Hello, this video is about the summit that I ran. I don’t know if you know, but this year 2022, in May, I ran a summit called the Share Your Brilliance Summit.

I have made a bunch of behind the scenes videos in my client and student only group that follow along the journey. So if you’ve bought a course with me, or if you’re a client of mine, you can go and check out that group.

In this video I’ll try to sum up what the whole experience was like and try to be objective. I have a bit more distance from it now. So it seems a bit easier to be objective.

I attended a summit and I hadn’t really attended any other summits before that. It was Elizabeth Goddard’s Summit, and I was actually unwell at the time I was in hospital. And so I had heaps of time to enjoy all the videos and I found a woman that Elizabeth had worked with who supports people with Summits. Her name’s Krista, Krista Bower, she has a “Summit in a Box” product. Check that out. 

I had been thinking about doing what I thought was a summit. Back in the day when there was Blab and Periscope. I used to do these Blabs where I would kind of speed date interview about a dozen or more people and we would hang out and I would just ask the intro people and ask them for three tips and then promo, and then I’d go on to the next person, it was really fun.

I guess I thought a summit was going to be like that, and then when I saw Elizabeth’s summit, I kind of got a bigger grasp of what the summit structure is.

Once I worked through the summit in a box program, (because I ended up buying that coaching package) which is great a really solid product, especially if you’re not techie because she gives you all the templates, like she gives you a WordPress website template teaches you exactly how to use all the tech that she would recommend. Yeah, that was a great thing to have her support.

Once I bought it, then I kind of started to realize, oh, this is way bigger.

One really nice thing about the Summit In A Box program is that you get an entire Asana or Trello board with every single task time-lined out.

She also has a calculator, so you can plug in your summit date and it back dates all your tasks which synchronises to your Asana board. Krista recommends having at least three months lead time on it. And she also really recommends having something that you’re upselling to. And so there’s a few parts of that marketing approach that I am not currently using in my business.

So I’m not really having freebies at the moment. Or a list builder, I’m not really selling one thing as an upsell to something else.

Really the only way I could get my head around the summit was that it really was my intention for it to be a digital paid product. And it was intended to be an end in itself. There are some people I know that purchased the summit and worked through it in that way. I think they really got the most out of it.

I did have someone jump on a call with me during the summit and say, “Okay, this is the summit, but what are you selling into?”.

And I was like, “Oh, that’s right. That’s what people do.”

And I’m not really selling anything. This is an end in itself.

It’s meant to be its own beautiful experience, which was all very kind of me.

In hindsight, it was a lot more work. If I was going to charge an honest price for that product, it would have needed to be a bit higher than what I charged for it.

Back to the asana project, I use Asana.

So the Asana project was great for me, because I’m used to Asana, it really helped me keep on dates and track all along.

I had a much longer lead time than 90 days because I had set a date. And then I had school holidays and I had other stuff happen. I had to reset my date to a later date, which ended up working really well for all the speakers.

Another nice thing about Summit in a Box is it’s got templates for like the emails that you would send to speakers processes for like an air table task where people can put in their information that speakers can submit their details and upload their picture.

I had to build an entire website. I had to set up an affiliate system, I had to set up a course platform to deliver the summit content. There’s lots of different ways to do it. I learned some new tech which was great. I’m already okay with setting up websites, so that was fine. I’m already okay with course platforms.

So that was fine. There were a lot things that are already technically easy for me. So there were a lot of places where I didn’t find the summit, too awful.

I imagined that if I hated tech, or I wasn’t comfortable with tech, that it would be a real stumbling block. And I would probably have me be looking to outsource a lot of that stuff, because that’s a massive part of the summit.

The other thing is, you’ve got a lot of people that you’re managing, so you’re managing yourself and the website and all the tech, then you’re bringing in speakers explaining to them how the summit works, managing the affiliate stuff with them, there’s just a lot of interaction required, not all speakers, but some speakers.

Then there’s managing the participants and connecting with them and making the most of the relationship building opportunity with them.

So there’s a lot of moving parts, which is fine if you enjoy that kind of level of stimulation.

There’s a bunch of key lessons that I really learned through the process.

Speakers, I’ll just start there.

It’s really important to have speakers who have an audience that they are well established with an audience who trust them, and who are willing to promote the summit to that audience.

I had a couple of people who have really devoted followings and they made effort to promote the summit. A lot of the affiliate sales went to those two people.

I’m thinking of two people in particular, one of them’s a kinesiologist, like trainer, so she has loads of kinesiologists that love and respect her work. A lot of people came into the summit through that woman, and another woman who is also a marketing consultant, I’ve actually worked with her so we have an aligned approach. She made a very consistent effort with the summit. She really sent a bunch of beautiful emails and promoted it really well to her list, and so on social, so that makes a massive difference.

There was another woman as well, who’s also a kinesiologist, who is well known in her community, shared it with a bunch of people. So those women really, a lot of people came in through them.

There was another couple of speakers who promoted so well, and gave it a lot of time and love and effort. While they didn’t bring in as many people, I just really appreciate their efforts.

It is a bit hard to know who are going to be those people before and some people that were speakers, (if you’re a speaker, and you’re watching this, I know that life happens)  who made it clear there weren’t going to promote or were unable to promote because of life circumstances. And that’s fine.

Another thing I learned with speakers is I onboarded a couple of people quite late in the game & I didn’t run them through the onboarding process. So they were just a bit in the dark about how it all works. I wouldn’t recommend doing that. You have your process, walk people through it.

Also, I would like to have a speaker meet and greet, Zoom call so that I could answer people’s questions because people just have questionsno matter how well as you word your emails, no matter how well you think it’s explained.

Other people still are going to be vaguely unfamiliar and not clear on how it works.

Next: My promotion.

I did ads, but I didn’t do split testing. So I needed to create a duplicate sales page for and separate product probably just for Facebook ads people. I spent a bunch like quite a bit, maybe, maybe close to $1,000 on Facebook ads, which I was really happy to do. But I have no idea if it worked. I mean, I paid out a similar amount to affiliates.

I did grow my list. So outcomes wise, I did grow my list by about 400 people, I sold about 50, all access passes. So I sort of had about a third of my goals. My goals were to sell 120 tickets, and to grow my list by 1200. And I did about a third of my initial goals, which is great. The thing with goals is, if I look at what the goal was and what I achieved, I’m going to feel bad about it. So I just had to switch over to being just really grateful and interacting with the present moment like what was real because otherwise I was just going to be sad the whole time. So there was a lesson in there about goals or lesson in there about Facebook ads. Lesson in there about some and presenters.

The trick is: if the summit ticket is $50, and you have a product that $60, you can say to your audience, look, I have this course normally $60, it’s going to be included in this summit as a VIP bonus for $50. So you’re gonna get a discount on my course, if you were thinking about buying my course already, just get it through the summit Plus, you’re gonna get all the summit presentations plus all the other presenters bonuses, so it’s just a crazy deal.

When you pitch it to your audience like that it’s a great offer. It’s a really great offer. And I guess I didn’t really get a chance to explain that to the presenters.

So some of the VIP bonuses were just a bit meager, like small.

I think what people felt was, “what?? I’m giving away something!!”.

No! You’re going to get paid as an affiliate, and you’re going to have someone on your email list, and you’re going to sell a course.

I take full responsibility, that was on me that I didn’t explain it well.

And then in terms of upsells into my own courses and programs, I had one person come from, from the summit, did the group program. And then I had a couple of people come through the summit did some courses after the summit.

What I know about me + my business is that my conversion time is very long, like it takes a year to two years for people to decide to finally work with me. So I’m aware that the seeds I planted in my summit may well germinate and come to fruition later.

If you have other questions about the summit. I’m happy to answer them.

I did sort of want to tell you my like what I spent what I made, I think I just broke even really, especially when I take into consideration the cost of the coaching package the summit in a box package, the cost of ads and the cost of affiliates. I pretty much broke even, but I did grow my list, I did make a couple of core sales and it was just a good vibe as well on the summit. So I did enjoy it. It’s just a lot of work.

There was a few things I didn’t do well, or the other thing was my niche.

So I thought I’d niched really narrow. I was niche, I’d niche down to multi passionate intuitive healers and business people with an online business. And the goal was to just become more visible to articulate your message and book more sessions, but I can see that that is still way too vague.

I needed to do something like:

kinesiologists who want to get online

or

naturopaths who want to understand how to do online marketing.

I just need it to be even more narrow: one group of people and one action and we’re going to spend the week or three days talking about content creation or we’re going to spend three days or a week talking about online platforms.

I needed to niche narrow and I I was being encouraged to do that by the summit coach Krista but I just really didn’t get it.

I guess until you go through it.

You can’t really get it.

So I guess maybe I would want another summit. A lot of people have said next time you do it and I’m like, oh, it’s still a bit too fresh. So maybe like every second year, I guess it might be something I’d be up for maybe 18 months. I don’t know when I’ll do another one or if I will, but hopefully this video is helpful for you.

I hope you have a beautiful day and I’ll see you soon. I’m sending you lots of compassionate love to grow your business and influence the world.