Common Pitfalls To Avoid For A Flawless Conference Experience

Steven Krein: Hi, this is Steven Krein. I'm here with my podcast partner, Dan Sullivan, for another episode of the Free Zone Frontier Podcast. Hi, Dan.
 
Dan Sullivan: How are you, Steve?
 
Steven Krein: I am doing great, doing great, getting ready for summertime, different energy of the year, but always an exciting opportunity to get, you know, I live in New York, so being out and about more and seeing more people.
 
Dan Sullivan: You'll go to the shore.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah. Go to the shore, do some travel. Kids are home from college. Lots of fun.
 
Dan Sullivan: All three are in college now, right?
 
Steven Krein: No, two. I got my two older ones in college, and I still have one in high school. So. But when you have three, I have three girls, as you know, and so my youngest one acts like the older one. And now I feel like I've got three women in addition to my wife now where any day between Thursday and Sunday have, you know, three to five of their friends over as well. So it's like a sorority house.
 
Dan Sullivan: From an outside observation, I think it's rounded off your rough corners.
 
Steven Krein: Well, you've known me a long time, Dan. Well, I was really interested in digging into what now that you're about 30 days from your first-ever CoachCon conference, was interested in really your learning from it. And having been in Strategic Coach now 25 or I think you said 26, seven years, I've been to so many different types of in-real-life programs that you've run outside of the quarterly workshops, from the Couples Conference to our Free Zone Symposium that you put on every February-ish. But I'm interested in what was your takeaway- First of all, describing the conference, what this was, why it was different than everything else you've done, and then what your big learning was from going through the experience.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, first of all, it's an anniversary this year. So our company as it now exists in the Program that really makes it that company was 35 years. And there were two other anniversaries this year. One is that I've been coaching for 50 years. So I started in, this being 2024, I started in 1974. So it's 50 years of coaching. And the other thing is I'm 80 this year. And I've been coaching for 50 years. So it was basically Cathy Davis and Eleonora Mancini, two crucial team leaders in the company, got together and they said, you know, why don't we have a big conference? And I didn't know about it until it was already under way for six months.
 
There was a lot of backstage stuff that was happening that I didn't know about. And then they got to the point where they had to make two commitments. They had to make a commitment to an event company as an intermediary between us to find the venue and just to bring vast knowledge and wisdom about just how you put a conference together. Then the other thing was, we got the commitment and wonderful venue, unbelievably good venue in Nashville at the Music City Center, which is a vast place, but very, very comfortable. Vast but comfortable. You usually don't get that. And Nashville's a super city to have this type of an event in. So they got that locked in, and then we found out about it. So we had about a year to go at that point. And then the whole thing had to do with, the real third issue was, you know, what's the conference look like? And, you know, how do we get early engagement from our existing clients?
 
And they started off with that, we're just going to have active clients, but people are really busy. I notice, probably since COVID, that when people are committing to go to live events where they have to travel, they give it a lot more thought than they did before COVID. So you were running into a change in society. The other aspect was, make it as easy as possible for people to sign up. So there was about three months of making online signups really easy, you know. And there's a lot of plumbing and electricity behind the walls of "easy."
 
So those are some of the initial things. And I wasn't part of any of the planning. As a matter of fact, as far as I can tell, I only made two contributions to the event. And they showed me the proposed schedule and agenda. And it started on a Wednesday. And they had a big party on Wednesday night at the venue. And then at the next night, they were going to send people home without a party. I said, there has to be a second party. And that turned out to be spectacular, the party after the convention closed. And the other thing is that...
 
Steven Krein: It was your birthday party.
 
Dan Sullivan: It was my birthday party. And I would say the other thing that I contributed, I gave... They said, you're going to be the lead kick-off speaker. I said, OK. And you're going to have a session inside of it too. And I said, OK. And I said, but you don't need that tomorrow, do you? And they said no. But what they did need, they created a special book. And it was a book that just went to the people who attended. It was called The Future Of Entrepreneurism. What they did is they interviewed me and they interviewed all of our coaches. So each of our coaches is featured in the book. And we've never done that before. So they wanted me really quickly to get the foreword in the first chapter. So I did that really quickly with a fast filter. And then I was interviewed. Shannon Waller interviewed me on it. And then they sent my text and the interviews out to all the other coaches so that they could understand what they were speaking to. And that was it.
 
And then I did a really neat panel discussion with Mike Koenigs and Jeff Madoff on... It was just a new model I've come up with, which is called "Technology Coaching Teamwork." And you can also say "Teamwork Coaching Technology." And I said, if you look at the future, more and more, you're going to see that almost all businesses have three tracks. They have a technology track, they have a teamwork track, and they have a coaching track. And part of the reason is that technology does not coach itself. And the other thing is, teamwork doesn't naturally expand itself or multiply ourselves with technology. You need a coaching component in the middle. And that was it, so that was the last panel. All of our talks during there were panels, with three exceptions. One was, Chris Voss was there, and he was main stage speaker. Joe Polish was there, he was main stage. And then Kathy Ireland was on the famous model, who's now a mogul. She's got a $3.5 billion global company. And she was on, she gave a talk, and then Jeff Madoff came and interviewed her, and everything went really well. But there was some really different things that we did, and I think maybe everybody will be interested. And again, this was all done by my team, two principal people, Cathy Davis and Eleonora Mancini. They put the whole thing together with the event company. So that's how we did it.
 
Steven Krein: So when you, I guess, think about how you sometimes are the lead and sometimes the participant in different events, you were able to be a participant, I'm assuming?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I was as surprised by the conference as anybody who, you know, just signed up and came as a participant. It caught me by surprise. But the other thing is, I make that deliberate. The more great things that can be created in our company that I have no involvement in, I see that as a form of progress.
 
Steven Krein: Well, I remember you talking years ago about if somebody else can do something at 80 percent, it's better than you doing it at any level. And so it sounds like they hit it out of the ballpark and did a fantastic job. As the participant, for you, what were the biggest takeaways you had that either you didn't have going in or were reinforced after spending the two days there?
 
Dan Sullivan: One of the things I've noticed attending other conferences, and this is actually every convention or conference I've ever been to since I've been an entrepreneur, was they overload with content. It's like there's eight hours, and there's a speaker every hour. They have eight speakers and they give you five minutes in between. And just based on our Coach experience, I have a, something that I talked to all of our coaches about. I said, I just want to tell you something. I've had 35 years of experience here, and I want, when people come to their workshop, more is caught than taught. And in order to be things caught, you gotta have a lot of time that's between teaching sessions, between coaching sessions.
 
So they build a half-hour in, so they would have four panels at the same time. And then there was a half-hour break. And we'd have things to drink, things to eat during every one of them. And everybody commented on it. They said, you know, I got a lot of ideas out of that session, and I needed to talk about them. And we had a little coaching thing where five minutes at the end of each panel discussion where people would say, what's the big idea you got? What would you do this idea? Who would you further contact to follow up on this? And everything else. So you had these nice half-hour breaks and then an hour and a half for lunch. You know, and it's what gets talked about in those free periods is more important in the takeaway at the end of the conference than anything they heard in the panel discussion.
 
Steven Krein: We've been doing the StartUp Health Festival every year since we launched, and one of the things that continues to get the best reviews and feedback elements in our forum is around the networking floor where there's no content. It's actually people talking and sharing and tables where everyone can get together and talk. It's unstructured. And ironically, it's the part that everybody... You know, you like to sit down and see some content, but inevitably where people can connect with other people and spend time in an environment that's got that kind of energy, it always blends in beautifully. And you're right. A lot of people don't leave enough room for it.
 
Dan Sullivan: The other thing is, we were at a conference, I won't mention the name, earlier in this year, and it had a profound impact, actually two conferences, and it has to do with the sponsors. So we had 16 sponsors. These were people who had businesses who created things that were interesting to other entrepreneurs. Like, EOS was there, Genius Network was there, Abundance 360 was there. And we were at two conferences earlier this year where the sponsors weren't allowed in any of the sessions, and the sponsors didn't get any food, and they weren't invited to any of the parties. So they're paying to be there, you know, and then not enough time is given between events for anybody to come to their booth.
 
So we said right from the beginning, you have a hundred percent status as a participant, so you can go to any session you want to go to. And all the food is available. You sit down for the meals with people, come to the parties and everything like that. And we just got a blowout response from the sponsors: "This is the greatest convention we've ever been to. This is the greatest conference we've ever been to." And it's just my sense, when you're having a very inclusive experience, don't have anybody excluded.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah, well, you probably I'm assuming curated only clients of Strategic Coach's, potential sponsors. That helps because clearly they speak the language that- They are authentically part of the community. And I think oftentimes sponsors of communities aren't authentically members of communities and unfortunately don't have that opportunity that, you know, what you create. And I know you said you weren't involved in any part of this. Was that an idea that was born from just they were selling tickets and then there was people who wanted to also sponsor? How did that part of the model come back? Because you've never had sponsors of anything.
 
Dan Sullivan: No. But that was all handled by the organizing team. But I had the experience of being at these other two conferences, and I said, they just blew it because they don't give time for people to network. And the other thing is that the people who are actually paying money to be sponsors, they're not included. And I said, you know, if people have a great experience, they'll tell a lot of people about it. And if they have a bad experience, they'll tell a lot of people about it. So what do you want everybody involved saying about this conference? And then, you know, the party was just a blowout. We took over two whole floors of a big, big club in Nashville. I mean, it's all clubs. Nashville is bars and clubs. We had two bands. One was an outdoors band and one was an inside band. And they were just, I mean, there's great musicians and great music in Nashville.
 
You know, just as a little sidelight, one of the things I got a thrill out of was Nick Nanton. Nick Nanton had two country and western songwriters that he interviewed, and it was a woman and a man, and the woman had nine number one singles, and the man had seven number one singles, you know, top of the charts in country and western. And what they each did is play and sing five of their number one hits. And then Nick would interview them. And I said, what a marvelous, marvelous introduction to Nashville and to the whole country and western culture. I think the room was just incredibly moved by these two. And they're very funny. It's not an easy business. But they're entrepreneurs.
 
Steven Krein: And that's Nick's Unique Ability around that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. But the one guy, Nick says, well, what's your life like, you know, week to week, year to year, what's it like? And this one guy says, "Every day I write two songs. Five days a week, I take the weekend off, so it's 10 songs a week. I do that 50 weeks a year, and I've been doing it for 28 years."
 
Steven Krein: How many number one hits?
 
Dan Sullivan: He has 200 of his 3,000 or so songs actually recorded by top-notch talent, and seven of them have been number one hits. And the other thing they describe, it's not done alone. You know, that every song is a collaboration among other songwriters and musicians. But one person gets the name on the song. And it's, you know, you have this image of people come up with great songs, they're off by themselves, and they just get it and everything. Nothing like that. It's all teamwork.
 
Steven Krein: Interesting. And I'm assuming the parallel you thought about was in tool creation. Or book creation in what you're doing.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Creativity is creativity.
 
Steven Krein: But the habit of every day writing two songs, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, pretty incredible.
 
Dan Sullivan: One of them had a really great line. It was the man. He was really funny. And he says, I got my first number one hit. And it was playing right across the country, all the radio. It was being downloaded on the internet. And he said, I came home and told my wife. We were so excited. And she says, I've listened to that song, you know? And she says, you know, it's just what every woman's wish would be the attitudes and the behavior of the person that they love. Your song just captures everything and she says, and it's also a mindset and experience that I've never experienced from you at home.
 
The one thing about country and western culture, you don't get above yourself in that culture. Everybody's yes sir, yes ma'am, no ma'am and everything. It's a very polite society.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah, yeah. Well, when you now look back at the conference, I think you said you're going to do it every two years, not every year, correct?
 
Dan Sullivan: So, at my birthday party, they thrust a microphone in my hand. I was supposed to say something. And I said, well, I don't want to waste my experience here. I says, Babs and I have just decided to invite you to CoachCon '26 in two years. And we're going to try our best that it be in Nashville. But, you know, that center, they have bookings out to 2052.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah, there's no shortage of locking that in. Why not every year? How are you thinking about time?
 
Dan Sullivan: It would be too disruptive to our business to do it. And besides, in two years, you can really create a fantastic convention. If you're doing it every year, you're trying to repeat things.
 
Steven Krein: Well, you talk about pre-COVID, post-COVID with in-real-life conferences. I think there's something very powerful about the world we live in today and how you're able to connect and collaborate virtually. So many of the tools we use so many of the days that we engage, you don't have to be in a room. But on the flip side, being in a room together once a quarter or once a year creates a connectivity and a fabric in a community that is unparalleled with any other way of doing it other than real life. But every two years, you know, we have Coach Free Zone Symposium every year. You've got your quarterly workshop. How do you think about the difference between CoachCon and the other activities that bring people together?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think CoachCon is really special. I don't know. We just chatted about it. We said we don't want to do it every year because the key person putting it together is responsible for all the workshops that I don't coach. In other words, Cathy Davis.
 
Steven Krein: It's like the different programs colliding.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And we're not making our money on conventions. We're making our money on the Program and the workshops. I mean, we broke even with this one, which is just a function of how many people signed up. So we did 350 total and we opened it up to "Out" clients. Out clients could come back, and a number of them did.
 
Steven Krein: What do you call them? "Out clients"? You mean former clients?
 
Dan Sullivan: Out clients. They've been in the Program, but they're not active right now. So a lot of them came back and they signed up on the spot to rejoin the Program. You know, there was movement upwards from Signature to 10x. The client with the most experience was 33 years in the Program. David Engel. You know David.
 
Steven Krein: Of course, yeah. I'm happy to see him in our Free Zone community now.
 
Dan Sullivan: And we had one person who had signed up but hadn't done his first workshop. So that was the spread. You know, it's just a separate special thing. We're doing it and we're not going to do it every year. But we'll start the marketing a year ahead this time. We'll really get people. And we have amazing video interviews and people's comments about it. So we have evidence of what it means for your marketing purposes. But let me ask you a question about your annual thing with your people, your entrepreneurs, your StartUp Health entrepreneurs. Because you've done it a whole number of times, and I think every year, you're doing it every year, right?
 
Steven Krein: Every January, alongside J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, which is a big investor conference that happens every January in San Francisco.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. So what difference does that make to StartUp Health, having all those people attending?
 
Steven Krein: You know, I think going back to pre-COVID, post-COVID, I think the idea of having an opportunity for us, it was the beginning of every year symbolically is a reflection of the past 12 months. What I think is an important look back just to kind of learn about what worked, what didn't work. As you know, for us, the celebration of the achievements of the last year and then looking forward over the next year. You know, we have a primarily virtual community that spends time connecting on, we have quarterly workshops, but we have masterclasses and office hours. And we have sessions at other conferences where there's meetups of our community at the Alzheimer's conference or at the diabetes conferences that take place.
 
For us, the opportunity for founders, which is our community, you know, CEOs, innovators, scientists innovating in healthcare with funders and customers and collaborators. Think of it like the marketplace engagement is an important part of the success of these moonshot communities and these moonshots because they're not all just businesses that are independently looking out and getting customers and going out into the market. They rely on collaboration. They rely on collaboration with funders.
 
That's a big draw to the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January. So the convergence of the key stakeholders that the entrepreneurs in our community need get connected in that kind of environment. And again, this idea of the tissue between sessions, if you're not giving people an opportunity to be in real life together, there's a big disconnect over time. One of the things we did, we partnered with another organization to do two of them a year now, one in the spring and one in the fall. And as we're thinking about our own next-gen version of our, we call it our Health Moonshot Summit, is bringing our communities together without those key stakeholders, which we haven't done before, is an important other dimension to it. But I think the relationships that you can develop in one hour or one day together can carry you for a long time. And so I think, just like having a remote team-
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, yeah. And it's got far more importance with yours. See, we didn't sell anything there. And that was something that I influenced in that we're having a party. We're having a two-day party, with actual parties at the end of every day. And we're just there to celebrate 35 years and everything. But there wasn't one sales pitch on the part of Strategic Coach during the whole thing. And the reason is because we have that going on every day as a normal course of business. And the other thing is, I object to being hustled when I go to a conference.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah, well, a lot of conferences have back-of-the-room sales, and everybody on stage is selling something. So it's more about the ideas. It's more about the connection.
 
Dan Sullivan: It's probably a topic for another podcast, Steve. I think there's a widespread tiredness and annoyance with hype. I'm just noticing that I've read four or five articles in the last two weeks and saying, you know, AI is really, really useful, but it isn't going to change the human race. It's just another new thing that can be added to all the other things that we have. So last year, there was an article in the Wall Street Journal. Last year, 50 billion—I don't know who they were surveying—50 billion was spent on basically Nvidia chips. Basically, it was Nvidia chips. But so far, they can only count for 3 billion people actually made.
 
I said, first of all, you don't have any coaching with it. I think coaching is to the 21st century what management was to the 20th century. Because I think a lot of management functions can actually be done automatically now.
 
Steven Krein: Like what?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, information processing. It's really, really interesting the things that technology can do. They have all sorts of frameworks, they have all sorts of interfaces now where the important information you need, which in the old days used to require a meeting with people sitting there and reports, and now it can all be on your screen, and it requires no time on your part to get other people's information. All you have to do is read it. So much of management is just, I saw there's a great website that's called Visual Capitalist. And it's free. You can just punch it in and look at it. But what they do is they take all economic information in the world and they put it in really neat diagrams. So when AI came out, this is about six months after OpenAI brought out ChatGPT, they said, as far as we can see, whose jobs are endangered? And they said, well, we've identified one group that it has no impact, and that's blue-collar skilled labor. You can't replace a plumber with a chip. But they said, it seems to be that highly educated four years of university and greater white-collar work, whose job mainly is to have a meeting to schedule the next meeting, that they're endangered.
 
Steven Krein: Well, it's interesting to see how, and I think entrepreneurs are inclined to be first movers on a lot of the AI new capabilities you have now. I think there's a lot of elements of tinkering and other things that you do with AI tools where you get quickly engaged with it to see how productive you can be. I do wonder, to your point of the disconnect between how much is spent on the infrastructure and the chips and AI and actually the gain in productivity, there's probably going to be a big delay.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I like Perplexity because it's really straightforward. And they say, ask me something. You don't even ask, you just prompt them with something. So this morning I said, what are the 10 common characteristics that we see with AI introduction that happened with the introduction of electricity starting in the late 1800s? And they went right through and they said this, this, this, this. And one of the things they said is you're asking people to change their habits. And that always takes a long time to get people, especially on an organizational-wide basis, they're going to change their habits. Evan Ryan, who's in Free Zone, he just has a service where he says, we can take a look at 20 jobs in your company, and we can probably free them up five hours a week for 50 hours, 250 hours, we can probably free them up. And that's his goal. These 20 jobs, we're going to free up 250 hours each. Well, that's a big number when you multiply it together, you know. And the whole point is to free them up from things that can be done by technology. But you're not replacing them; you're just freeing them up to do where they're really valuable.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah. We ventured from conference to AI.
 
Dan Sullivan: But the big thing is that we had sessions, we had panels on AI, and it's very useful. And everybody is looking for the thing that changes everything. And I said, nothing changes everything. It only takes hold where it's useful in getting the most important things that are already important done. If we can get them done faster, easier, cheaper, get a bigger result out of it, that's great. So I think it's going to be a long introduction. But back to the convention, we will do it again, and next time we'll have 700. So we've set the goal. We went 350, now we had 700, and that was just a function of marketing.
 
Steven Krein: Yeah. Any other big change you'll do differently for the next conference besides market it earlier and double the size of it?
 
Dan Sullivan: Nope. I mean, there probably are, but one thing, it was our first experience with sponsors, and each of the sponsors wanted a picture with Babs and me with the booth with, you know, with their logo visible. And that was sort of an afterthought activity. So next time, the day before the conference, you know, all the booths have to be up because they got to be ready for the next morning. We're going to just have a two-hour period where Dan and Babs go through the lineup of sponsors, and we have our picture taken and not do it during the convention itself. And I will tell you, Steve, of all the things that could be corrected, that's the only one that's popped to the surface so far. And that's a backstage issue.
 
Steven Krein: I was just going to say, that probably only bothered you when you thought about it. A lot of people probably it worked for them and they're good. So, well, it's wonderful. I think, you know, it's interesting in the world of hybrid where you have in-real-life connected with virtual, connected with what I think are different flavors of events that you do. Like, I think about your symposium in February every year as, you know, it's different than the quarterlies, but it's the night before and the night after that you talk about, which is not a programmed part of the conference that becomes the unlock of connecting with each other.
 
Dan Sullivan: And I've always believed that $1 spent on alcohol always gives you an immediate 10x result. Even from the people who aren't drinking.
 
Steven Krein: Well, any big insights from this conversation, Dan, out of curiosity? Your takeaway?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I'm going to send this to Cathy Davis and Eleanora Mancini, you know, what Dan got out of it and what Steve's going to get out of it next time.
 
Steven Krein: Excellent. All right. Well, I always appreciate the conversation and the reflection on your thinking about your thinking and, in particular, how it's really inspiring to see you not involved in something, such a big program that you just kind of were more of a participant in. I think there's a good lesson in that as well. How to empower your team and guide your team to do things without your involvement. And the byproducts of that are big payoffs, you know, even beyond the conference.
 
All right. Great seeing you, Dan.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Thanks for the questions and the conversation. I love this. So we'll be doing this 25 years from now.
 
Steven Krein: I love it. I love it.