In this episode, I dive into the powerful impact of hosting local workshops for your business. As a solopreneur who's been feeling a bit isolated lately, I share how I'm tackling this challenge head-on by organizing a local workshop.
Here's what you'll learn:
🤝 Connection and Engagement: Discover why face-to-face interactions are irreplaceable and how workshops can combat isolation.
🧠 Knowledge Sharing: Learn about the unique energy exchange that happens when teaching in person and how it differs from online formats.
🏆 Building Authority: Find out how workshops can establish you as an expert in your niche and create valuable marketing assets.
💼 Business Growth: Understand the potential for gaining clients and deepening your own understanding of your subject matter.
📅 Planning Your Workshop: Get insights on choosing your topic, setting objectives, and determining the ideal format and schedule.
🏢 Venue Selection: Learn about the importance of logistics, from room capacity to tech requirements.
📣 Marketing Strategies: Explore effective ways to promote your workshop, including social media, email marketing, and local advertising.
📝 Follow-up Techniques: Discover creative ideas for post-workshop engagement to maintain connections and reinforce content.
🎤 Gathering Feedback: Understand the importance of surveys and how to use participant input to refine your content.
Whether you're looking to break out of isolation, test new ideas, or simply share your knowledge, hosting a local workshop could be your next game-changing move. I'm excited about my upcoming AI workshop, and I hope this episode inspires you to plan your own!
RESOURCES
Don’t miss this episode and let me know your thoughts after you listen. I always love hearing from you. DM me on Instagram @jen_lehner
[00:00:00.550] - Gary Vaynerchuk Hey guys. It's Gary Vaynerchuk. You're listening to the Front Row Entrepreneur Podcast with our girl Jen.
[00:00:10.360] - Jen Lehner Hey there. So recently, we talked about loneliness and isolation as a solopreneur. We discussed that in our recent episode because that has been plaguing me a little bit. I have done a few things to zhuzh things up. One of them is hosting a local workshop. I want to talk about how this can really be a game changer for you in your business and just in the overall way that you see things and the way that you feel about things. The workshop that I'm hosting is about AI, how to use AI in your business and in your life. It's probably not long enough—it's just one hour—but I just want to give people a taste of it. I'm going to be doing it at our local library. Here's why I decided to do it. First of all, this is going to directly connect me with other human beings. It's forcing me to engage with people in real life, and that's always a good thing. Also, being able to share your knowledge in person is really impactful.
Read more...
[00:01:20.320] - Jen Lehner There's an energy exchange that is just not like anywhere else. It's just not the same as teaching on Zoom or in a recorded video. Even if you have 100 or 200 people in the room—which I'm not, I'll have up to about 45 if I pack the room—that's a pretty intimate setting. It's a great opportunity to really test out and refine any ideas that you have about an upcoming product or project in a live setting and get really immediate feedback. It builds authority in your niche because, well, first of all, you will obviously be building authority with the people who are seeing you speak in the front of the room. But then there's the potential for creating really valuable marketing assets, which is exactly what I'm going to do. I will have a photographer there catching some action shots of me teaching in front of a room, and there will be a videographer there just for a little bit to capture some B-roll to use in future marketing. You're capturing yourself as the authority in your niche with those images and that video. Then, even though my workshop is free, there is a lot of opportunity for business growth anyway.
[00:02:44.640] - Jen Lehner Inevitably, when you do something like this, you will gain a few clients. You're also going to be deepening your understanding of whatever it is you're teaching. You've heard of the concept that when you teach, you learn because it forces you to organize and clarify your thoughts. Questions from the participants in the room can really provide you new perspectives and insights. As I think Albert Einstein said, if you can't explain it simply, you just don't understand it well enough. This really forces you to do that. I mean, you could get up there and ramble and be all complicated, and you will get immediate feedback from that as well. This forces us to really be clear with our messaging and how we deliver information. Of course, the more we teach, the more we learn, the more we feel comfortable building on our knowledge. There's so much good that comes from it—an increase in confidence and being a better presenter. I think the benefits just go on and on. Let's talk about planning your workshop. First, you need to know who your target audience is, and you want to choose the right topic. For me, in this case, the topic really chose itself.
[00:04:09.770] - Jen Lehner It's what I'm excited about right now. I'm excited about AI, and I feel like there are a lot of people who don't understand how much AI, for as scary as it is—and it is scary, and for as much damage as it's done and probably will do in the future, unfortunately—there is also so much potential for it to help us in our businesses and in our lives. I'm just genuinely excited about it and genuinely would talk about it all day long without getting paid a cent. I guess I'm creating a captive audience for myself so that I can share this information that I'm so excited about. Then you also want to set clear objectives. Why are you doing this? Do you want to pitch something at the end? Maybe it's a free workshop, and at the end, you want to invite people to come into your group coaching program, or you want them to purchase a course from you or work one-on-one with you or buy real estate from you. But figure out what your objectives are. My objectives from my workshop are to, number one, connect with people. Number two, get them really excited about what AI can do to help them in their lives and business.
[00:05:26.230] - Jen Lehner Number three, I want to get these marketing assets. I want to capture the video and the audio to use in future development of these things that I'm going to teach. Hey, I thought this would be a good point in the conversation to interrupt myself and let you know about our brand new AI Strategy Club. You can learn more about it at frontrowvip.com/ai. Basically, this is a place where we come together and learn AI, learn about ways to use it in our business and our personal lives, as we're discussing today. So check it out. I would love for you to join us. Then you need to think about your format. So obviously, in this case, it's live, right? We've established that we're not talking about a Zoom workshop. This is a local workshop in person. Do you want it to be lecture-style or interactive, hands-on, a little bit of all three? Then you want to determine the ideal length and the schedule. I chose noon, and I don't know if that's going to be a good time. I'm doing a lunch and learn concept. I'm doing it on a weekday. This could be bad.
[00:06:44.300] - Jen Lehner I just started promoting it, so I don't know if I'm going to be able to fill it up, but that time works for me. I am at my best energy level from about 9:00 AM till about 1:00 PM, and then I start to fade. So I definitely wanted to do it within those hours. Doing it at lunchtime, I might be able to get some local working people to come on their lunch break. Then we need to think about the logistics and the venue. So finding the right venue is really important. You want to think about how many people you want, how many people it will accommodate, the location, the amenities, the cost. In my example of the event that I'm hosting, I chose the library. The room will hold up to 49 people. It is centrally located in town. It's going to cost me $40. I'm allowed to bring in refreshments, and they have all the media equipment that I need. There's a screen on the wall, I can plug into their computer to connect my slide deck. They have all the technology that I need in the room. They have good WiFi, but I can't stress to you how important this is.
[00:08:00.110] - Jen Lehner Wherever you go, that really needs to be your first consideration. If you're going to be using a slide deck and you need a screen, then you need to make sure that they have good WiFi. If they don't have their own hardware, you have to make sure that you are allowed to bring in your own equipment because a lot of places have policies about that. Same with refreshments. When you book a place at a hotel, they don't let you usually bring in outside refreshments; they want you to purchase from their caterer. Even if you just get coffee service, it can be really exorbitantly expensive. I would say for a paid event—again, my event is free—I feel completely comfortable doing this at the library. I don't need any bells and whistles. For a one-hour talk, I mean, maybe I'll have some coffee and water there, but I don't really need to have any snacks. In fact, I don't want them to be distracted because we only have one hour to really dig into the content. But if you are going to charge for your event, then I'm a fan of going all the way in the other direction.
[00:09:03.900] - Jen Lehner If I'm going to host a live paid event, I want people to walk away feeling like they got out of it way more than they paid. I want the venue to be lovely. I want there to be fresh flowers. I want there to be delicious treats, food, appetizers, whatever. I want them to have a takeaway little memento, whether it's a journal or a pen or some nice takeaway. But that's just me. There's everything in between. If you are going to charge, it really is important to pick the right price point. You have to work backwards. First, we have to find out how much it costs. Let's say you have a location, and actually, the event is inspired by this location. It's the reason you want to have an event because you love this place so much. Obviously, you're going to call the catering director or the event manager, and you're going to find out the numbers. Then there's a lot of hidden numbers on top of that as well. It might be parking, it might be taxes, service fees—all of that stuff. You need to make sure you know exactly how much you're going to be paying for all the materials, the supplies, if you have to rent anything like a projector or a big screen.
[00:10:25.710] - Jen Lehner You need to know what all your costs are. Then you need to understand the refund policy. There's always the possibility that we could put down the deposit, book the room, schedule the event, and nobody shows. I don't think that's going to happen to you because you're going to do your homework. But things happen. There are pandemics that come along. For example, we just never know. We want to make sure that we have an out. If you're hosting an event that's quite pricey, then usually, they'll have something like you can cancel as long as you do it not within 30 days of the event. Once you hit 30 days until the event starts, no cancellations. But 60 days before the event, you can—or 55 days or whatever—you can cancel with no penalty. Then what I like to do in a situation like this is you let the people who are signing up for your event know that there are no refunds after your cutoff date. Your cutoff date is actually earlier than their cutoff date. That way, if Betty Sue signs up for your event, she pays a $1,000 deposit or $500 deposit, then she has to cancel for whatever reason—especially if you only have limited spots.
[00:11:53.210] - Jen Lehner That can really hurt you. So this gives you time to fill that spot and resell it to someone else. Or if, again, you end up in the horrible scenario where people just aren't signing up for your event, and you've done the math and realized that you need at least 10 people to be profitable on this event, then you can get out of the event and get your deposit back from the event space. But those things—those high numbers—really are more for retreats. They don't really apply to a day workshop. What we're talking about today, in my mind, is really more of a one- to three-hour event, maybe half-day, where you're covering a very specific topic, and it's very straightforward and not super complicated. All right, let's talk about marketing your workshop. Well, you would just market it the same way you market anything else that you do. But here, this is one of my favorite things to market. I love to market a local event because it's really way easier than marketing anything else, in my opinion. Think about it. We often ignore our local network, especially those of us who sell courses online and all of that.
[00:13:08.060] - Jen Lehner Really to our own disadvantage, we would be wise to really use that network more. But first of all, with Facebook ads, it's really easy to just target by zip code. In my upcoming event, I know that I'm going to be really targeting my little town, Shaker Heights, and then I'm telling Facebook to go 25-mile radius outside of that. It's really easy to get in front of exactly who you want to be in front of and eliminate the people who you don't want the ad to show to. The other thing that is just great—and you may have noticed when you post on your Facebook personal profile, you get way more action than you do on your Facebook business profile. And guess what? Now's the time when you can really make that work for you for your business. You could go ahead and post your promotion on your personal profile, call out who you want to come. Because now, with all the AI Facebook, if you put... I recently read a study about this, and I don't remember who published it, but basically, what they said was when you make it a point on your promotional stuff on Facebook to call out your audience in the copy, then it increases the chance that Facebook is going to show it to those people, which just makes sense.
[00:14:26.510] - Jen Lehner On my post, I wrote, "Hey, Clevelanders," or something like that, or even, "Hey, Cleveland," or "Hey, Cleveland entrepreneurs." But I'm going to call them out on this Facebook post, and then I'm going to post it. Then I'm going to add some extra like, "Hey, if you have a friend who owns a business or is curious about AI, please share this with them." Even if the people you're connected with locally on your Facebook profile aren't the exact right match for your workshop, they know someone in town who is, so they'll start tagging people locally, and that's a huge help. And guess what? Your local coffee shop, as long as it's not Starbucks, but your locally owned coffee shops and businesses and cafés, they still have bulletin boards. You can have old-fashioned flyers and stick them on the bulletin board. You can ask the event sponsor or the event venue if they have a newsletter or a bulletin board where you can post. You can use Eventbrite, you can use Facebook Events, because Facebook events show up as local events. You can use Meetup.com. You can use Craigslist. Obviously, you can use your existing email list.
[00:15:46.570] - Jen Lehner Let's talk about email for a second. Your email marketing for this is going to be very similar as it is to anything else. For your email marketing, the logistics on the digital end look like this: Someone signs up from a landing page. We just have a very simple landing page. On the thank-you page, we remind them to add the event to their calendar, and there's a little button where they can click to add the event to their calendar. It says, "If you'd like to chat more about AI, please make sure to join my free online classroom." Then I'll link to my free Facebook group. Then it says, "Need help? If you have any questions or any further assistance, please don't hesitate to reach out to us." I put our support email. I always say never squander the thank-you page. Probably be even better—I just haven't done it—to have a video on there, really excited, getting them excited for the event, because since they're not paying, you know how that goes. People tend to drop off. I'm probably going to overbook this event knowing that there's a percentage that are not going to show up because they did not pay.
[00:16:52.010] - Jen Lehner Then in our follow-up emails, after they register, they're going to get a confirmation email with all of the details again—what time, where, the address, and any other relevant information. Then as we get closer to the event, we also ask for their phone number on the opt-in page so that we can send them text reminders. Then as we get closer to the event, there's more information I want to tell them. I probably am going to want them to bring either a laptop or an iPad or, at the very least, a smartphone and have them download, for example, ChatGPT. Little reminders like that—maybe whatever about parking—but they'll get those as we get closer to the event. Obviously, now that you have all of these people's emails, you have grown your email list a little bit with a very warm set of leads. Now you know exactly who these people are. After the event—oh boy, there are so many fun things that you could do. But before follow-up, let me mention one last thing that I forgot is that if you have the time, it would be smart to have another person there to just ask some of the participants after the fact on video if they'd be comfortable to just sharing what they learned or their favorite thing about the workshop.
[00:18:20.770] - Jen Lehner You're not going to ask every single person, but just to catch a few people who maybe you notice were particularly engaged or people who will come up to you after the fact to usually talk to you, share their feedback, or ask extra questions. Those are the people you want to just whip out your iPhone and say, "Hey, do you mind if I just ask you a few questions? And then I might want to share this in my marketing?" I've never had anyone tell me no. That's something really important to remember to do and add to your checklist. All right, now with the follow-up. One thing that you could do if you own a product like Kajabi—that's what I use to run my business on, I love it, it's where all my courses are and my membership site and all of that good stuff—or you have Teachable or anything like that. One thing you might want to do is let them know, give them a special link at the end of the presentation, and let them know that they can watch the replay there, or you have other resources or ways to learn more where you might have more content.
[00:19:25.410] - Jen Lehner But let them know that the slide deck, for example, that you used in the presentation is going to be available, and they're going to get free access to this product. You make it a product that they have to log in to your world. When they log in to go and access that product or the replay or the slide deck or the extra resources, they're also going to be able to see beautifully presented. Because those platforms allow you to make everything look so pretty, they're going to see off to the right, let's say, the logo for your podcast or a button that shows how to work with you or to schedule a one-on-one session with you. We want to be really smart about how every step of the way, we're making this work for us and for them. You could package everything up beautifully, have a thank-you message sitting in that portal, "So good to see you. I hope you learned a lot. Here are some key takeaways," or whatever. You could create a custom infographic from what you had discussed that day or some visual summary. You could create a physical action pack with relevant tools or resources that you could mail out.
[00:20:45.160] - Jen Lehner You could have a virtual implementation happy hour scheduled a week after or a month after to follow up with everybody. You could create an exclusive podcast episode for all of your attendees. You could send a handwritten note in the mail with a small relevant gift. This will require you to collect their physical addresses at some point, which I highly recommend. Maybe you do it at the event or on an intake form after they sign up. You could create a photo mosaic of workshop moments. You could offer them a free 15-minute office hours call to process through any remaining questions that they have. But basically, these are all ideas that just go beyond the standard thank-you email and provide various ways to reinforce the workshop content, show personal appreciation, encourage implementation of what it was that they learned, and maintain the connection that you established during the workshop. I bet you have a lot of ideas that I didn't even cover, and I would love to hear them. As I was mentioning the intake form, I realized that I forgot that in the beginning. As opposed to editing this and going back and trying to figure out where I need to insert that, I'm just going to say now that after they register for the event, and before the event, is a wonderful opportunity to ask them whatever questions are going to help you to deliver the content that they're looking for and figure out where they are before they ever walk through the door.
[00:22:32.240] - Jen Lehner Are they beginner, intermediate, or advanced as it relates to your topic? Their general demographic. Whatever it is you need to deliver the best workshop that you can, you want to ask on some simple intake form. But remember—not too many questions. Then also, at the end of your event, after it's over, really important to survey them about the content that you delivered so that you have feedback so that you can this content into whatever it needs to be. We definitely want to be thinking about repurposing these workshops into something else. Even if it starts off as paid and not as free, even if it starts off as paid, this is going to give you an opportunity to develop it with their feedback, decide what to delete, what to keep, what to expand on—a really important part of the process. Okay, well, I hope this has you a little bit excited about hosting a workshop. Remember, they don't have to be fancy. It doesn't have to be... I mean, I'm doing mine in the public library that is two blocks from my house. It could be fancy, it could be not fancy, but mostly it should be something that you're excited about doing.
[00:23:55.790] - Jen Lehner I would love to hear if you do decide to do this and I'd love to hear how it goes. If you have any questions, obviously, you can email support@jenlehner.com. But even better, I would love to hear from you in a DM on Instagram. That is the best way to reach me. I love when people leave me voice messages over there, and then we can chat back and forth. My Instagram handle is @jen_lehner. Until next time, see you in the front row.
