Behind the scenes of my Rise Above Summit

Today’s episode of the podcast is a solo episode where I am giving you an honest account of what it was like to run my first ever Virtual Summit. In the episode I share with you the good, the bad, and the ugly lessons that I learned, and what I will do differently next time!   KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST My experience of previous summits and what I did differently What I spent money on and what I did to ensure I covered costs The statistics on my registration numbers and how many people turned up If you enjoyed this episode then please feel free to go and share it on your social media or head over to iTunes and give me a review, I would be so very grateful.   LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE Connect with Teresa on Instagram, LinkedIn or Facebook   Transcript Today, I am taking you behind the scenes of my first ever summit. I'm going to be sharing with you what worked, what didn't, what went absolutely wrong that we didn't plan for, and I don't think could have planned for. I'm also going to be sharing with you my registration rates, my turn up rate, and what it did for my business. I learned so many valuable lessons in this process. And I'm sharing them all with you today. Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of your dream business podcast. How are you doing this week? I hope you are good. So this week I have decided to share with you all the stuff about my summit, basically the good, the bad, the ugly, the things that went wrong that we did not expect, and whether I'll do it again and what I would do differently. And whether you're looking at doing a summit or not, I think this is going to be a really interesting look behind the scenes of running something like this at this level. And some of the lessons I learned with the summit actually are going to help me in lots of other areas of my business. And actually something that kind of come up during the summit is now inspiring me to make some changes in the rest of my business. So I've written some notes. And I'm kind of hopefully going to go through them in order. As you know, if you listen to this podcast regularly, I don't script it. That's just the way I like to do it. I like to be very off the cuff. I like to have an idea of what I'm going to say to you, but I like it to be a conversation. I like to imagine that you've just said to me, Oh, how did the summit go? And I'm about to tell you how the summit went. So it is very relaxed. It's the style of the podcast. If you're new, welcome. So lovely to have you here. If you are new and you don't subscribe, then I would love it if you took a minute to subscribe to the podcast. That would be amazing. Okay, let's get cracking. So why did I even do a summit in the first place? Now, this had been on my radar for a really long time. I have been a guest on many summits over the years, and at the moment I seem to be getting a flurry of them. And my experience of them was mixed, but I would say more to the not brilliant end. And I've spoke openly before now about Fifi Mason and her summit and how that was the best one I'd ever done. She really kind of seemed to get it in her head what she wanted and how to manage it. And it was marketed really well. And it was It was just brilliant, and she was great, it was really well organised, and I loved doing it, but like I said, on the whole, I had had lots of experiences and summits that weren't brilliant. Even though it'd been on my radar for a while, I just thought, I don't want to do a summit. It seems like a lot of work, if I'm honest, and it was. It's a lot of work and I don't know that it'd be that brilliant. And I am going to be honest and say, I think there was an element of, not imposter syndrome, there was an element of fear. What if people said no? What if I asked speakers to come onto the summit? Because doing a podcast is different, and I've had some obviously phenomenal names on this podcast, but summits are different. And like I said, I think lots of speakers maybe have the impression that most of them are a bit rubbish. So, and I say that very fleetingly, they're not rubbish, obviously. So, I decided that I was going to take a bit of a punt and make a decision to do a summit based on one thing only. I attended, what's like this, I attended the Guru Summit, which basically is a summit for email marketing. And I was interested to see what they were talking about, signed up for it. And it was a really, really good summit. I was only an attendee, but they used a really good system. They did more than just your average kind of interview thing. And they had thousands of people like register for the event. So I was like, That's how you do a summit. And at the event, they had Martha Stewart's keynoting nuts and Amy Portfield, and I, and they were the reasons I signed up. I wanted to see both of them speak. And so I thought to myself, I'm going to do a summit. I've got to do a summit that has a really good keynote. And as you know, I'm very fortunate that Amy and I are friends. However, one of the things that you probably need to know is that. I don't ask Amy anything from a business point of view. We don't talk about business. We only ever do social stuff. And we only really ever do that when I'm over in the States, obviously she doesn't travel here to the UK and we, you know, have a really lovely time and I love spending time with her and she's awesome. And obviously I massively admire her from a business point of view, but we tend to keep those really separate. So we don't talk about business. I don't ask anything of her, you know, so I thought to myself, I'm going to do it. I'm going to ask Amy. And I spoke to my husband and he was like, just ask her, you know, basically use my language back to me. What's the worst that she can say? So I said to the universe, you know, I love a bit of woo. I said to the universe, okay, I'm going to ask Amy to speak at the summit. And if Amy says yes, I'm doing a summit. If Amy says no, I'm not doing a summit. It's not meant to be. So send her a DM. And I have a text. I have her phone number, but I thought I won't text because that's really personal. I'll send her a DM on Instagram and. I'll do it that way. So I sent her a DM saying, is there any chance you would do a summit? If so, you know, what would you charge? And all that sort of conversation. Anyway, she didn't see it. And I went to, I was actually doing one of my in person events and I was sat with Becci McEvoy who edits, not edits, who does the show notes podcast and helps me with social media. And I'm sat with my husband and they were like, have you heard back? And I said, no, she's not seen it. And Paul said to text her. My husband and I don't want to text it. That's really personal. Like I feel like that felt to me as if I was stepping a boundary or overstepping a boundary. And Becci said to me, what would you tell us to do? Because she's in my executive club. And I said, I'd tell you to text her. And she's like, there you go. So I decided to text her and I sent her a really casual text and said, Amy, I'm not sure if you saw, I sent you a message over on Insta, you know, if you want me to send it again, let me know. And within like 10 minutes, she replied on Insta going, Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I've just seen this and yes, a hundred percent. I'll speak at your summit. And we talked a bit about how that might look and what it would be. And that was it. Summit was born. So my objective was to add people to my list. That was my main objective. The reason people do summits is because it's a really good way to get new people onto your email list. Credibility. I wanted people to see me at the level I am. And by pulling in someone like Amy, by putting on an amazing summit, then people would realize my level of credibility. And from a financial point of view, I wanted to break even. I knew I was going to invest a lot into making the summit really good. And I'll talk about what I invested in a bit. I wanted to break even. That was my objective. If I made money, brilliant, but that wasn't the objective to make money. Now, a couple of things that I went into thinking is On an average summit, and I say average because obviously I've done lots of them, what normally happens is they get between 15, 20, 25 speakers who pre record interviews. Now, from a speaker point of view, this is awesome. Like, I love nothing more than someone saying, can I interview you? Because I don't have to prep. I don't have to think about what I'm going to say because I do, Kind of do things on the fly anyway. And I know my subject I'm good at what I do. So I have no concerns about someone saying to me, can I interview about this? And I know I'll be able to speak. And then, and the interviews can last anywhere between 20 and 30 minutes. And then they tend to do the summit over a number of days. It's not live. The videos are released at certain days. Sometimes they have a Facebook group. Sometimes they don't. And I just thought, I don't want to do a summit like that. Like if I'm going to do a summit, like everything I do, I want it to be the best flipping thing you've ever seen. And there's...