The $200,000 Mistake

So as you guys know, the other day I ran a live webinar event for one of my clients.

I mentioned it a few days ago, so if you missed that email you can go view it now in the archive here.

In today’s email, I thought I’d shed some light on some HUGE mistakes I made during this webinar, so you can apply it for your next live event.

Maybe it’ll make you the $200,000 that I lost.

Now - I want to start this email by saying the webinar was still a success in some capacity.

We collected nearly $40,000 on the event and booked over 40 backend sales calls in which we have a 30% upgrade rate at the moment, on a $4,000 package.

This means there’s still a possibility to clear upwards of $90,000 or more from this live event, especially when you consider that we’re still making offers on the backend which I’ll talk about shortly.

However, this didn’t meet my standards by a long shot and I was pretty pissed about it.

You see, on this webinar, I made some base KPI’s that I knew for certain we’d hit.

This included a 35% show rate, and a 15% CTR on the actual offer itself, based on these metrics we would’ve cleared over $136,000 on the front end alone excluding all upsells.

We actually exceeded the show-rate KPI, so in the first few minutes, things were looking promising.

I was already envisioning myself in the master suite of the nicest hotel in my city before sundown, recording a YouTube video overviewing the success of the webinar.

But here’s when things took a dramatic turn for worse…

After a few moments I checked the chat and I spotted a message which stated:

“Who else is here from India”

And almost instantly there were a bunch of replies saying “me”.

If you’re in the space of info-marketing you can clearly see why this especially is a bad sign.

At this point, I realized mistake number 1.

Which os NEVER misconstruing organic metrics vs. paid metrics.

Now this is something I inherently know, I’ve run many promotions that have generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in one lump-sum however I didn’t consider organic metrics vs. paid metrics during this specific event.

And this grave mistake cost me a brand new Patek.

This brings me to my next point which is…

The art of thinking.

When you’re running a business things can get hectic which is obviously simply a reflection of your own setup.

And man, things got really really hectic planning this webinar which almost literally took me out of my role as a CEO and into the role of a COO.

By the way, I already pay someone extremely well to play the role of a COO so there’s no room for me to play that role as well.

You see, your highest ROI task as a business owner isn’t creating automations or workflows, pushing sales in the door, or even communicating with your team.

In fact - I’d even argue that communicating with your team too much is actually extremely low ROI.

The biggest lever you can actually pull in your business is simply thinking.

Yup, just thinking.

Prior to this webinar, I didn’t really give myself much time to think, not nearly as much as I should’ve.

And if I had just given myself time to think I would’ve thought of the obvious which is…

1. Make specific KPI’s based on organic traffic 

2. View the metrics in our tracking software and weigh the US base vs. 3rd world base and make proper adjustments to the marketing strategy

3. Make the webinar offer open in another tab, instead of the same tab

Now there are a lot more things I should’ve and could’ve thought about, however, I let my setup get sloppy which reflected in our performance.

This also segways perfectly into the next point of today’s email which is PPP (proper preparation prevents poor performance).

Leading up to this webinar things were a mess to say the least.

Such as our SMS sending getting flagged the day of the webinar, our email sending software limiting our sending capacity, backend order automations, failed payment automations, and even the backend upgrade sales script.

To give you a grasp of how much of a mess things were - we didn’t even have the order confirmation automations on until 20 minutes into the webinar.

I saw the test slack automation finally come in once we got into the story section of the webinar.

This appalled me.

And also showed me how much more we need to dial in our systems, and how much more we need to invest into scaling our systems.

For context just this month alone we’ve invested over 5-figures into our systems at the agency and over 252 hours, but we clearly need to invest more.

And I’d advise you to do the same, so you can always perform at the highest level when god calls you to the stage.

Before we end this email, I want to leave you with one more point and I’d say this is actually the most important by far.

This is the philosophy of idea meritocracy.

Said best by Ray Dalio, a billion dollar investor - idea meritocracy is a system where the best ideas win no matter who proposes them.

This basically means, that no decision should be simply made based on hierarchy and no title should add strength to any idea itself.

Instead, idea meritocracy is a culture in which ultimate truth is the determining factor and leaders within the company accept humility and the simple fact that their not always right.

I’ve actually ran into this problem for quite some time and I believe that by incorporating this culture into my company we could’ve made more money on this webinar.

As a founder, you can find that sometimes you may be stubborn. 

You feel entitled, and you feel that your ideas are the ultimate truth and critical decisions should be made based on your ideas.

Well - I’m here to tell you that this is the completely wrong approach you should take in your company.

Recently I hired an executive assistant in the company, you can call him my prodigy.

My goal and objective is to work him like crazy in the company while having him shadow me and the team so he can run his own company successfully.

This person in particular mentioned a few tips on how we should structure this webinar a few weeks ago.

Want to know what he said?

I literally have no f*cking clue.

Thinking about this made me realize how many valuable tips I possibly disregarded or didn’t even consider because of my own ego.

That in itself - could’ve potentially saved this webinar from the disaster that it was (per my standards).

That’s it for this email, now before I go I promised you something special.

You can click the link here to find the full video breakdown on how I used psychology to make over $500,000 in 60 days.

I made this video exclusively for this list - so make sure to watch it and give me your feedback.

Talk soon,

Malcolm