Overview:

Brendan shared how he leveraged data scraping and events to build influence in regional areas. He discussed scraping databases from Google, Yellow Pages and LinkedIn to find contact information for local businesses. Brendan then used this data to fill over 30 networking events across various cities in Australia. The events helped connect businesses and also generated sales leads for a business coaching client. An interesting point was how Brendan created an Instagram account to engage local businesses in the months before his Sunshine Coast event. This helped promote the event and increased attendance.

Takeaways:

• Brendan leveraged various platforms like Eventbrite, SMS, LinkedIn, and data scraping technologies to book events with little to no advertising spend.
• He scaled up his event business by creating business breakfast events in different regional areas and building databases of local businesses through extensive data scraping.
• Scraping databases from sources like Google, Yellow Pages, and LinkedIn was a key part of gathering contact information for targeted outreach.
• Automating parts of the data validation process through custom software allowed Brendan to significantly speed up database cleaning.
• SMS, email, and direct LinkedIn messages were used to invite local businesses to the events. Referral strategies helped boost attendance.
• Building an Instagram following in targeted areas helped promote events to local businesses who followed back.
• Brendan ran over 30 networking events across various cities on the east coast of Australia for a business coaching client.
• Post-event, leads went through a filtering and sales process for the business coaching client.
• Virtual and live events both have opportunities, and COVID has made business models more flexible.
• Niche targeting and relationship building, like what Brendan discussed, can be critical for certain industries and clients.

Automatically-Generated Transcription:

Let's, let's move on to our second presenter today, which is Brendan Goldbe and what's quite unique about what Brendan's doing.

I was chatting with him a couple of months ago and he's telling me about all these growth hacking techniques he's using, which are, uh, are the free or almost free to fill events.

For instance, this month he put 90 people who paid into a room with $0 ad spend.

And today what he's gonna be sharing is how he leverages off platforms like Eventbrite, SS m s, LinkedIn and Data Scraping technologies to book events.

Solid.

Over to you Brendan.

I'll make you co-host and yeah, hand the reins over.

Yep.

Suppose should be able to share my screen.

Yeah, I'm just trying make you co-host.

There we go.

Ah, yep, yep.

Ah, there we go.

Pick a screen.

Every screen's a winner.

Okay.

Yeah, so I guess to, to start off, what I might do is if I can take a preference to start with that, had I met Johan six months ago, things would've been a lot easier for me, but, we'll, I'll give you a bit of an idea of a project that I've just, um, recently completed.

Hopefully you can see the, the PowerPoint presentation's definitely not as fancy as Johan, so it was always gonna be a tough man to follow.

Um, so basically, um, very quickly, my story was, um, seven years ago actually.

Sorry.

No, it's normal.

It's more than nine years ago now.

It is.

I was working for a document management company and I was in a situation where I needed to start generating leads and the whole going to the Chamber of Commerce thing wasn't working.

I basically said to the guys, I said, look, does anyone wanna have coffee with me on Friday on my LinkedIn?

And 30 people turned up, and then the following month I did the same and 60 people turned up, and the third month we had a, we had to move away from coffee and get back into the drinking arrangement and we had 130 people turn up.

That was my forte into creating events.

And at the same time, it was my forte into a two year period where I built my LinkedIn from about 500 connections to just over 10,000 with a primary focus on actually connecting to people locally, creating geographical influence within a very, within another town of Toowoomba, which is two hours in land from Brisbane.

So, so that was the start of, of my journey and why I'm here today showing you some of the things that I worked out.

So in September last year, uh, I, I ran a couple of events for a business coach last year who basically, I had him as my guest speaker to one of my business breakfast.

The first one, I think we had 110 people at the business breakfast, and then he came as a guest speaker and converted at over 10% to his clients at that particular event.

And then we were like, oh, that went pretty well.

So we put on a dinner.

So we did a four-course dinner in, oh, sorry, lemme start again.

It was actually a two course dinner with a drink, sorry, in Toowoomba when we had 210 people at the dinner.

And then, yeah, he converted really well outta that as well.

So that sort of started the relationship from there.

And then he came back to me in a month or two later and he said, do you reckon you can create an event in a place that you're not very well known?

And I said, oh, I can give it a go.

So I, I spent a couple of weeks and put on a business bre uh, sorry, a dinner, uh, at the Sunshine Coast of which we had 130 people turn up for that particular dinner.

So sort of triggered some discussions that came from that.

And the, the scary part was back in, I think it was the start of December 1st, first week of December, he came back to me and he said, what do you reckon you could do?

You reckon you could run 36 events in 90 days all the way from Darwin to Adelaide?

And at that point it just blew my brain.

My, the idea of being able to run that many events in that shorter period was, was crazy considering I'd just spent three to three to four weeks putting on one event in the sunny coast and we were putting, like, we were putting on up to four events a week.

So essentially that was the problem that I needed to solve, and I needed to scale that particular problem.

So what I had to do was we created these events that were a business breakfast that were located in a range of different areas, and we had to create a, uh, at the start of December, I had zero database.

Like I, I had no database, I had nowhere to start, no preexisting relationships.

And these locations were not, you can build a database pretty easy in country area, sorry, in re sorry, city areas.

But trying to create databases in regional areas is actually, um, a lot more difficult than you would think.

Um, so what I had to do once I identified the problem that I had, the next step was actually to identify who actually holds the databases of these particular areas and what does it take to actually get hold of them and filter them and things like that.

I quickly identified that in order to actually create influence within these areas and be able to get a really good database, I knew that Google Maps has a, you know, is probably 90%, um, accurate on most of their sort of locations and the data that they have 'em, but they don't have email addresses.

You, you've got a second stage where you've got a, you've essentially got a scrap databases for the email address, and then you've got things like yellow pages, LinkedIn, just straight Google search grunt work from a VA perspective.

And then you've got lots of other database type programs, zoom info, find that leads Nova Lucia get prospect comment, obviously from Johan, sort of things would be added into that particular category now as well.

So once I identified those data locations, the next step was really around what's the procurement strategy for those particular type of scraping.

I was in a situation where I went out to the market and I said, this is the data I need.

And then, and basically had to get some pricing on getting that data.

And that was getting, once I outlined pretty clearly what I needed just for the scraping side of things, I was up for 20, 30, 40 grand for the particular types of scrape that I was looking at, and particularly because of the volume and the speed at which I needed to acquire that data.

So I had to decide in that particular time, was I gonna outsource it and pay it or was I actually gonna learn how to do it myself?

And coming from an IT networking background, I actually went down the, the rabbit hole of actually building out a, a scraping room is probably what you would call it, where we, we had up to 12 computers running full-time scraping with multiple VMs.

We were changing proxy addresses every 30 seconds roughly.

So a fair bit of work from an IT perspective to, to set it all up and the hardware requirements for that.

But yeah, so we, I learned a lot of skills within that, within that period of time about how do you set it up, how do you segregate it off your network, how do you, what each particular type of platform that you're scraping from will allow you to scrape at different speeds.

You'll, you've got things like yellow pages, which are really highly set up to stop you from scraping.

There's a certain, there's ways around it, but you've gotta, you've gotta work through and, and sort them out.

And then it's all about what timing you have to actually scrape these databases and where you're actually gonna store the actual data.

When you do scrape it.

Most of the scrapings you'll find will come down as C S V files, but you've gotta also understand that a scraping is just a search.

You might say, look, I wanna search for, say, accountants in Sunshine Coast or something like that.

It'll give you, it might give you 150 accountants who are actually in the Sunshine Coast, and then the last 50 or a hundred that it gives you, it's expanded to Brisbane or it's expanded to Gold Coast or whatever.

There's a filtering process past that as well.

At some point I decided that, hey, I've gotta sit down and, and learn it.

And that's, that was a, a piece of expertise that I, I've learned from there.

Once I've learned how to do it, it was all about identifying the parameters that you wanna scrape there, you parameters you wanna scrape for, and how you execute that.

I figured out that Google's got 3,942 different categories of businesses that you can actually like categories for businesses.

So if you wanna scrape Google, do a really deep scrape on Google.

I just did a deep scrape of Toowoomba.

We basically had all the computers running for, I think it was nearly three weeks solidly.

So we had to aircon the room just for the fact that the amount of power we were consuming and the amount of heat that was being generated from all the computers running.

And one, yeah, once, you know, if, if you get to that point, that's a really deep scrape, which is what I wanted for my Toowoomba stuff.

Whereas for the project that I just did, we had 50 categories, which were our primary categories of business that we were scraping for, and we were scraping for those 50 categories in each one of the locations.

Then, then it comes around to how much of it can you automate to a certain degree.

There was a certain aspect of it that I could set and forget, but scraping is very much not a, uh, a science in the fact that if you scrape for long enough period, maybe the IP address gets burnt or something like that.

So then you've gotta change IP addresses, reset pre proxy servers and things like that.

There's a fair bit there and depends on at what price you pay for the proxy servers too.

The cheaper proxy servers, you'll get booted earlier, your high-end residential proxies, you've got a bit more time to play with them, but at a lot higher, um, cost to obtain them from there.

Once you, once we grabbed all the spreadsheets together, this was where there was a fair bit of expertise that sort of came into play around, firstly, we merged the Google scrapes with the Yellow Pages scrapes with some data.

We also pulled off a LinkedIn deep scrape.

We pulled them all together into a a, we were actually using Google Sheets, a Google spreadsheet, which made it live.

And then from that we went through a process of actually validating the actual scrapes around the distance from the actual venue.

I actually worked out how to create a connection between a Google sheet and a Google map, a p i, so I could do a a p I call and, and get the, um, travel distance either in time or in kilometers between the venue and a business name a business.

'cause I, I didn't want to be like, if I was putting on a vent in say Emerald, I didn't wanna be sending out emails and SS M Ss and stuff to businesses that were in Sydney.

So it was pretty important to be able to really start, get people who are close and handy to that particular location.

And that was probably my biggest win was that software that I wrote that allowed me to do that was probably the biggest win of my whole, of the whole event in that what was taking now anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute to do it by VAs was I'd get to a point where I could validate 80% of a data scrape using the automation that, like the software that I created with the Google Maps A p i so really only left about 20% of those left that I had to get vass involved to try and work out is particularly around businesses that say that they're located around the whole of Australia.

They're not geographically located in the specific loca location.

So we had to push them outta the way from a email cleansing point of view, heaps of software out there that you can push an email database through and it'll give you some valid, invalid and unknown sort of outcomes like checking some things in the background on that.

We used, I think it was one called NeverBounce was one of the ones we were using.

Snow V was the more expensive one we were using at the time, but it gave us some pretty clear indications of when we then pulled them back into our spreadsheet and then pulled that data back in.

We're able to then remove the ones that we thought were invalid and used the VAs to then try and plug those holes for the ones that we were critically trying to get to.

We also used, I dunno if anyone's familiar with Novio, but Novio, if we could determine, we, we used some formulas to, to determine whether the business had multiple locations or whether it just had a single location.

And if it was a single location business that was only located in one geographical area, we were able to use novio to look at a domain, which would then once you plug in a domain, it'll spit out all the different email addresses that it knows based on that domain.

So that's a pretty handy way to, to track down and also allows us to figure out the formula for the actual email addresses if we're trying to back load them from a LinkedIn.

From there we, we had to upgrade our Eventbrite to be able to handle over 6,000 emails a day and basically we uh, scheduled them into Eventbrite for each event and basically sent out emails from them.

We were getting, I think we sent out just over 120,000 emails and we had a read rate of, I think it was about 50% or 55%, which wasn't too bad.

We would, what we then did was we then did some monitoring a couple of weeks out from the event.

Like when we sent the first one about three weeks out, we would then monitor whether or not it was read, unread, subscribed, and then we'd pull that back into the database fire a vlookup just to be able to, and then we could do some things based on that to get a bit deeper into those businesses.

From here.

We were then able to look at all the, so say for example with Toowoomba the other day as an example, we, from the database of businesses that we had in Toowoomba, I've got 2100 mobile numbers, which is the primary number of the businesses.

And what I was able to do from that was, um, send out an invitation to the events from to that main number of the business.

There's a couple of different ways you can send it out.

You can use software where you can send it out as a word rather than a mobile number.

For the big project that I did recently, I actually created an S M S P A B X.

So using a company called Maxo, M A X O and from that I was able to send out SS M Ss, but when the s m s people replied to it or things like that, it would come back in as an email.

So I was able to triage the replies and questions and everything from there.

A lot easier for the event that I did in Toowoomba.

My mobile number's extremely well known in Toowoomba and easy and very visible in everything I do.

I actually, I've got a Telstra plan with unlimited SS m s that allows, with the iPhones you can actually turn off iMessage and then you can actually bulk ss m s from an iPhone.

There was physically no cost in sending out the s m s from that particular one.

So one thing that I learned very early on was to make the, I tested about 20 different scripts for the, like the SS m s was going out and the one that I seemed to get the best response from was like, I've got an example of it here.

Hi, it's Brendan from toma.com au and for the other events I did, I'll just be like, hi, it's Brendan from business Networking events.

I'm reaching out to local, whether it's TOMA businesses or Emerald Businesses or whatever the geographical area is to invite them to an event on the date, the price and a link to event, right?

And that was, that sat within that 300 character limit.

So it would go out as two ss m s and it seemed to work pretty well.

It's, it, it got rid of a lot of people responding back who is this got rid of people going.

And you'd probably get one in a thousand people would come back and say, how did you get my number?

But apart from that it, it went exceptionally well.

Outside of that, from a lot of my things, LinkedIn is my baby and that's where I spent a lot of my time.

LinkedIn events are incredible and there's a few lessons that I've learned around that.

But essentially create the event on LinkedIn, identify your target market.

If you've got sales navigator or access to someone who's got sales navigator, you can pretty much pull up a pretty good list of from that, from the type of people that you're potentially looking for.

Heaps of software out there where you can actually scrape that list back into a C S V file.

And then what I normally do is, depending on whether I've got it from a data scrape or a deep scrape, the deep scrapes that I do with a guy over in Vietnam, he'll actually show me a spreadsheet where it'll, I can order it by the number of connections that the person has.

So what I'll do is my priority will then be on the most connected people and then I work down the spreadsheet.

'cause no use sending stuff to people who've got 10 connections on LinkedIn.

By doing a deep scrape of a specific area, it, it makes a big difference and gives you a really good data set of businesses and what people do within that particular area.

Yeah, from there there's gonna be people that I'm connected to, ideally within that area that I'll either try and connect to and then invite them to the event or if they're in a, a LinkedIn group that's that I'm also in, you can actually direct message 'em through that.

Or if they've got interest in the event and you're not connected to 'em, you can also direct messaging 'em through the event.

From there, we spend a lot of time working on sort of referral strategies for people as they register for the events.

We would then either try and connect to 'em on LinkedIn, start having conversations with them on direct message s m Ss or email and then offer 'em $5 off a ticket or something like that if they wanted to share it with their friends or ask 'em if there's someone else that they'd like to bring along.

And that was a good way for us to get a few extra people in the room.

Outside of that, the one that I actually used that worked quite well at the Sunshine Coast was I created a Instagram account and from that I spent a month and a half just following local Sunshine Coast businesses that I, I basically some from some of the data scrapes that actually gave me a lot of their Instagram codes, the Instagram handles, and started following them and they'd always get a percentage of them that would follow you back.

And we created a bit of a strategy around that.

And then we had some discussions with them during that two month period about some events that we were working on as well as if they start following you back, then they start to see some of your content promoting your upcoming events.

So I guess from there, I don't know whether, how much time I've got left, but yeah, it was basically a bit of time left to do some q and as.

Um, happy to field some questions and I guess with a preference that this, if you asked me these questions six months ago, I would've said that this is not my expertise.

But having been in the hole working on a lot of this for a long time, it's, I've definitely learned some skills and if I had to do it again, there'd, there'd definitely be some things that I'd do differently and, and I, yeah, learned a lot of mistakes from it, but also found the opportunities out of those mistakes as well.

Yeah, so interested any questions that anyone has or anything that I haven't covered in as much detail.

So thank you.

Awesome.

Thanks Brendan.

That was, that was great.

Yeah.

The only thing that I'm concerned of is John Dwyer's gonna use his technical skills and set up in competition to you.

Yeah, yeah.

I'll give him a hand.

Yeah.

You know what, Scott, I don't know whether you realize, but I have got feelings actually, I'm sorry I can't back that.

I can't back that up.

They're, They're in a folder wrapped in, wrapped in plastic so they don't get damaged.

And, and Tim and Tim, it's funny 'cause we've all done seminars and stuff and uh, I've got a, I've I've absolutely gotta say, uh, Brendan, that's great stuff that you put together.

I certainly will wanna talk to you, that's for sure.

But, uh, whenever I am giving out the sarcasm and all the criticism in any of the seminars that we used to do before Covid, anyone that had a shock back at me, I'd always hated them.

Look, I'm sorry, but I've got no feelings.

It can't possibly hurt me.

So we've got a question, Rob and then Steven have the hands up.

Yeah, go, go for it, Rob.

Pick my brain.

Right.

So thank you Brendan.

I'm a it nerd myself somewhere now I appreciate the effort that's actually gone into that, how that's been targeting largely businesses.

How would you, I guess, try to do that and try to target consumers?

Do you think that's actually translatable?

Um, so It depends on where you can get the data set from.

The only other, the other way you can do it is if they're on LinkedIn, you can use some software called novio and do a data scrape of LinkedIn and then from that data scrape you can inject it back into, you can use their social profile, inject it back into novio and Novio will spit out an email address one in five times roughly from my experience.

So I did a, I've got a database of Toowoomba, which has got 40,000, 41,000 LinkedIn users in Toowoomba on that spreadsheet, which is a full deep scrape of Toowoomba.

From that we injected it into Novio and I think we got 6,000 email addresses we're actually populated from that particular database, which yeah, you can, you then, then have to run it through other software to validate the email addresses and things.

It's not a, it's not an exact science if I, I don't exactly know how they obtain the email addresses originally, but you get a fairly good hit outta them.

The ones that it does give you, I I find there's always maybe 30% of them that are invalid and there's about 70% of them that are either known or unknown status of activity.

So, but I, I think it's a matter of, like, my view on it is that you really gotta have sort of an email that you can send out that you can then do some analytics on to work out whether it's a valid email address or not from there.

And I'm sure there's people that can help you.

People that are, are much more experienced than I am on that.

So I'd I'd be curious for a tech off between you and Yuhan to go, how, how would you actually blend those two things together to actually make that work really well?

Yeah, I, I think that there's definitely some opportunity there and I'm not exactly, I'd have to have a, a deeper conversation with Johan to see where his data sets come from in the background.

But it's, it's interesting the different data sets you can pull from.

And the most expensive one I looked at was one called ZoomInfo and they wanted to get full access to their platform was 20,000 a year I think it was.

But I tested it for seven days and wasn't getting the results of what I needed.

So I, I didn't find it had the, uh, it's very good in us, but in Australia it just didn't seem to perform over here enough for to warrant 20 grand.

So It's your business now a a screen scrapping business gun for hire or you just, this is just something you get on a sideline to try and get the, the events going?

Yes, it was, it was pretty much a, it's a, it was very much a six month distraction.

Um, and to a certain degree I, I learned a lot around it.

I, I've used a lot of the skills that I've learned to, to create some of my own events here locally.

Watch the future holds at the moment is a little bit unknown.

I'm working through a whole heap of different things.

My, I guess my keen interest is actually around the process that I went through to get geographical influence within Toowoomba for a specific category.

And I run a, a group similar to a business B n I, if you're familiar with B N I, I've got a group locally that I'm working on some projects with them to create some geographically influence for their particular categories.

We've got a couple of test cases that we are working through at the moment and that I'm trying to help one-on-one and just yeah, grab some of the skills that I've learned from that and it's, yeah, it's a, it's an ever evolving beast at the moment.

So I, I can easily introduce you to an owner of A B N I chap or had they have 13 B N I chapters that I'm sure they'd love your skills mate.

Yeah, yeah.

So the, there's a few people out there that in that sort of world I've got some opportunity to build my own.

I've got one called TOMA Business Partners and wanna start building that outside of Toowoomba as well.

And I've had a chat to some of the guys from BX and B n I, who, who are obviously very interested in some of the skill sets that I have around that lead generation thing.

'cause that's what a lot of them struggle with filling those particular holes.

Yeah, That's, that's awesome.

And uh, Steven, Yeah, I had two questions and Rob asked them both, so thanks Rob.

Exactly those questions, but the, the one about gun for hire is interesting.

One, I'm still not clear on your answer on, on that because as a ZoomInfo subscriber mm-hmm.

Yeah, it, it, it's one, there's still some things that ZoomInfo, that Salesforce navigator does better than ZoomInfo, that they're just not, there's no one thing that ties it all together.

So that's why I was interested in the, is this a product that you sell or is it just, um, sharing with us the s**t that you did and you had a lot of fun playing with?

I, I'm, I'm happy to have some conversations.

Like, I, I, um, my, my scenario is that I actually, up until June last year, I was actually working for a, um, a building company.

Um, you know, I sold 160 odd houses last year.

I essentially resigned from that role in the idea of going out on my own and doing my own thing.

I immediately got snapped up pretty quick to do a couple of projects and coming out the backside of those now and trying to work out what the future holds from here, that's the heaps of opportunity hits my desk every day.

It's just trying to work out which ones to, to grab and run with.

But yeah, happy to discuss it with anyone, so, Yeah.

Cool.

That's good.

And Mark, Brent, Brendan, on that subject, is there, is there a contact email that you got Scott, or you got a web page you gotta, or Do do, do you wanna drop your details into the chat, Brendan?

Yeah, I'll just drop my details in.

The easiest way to find me is, is on LinkedIn.

Yeah.

Um, and then, but yeah, happy to share my mobile number.

Always happy to have a conversation.

Alright, that's great.

And, and Martin, did you have a question?

You, you're on mute, Unmute.

Uh, so my question was, I'm not sure if I quite caught the outcome.

So there were 30 odds, were there 30 odd actual networking events?

What, what was the attendance like at, at those events?

Yeah, So we, um, did 30 we, in that project we did 36 events all the way from Darwin all the way along the eastern seaboard and down into, yeah, Victoria and Adelaide outcome was, we were getting between 40 and 80 attendances people per event.

And then from that there was a lead funnel and everything that's, that rolled out the back end of that, that the business coach was able to fill his, yeah, fill his quotas to a certain degree with business coaching clients.

So he, his upsell, not his upsell, his sale is a $20,000 a year business coaching package.

So yeah, the, he dragged, like most events, he was getting 30 to 40% pink forms, I guess you'd call it, from the event.

And then from that he was going through some filtering to work out which were a good fit to work with ongoing from there.

So he went through like a, it, it's a very detailed process post event 'cause it's financials and the whole shebang, like it's a quite a detailed sales funnel to work out whether they're a good fit for each other or not.

So he, he's relatively selective these days.

Okay.

So this was a whole, this whole exercise was with one business to generate, this was Lead gen, lead generation for a business coach?

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

Cool.

So essentially he was, um, like the end result was he was paying me to put on events for him in all these different locations and he was going as the guest speaker to those events.

Yeah, no, that's, uh, Yeah, so he would deliver for an hour and at the end of it he would say, look, does anyone who's interested in, in learning more about what I do, there's a form on the table, fill out the form.

And then they basically had a, a sales process post event to, to manage that.

Were you getting a clip on the comms there?

On the backend?

Correct.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nice.

That's good.

So I had an, I had an event fee and then I had a success fee.

Very cool.

So that, that's good.

That's good.

And I think with stuff like Facebook ads soaring and, you know, all of that sort of thing, it's yeah, it, it, it's definitely a good, a great option.

And yeah, this isn't something Brendan Yeah.

Has delivered before.

It's just something I'd, we were having a conversation, I'm like, oh man, this is awesome.

Come and share it with, with elite marketers.

So yeah.

Yeah, Karen and Ken would definitely be interested in this.

I'm sure I can't see their faces, but yeah, I'd imagine this would be right.

There's Karen, Hey.

Yeah, right up your alley.

Yeah, it's more Ken's domain, all the IT stuff.

Ah, I'll leave that to you.

But yeah, look, I, I guess it's interesting that, and the stuff that Johan was talking about earlier about really warming up a, warming up an email address or warming up a contact and then pushing 'em through a, some sort of lead or, or conversion sort of sales funnel is, is definitely of interest to me to, I've got the ability to create all these leads, like these lists, but then it's really trying to target who is the ideal product at the other end of them.

Yeah, No, that's, that, that's awesome.

That's awesome.

So well let, let's break out into breakout rooms for 10 to 15 minutes.

Hey guys, we're back.

We're back again.

We might go just around the room and get some takeaways.

Uh, Judith, what was your big takeaway from your group or breakout session?

We had some good chats about what people are are doing and the difference between live events and virtual events was interesting.

We talked about how there advantages for both, but the cost of live events now is really apparent when you can consider what the costs are for virtual events.

And we went through an example of Kerwin Ray and just how he is doing everything, social media at the moment he's doing all of it is on social media, on messenger, on all of this to do the close.

And it was interesting how it's all virtual and some people are, have really pivoted and their businesses are super, super successful with doing it that way.

So mm-hmm.

I think Covid Hass made stuff certainly more flexible.

There's a lot of opportunity in a lot of different streams right now.

Yeah, yeah.

No, ab absolutely.

No, that's very true.

Change means we must adapt.

Mm-hmm.

So, yeah.

No, that's, that's great.

And Grant, what was your biggest takeaway?

We just spoke about, when I say we, it's Jason, Tim, we just spoke about when is it the, the gathering of, of this data and this, this audience, right?

For which type of businesses?

Because it's not right for everyone.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, and once again, at what point is a drive for a business to go down this road, even though the, the technology and what Brendan has put together is really phenomenal in the sense of, of that gathering tool.

I spoke about an example of a client that's trying to break into the American market and once again, hasn't got a clue where to find people.

Once again, there, there's great ability with the view to gather that niche audience.

So we came up to the, the conclusion that we, when someone is very precise or very niche or very hard industry, then this would be a great gathering tool, but it's not going to be for everybody.

And so we were just unbundling how phenomenal the technology is and how best to utilize it for various customers.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, no, I think that's, that's great.

That's great.

And, and Tim, Oh, I think it, again, just to sort of echo some of those comments, um, we, we talked a little bit about finding the, the appropriate strategy for, for the client, right?

If it's a relationship driven thing, you need to build a relationship, right?

A plumber who's not running Google ads is an absolute idiot, right?

But an accountant to run Google Ads is probably gonna find it hard going, but there's certain, I think there's certain industry types or, or industry sectors that particular marketing strategies lend themself more to.

And we need to be cognizant as we're recommending those to clients and say, look, you can do this, but this is probably gonna need to a better result.

Um, where we need to build relationships and or partnerships stuff like what Brendan's talking about there is, is absolutely critical, right?

You just need a deeper conversation.

You need to get face-to-face with people and an event strategy to go, here's a soft way of getting you in the same room where we can shake hands and sit around coffee and talk s**t is a really strong one where a relationship is more important than the transactional nature.

I guess also too, something to add to that too is that sometimes I think businesses don't put enough e emphasis on actually building a community around their business and building their followings and stuff like that.

And, and even some of these crazy lawn mowing guys at the moment who just, they get paid more money to take a video of them mowing a lawn than they do actually mowing the lawn.

Yeah.

It's a total change of, it's a flip.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, that's, that's great.

That's great.

So, so that's pretty much a wrap for this week.

Next, at the next session.

So upcoming sessions, we have 26th of May.

We've got the, the 60 minute, that's a pure networking event at one o'clock, and then 9th of June is the next session at 11:00 AM the two hour that session, we're gonna have Rory, who was here earlier, he's gonna be talking about TikTok.

So he is gonna be going through how he built two TikTok accounts to 30 1030 3000 followers in two in totally different niches.

Why you should be, be prioritizing short form video content in your budget over other, most other forms of organic content.

How to build an engaged following through storytelling, creating a con common enemy and having a mission people can get behind and how to generate leads and monetize with TikTok.

And then we're gonna have Michael Hanson, who's just a, an amazing storyteller and award-winning filmmaker.

So you see the stuff that he does for brands and it's like, it's been created directly out of a Hollywood studio.

And yeah, it is very much about humanizing copy and humanizing content.

So how to help brands create stories that will last the test of time.

So he's gonna, he's gonna go through three story formulas so you can learn to story tell on film in a very precise, in a very precise way.

Yeah.

So that's what we've got, we've got to look forward to.

And yeah, no, that, that's, I think that's a wrap.