In March of 2022 I hosted my first workshop, called Radical Strategy: Designing Sustainable Business Cycles.
I had 8 register and 4 people attend, from my email list of 117 subscribers.
And I kept hosting a free workshop (now called the Deeper Business Dialogues) once a month for going on 2 years.
Over 500 people have registered for at least one class, with sometimes up to 70 registering each month. So when you host one and only a handful of people show up… keep going!
And 90 attendees have been a past or present client, Deeper Foundations cohort participant, or Deeper Business member.
It’s the highest leverage activity I’ve ever done in my business.
And I’ve never charged for them, for two reasons.
- I want people to be able to access knowledge without a high price tag or sitting through an insufferable “webinar that’s really a sales pitch.”
- Revenue generation isn’t the role of workshops in my business. And I’m prioritizing growth over monetization (because it’s hard if not impossible to do both at the same time).
The role(s) of Workshops/Roundtables
If you’re an expertise-based business (especially those serving individual purchasers), workshops can be a powerful tool in your marketing portfolio.
List Growth and Connection
The greatest honor any business owner can receive is a referral. And you know what’s easy to send a referral to? Something free.
Especially in this AI world where it’s so hard to know who to trust, it can be a lot easier to check out someone’s free work to see if they are someone you want to learn from. And it doesn’t risk as much from the referrer. If they didn’t find the workshop valuable? They’re only out the time, not the money.
And as a first step, compared to a lead magnet you might download once and then forget about? They’re spending an hour with you, not 30-seconds reviewing and setting aside a PDF.
An Invitation to Deepen
Whenever someone asks to learn more about what I do, I always have another event to invite them to that can deepen the relationship. They get to see me in my element (teaching) and walk away with a lot of value in an event I’m already hosting anyways. I’m not relying on email or social to build the relationship, we’re doing it in a way that builds trust and rapport much more quickly.
And frequent attendees, especially those who speak up? I get to know you, even if you're not a paid client. It's a two-way dialogue, not a one-way monologue.
Building and Testing Business Assets
When the book comes out later this year, frequent Dialogue attendees will recognize much of the content. Where better to test out content, frameworks, and teachings than on a live call with humans? I’m forced with my own deadline to formalize and articulate my own thoughts before sharing them with a screen full of Zoom faces. I can see where my content needs to be adjusted. You’ll also see me writing a lot about what I want to teach in my newsletters every week as I research and prepare.
When the workshops go well? These are now assets I can take as workshops to other communities. And every community I presented in had seen me teach before so they knew what they were getting. (Want me to guest teach in your community? Email and we’ll set it up!).
Buying Signals
Workshops can be a powerful signal of interest from people who are intrigued about you, especially paid workshops. While I don’t have paid workshops yet, paying for a workshop means they’ve signaled not just interest, but intent to purchase - because they’ve already purchased something from you. With a larger quantity of attendees, buying or purchasing a paid tier for an offering often signals more commitment to follow up with them for the next step. But even if/when I introduce paid workshops, I’d have to sell a whole lot of $50 tickets in order to equal the revenue from one private client - and I didn’t want to put up that potential barrier to someone attending a class.
Finally, workshops can be a formal business model
Especially if your time is limited - you run another business, you do fractional client work, or you otherwise are limited on time from other paid work - workshops can be a formal business model.
Olly Richards is a great example. He runs StoryLearning, a language education company, and burst on to the business-building scene in late 2023 with a $1M business case study doc. He primarily makes money in mentoring other 7-figure online educators. But he sells a bunch of $100 workshops - as a buying signal/lead qualifier but also with his audience size, can make $5,000-$10,000 a pop. Of course, he has almost 20,000 subscribers on his list. I don’t.. not quiiiiite yet.
The trick here? Try not to serve too many different audiences. It can diminish your positioning or fracture your focus if your workshops are serving a different kind or caliber of audience than who normally invests with you.
Not ready for a monthly workshop?
You certainly don’t have to teach a fully fledged master class each month.
But what you can do?
Gather people together regularly.
Alternate between showcasing your expertise, answering questions, and holding space or connecting attendees to each other.
Instead of “always be closing”, always be inviting people to step further into your world, in a forum that you can consistently host.
And don’t give up when the first few are lightly attended. Build the familiarity, build the systems, and build momentum.