolarCon.
Speaker: And actually just got back from Disneyland, little recovery day.
Speaker: So I feel like I need a recovery day after all this, a little out of it.
Speaker: So I apologize if I sound beat up, but I'm coming at you and was excited to just recap a little bit.
Speaker: So once again, thank you if you're able to join us.
Speaker: If you were not, I hope you can come to our next event.
Speaker: We're planning on doing more in the future.
Speaker: We got great feedback from everyone that was able to attend.
Speaker: And I thought it was some super valuable presentations that were given.
Speaker: Great food, great networking.
Speaker: Overall, I thought the event was a huge success for the most part.
Speaker: Always looking for improvements, but I'm going to talk about it.
Speaker: So I want to hit you with six or seven lessons that I learned from doing this event.
Speaker: Looks like possibly eight.
Speaker: I just jotted down some notes before I hit record here.
Speaker: And my overall thoughts are that events, they are no joke.
Speaker: They take a lot of planning, a lot of preparation.
Speaker: It's not for the faint of heart.
Speaker: Overall, they are very rewarding.
Speaker: So we did our event Wednesday, April 17th.
Speaker: It was the day before SolarCon.
Speaker: And we did it at the aquarium, got great feedback from that.
Speaker: We had sharks swimming in the background.
Speaker: We even had scuba divers come down in that tank during the presentation.
Speaker: Maybe a little bit distracting when they came down, but it was pretty cool.
Speaker: It was unique.
Speaker: Drew some attention.
Speaker: And so my first lesson that I learned was the people that pay, pay attention.
Speaker: And what I mean by that is, as many of you know, we included this boot camp as part of our offer for SolarCon.
Speaker: Anyone that bought our SolarCon tickets with the coupon code, they got a free ticket to our event, which was great.
Speaker: But the downside of that is...
Speaker: Technically, they weren't paying for our events.
Speaker: Those that came weren't paying for our events.
Speaker: And all the people that did buy a ticket outside of that, they showed up great.
Speaker: But I was a little bit surprised that a lot of people that took advantage of our solar con offer didn't show up to the events.
Speaker: And it was just a reminder that that's the power of paying for stuff is you take it more seriously.
Speaker: You do what it takes to get there.
Speaker: And I think there's more growth involved.
Speaker: So maybe a little adjustment.
Speaker: Maybe I need to charge more.
Speaker: Yeah, that's just how it is.
Speaker: And that's why, you know, people in our coaching program, they're charged for it.
Speaker: That's why any top coach that you work with, they're going to charge for it.
Speaker: Because really, I think it's necessary for people to grow, to take action, to
Speaker: At the end of the day, people that are paying are going to take it more seriously and put more effort into it.
Speaker: So that was my first lesson.
Speaker: Hey, we did have, it wasn't a huge event and I wasn't expecting it to be massive.
Speaker: I was hoping we didn't quite reach our goal of how many people I wanted to attend, but we had about 25 people there.
Speaker: So, you know, kept it up close and personal and the people that were there got a ton of
Speaker: valuable contents, gave us great feedback.
Speaker: So I think it was actually more valuable keeping it tight knit like that for the people that came because we were able to customize it, do a little more Q&A, stuff like that.
Speaker: And then the second lesson I learned is these events, they are expensive.
Speaker: They cost more than you think.
Speaker: If you're not careful, money can just start flying off the shelves.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So yeah, learned the lesson.
Speaker: Definitely wasn't a moneymaker for me.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So those that think events are moneymakers, most of the time they're not.
Speaker: You talk to anyone that runs events, a lot of these events aren't making money.
Speaker: A lot of people go in the hole to get exposure, to get their name out there more.
Speaker: And that's really what it was for me.
Speaker: Definitely winning the hole.
Speaker: I think there's some things I can tweak to, you know, monetize it to hopefully break even.
Speaker: That's the goal on these.
Speaker: They hopefully can at least break even, but they're more expensive than I thought.
Speaker: So if you are planning events for your company, for your team, make sure you budget accordingly and
Speaker: And realize that there's probably going to be stuff that comes up.
Speaker: It's probably going to end up costing more than you think.
Speaker: And there's going to be surprise expenses for sure.
Speaker: Hey, lesson number three.
Speaker: Our sponsor for the event was Repcard.
Speaker: And they are the bomb.com to work with.
Speaker: Would definitely recommend them for any event you have.
Speaker: And if you have not heard of RepCard, if you're not using them, go check these guys out.
Speaker: Was super grateful that Brad Morton and his team could sponsor our event, help us out with it.
Speaker: They helped us out with some super cool name badges.
Speaker: Funny enough, I actually had one of my buddies that came.
Speaker: And he wore his name tag to SolarCon on accident.
Speaker: He wore his solopreneur name tag to SolarCon the day after, which I thought was pretty awesome.
Speaker: You know, the people letting him in weren't so happy about it.
Speaker: They didn't want to let him in.
Speaker: But that's how cool they were.
Speaker: So thank you to Brad.
Speaker: Thank you to Repcard.
Speaker: And if you don't have a way to follow up with your leads to track them,
Speaker: or you need a solid door knocking app, dual knocking tool, definitely go check out RepCard.
Speaker: They're sweet.
Speaker: Okay, lesson four is make sure you make it obvious where your event is taking place.
Speaker: Hey, this is something I didn't really think of beforehand, but make sure you have signs pointing to where people need to go for your event or someone out hurting people to where they need to go.
Speaker: There was quite a bit of confusion on where the event actually was in the aquarium.
Speaker: So hindsight should have made it more clear where the event was and had signs or had a welcome, something like that.
Speaker: Because, yeah, there was a lot of confusion.
Speaker: So apologize if you were confused when you got to the event.
Speaker: Lesson number five, and this is kind of a funny story, but I had to buy quite a bit of food for the event.
Speaker: These venues, a lot of times they require you to buy a certain amount of food.
Speaker: So no matter who showed up, I had to buy the food.
Speaker: So we actually, just to meet the minimum food budget, had to do breakfast, lunch, and a snack after.
Speaker: So it was tons of food.
Speaker: It was great.
Speaker: Breakfast barely got touched.
Speaker: So we had tons of leftover for that.
Speaker: Lunch was a lot better.
Speaker: But the lesson I learned is if you want to take leftover food, make sure you tell them right after the event.
Speaker: It was kind of funny.
Speaker: I had all this leftover food.
Speaker: Now I'm thinking, okay, well, we spent all this money on food.
Speaker: And, well, you know, I'll just take some home for dinner.
Speaker: Not a big deal.
Speaker: Because we had, you know, some barely got touched.
Speaker: And I go after the event.
Speaker: I'm talking to the chef people.
Speaker: And I'm telling them, hey, can I take this in boxes, whatever?
Speaker: Be cool.
Speaker: Let's have some for dinner.
Speaker: And they're like, oh, you know what?
Speaker: We gave it to the employees.
Speaker: It's all gone.
Speaker: Yeah, we get rid of it after.
Speaker: If we don't hear anything, then we typically just give it away to the employees or trash it.
Speaker: And I'm like, are you serious?
Speaker: I drop all this money.
Speaker: It's just down the drain.
Speaker: So lesson learned.
Speaker: If you do want to take your leftover food,
Speaker: People that know me know I love taking, you know, I'm a food guy.
Speaker: Like I like taking my leftovers if I got leftovers.
Speaker: And so if you want those leftovers, make sure you tell the people right away.
Speaker: Otherwise, it's getting thrown in the trash or it's getting eaten by the other employees, I guess.
Speaker: So, yeah, kind of a funny story, but that happens.
Speaker: Lesson number six, make sure you plan out a good intro to the events.
Speaker: This is something that I was scrambling to.
Speaker: I didn't think about till the last minute, but it was my job to introduce the speakers to kick off the events.
Speaker: And I did plan something, but I didn't think about this till the night before.
Speaker: So I was up, you know, pretty late planning on how I was going to introduce the events, how I was going to intro the speakers, because it's just not something that I really thought about.
Speaker: So might be obvious to other people, but yeah, I didn't think about that a ton.
Speaker: Number seven, I have a marketing plan to get people to the event.
Speaker: As I mentioned, I didn't quite hit the goal for how many people I wanted there.
Speaker: And I think if I would have come up with a little better marketing plan instead of just relying on posting on social media, talking about it in the podcast, a few other things, I think I could have got...
Speaker: I think I could have met the goal on how many people we wanted there.
Speaker: But, you know, lessons learned.
Speaker: Just because you have some people on social media, just because you got a podcast doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get the word out to tons of people.
Speaker: And I did have people at SolarCon after the event.
Speaker: Quite a few people came up and had no idea I was even doing an event.
Speaker: So that just shows to me that that's on me.
Speaker: I need to make sure I market it and really get the word out.
Speaker: to everyone and make sure they know that I'm doing an event.
Speaker: And then last but not least, one of the other issues with my events is
Speaker: I don't know if there's an issue, but I started at 9 a.m.
Speaker: the day before SolarCon.
Speaker: And as I started thinking about it, I'm like, OK, what were some other reasons why maybe I didn't hit the goal for the attendance?
Speaker: And really starting event at 9 a.m.
Speaker: SolarCon didn't start until the next day.
Speaker: That meant that people really need to show up the night before, in most cases, to even make it to my event.
Speaker: So I think in hindsight, it made it maybe a little tricky for people to get there.
Speaker: They had to adjust their travel plans by quite a bit just to make it to my event.
Speaker: So yeah, and I did get that feedback from a handful of people that couldn't make it that had tickets.
Speaker: So yeah, next, next year, um, or next time I do an event, just something I'm going to be conscious of, um, just the timing of it and the, uh, planning around when people can make it.
Speaker: And I know you're never going to be like, it's never going to be convenient for everyone to make it, but, um, yeah, possibly kind of tweak the schedule on it to get some more folks there.
Speaker: So anyways, those are just a few lessons that I learned.
Speaker: Overall, the event was a great success.
Speaker: So much value.
Speaker: We are going to be posting the recordings in our Soul Society training platform.
Speaker: So if you're interested in signing up for that, you can go to soul society.co and she can take advantage of those if you were not able to attend.
Speaker: But just so many nuggets.
Speaker: We're probably going to do the next episode.
Speaker: I plan on doing just a little recap of some of the content in the event and then also a recap of SolarCon.
Speaker: But I wanted to keep it brief and wanted to just share a couple lessons that I learned from the first event that I've planned and that I've made happen.
Speaker: So thanks again for supporting it.
Speaker: And thanks again for supporting the podcast.
Speaker: It means so much.
Speaker: I really appreciate those that were able to attend the event in person.
Speaker: And all I ask, if you're listening to this podcast and have not left us a review or have not shared it, please go do that.
Speaker: That's how we keep the podcast spread into more people.
Speaker: And that's how we increase the impact with it.
Speaker: So tune into the next episode.
Speaker: And I promise I should be a little more recovered.
Speaker: Hopefully I sound a little less zombie-ish on the next show.
Speaker: And we'll see you on the next one.
Speaker: Peace.
Speaker: What's up, solopreneurs?
Speaker: Hope you enjoyed the episode.
Speaker: Before you run out and start selling more solar yourself, wanted to let you know about an exciting new cheat sheet we created specifically for you in mind.
Speaker: One of the top questions I get asked on Instagram, on Facebook, by our listeners is, Taylor, where should I start?
Speaker: What episodes should I listen to in the podcast?
Speaker: And
Speaker: You got too many podcasts, man, because now we have over 200 episodes.
Speaker: So what we've done, we created the top 10 most downloaded, most listened to, and I would say widely accepted, most useful podcasts that we've done here on Solopreneur.
Speaker: We put them together all in one sheet so you can go, you can hit the ground running, especially if you're new, you do not want to not have this sheet.
Speaker: So go download it right now.
Speaker: It's going to be at top10.solarpreneurs.com.
Speaker: Again, that's top10, the number 10,.solarpreneurs.com.
Speaker: Don't forget the S on solarpreneurs.
Speaker: We will have that in the show notes.
Speaker: Go download it right now.
Speaker: And especially if you have not listened to them, go listen to them and you can re-listen to them.
Speaker: That's going to show you how.
Speaker: So go download it and we'll see you on the other side.
