140 - Summit Wrap-Up Part 2 - What it Took to Put on a Summit

As a business growth coach for coaches, I’m always looking for ways to help my clients expand their businesses. That’s what the Design, Live, Thrive Summit was all about. The results for my clients were fantastic and the attendees have given incredible feedback on how impactful the speakers were.

In this episode of the Life Coach Business Building Podcast, I’ll give you the rundown of what it took to organize this first time event. A 2-day Summit with 16 speakers was a big undertaking and I worked with my team to execute it in just 3 months.

Listen as I share more about everything I did, from coming up with the perfect Summit name, to making sure that the event goes as smoothly as possible. As a Summit hostess I had 3 areas to balance:

Preparing my clients to speak and shine in their talks.
Marketing the event so we had plenty of people signed up.
Executing the event live.

So if you are a coach or if you’re just curious about what it really takes to put together a virtual summit, then come join me in this episode because I will cover all the details!

Transcript

There wasn't one single talk that, you know, was not a home run. We had everything from three or four people talking about body image and weight loss and, and kind of their take on how to do it. We had somebody talking about coaching your teens. We had somebody talking about parenting relationships and how to better manage those relationships.

We had somebody talking about preparing to care for an elderly loved one. We had so many talks for midlife women who wanted to be empowered. So if you have any interest in any of that, my goodness, you've got to buy that replay.

Hello, I'm Debbie Shadid, the host of the Life Coach Business Building podcast. If you are ready to have more clients in your life coach business, then you're in the right spot. Each week I'm gonna teach you super simple strategies to grow your business without feeling overwhelmed and without spending money on paid ads. If that sounds interesting. Stick around and let's get started.

Welcome to today's podcast. Excited to be here with you. I'm gonna share the details of the summit. This is a breakdown of what it took for me to put on the summit, what my thoughts were about it, kind of what the results were. Now, if you listen to last week's episode, that is the first part of this two-part series where I'm doing a recap on the summit.

Last week we had several of the speakers on. We talked about the summit experience from their point of view. We talked about what the attendees experienced. And let me just say again, you've already heard it, but it was an amazing, incredible, fun experience.

Alright, let me tell you the details. First of all, I came up with this idea a year ago, January 2022. Each year I look at kind of my business. I look at what's happening with my customers and I decide, you know, what do I want to do to improve what I'm already giving to my clients? Two things came to mind. One was there still is this part where people don't understand life coaching. And although I help them write their marketing copy, I help them really create their message and we really spend the time making sure we've got that really good, life coaching still is kind of a mystery. So I wanted to have the opportunity to expose more women to life coaching. That's why we came up with the Design Live Thrive Summit, which by the way, was not my original name.

As it turns out, it's hard to find domain names. You know, when you come up with a domain name like Best Year Ever, there's tons of domains like that, but most of those are already spoken for. So I wanted to get a name that wasn't already taken by another summit. and that would sort of say what we want to do in the summit, which is help women design or redesign an amazing life to really step into it and live it fully and then to thrive as a result of it. So that's what the concept of the summit was. So it was to get more women, particularly midlife women, to understand what coaching could do for them. So that was the first thing that I wanted to accomplish.

The second part was how could I get my clients in front of more people? I believe organic marketing is the best as you're growing your business. But there's always this dilemma of where do I meet people, you know. And we're always coming up with ideas, literally every single week with where could you meet someone who could you talk to? You know, exploring all the avenues of organic marketing.

We are on that, but still I wanted to help with that too. So my thought was, if I create this summit for midlife women, I will help my clients create a signature talk. They can be seen as an expert, which really did happen, as you guys know. That was really cool. They could teach their concepts to women who signed up for the free summit so that these women who attended would be exposed to what coaching could do for 'em, and they could grow their email list. So that was my thought. January 2022, well, I didn't do anything about it because the time just wasn't right. My business this last year grew very fast.

I doubled my business and so there just wasn't the right time to launch it. As we got towards the last quarter of the year, I thought, you know, it's now or never. I'm either gonna get this done and launch it for January 2023, or I'm gonna put it on hold. So guess what? I decided to go for it. So I had my first official meeting with my team the first week of October.

And thank goodness for them because they helped me really figure out all of the moving pieces that we needed to put together and how it would all work. So we basically made kind of like a timeline of what it was gonna be. And then I started talking to my clients about it. Is this something you'd be interested in? Would you do this? This is what I have in mind. So people were initially very excited about it.

So I moved forward and I started working on a website and I, again, wanna mention that I already have a very busy coaching business. So to add, like developing a new website, writing the copy, I was basically building a second business in the fourth quarter of the year when I had the most clients that I'd ever served in my program.

So that was a challenge. And the other piece was, that I have written a marketing copy for, I don't know, maybe a hundred coaches. And I was trying to make the marketing message different from what I have already written for all those other coaches and most of the women that work with me work with midlife women.

So it was like, boy, that was a challenge to write the marketing copy for the summit and make it sound different from each one of their marketing copy. And also, I was trying to write a marketing copy that could include all kinds of topics. Because I knew we were gonna have people that talked about weight loss, that talked about empowerment, that talked about many different topics.

All right? So I was trying to write a generic copy for women to come to the summit. You know, you have to sell something that's free. I always say this to my clients, free still has to be sold. So I had to sell the concept of the summit to them. So that's what we worked on in October. My team began to put together the website.

We talked about what was gonna happen there. I created some branding, very, very simple branding. Again, we wanted to make sure that the branding was very neutral so that it could match everybody else's branding. Our goal was to have all of the speakers promote the summit on their social media platforms and to email all of the people on their email list, which their email lists were small because they're mostly personal contacts, which actually fit perfectly because personal contacts were mostly midlife women who didn't know about coaching. So I had to make some pretty generic branding that would match everybody else's branding.

Then I started working on helping people. Then I decided I needed to create a format for their talk. I decided the talks were gonna be 30 minutes, and I wanted the summit to be very fast paced, so I actually created an outline, almost kind of filling in the blank outline for sort of the skeleton of what their summit talk would be.

I also started looking for a copywriter. I knew that I wanted the copy to be good, and so I looked for somebody who had summit experience and that was a good thing because probably I would not have had so many different emails if it wouldn't have been for the copywriter. I also made the decision to separate the summit from the business building boutique. So any of the conversations that were about the summit were gonna be in separate coaching sessions. So I was already busy and now I added 12 extra hours of coaching in December. Which is when all of the summit speakers started working on their talks, which again was a busy time.

If there was anything negative about that, it was that December, it's busy for people. But, you know, my thought was that the 1st of January is the time when women want to change their life, and so that's the best time to do the summit. So I had separate coaching, I had a separate Facebook group, and I scheduled 12 hours of coaching, as I said, to prepare the outline with the goal to have a hundred percent of the summit talks, the canva slides, a practice video, all of that to me before December 15th. The reason why we picked that date was that I wanted to take off of her Christmas break and my team wanted to take off for their Christmas break, and I also knew that the women that were participating in the summit would want to take off for the holidays as well.

So that was my goal. Let's say half the people were able to meet that. Probably by about December 20th, half the people were. The other half of the people were having a struggle trying to get it together. you know, it was the first time for everything. And some of these people were just beginning like we were writing their copy, their first bit of copy and they were writing their signature talk almost at the same time. So I will tell you one lesson I learned, if and when I do this again, is that I need to have people a certain, kind of like a certain level in my program before they qualify to do the talk. So they have to have their marketing message really nailed, which is this big piece of copy that I help people write.

We have to have their branding done. Their websites, like many of these women, did not have websites done. So they had never marketed, they had never posted on social media. They hadn't sent their first email. They were learning Canva. They didn't have websites, and they were gonna have to write a signature tal k.

So you can imagine it was a lot to learn all at the same time. So three outside speakers were invited because I needed to fill some gaps. What happened was, three or four of the speakers that were originally signed up, dropped out. In addition to that, I also basically dropped somebody out because she was so far behind.

I didn't know how she was gonna get caught up. My goal was, again, to have good talks recorded that I could use, first of all to review, to make sure that they were in alignment with what I had promised the summit would be. And also, by the way, I promised the attendees that we would not be selling 'em anything. So I wanted to make sure that every single talk was not kind of a sales pitch. I wanted to make sure that it was really just an opportunity to present, you know, their awareness. I really just wanted to make sure it was an opportunity for them to present the knowledge that they do, in regards to their niche, in regards to who they coach, whatever that was, the transformation they provide, the awareness that they give people. I wanted that to be what the workshops were about. So I created all of the social media graphics. So we had social media graphics for every single speaker, and we had their pictures on it.

The website had their pictures on it, and again, they had to write bios for themselves. One more thing that many of those people had not done. You talk about a lot of growth for the coaches that were relatively new. My goodness, this accelerated what they did. Now, I also know that it was stressful. It was stressful to get all that done because this was all things they had never done before.

But yeah, my team created the social media graphics. We wrote all of the social media copy, we did the hashtags. We had a schedule. I got the emails from the copywriter, went back through all of those. We had emails for all of the speakers to send to their list. We had emails that I would be sending to all of the people that registered.

We also set up a place to purchase the replay, and so we were selling the replay prior to the workshop. We created a brochure with a schedule in it and all of the coaches' bios in it and all of their pictures. There were a lot of marketing pieces that came together for the coaches to be able to promote.

All aspects of the summit. Everybody had, gosh, probably four or five personalized social media graphics. Plus they had a whole host of countdown days and various things that they could post on their social media with the captions. So they really didn't have to do anything except for get the stuff on social media.

So the three speakers that I found that would fill the gap to kind of round out the speaker lineup were speakers that had topics different than what my clients coach on. I wanted to make sure that my clients had the biggest opportunity to grow their business, so I was not gonna bring in an outside speaker that would be talking about something that my clients were talking about.

So we found three different speakers . That would include Tracy Hoth, who is an organizer. You know, she's a certified coach who helps people get organized. Then we had Erin Slutsky, who is an Enneagram coach. And we also had Mary Michele Nidiffer, who is a style coach. She also owns a boutique. We'll leave their links in the show notes so that you guys can locate them. Those three women had hour-long workshops.

We also planned as part of the marketing for a series of podcast interviews with my clients, and I prepared the questions and we sent 'em the questions in advance and we started recording the podcast.

There were supposed to be four podcasts. I will tell you, I did one and then I skipped, and I did my year end wrap up for my business and then we went back and did three more podcasts. That was a fun opportunity to be able to get the speakers some additional PR and to get them sort of talking about their topics ahead of the summit.

As we got down to probably the last two weeks before the summit. And let me tell you what, it was a lot, a lot of work on my end. I was really working, trying to collect all of the information from everybody because I needed their freebies. I needed their talks recorded. I needed to make sure that we had, all of the talks were different. So I reviewed 16 talks to make sure that they were all different.

I checked sound quality, lighting, all of that, their slides. I reviewed all their slides. That was a lot of work. And for some of the coaches, they had to re-record their talk three times because there was either a sound issue or there was something that they said that wasn't in alignment with what I wanted.

My goal was to have not only a talk that I knew inside and out, so that as I was the hostess of the summit, that I would be able to have conversation with them about their talks. But also I wanted to make sure that we had a clean backup copy that when we went live for the summit, if any of the coaches had an issue with their internet or anything else, I wanted to make sure that we had a way to make sure that that speaker could send out a copy of their talk.

And I will tell you, we did have a speaker who I think had some internet problems. They're not sure what it was, but there was a lot of breaking up in, you know, sentences. So we are actually going to send out the actual pre-recorded one instead of the one that was live, so that on the replay, the listeners will have a better experience.

All right, let's talk about my goal as far as registration. My goal was to have 300 people register. Now, that's a small number, but this was our first summit. I knew that I had lots of people that I could email. I have a few thousand people on my email list and the speakers we're gonna be emailing their email list.

So one thing I have not done is take an account of each person's email list and exactly what emails were sent and exactly what social media posts were sent. I will tell you if there's one of those things I need to do differently next time, I need to have a spreadsheet that they fill out where they are telling us exactly what they did, because that will help me make better decisions going forward in the future.

So my goal was 300. I will tell you, we started inviting people about the 1st of January. We had written a couple of pre emails right before Christmas, but we knew that January 2nd would be the time that people would be most interested in their New Year's resolutions. I'll back up and say our first emails were like December 27th, so right after Christmas, we did a couple of emails that week, and then January 2nd we hit it hard with you're invited.

We started getting some registrations within the first week. You know, there were maybe 50, a hundred registrations and I was like, oh, this is not good. I was really pretty disappointed, honestly. I will say we hit the number of 358 registrations by the time the summit went live. One thing that's interesting though is we have double registrations.

I'm not really sure why people came back and registered twice. I don't know exactly what that number is. I'm recording these two after Summit podcasts the day after the summit. So, we will look into those numbers later. We have sold to date 55 replays. Now the replay is, gosh, my team edited the videos, and they're up on a separate website, that you can purchase the replay, and we're still gonna keep that replay available.

If you're listening to this podcast, you can go purchase it at designlivethrive.com. It's 15 bucks. I made it accessible to anyone, and I wanna tell you what those talks that those women gave, they were so, so, so good. I mean, honestly, the speakers did so great. The other speakers loved each other's talks and the attendees, the feedback from the attendees was so good.

For you coaches listening to this, I thought freebee, you know, we should uplevel what we're calling this. And so they were actually really good gifts. I mean, most people did workbooks. They're not shabby opt-ins. So that was part of what you got when you attended the workshop live. That's part of what you can purchase with the replay.

They're all in one place, so it's the replay plus the coach's bio, plus links to their social media, their website, and the summit gift. Each coach has their own page. Another really great way to have extended exposure for these coaches. I can tell you for sure, the coaches that are speakers right away, they started receiving positive feedback on the posts that they were posting on social media from family members and friends, like, congratulations, so excited for you that you're a speaker at this summit.

It instantly gave them credibility, and that is what I wanted. I wanted live coaches to be more credible and instantly, honestly, the feedback, as soon as they posted their picture on social media, said, I'm a speaker at the Design Live Thrive Summit. You could see the positive comments starting to come, which was so, so fun.

All right. Let me move forward to the week of the summit. From the perspective of the person who was putting it together, wow, it was a lot of work. I don't know how I could do it differently except that I would need more time. I would need to make sure that everybody got their stuff to me in more time.

I was up very late, multiple nights in a row. And because my team is out of the United States, I was also up early in the morning talking to them and late at night talking to them. So that last week before the summit leading up to it was really rough on me. I was very, very tired and I had listened to so many talks and written so many emails and really begged everybody that was a speaker to get their stuff to me. That was probably the most stressful part, was trying to get all the pieces that I needed from the speakers that hey, had promised to the attendees together so that we could finish our job.

Alright, summit day. Let me tell you what, we had practiced the technology three different times. We'd had technology meetings where we practiced on Zoom webinar, how it was gonna go. Everybody showed up and it was just so good. I introduced each speaker, I told a little bit about them that I had written. I read their bio plus what feedback I had. I also had it, every speaker provided me with questions. So that they were prepared to answer the questions that they provided me with, but also ones that would allow us to have conversation.

I also made notes about each person's talk because I had heard 'em multiple times because I wanted to make sure that there was good conversation, you know, additional conversation beyond the talks that was interesting to the attendees. We did have the chat open, so that gave an opportunity for people in the chat to ask questions, but there was not a lot of chatting going on, so I was doing a lot of the chatting and asking the questions.

I will say again, the feedback and the chat was super positive. People loved it. We did offer one hour of open coaching at the end of each day. My thought was I wanted to keep everybody on schedule. I didn't wanna have any time where there was nothing going on because I didn't want anybody to log off the webinar and not come back.

So all of the talks were 30 minutes, with the exception of the three outside speakers. They had an hour and they were really back to back. Day one we kept right on schedule. We did have an hour break for lunch, but that last hour when we brought everybody back together, still the attendees really weren't interested in asking questions, and that wasn't a problem.

It's just that I had saved an hour for that, so I would probably skip that in the future. It did give an opportunity for the coaches on day one to be able to introduce themselves. I said, why doesn't everybody take a moment? Tell who they coach, you know, that kind of stuff. So they got to go back around and introduce themselves.

My job as the hostess was to sell the coaching, was to remind people throughout the day that all of these coaches, even though they are not at the workshop selling coaching, all of 'em are passionate about what they do and that the attendees should schedule consultations. They should follow up with them.

So I kind of was doing this, the selling all day long, actually both days of the summit. So day one was so, so fun. It was a Friday. We actually had about 121 I believe, unique visitors that came. So we had good attendance. We had most of the morning 55 people at each talk. There was a lull in the afternoon, mid-afternoon.

It was a slightly smaller amount. And then when we wrapped up towards the end of the day, the number of attendees went a little bit back up. So, for sure the morning was the best time. So that was a wrap of day one.

All right. Let's talk about day two. When I got on day two and started the actual summit at 9:00 AM there were not very many attendees. So I actually kind of stalled a little bit. I wanted to really be on schedule, but I also knew that Greta, who was gonna kick off the Saturday summit talks, her talk was really good.

It was about overwhelm and so I wanted to make sure as many people as possible could be in their lives. So I did stall and give some time for some more attendees to be able to come on. Every talk on Saturday ran over schedule. So I don't know if it's because I started late or if it's because the speakers ran a little bit longer than their 30 minute time slots.

And I will say even though there were smaller attendance on Saturday, the interest and activity in the chat was higher. So I'm not sure how that all worked out, if maybe the people on Friday might have been listening while they were multitasking, maybe doing other things. And so they weren't in the chat quite as much where the people on Saturday might have been really sitting at home with their laptop watching, and you know, exchanging conversation in the chat.

It was really, really good. But again, we got to that last hour that I had saved for open coaching and really, nobody was interested. I was hoping that somebody would want to be coached. I could bring 'em on or they could have questions in the chat. We had some questions that I presented to the speakers. We did answer those.

But all in all, you know, I know for sure those two open coaching sessions at the end of each day were not useful. I wanna say one other thing that was really neat was Christine, one of my ladies on my team, she had created a video that went before the summit. So for 15 minutes before the summit started, there was a video and some music that played.

I really appreciated that because what I had in mind was a static screen that said, you know, the Design Live Thrive Summit will start soon, maybe with a countdown clock. What she created was much better. And I also got very good positive feedback on that. All in all, I feel like I was in labor and I birthed the baby.

And if you've had a baby, you know, all the pregnancy and, and the labor is like, oh wow, feels like a lot and you're tired and it's exhausting. And then, as soon as the morning started of the summit, oh my goodness. I was on cloud nine. I mean, I had so, so much fun. it was exactly what I wanted to be doing, and, immediately it was like all of the pain and agony of all of the planning and putting all those pieces together and all the extra hours and so many late nights the week leading up, all of that was gone because it was so much fun. I had the opportunity then to really do what I wanted to do, which was to feature my clients, let them shine, put them in front of people. And it just worked out perfectly. I mean, the feedback from the summit was so good. People said repeatedly, either to me or in the chat, like, this is the best thing that we have seen.

We did it live. Nothing was pre-recorded except for the one talk that we're gonna send back out in the replay. I actually sold quite a few replays on the actual Summit day because people were interested in listening to the talk again. So a couple of things that we need to do if I do this again, is number one, I need to make sure that my clients are done with several things.

Like they have their websites done, they have, you know, a presence on social media, maybe they're, they actually have sent one email so they know how to do it. so that when we go to work on their signature talk, there aren't all these other pieces. So they can actually approach it, you know, not with such a stress, overwhelmed feeling.

So we need more time. I need to work on all the marketing that was done mostly by the copywriter. I reviewed it. I will tell you, it just didn't sound like me. It didn't sound like something I would write, but it was okay. It was B minus work. I just had to get it done. So I would work on all the social media copy and the emails, and then have my speakers send out the emails in a little bit different order than what they sent them out.

So that's probably a big lesson learned. All in all, it was honestly, for a first time summit, I've never even attended a summit. I had no idea what I was doing. My team was so helpful. All in all you guys, it was, I think if I do say so myself, a home run.

It was super fun .I think all the speakers loved it. Everybody was thrilled. The attendees were thrilled. I believe that for sure my clients are going to get some clients out of it. You know, those coaches' talks were so good, people were so interested. I'm sure that they're gonna grow their business as a result of that. Now, it's the day after the summit as I'm recording this, so we'll have to see what happens.

I do have a series of emails that are scheduled to go out this week promoting the replay. And talking further about it. Again, you can, as a listener to this podcast you can purchase the replay designlivethrive.com, and you'll have access to the replay for 90 days. I would just buy it, you guys, 15 bucks.

It is so, so worth it. All right, I think that's enough details for you. Do you have any other questions about doing a summit? My goodness, reach out to me. Otherwise, if this sounds interesting to you, we should be working together. I just wanna invite you to have a conversation with me about your business.

If you're a coach who is just stuck trying to figure out how to grow your business, if you're looking for somebody to give you really specific steps to review everything you write, to help you figure out all of these pieces. I mean, I taught people how to do email marketing, how to do Canva, how to write their signature speech, how to present their signature speech, you know, all of those pieces.

How to download their emails from their personal contacts and put 'em into their email server. The list goes on and on of what they were able to learn and accomplish only for the summit. And that doesn't even include everything else I do inside of the business building boutique. So you're gonna wanna have a call with me.

If you wanna make 2023 your best year ever, then I wanna talk to you. Alright it's debbieshadid.com. You can schedule an appointment there. I look forward to meeting you and just hope and pray that you have an amazing new year.

I'll talk to you next week. Bye-bye.

Okay ladies, that is it for today. Before we go, I want to invite you to head over to debbieshadid.com. I have this incredible Canva training, specifically designed for life coaches where I'm gonna teach you how to use Canva to create beautiful graphics to market your life coaching. All right. Have an amazing week.

I'll talk to you very soon. Bye bye.

Coaching Lifestyle, MindsetDebbie ShadidJanuary 25, 2023coaching business, life coaching for women, summit

140 - Summit Wrap-Up Part 2 - What it Took to Put on a Summit

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