Just One Hit

Talking to my partner, Jeetu, the other day. Was saying how 1 BIG HIT would make everything much easier. We're doing well now. We're following the agency/consulting model and we are a few months into making this work. It works. I love it. It's 4 years  worth of work finally becoming worthwhile. But, it's a ridiculous amount of work right now.  Things are going well cash flow wise. Between these two (1, 2) events, we are soaring at another level. And this is a sustainable business model. We could follow this model into retirement. And it'd get a lot easier as time goes by. We will follow this model for atleast the next 6 months. But, this model won't let us expand our business past MA.

So, as time and resources permit, we'll be transitioning more towards a network/media model. We have a few initiatives on the way which will allow us to drive significant traffic to our client's events:

• Redesigning WhizSpark, so it's more than just brochureware w/a gate to our event planner functionality. We'll open up our event search and we'll list our featured upcoming events on the home page. (More.)
• Formalizing our Art, Wine and Networking promotional partnerships so that they are long term and for multiple events. Currently, we trade traffic on an event by event basis leveraging word of mouth email heavily. (Most of these sponsors are not paying. They have agreed to invite others to the event, in exchange for having their logo and link published to the event site.)  Working with local bloggers, business and myspace users, we'll  start syndicating our featured events to other websites. We'll make it worth their while by giving them access to events for free, and/or by sending traffic back at them. All transparently, of course.
• Enabling our email marketing clients to publish their newsletter content to our site. (The secret is out.) This will help our clients reach more people and will drive more traffic from search engines to WhizSpark and to them. We have a lot of locally relevant content locked up in our database. (See the 3rd result down.)
  
• Doing some of our own events and building our own event's brands. This will be very selective and we'll only be repeating events that have been successful already - to reduce risk.
• Doing Art, Wine and Networking events in different cities managed by other event planners.

But, these are initiatives that will allow us to inch towards our goals. It's still a crapload of work. We know that there are smarter ways to do this. One of those smarter ways seems to be - to have one big hit. And we started thinking about what that "hit" could look like. Here's a list:

1. Landing a huge client that does a lot of events. They are successful, but want to take it up a BIG notch and are willing to invest to make it happen.
2. A huge sponsor. Finding large local businesses that want to sponsor a number of our/our client's events. (EG. Hanover Insurance or Fidelity agrees to sponsor, endorse to their clients, and finance our networking events, seminars, fundraisers, etc. Of course, they'd get a measurable return on this.)
3. Landing a huge partner that can drive a significant amount of local traffic. I can't think of who this would be. There are few companies based in Central MA that can actually drive a significant amount of traffic in a timely manner (timely is key for events). For this to work, the partner would have to be a large ad network, social networking site or national publisher that knows when local visitors visit their properties. They'd have to be willing to do this on a performance basis, but if they can drive it, we can monetize it. They'll get paid. And we'll both have a runaway revenue stream, as event producers flock to our sure-fired ways to increase attendance at their events.
4. Tony Robbins, Jack Welch, Cassie, Brad Pitt, Robert Scoble, the Survivor cast, or some other big stars who want us to promote events where they perform, appear, etc. We'll help them grow their reach further and monetize it better.
5. Others?

Referrals welcome.

Comments

[karen]

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