"In a lot of ways, I think anybody who's a tinkerer has got this opportunity right now to just change everything..."
Carl Smith is the owner of the Bureau of Digital, an education and community organization that serves digital agencies. He launched his first online summit 3 years ago and in the time since has experimented with a variety of remote event tactics.
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The Bureau of Digital
Key Takeaways
- Approaching a remote event as a series of Webinars diminishes engagement. Remote events should still be events, with hosts and music. It should be an experience.
- Remote events shouldn't be planned as physical events replicated in virtual- they have different benefits and drawbacks. The opportunity is to identify the things that work better in virtual.
- One of the benefits of virtual events is that everyone in the audience can ask questions.
- Another benefit is that the crowd can interact with eachother in the background of a presentation.
- Another is that you can more easily encourage social interaction by setting up breakout calls where people are exposed to people they might not normally talk to.
- Carl is experimenting with what he calls, "The Bureau Box." He's mailing a personally customized swag box to all attendees. It helps to make the event more of a unique experience and provides additional sponsorship opportunities.
- One of the challenge of remote events is that it takes place at people's homes. However, Carl also see's that as an opportunity for attendees to more authentically connect.
- For pricing, Carl feels like everyone is trying to figure it out, but his organization is coming 30-40% cheaper off of their live events.
- Remote events lower the barrier for getting amazing thought leaders. They don't have to travel and can set aside just a small part of their day to participate or present. This can be really great for suprise guests.
- On the surface, remote events are far cheaper. But if you want them to replace live event revenue, you're going to spend as much time trying to figure out how to replace changes in sponsorships, exhibitors, and the drop in pricing.
- Sponsors are key for replacing revenue from live events.
- Some sponsor placements for remote events from Carl: The Bureau Box, videos between sessions, and transcribing the sessions post conference into a guide with sponsor placements on it.
Resource List
Full Transcript
Growth Camp, One of Carl's Online Events
John Hooley:
I'm John Hooley, I'm the president of Resurgent. I'm here today with Carl Smith, the owner of the Bureau of Digital. A man whose business attire is mainly flip flops and who once wore [inaudible 00:00:57] for three weeks before they realized it and hired him.
John Hooley:
Carl, thanks for being with me today.
Carl Smith:
I appreciate it, John. I appreciate the invite.
John Hooley:
Yeah, so what I wanted to discuss with you, I mentioned it before we started this off, but associations are facing this challenge of running remote digital events and you've already faced that, and so I was hoping to pick your brain a little bit about it.
Carl Smith:
Yeah, absolutely.
John Hooley:
So when did you start? What's your experience to date?
Carl Smith:
So I think besides regular webinars and things of that nature, we had our first online summit, I believe, three years ago. The first thing we tried was just kind of a bunch of webinars in a row. I think a lot of people do it that way.
John Hooley:
Right.
Carl Smith:
It's just not good. People fall off. It's not quite the same. So what you really have to do is inject some personality into it. It doesn't mean that whoever is giving the talks or doing whatever has to be overly energetic, but what it means is there needs to be a host. There should be music and there should be humor and it should be fun, it should be an event. But you can't make it like you would an in-person event, you can't try to replicate it. You just have to start over and embrace the online potential.
John Hooley:
That's interesting, because I've seen associations I think are especially used to making money off of their trade show and there's a lot of people that are approaching this whole idea as it's an analog, do the same thing we did in physical as we are going to do on digital. What I'm seeing a little bit is it's a different domain, and it sounds like for you that's the case.
Carl Smith:
Yeah, definitely. We had an event yesterday. It was all about selling during a crisis. It was a David C. Baker and Blair Enns. One of the things that I think is great with online is everybody can ask a question. We had a hundred people that were watching and they all had the opportunity to interact. You can't do that when you're in-person, right?
Carl Smith:
Now with a trade show, yeah, this is going to be kind of tricky. I'll tell you one thing we're looking at for some of our events is what we're calling a Bureau Box. That means when it's safe to send things in the mail again, we're real sensitive, we don't want to make anybody upset or take any risks, but this idea that we can still send out snacks and we can still send out special things that people aren't expecting. Even let them choose the area they want the event to be in. Do you want to be in the mountains? You want to be on the beach? You want to be in the city? You're going to get different swag when you open your box. You can have multiple boxes inside that box so that at different sessions, you're opening something new, right? Something that keeps people engaged.
Carl Smith:
With a trade show, I would say there are different things you can do, especially in Zoom, where you can have breakout rooms and things like that. So take advantage of that where people could sign up maybe to get some quick pitches, right? Maybe if you've got one person who's way into, say, advanced tech for marketing and another person who really wants to understand more about point of purchase displays or whatever it might be, set up a different room for each one so that they can go in there and get their little lightning pitches or whatever it might be, because there's no way they're going to interact with the product or interact with anything like that.
Carl Smith:
So again, yeah, just give them that opportunity to learn and ask questions and do all the things that we just can't do if we've got a few hundred people walking around a room.
John Hooley:
Yeah, that's really interesting, and those are really, I think, excellent ideas in terms of focusing more on the experience and the difference of experience between a virtual and a live. I know something that associations always do in the physical space, or often do, is some sort of industry speed dating, which sounds like it would work really well for that sort of meeting room, you know?
Carl Smith:
Yeah.
John Hooley:
Just tell me what matters and check them in, check them out. What sort of challenges have you faced that are different than the physical world? In the physical world, you have room blocks and you've got all these logistical concerns. What are the challenges of running it remote?
Carl Smith:
I think the challenge of running it remote is that you don't necessarily... In fairness, we're doing our first big event, which is going to be Growth Camp. That's later this month, so I'll be able to tell you more after that. But I anticipate our biggest challenge is going to be, even though somebody may pay several hundred dollars to spend a day with other people online, it's going to be really easy to get pulled away because you're doing it at home.
John Hooley:
Right.
Carl Smith:
One of the things we're doing is we're going to have like a little opening meet and greet the night before the event where everybody is welcome to bring their significant other, their pets, their kids, whatever, so that during our time together, it's not a big deal if we see that falcon just jumped on the screen, or Timmy came in because he wants to snack. It'll almost be endearing.
Carl Smith:
So what I don't want is for somebody to feel like they can't be on the event because life happened. I want them to be on the event because life happened, right?
John Hooley:
Right.
Carl Smith:
This is our opportunity to embrace each other at a new level of humanity that we used to always try to shield each other from. I'm hardly the first person to say that, I just truly embrace that thought.
John Hooley:
Well, I think that's the first time I've heard it, so you're at least cutting edge for me.
Carl Smith:
Well, edit that out. Make it mine.
John Hooley:
Okay. You're at the front.
John Hooley:
So in terms of managing the chat, because this is something that came up again as you were talking about that live environment, in a real environment, you have that one microphone going out to the crowd or people are lining up at it, is there any way that you found to manage the chat? Because you get a lot of people on there, you get a lot of questions and stuff like that.
Carl Smith:
Yeah. So it's going to depend on the technology you use. I know that Zoom has some privacy issues, but if you just put a password on it or make it registered, it kind of solves all those problems. So I think it's a little bit of it's like every phone can be called by anybody, that's kind of the way Zoom is if you're not careful and lock it down. But if you have Zoom and you like Zoom, it has a Q and A feature where people can just put their question in and then you can either reply in person, you can actually reply live, or you can have somebody type a response.
Carl Smith:
So when we had COVID-19 Financial Options for Small Shops Q and A, we had three CFOs and two lawyers on a panel, and we had 35 questions come in over the hour. Well, whoever was on the panel that wasn't speaking would take a question and reply to it via text and they would just type in the answer.
John Hooley:
Oh nice.
Carl Smith:
The other thing is you can have the chat and that's great, we're always watching the chat because we want the crowd interact with each other as well. Another thing you can't really do in person but you can do online is have the crowd be talking to each other. Right? So that's kind of cool. Then the other thing is with Zoom you can actually click on an attendee and turn their mic on. So we had one situation where somebody had asked a question and we needed some clarification. It was easy for me to just quickly in the attendee panel find that person, turn on their mic, and say, Tom, do you mind giving us a little more background? We just want to make sure we're answering the right question. I've turned your mic on. Then they're able to apply.
John Hooley:
Right.
Carl Smith:
So the tools in Zoom, and this is not a Zoom plug. I wish I got paid by them. Good Lord, I'm paying them. But Zoom, I think, is just ready for this. Also, we were talking about the idea of breakouts, you can set in Zoom to randomize people in different breakouts. So you can say I want to have 10 breakouts of five people each, go, and it's just going to be a serendipity call. You're going to have people meet each other that didn't know each other. So that's just another little tip for what we've been playing around with right now.
Carl Smith:
But in terms of managing the chat, it's actually really easy because you've got ultimate control, and being able to turn on and off somebody's microphone, and also being able to put them over into a special area just for Q and A.
John Hooley:
Yeah. That's really interesting, because one of the challenges with the virtual event is that the reason people go to these live events much of the time is for hallway tracks.
Carl Smith:
Oh, yeah.
John Hooley:
It's hard to do a hallway track virtual, but something that you can do virtual that you can't do live is you can get all those shy people into a room to talk to each other. You know what I mean? A lot of times if you do a live event, like I went to one of the Bureau's events for the first time and I didn't intro myself, you have to be brave. You have to go out there out of your way to talk with people. But virtually you can sort of force that, force function that.
Carl Smith:
Yeah. No, you can. It's interesting, because a good friend of mine who's an introvert say this is introvert's paradise. We are all so happy right now. I was like, okay, okay.
John Hooley:
Yeah, I'm an introvert. So it really is.
Carl Smith:
Yeah. I flip back and forth, in a weird way. But I think in terms of the hallway conversations, that is what everybody always wants. I mean, that's where you learn. I was part of a podcast for five years that got really popular. It all started because I was having a conversation with somebody I just met sitting down over a beer and somebody looked at us and said, this should be a podcast. Right? Next thing you know, we've got 5,000 listeners because the two of us just had a chemistry. Those are the people you meet in those hallway tracks.
Carl Smith:
So what I would say there is, and we've seen this, a lot of people started having virtual happy hours, right? I got this question from somebody yesterday, they said I met most of my clients at in-person events. I'm not good at calling people, I'm not good at emailing people, but if I meet somebody and we can have a casual conversation that's going to lead to what I offer and what they need, then things will be great. I said, get all of your current clients, tell them to invite a friend and have a happy hour, because some of those friends are going to be in the same space.
Carl Smith:
The thing about the happy hours, and this was funny, I will say, I had to go to three in a row and I'm pretty sure at third one I was overserved. I've got to go back and look. Somebody slipped something in my drink as I was sitting here by myself. But the thing that I saw worked really well, and David Baker and Blair Enns had a little happy hour that I was privileged to go to. They had probably about 30 people on it. What they did was they went around the screen and asked each person kind of a question. So it wasn't this mad free for all or you couldn't talk because everybody talking would just cut everything out. You still, even when you're doing something that's going to be more social like that, you can do it that way.
Carl Smith:
One thing we're going to play with, and this is getting to that idea of those hallway tracks, we're going to try to integrate Slack and Zoom in one session. So let's say that, John, you got asked the question, hey, what was a positive thing that happened this week? You said, Carl actually showed up to this interview. Right? So you can talk or whatever, and then there's somebody else on the Zoom chat who has had that experience and they can, via Slack, just send you a Slack message and say, hey, can I spin up a quick video, I'd like to talk to you? Right? Then you can turn off your screen on Zoom or you can leave it on, but then you can have a Slack conversation via video right there. So it's kind of this idea to say, hey, let's go over in the corner here. I'd like to talk to you for a second.
John Hooley:
Right.
Carl Smith:
Is it going to work? I don't know if it's going to work, but it's an idea. That's the thing I think we have right now. We almost have this pure potential of trying to just do different things. I'm really excited about the idea of, again, I said don't try to replicate in-person online, and I'm trying to do that in a way, but this idea of those private conversations, those one-on-one conversations, because you heard something in the bigger group and you said, I want to talk to that person.
John Hooley:
Yeah.
Carl Smith:
I think that's the kind of thing, or even it may end up being in the chat because in a Zoom chat you can select one person. So it may be that you even can do it there and say, hey, we're going to have a break in an hour, I would love to just spin up a quick Zoom so we can talk.
John Hooley:
Yeah. Yeah, I've seen that. I actually started this morning with a Zoom meeting call, hour and a half, people I barely know. We've had some of those interactions like, hey, I'd really love to learn more about what you're doing or ask you about this. So there's definitely potential there.
John Hooley:
In terms of selling the conference, what sort of price points have you been able to sell at?
Carl Smith:
It is so crazy right now. I think the biggest challenge is, I was talking with a friend of mine, Oliver, who runs a magazine and he's working with Shopify right now on some stuff, and I used the phrase empathy versus eating, right? Because it's like you have to be so in tune with where everybody is right now because it's where you are as well, but you also have to eat. So it's this challenge of, and I don't think they're at odds, I think what it truly is is you just have to be a new level of honest and the empathy that you feel for somebody else is also going to be how they feel towards you because of more transparency.
Carl Smith:
It used to be we worry about oversharing. I don't know where that line is anymore between transparency and oversharing, because we start off every conversation with, how are you, and we end it with, stay strong. Right? This is what's new. So in that context, I think we have to start every conversation with what's changed for you and how can I help you now?
Carl Smith:
We were having this conversation yesterday where someone was like, we have a phase two that's scheduled to start and they've slowed down and I don't know how to force it through. I was just, you can't force it through. If you want them to respond to you, you need to just reach out however you do, if it's email, if it's phone, whatever's normal, in the way you connect with them, and say, hey, things are definitely different. I just want to see how we can best service you now. If it's not time for phase two, that's fine. If we can find a new way to keep working and maybe we can defer the payment, you let me know. The rules have changed, we just want to keep moving forward with you.
John Hooley:
Right.
Carl Smith:
Because there are very few people who are going to not reply to that. If you're saying, I'm okay if you say no, you've diffused that whole situation. The other thing, and I can't remember who it was that said this, but the idea of saying at the end of it, I know you'd do the same for me, suddenly makes it reciprocal. Right?
John Hooley:
Yeah.
Carl Smith:
So, John, if I was supposed to come over and paint a room in your house and you're like, we don't want anybody coming over to the house right now because we are distancing of a social variety, I could say, well, you know what? Maybe we could just take a look at the rest of the house online and we could plan out what the colors could be. I just want to keep working with you, I know you'd do the same for me. So is there anything we can do to move forward versus just sit here and be bored? You know? More than likely that person is either going to say, no, I'm going to sit here and be bored, at which point you're off the hook and you move on, or they're going to say, that sounds kind of interesting. Why don't we try that?
John Hooley:
Right. Right, for sure. What about in terms of marketing the conference and selling the conference? Do you think that that sort of empathetic-
Carl Smith:
Oh, that was the question. Yeah.
John Hooley:
Not that what you said wasn't useful. It was. [crosstalk 00:17:16]. Because we're all facing that.
Carl Smith:
Yeah. I think it's kind of the same. We want people to become members. We know that the way forward right now, we've always had members and they've always been great, we're not going to be able to. I mean, we watched our revenue drop 95% overnight. 95%.
John Hooley:
That's rough.
Carl Smith:
We're like everybody else. We're talking with the team about having to go kind of touch and go on stuff. So when it comes to the events, we're experimenting. We did $10 price point for the Q and A's and for the less formal webinar types. The things that are, they're not really a we're going to send out a whole bunch of information. It's going to be much more about ask us questions and we'll tell you what we know. $10. And you know what? We saw about a 30% conversion from people who came to the ticketing page to those who bought. That felt pretty good.
Carl Smith:
Now on a webinar, we've got some more official webinars with really well known speakers, great influencers, great leaders, we're putting those at 25. Now again, if you become a member, which is $19 a month, we've also opened up monthly membership, so that's a change, you get all of this for free.
Carl Smith:
So that's another thing when you start looking at the pricing, we're trying to get to a new mode of being able to hang out, stay around, right? So it's weird when I talk about this, I don't want to sound like we're playing people or trying to figure out what they'll let us have. It's much more about what can they do. $25 has not been a problem for those. Again, we're seeing about a 30-ish percent conversion for people to get to the ticketing page, but much fewer people go to the ticketing page. I don't know if it's the price point or these events are further out.
Carl Smith:
So again, we're really at the beginning of this. It's kind of hard to say. But I'll also say that we will let a speaker give out a free discount code. When we had David and Blair on, they had a 2Bob's discount code that they sent out and we saw maybe 35 people sign up in the next four days. Now they're also both very popular, they've got great followings, so that obviously plays a role. But I think if you're doing something online and there's good value, I mean, you might get to go out to dinner at $10 a shot. We'll see what happens with the other stuff.
Carl Smith:
Now when it comes to trying to do more of an online workshop, we're taking our workshop that was going to be in New York, we had a lot of New York events this year, John. Don't think they're going to happen.
John Hooley:
I'm sorry to hear that.
Carl Smith:
No, it's all right. We had a workshop in-person, that workshop was 699, and we're bringing that down to 499 and for members it'll be 299. Again, we're just stabbing in the dark. What we're really looking at is what seems fair. I mean, pricing is always a dark art, but we're just trying to see what seems fair. And you know what? If nobody buys, we're going to lower it. This is not a time to stand your guns.
Carl Smith:
It's not a time to do things you don't want to do, I'm not saying that. I'm not saying give up on your goals or your values or any of that stuff. But when it comes to what you offer, you're going to have to be flexible to make it through this crisis. Is going to last two weeks or two months or six months? It's going to be different for every industry. For us, mainly we were the event space, although we're an amazing community. In the event space, it could be a year. I mean, honestly, until people are comfortable traveling, we have no idea what's going to happen six months from now if COVID-19 has a low resurgence as people predict. But I would say, when you're doing your workshops, look at your audience, look at what you normally charged, and make sure you come off of it 30%, 40%. For some people, it will be easier, because they don't have to travel.
Carl Smith:
Our bigger events, which would have and did, they were selling for about $4,000 a seat, those are going to come down to the 899 range. One of the things there that I think is really important is if you are going to have people in a room and breakout rooms throughout the whole day, you've got to make sure you give them breaks. You can't have somebody sitting in front of a laptop the whole time.
Carl Smith:
One thing, just to throw out there, that I think makes it really special is once you see the content, people want it, you can reach out to your network to find that either really smart, really popular, whoever it might be, that really understands that content and have them be a special guest. Right? Just for one session. This becomes the type of thing, if you're going to charge more, make sure you're giving more. Make sure it's known, but also leave a little mystery. Right? If you can have somebody that's going to show up in the burnout session, but not tell anybody who it is, and then it turns out to be somebody that the community really loves, right? For us it would be like Sherry Walling, who is this amazing human. She's got a book called The Entrepreneur's Guide to Keeping Your Shit Together, right?
John Hooley:
I worked with Sherry.
Carl Smith:
Oh, she's awesome.
John Hooley:
Yeah.
Carl Smith:
So, okay. Well, don't tell anybody that she's the special guest. But she did email me back today, so she's going to do something with us.
John Hooley:
That's awesome.
Carl Smith:
So I think that's another thing. It's like if you're going to charge more, make sure people get more. You know what? I couldn't have Sherry just show up if we were going to be in New York for one session. It wouldn't be worth it to her, it wouldn't be worth it financially, like the whole thing. But now we can do all that.
Carl Smith:
So I would say put your pricing, lower it slowly. Because raising it is going to be hard. But I would also make sure that you let people know on some level this is crisis pricing. We understand things are different and we want to help everybody.
John Hooley:
Yeah, it's interesting. I spoke with Charles Max Wood about this, and he was pricing conferences like 25 to 100 dollars, and I think you've done a $100 conference.
Carl Smith:
Yeah.
John Hooley:
But his perspective on it was that the clout of the speaker is really what's driving most value, whereas an in-person event, that hallway track, that's [crosstalk 00:23:48].
Carl Smith:
The venue, the space.
John Hooley:
Yeah, it all adds to value.
Carl Smith:
Oh man, New Orleans, when we were at the Orpheum, that theater is just so amazing. So it's like, yeah, you promote the experience. Whereas when you're online, you promote the connection. I think that's absolutely right.
John Hooley:
Yeah. But I mean, the value is still there for a lot of this stuff.
Carl Smith:
Oh, yeah.
John Hooley:
It's really trying to assess what that value is now that it's changed, like trying to get an accurate assessment.
Carl Smith:
Yeah.
John Hooley:
What about on the cost side? Putting on a live event, it's a considerable cost.
Carl Smith:
It's unbelievable, and I'm still trying to get some of those deposits back. So first [inaudible 00:24:30] is easy to say and it's easy to enforce when you have a pandemic, but getting the deposits back, they can say, oh yeah, we can't go into our office because got to shelter at home, and sorry, that's where the checkbook is.
Carl Smith:
But I would say, yeah, the time cost, so it's really an interesting question, John. If you just go flat out, yeah, it's so much cheaper to do an online event. But if that is going to be your main source of revenue or exposure or lead generation or whatever to replace an in-person event, you're going to have to do more. So I don't think the time commitment is going to change and I don't think the exchange is going to go up. You're going to spend more time over more events, more very careful promotion, because, rightfully, you have to be sensitive.
Carl Smith:
But I mean, we've increased our number of sales per week by about 400% in terms of the number of transactions. 400%.
John Hooley:
That's awesome.
Carl Smith:
Which came out to be just under $400.
John Hooley:
Well, don't talk about the second number, just the first number.
Carl Smith:
Well, that's it, right? So you have to realize that they are going to be other things you can do. I will say what has saved us is the amazing relationships with our sponsors, like MailChimp and Envision and some new people who are looking to come on. They hung with us and they said, let's do this. We're actually getting them better engagement, better exposure, with this audience. Where if we're doing a riverboat cruise or if we hire a jazz trio to be the breaks in between sessions, that's really cool, but now they're going to be on these videos with a thank you and watermarks and all that sort of stuff and they're going to be mentioning all the post event stuff. So I think in terms of the cost, it goes way down. In terms of being able to offer value and get paid for it, it's going to be about sponsors.
Carl Smith:
Because the attendees, yeah, you want to put value on it. If somebody pays $10 for something, they're going to show up. If it's free, they're less likely to show up unless that content or the human that's presenting it is like super powerful. So in order to get the right exchange so that the right people are there to hear the message of the sponsor, every sponsor we have is vetted by the community. So that's another thing. It's like I always say, does anybody have a problem with these people? And they will tell you if they do. We've got 8,000 in the community. They tell us.
Carl Smith:
So I think when you get the right sponsors with the right audience, with all of that, you can still, I don't want to say thrive, because we're not there yet, but you can still keep going without a doubt.
John Hooley:
Hmm, and in terms of adding value for these remote events, you mentioned a placement being between sessions, giving them video spots.
Carl Smith:
Yeah.
John Hooley:
You mentioned that box that you're going to send out to make it more of an experience to attend the conference.
Carl Smith:
The Bureau Box, baby. I've wanted to do that for years. In a lot of ways, I think anybody who's a tinkerer, not that we're enjoying the reason, but we've got this opportunity right now to just change everything. So yeah, the Bureau Box, yeah, definitely excited about that.
John Hooley:
Are there any other sponsor or placements that you're using for the live events?
Carl Smith:
Yeah, so one other thing that we can do when we're doing things online that we can't do when we're in person a lot of times is record everything. It's almost a given that we're going to record everything, which means we can transcribe everything. Which means we can actually compartmentalize stuff, curate it, put it into really good notes, which can have logos and thank you's and links and all of that. So now all of your post event followups can have valuable content. That means that anything for sponsors is going to hang out longer.
Carl Smith:
I think I'm really excited with this for our Growth Camp because we're going to be able to curate all of these conversations. It will still be very private, but where an attendee is always jotting down notes, like if you ever come to one of our camps, what I always hear is I took 40 pages of notes, I condensed it into 18 things I thought I might try. I tried three of them, one of them changed everything. Right? So now we'll be able to help those people stay engaged. They'll still be able to take their notes, but now they're going to get this lovely packet at the end that basically is just insights and ideas that the room came up with. We can even brand different pages based on the most relevant service provider, sponsor, whoever it might be.
John Hooley:
Nice. Yeah, that's a fantastic idea. In terms of pitching it to attendees, how are you thinking about your pitch?
Carl Smith:
I would say it's really not a pitch so much as an invitation. I appreciate that it could feel like I'm just sugarcoating it a little bit. A lot of this starts for me this weekend, and only with people that I know really well. I really don't reach out to a bunch of people on the weekend, but times have changed. But it's really about reaching out and just saying, hey, these are the other people are going to be in the room, these are the conversations we're going to have. I know I saw you in the channels talking about this stuff. I think it'd be great if you can join us. Here's the cost. If that's a problem and something you can't do right now, let me know and we'll figure that out. We'd just love to have the right people in the room.
Carl Smith:
That has been what I've said about our bigger events the whole time. We just want the right people in the room. It's not about playing anybody or making them feel special or anything like that. We truly, we don't ask the wrong people to come into the room because the right people will get pissed. Right? So it's like you have to make sure. So when you get that invitation, I think it actually means something. At least that's what I tell myself. Very rarely do I not have somebody respond with either why they can't or why they'd love to.
Carl Smith:
Yeah, I think it's the nature of always being as honest and open as you can and never pushing anyone to do something that they say is not a fit.
John Hooley:
Right. Yeah, I think that's generally wise just in terms of trying to help other people.
Carl Smith:
Just to be a human, I think it's a good plan. Yeah.
John Hooley:
Yeah. So that's more for the camps, right? Where they're small, but they're higher priced. They're that 499, 699?
Carl Smith:
Yeah, that's what we're going for.
John Hooley:
Cool. I think we've covered the tech stack. I think we answered most of my questions. This has been really an eyeful for me, and I know a lot of people in the association space will find it insightful. I really appreciate you taking the time to share.
Carl Smith:
You're welcome, John. I want to share one last thing that I think is really important. Remember that you're going to have people attending from different time zones. So don't plan on 9:00 AM start if California is going to be there and you're in Florida. I'm not saying I did this. It was not me. But remember that you are going to have people in different parts of the world and this is an opportunity. You can take one event and have it three times in different time zones.
John Hooley:
Oh yeah. Yeah, that's a really good insight. That's something else it's hard to do in person.
Carl Smith:
Absolutely.
John Hooley:
Yeah, the time zone thing. I tried to schedule a call yesterday and I went from Central Time to Pacific Midway Time to Pacific Los Angeles Time. Yeah, remote work.
Carl Smith:
Oh, that's crazy. There you go. But thank you so much, John. I truly appreciate it.
John Hooley:
Yeah, thank you Carl.
John Hooley:
So I think we'll stop it there. Again, Carl, thank you for taking the time.
Carl Smith:
Yeah, man.
John Hooley:
Bureau has been really helpful to me, the two events. I wasn't able to make New Orleans, but I was able to make...
