Hosting your own events doesn’t need to be intimidating or expensive.  You can start with a one day 3 to 6 hour event to prove your concept before you try something as pricey as a 3 day event. Here are tips and recommendations for making your first event a success from experiencing on both the hosting and participant ends of events.   I invited you to a free live training on the three steps to fill your calendar as a healer so you can support yourself and your family and still have time off, go to: https://www.highpaidhealers.com  

Tips for creating your own events.

I’m sure you've been to some events where your energy got dragged down and you may know may or may not know the reason why. Here are some tips for doing your event without losing your shirt and have  everybody walk away extremely happy they came 

How to have a successful in person event. 

An online event works, but an in person event is way more effective at enrolling your clients.  It’s a little like a meetup but there's a little more something to it. A meetup will last only one to one and a half hours where your own event can be six to seven hours.  

And this is what I would suggest for the first time doing it, a one day six hour event. Don't think that you can do a four day event right off the bad. Four-day events, including getting a staff to help you, having a crew record your event with the right equipment, and booking the hotel ballroom can easily run you 30 to 40 to 50 thousand dollars.  Unless you have a proven system or program that costs a minimum of $10 thousand dollars, you won’t make your money back.  

As a healer, there are some things you can market in a one day event.   You don't have to do classes or teach what you do. First,  a single day event will help you with proof of concept.  After doing this successfully a few times, you can expand the event by inviting other healers and bringing other speakers and programs into your events. 

Let's just focus on the one day event for now. 

Book a hotel space or a meeting space, start with a small meeting space that will hold up to 50 people on tables.  One good thing about booking the hotel space is they usually already have liability insurance. 

You definitely need to check with them to make sure because if somebody trips and falls or gets hurt somewhere in the hotel, they can sue you and you can lose your shirt. I heard this true story from a man this happened to.   He did his very first big event, after which he lost a half a million dollars.   This was everything that he had saved up and had earned from the last four or five years. 

After you get your insurance squared away, you’ll  want to name your event a unique name so people can relate to it.  I called my first event “ love and money with Dr. Anastasia Chopelas.” 

Advertise your event ahead of time  to bring people to it. 

This way you can advertise it more easily on a pamphlet or flier that you can hand out at your local networking meetings. You can also advertise it in a localized facebook event, on Eventbrite or on Craigslist event.  For your first event, you can advertise it cheaply with online locations that already has a search engine and traffic. Check to see whether you can do your event on meetup or not. 

When you book your hotel room, do it for a Saturday. Saturday doesn't have a lot of traffic. I live in Los Angeles: traffic is something that you need to take into consideration.  You might be living in a city where it doesn’t significantly slow down your attendees. 

Record your event the easy way.

For the first event, try a six to seven hour block of time starting at a relatively late hour, like 10am. That way you give people time to comfortably get up and drive to your event. Make sure that you get a parking deal with the hotel or the event space. I found a place that had free parking.  The modest room was about $500, which isn't much when you compare it to what it would cost to run an all day 3-day event.  That’s just a drop in the bucket in comparison: one sale will make up for that.

Find someone to  help you record it, if not on a good quality video camera, using a smartphone or tablet on a tripod.  You can get a lapel mic that plugs right into those that will provide you with good quality sound from across the room.  These mics run about $20 and provide decent quality sound. 

You definitely want to have that event recorded. You will drop gems and pearls of wisdom that you can then take, edit, put on YouTube, Facebook or other social media to help draw more clients to you. 

You also must plan out the entire event. 

Mine was three hours, a lunch break, and then three more hours. Plan it out in 90 minute bursts, then breaks.  On breaks  can also assign people to meet someone new.  Have them ask each other a particular question with someone they've never met before. And this really helps raise the frequency of the group. 

90 minutes is just about right because people will focus better with breaks.  Once you start going past the scheduled time, they will get antsy. And I've been to events where someone said it was going to take two hours for a certain segment but ended lasting three and a half because they kept talking. And what happens is that once you start moving past the time that you have allotted, people start getting impatient and stop listening.  You are now going out of integrity.  When you go out of integrity, people start getting really nervous and stop trusting you. People do not have a good time.  

I remember an event where it was supposed to finish up by 5pm. At 8pm, we were still in the room and people started talking with one another and stopped listening. I got up and left. It was not worth it anymore because my energy was shot.  He was so out of integrity.   If he had said in the beginning the event lasts until 8 pm, it would have been okay. 

Nothing shifts energy faster than going out of your time slot.  And nothing is that important to keep teaching.  You can be selling your product once you’ve demonstrated its amazingness.  

Some thoughts on what to do during your all day event

Here’s my take on it and what I did: Do a little teaching and then a demo.Maybe include an arrival meditation and a departing ritual.  You could include a bit of writing their thoughts down, journaling, some self evaluation on a chart.  You could also include reading them because people love to hear about themselves. 

I handed out a wheel of “fortune,” the success wheel I called it, where they evaluated themselves on how they took care of their health, how satisfied they were with their relationships, how well they expressed their creativity, and their spirituality, etc. If anybody was unsure of their self evaluation,  I would do a reading on them. 

You can have them stand up, do deep breathing exercises,  expand their auras or fields,  and get into a power stance. There's so many things that you can do to help break up them sitting in the chair. They can journal something and share it with a neighbor and then bring it back to sharing their ahas.   

Your audience will want to maintain a relationship with you because of your event

When your audience has had a good time, they want you to sell something so they can keep up the fun relationship they had with you.   I did a pitch at the end of mine and sold them into an 8 week phone course.  Half of my audience bought the program called “Diamond Enriched Life Program”.  They also got a free appointment with me in the end: have them fill out a form at the end with an appointment schedule. You can have private conversations with them to answer their questions and perhaps downsell thim into something else.

I sold that course for 497 right the first time.   The next time I sold it for 697.  In both case, I had about 27 people in the room and sold 13 of them. And so of course you see the $400 that it costs me to rent the room was easily recouped with the 497 times 13. 

The proof of concept worked really really well. I also upsold many of these people into higher level courses, so made much more than just the investment in the space and materials.  

As healers, you can offer them a special group healing program focusing on what you do best.  It would be way less then working with you individually but you receive more because you have a one to many program.

You can have three options, group healing, mixed group and individual, and then individual.  Most people will probably take option B which is what they tend to do but many will take option C. 

Events were worth my time and monetary investment

Each time I had an event, my return on my investment was about 10 X.  Projectors, screens and mics are expensive to rent. FYI, You can get a mic with a speaker for about the same price as it would cost to rent them.

If the room is small, you really don't need a mic. I didn’t use a projector the first time around.   I had round tables for my audience, which is great for interacting with one another. If you have an oblong table, the person at one end doesn't interact with one at the other.  Round tables encourage crosstalk, which makes it much more fun for your audience.  This is something to consider. 

It can get expensive to advertise your event.  Give yourself at least 2 to 3 months of chatting with others.  You can mention it in your regular networking meetings, and as mentioned before, you can use Eventbrite, Facebook events, on your social media, and Craigslist.  

 Improve your show up rates using these tips

Show up rates will be low unless you do something about it.  Get them to register in one of two ways: charge a small fee, like $27 to  $47.  They have a little skin in the game and you tend to get a100% show up rate. The other way to do it is to create a 30 day trial in your software. They won't be charged until 30 days later, so they're not charged if they come but if they don't show up, you let the charge go through. It's free to come, pay to “no show”. I’ve done this both ways and it works well.  I had 100% show up. So those are two ways to really help bring people in and have them show up.

Standout Quotes:

• "Creating your own 6 to 7 hour event allows you to demonstrate your abilities and form better relationships with your attendees."
• "Tip: Have someone record your event, so you’ll have a recording of the gems and the pearls of wisdom that fall out of your mouth.  You can use them on YouTube or Facebook to draw more clients to you." 
• "Tip: advertising your event can be creating a pamphlet to hand out or posting it on Craigslist or EventBrite." 
• "Tip: In your own event, do a little teaching then do a demo, like a meditation, a healing, or have them journal and talk about it." 
• "Tip: when booking the hotel space, check to see they already have liability insurance."
• "Tip: Start your 6-hour event at a relatively late hour like 10am on a Saturday to allow people to arrive comfortably."
• "Tip: you can sell a pricier package at an event. Those that don’t buy, send around a sign-up sheet for an appointment to speak privately with them." 
• "Tip: Selling a group healing is less costly for healing clients but allows you to leverage your time."
• "Tip: To increase attendance at your event, charge a small fee like 27 or $47."