#260: Detailed Breakdown: Our First Offline Event (And What We’ll Do Differently Next Time)

Jay Clouse [00:00:14]:
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. Two weeks ago, we ran our first ever in person experience for the Lab, which we're now calling the Lab Offline. To this point, most of our experience with the Lab has been online and and now we're formally creating these offline experiences as part of the membership. These offline experiences are only available to members on our standard and VIP tiers, at least for now. And of the 200ish members we have in standard and VIP, 40 purchased a ticket and made the trip to Boise for the first event. That's 20% of our members. And my goal was literally 40 people.

Jay Clouse [00:00:55]:
I tend to undersell things and this event was no different. I didn't really push it very hard internally in the community since I knew this would be a totally new experiment. But 40 people coming through felt really great. It felt like a big win. And while it's fresh, I wanted to share my perspective on how the event went, as well as the specific feedback from different people who attended. The feedback in person was fantastic, but just to be sure, I sent an anonymous survey to attendees as well. And so far, 72% of the people who attended have completed that survey and, and the average rating is a 9.4 out of 10. Not only that, but when asked how likely they are to attend another event, 96% said very likely and the only non very likely vote still said slightly likely.

Jay Clouse [00:01:40]:
So all in all, this felt like a big, big win for everybody involved. It wasn't perfect, but our biggest goals were, number one, create an experience that will make people want to return and do another event. And, and number two, not lose too much money. This, this event, this, these offline experiences, they're not intended to be a money maker for the community or the business. I see it as a reason for people to join the community in the first place and stay in the community, basically. I know there are some folks who fit the mold of who would be a great member for the Lab, but they're busy. We're all busy. We're professional content creators and our attention, our time is the most fit, finite resource we have.

Jay Clouse [00:02:19]:
So I believe we can make these events so good that if you join the Lab and only attend our offline events, it will make your membership each year worthwhile. And so I basically want these offline events to break even financially. Now, spoiler, we did lose some money, which I'll talk about and break down later. I'm going to share all the numbers here. But even with that, I felt like we accomplished Both of our goals. It wasn't such a loss. I regret the experience by any means that there were other hiccups. United Airlines almost ruined the trip and there was a chance that we lost $43,000 on the event, which sounds hyperbolic, but I'll explain.

Jay Clouse [00:02:53]:
And in this episode I'm gonna break down exactly what we did, what went well, and what we'll change the next time around. We'll get to that full breakdown right after this. Let's talk about what we did to make this event successful and some of the details that went into planning. We built this event on direct feedback from our members. I first talked about this event back in October of 2024 and basically I ran a poll inside the lab, which is built in circle, to ask what style of event people wanted to see. I asked if people would prefer a swanky standalone destination event like at a resort so it's part vacation or a more cost efficient option like bolting the event onto the front of an existing conference. And I even named Craft and Commerce as the most likely conference to bolt this onto the efficient option won by a 65 to 35% split. So we decided for this first event to move in that direction.

Jay Clouse [00:03:51]:
Put this event on the front end of a pre existing event, namely Kits Craft and Commerce Conference because that seemed like the creator event that would attract the largest subset of our community. A lot of us go each year. The last two years we have done a dinner on the front end of Craft and Commerce and that was always really well attended and really successful. So we figured let's just expand that. The challenge is there's never a perfect solution that serves everyone in a community. As you saw already, we had a 65, 35% split. Some folks really wanted the destination style version of this, but we can't make everybody happy. Basically there will always be scheduling conflicts, there'll be location conflicts, there'll be different preferences that people have.

Jay Clouse [00:04:35]:
So doing any type of planning for a community like this is just a game of choosing the most common choice to try to serve as many people as possible, knowing that those choices will run counter to some people's preferences. People may be upset, people may be feeling left out, but no matter what you do, there are going to be people left on the outside for all kinds of reasons that you can't control. Unfortunately. I love Crafting Commerce, so that's where we landed. We decided to do that here in June of 2025. And with crafting Commerce running Wednesday through Friday, we planned our two day event for Monday and Tuesday of that week. Craft and Commerce is kind of unique in that the Wednesday they really only have a registration and the opening party for the majority of attendees. Thursday and Friday are heavily programmed and then they recommend or hold space for attendee led meetups on Saturday.

Jay Clouse [00:05:28]:
So depending on how you think about the event itself, it's either three days or four days or two days. But we had our event planned for Monday and Tuesday, which left Wednesday as kind of a buffer for most folks, which I think ended up being a good idea. But the result was we had encouraged people to fly in on Sunday evening because we knew we would start early on Monday. So a lot of our folks were coming in on Sunday, leaving on Saturday, which is a full week in Boise. Not a small ask for anybody by any means. Not everybody stayed for Craft and Commerce, by the way. I think three quarters of the folks who came to the conference stayed for all of Craft and Commerce, but there was a good number of folks who came just for the lab offline, and that is totally fine. Leading up to the event, I talked to a bunch of people who have put on events before so I could try to learn what I don't know and get ahead of that, solve some problems in advance.

Jay Clouse [00:06:25]:
Some of those conversations were aired here on the podcast feed, including Dan Andrews, Ryan Hawk, Justin Moore after his sponsor Games event. I've linked to all of those episodes in the show notes. Other conversations were internal to the lab. We have other members who are in very similar positions to me who have run their own events, namely Chris Hutchins and Chad Carson. After their events, I actually basically recorded a debrief with them, put that as a recording in the lab and on our private podcast feed. And so members of the lab could hear exactly what their events were like, what I learned from it. I asked them a bunch of questions and that was super, super helpful. And even beyond that, some folks outside the community, like Jason Gaignard of Mastermind talks, were super generous in sharing their perspective, giving me some feedback.

Jay Clouse [00:07:11]:
And I felt like I had a lot of people sort of on my side helping me learn and look around corners, basically. So these conversations, and especially my conversation with Chad, because he was very generous in sharing with me and our community a breakdown of his budget. This started to give me a rough idea of the major cost drivers in an event. And I started thinking about this actually with another episode that recorded a long time ago with Michael Stelzner, and I was asking him a lot about the cost drivers, and they weren't that surprising. We Weren't doing something to the level of like a conference. One of the major cost drivers that Michael talked about was providing Internet to attendees. And that was just kind of built into the package of the room we rented at a hotel. So the big costs were food, the venue that we rented, swag that we got for attendees, which are these amazing super soft hoodies.

Jay Clouse [00:08:00]:
I shared a photo of it on my LinkedIn last week. And then other miscellaneous supplies. There's also the potential cost of a hotel room block, which I'll talk about here in a little bit. This is a whole new world for me, and this is where I could have actually put myself in a big, big hole and lost a lot of money. Thankfully, that didn't happen. But depending on how you negotiate rooms at a hotel, this is a potential sticking point that I'll break down here in a second. So the challenge with these categories is that there are a mix of fixed and variable costs. Renting a room, that's a pretty fixed cost.

Jay Clouse [00:08:39]:
No matter how many people we have in there, that cost is going to be 800 to $1,000, depending on the venue. Maybe a little higher, depending on the venue. But food, swag, other supplies, that is variable based on how many people you have coming. So you have to have a rough idea of how many people are coming to get a good sense of your budget, your costs, and therefore a sense of the per attendee cost so you can break even again. I was just trying to break even on this. This is another area where the headcount for the hotel and a room block can be a problem. Actually, I'm just gonna go ahead and break this down right now. So the way getting a hotel room block works, basically what we wanted to do was get a preferred rate at the hotel where we were renting the space.

Jay Clouse [00:09:25]:
Okay. I think this is a pretty common thing. You want to give your people a better rate than standard because you're bringing in a whole group of them. So you go to the hotel and you think, I have this leverage of. Of a whole group of people who want to rent rooms. I hope they give me a better rate. And they will do that. But what they do is they have you sign a contract that basically says, okay, we'll give you this rate under these conditions.

Jay Clouse [00:09:48]:
And what they look at is the number of nights you are saying your group will book. So I came in saying we have about 40 people. That's the head count we landed on because we. We did a rough RSVP for the event in Circle. About 40 people. A little more than 40 people said they would come. Of course, they didn't pay yet. So I just kind of assumed, okay, some of these people won't end up coming.

Jay Clouse [00:10:13]:
Other people will join and end up deciding they want to go. 40 feels like a safe ish number. And that's what we used to bring to the hotel. We actually went with 39. So we went to the hotel, which was Hotel Renegade, this really nice boutique hotel with great room pricing. And we said, hey, we have 39 people coming. What's the best rate that you can give us? And they said, how many nights do you plan to stay? And ordinarily, when you're running an event, it's just gonna be a couple nights, right? If we're doing Monday and Tuesday, it would be reasonable to say, well, we wanna have nights for Sunday when people get there Monday, and then check out Tuesday or check out Wednesday, you know, so you would have three or four nights. The challenge for us was there were people coming that wanted to stay for all of craft and commerce.

Jay Clouse [00:10:59]:
So I wanted to give them that preferred rate and a consistent hotel room all through the week. So now we had 39 people coming. And I was trying to say, we want rooms for 39 people all week. And so they basically just do the math and say, okay, if you want to check out on Saturday, the following week and check in on Sunday, that is Saturday, six nights times 39 people, that is 234 room nights on your contract at this preferred rate of $229 per person. Okay, great. That means that I have a better price for everybody who's coming. Right? Except when they think. When the hotel thinks 234 nights at $229 per person, that math is they expect $53,586 in room revenue from that contract.

Jay Clouse [00:11:53]:
And the way it's written, there's something called attrition. You are responsible for personally guaranteeing some percentage of that. Otherwise you cover the difference. So the percentage I had to personally guarantee to cover was 80%. Basically, of those 234 room nights they were making available, we had to book as a group 187 of them, which is a total revenue of $42,869 or whatever difference there was that our group came up short. I had to personally pay that. And where this got tricky was not everybody was staying for craft and commerce. So automatically, even if everybody who came for the lab offline, if we had 39 people and they all booked a hotel Room, which isn't even completely likely.

Jay Clouse [00:12:41]:
Some people are gonna choose to stay somewhere else. But if 39 people came and they all booked the hotel room for the first two days, but then several of them left before crafting commerce, all of a sudden we have this gap in how many rooms total are being booked for the week that I am personally liable for. So that was really, really scary when I realized it. Cause I didn't actually like really think about this until the contract was signed. I didn't really think about the fact that I was personally on the hook for booking $43,000 in business for the hotel, not including our actual like venue and food. That was very stressful because if folks chose not to stay at the hotel, I just would have been out a lot of money. This is how we would have lost the most money possible. Now, luckily we did actually book 180 rooms total.

Jay Clouse [00:13:31]:
And the hotel itself booked the remaining rooms that were there. And so even though we were technically like $1,400 short of what I personally guaranteed, they chose not to assess an attrition fee to me, which is kind. Although I will say, as you'll hear later, we ended up booking a second room. And because our room block was actually sold out, we had to book a suite and it was so expensive. Okay. Anyway, onto the rest of how we designed the event. I. I wanted to share that in case you're thinking about booking a hotel.

Jay Clouse [00:14:04]:
Once we had decided on the hotel and again we used Hotel Renegade in Boise, this really nice boutique hotel. They were great in terms of the pricing for the room. And they had a room that was perfectly set up for about 40 people. We had some help actually from Sona Events based in Boise. They help with craft and commerce. And Haley at Kit was also very helpful. Once we had this locked in and assumed we were having about 40 people, we started doing some budgeting. Using some of the figures from other members event experience as a guide, we started making some assumptions on food cost, venue cost, swag, materials.

Jay Clouse [00:14:40]:
We estimated several different scenarios. A low end cost estimate, a high end cost estimate, and then a blend of the two to basically get an average. We added those costs together and looked at how they compared in a world where we had 30 attendees. 40. 40 attendees, 50 attendees. Ultimately, we based our budgetary assumptions on the 40 person guest list and we were advised to add a 10% buffer for just assuming that we missed something. And this led to an estimated per attendee cost of around $321 per person. That would give a total budget for the event of just under $15,000.

Jay Clouse [00:15:23]:
And knowing that we were probably still missing something and if we had fewer than 40 attendees, that the per attendee cost would actually be higher. Due to the fixed costs, we decided to price tickets at $4.99 per person with an early bird price of 399. And once those prices were determined, we could actually start selling tickets, collecting real RSVPs and making this event much more real. I just looked at the numbers. We had 80% of people book at the early bird rate. So I'm glad we didn't price that underneath our estimated cost too far. And we started collecting registrations on March 21st of this year with again the event starting on June 9th. Now, there were some unanticipated costs, including service fees at the hotel, which turned out to be pretty high reprinting of materials, which I'll talk about in a little bit because that was both unnecessary and frustrating.

Jay Clouse [00:16:21]:
We added in a videographer to the event really last minute, and we increased our food totals first morning based on how much food was eaten at breakfast. So the actual attendee cost came out to be $445 per person. All said and done. But what I haven't mentioned yet is that not only did I bring my wife and daughter, but my mom came along too. We realized that Mal, my wife, was going to miss so much of the event that she helped plan. She did so much of the planning of this, but she was going to miss so much of the evening activities because she would be putting the baby to bed and then staying in the hotel room to watch the baby. So we reached out to my mom last minute. I really didn't expect her to take me up on this, but she was feeling spontaneous and said that she would come along.

Jay Clouse [00:17:07]:
So we booked a flight and an extra hotel room for her. Our room block was full, so we ended up actually giving her our hotel room. And we booked a suite, which was nice but super expensive. We booked a rental car and this effectively doubled our travel costs because we had an extra ticket. It was closer to the time of travel, so that ticket was more expensive than ours was. The hotel cost ballooned quite a bit. So if you factor in the cost of our travel, including rental car, and I do want to bake our travel costs into the cost of these events. The per attendee cost then comes out to $648.

Jay Clouse [00:17:47]:
So if you're doing the math at home, the total cost of the event, not including our travel costs, was just shy of $18,000. And the total costs, including our travel costs, were just shy of $26,000. So however you want to think about the expenses and the costs, I am personally thinking about the costs, including our travel. So I would say it's $26,000 for this event. And total revenue from ticket sales was just shy of $17,000. So if you look at that, we either lost about $1,000 on the event or $9,000 on the event. And the difference would be that we were either over budget by $26 per person or $229 per person. Again, I'm going to go with a larger number, $229 per person.

Jay Clouse [00:18:32]:
And that's not too bad. You know, we're gonna eat $9,000 on this event. But what I really wanted to do, I guess a third goal I didn't mention earlier, is that we were really trying to just get the economics down of this event. So the next time we do it, we have a better idea what to expect, how to price it, the planning goes a little bit quicker, all the details are a little bit better, and all in all, not a bad cost to pay for a fantastic event and learning everything we needed to learn about it. After a quick break, we'll dig into the structure of this two day event and what attendees really liked about it. And later I'll share what we'll be doing differently the next time around. So stick around, we'll be right back. And we are back.

Jay Clouse [00:19:13]:
Let's talk about the structure of the event and what people really liked about it. First and foremost, I can't overstate just how effusive and how positive the feedback has been from this event. Just from the anonymous survey itself, here are a couple quotes that I pulled that were meaningful to me and I think speak to how people felt about the event. First quote is, I've attended tons, like so many Mastermind retreats that we've paid thousands for. And the Lab offline far exceeded all of them. Next quote. This event was polished in a way it shouldn't have been given. It was your first offline event for the Lab.

Jay Clouse [00:19:51]:
Next quote. The Lab offline is what made craft and commerce even better for me. And we had several people say that. Others mentioned the swag, the hoodie, and the personal notes that I provided. Everybody who attended got a personal note from me that was written specifically for them. They were all unique. And the last quote is just perfectly planned. I probably have at least five new people I consider friends and 15 people I might collaborate with.

Jay Clouse [00:20:16]:
Completely worth it. Of the people who responded to the survey, 100% of them said they met somebody new. And. And people love the hotel, by the way. That was given a average rating of 9.6 out of 10. That came up in a lot of feedback. So one thing we will certainly be doing moving forward is continuing to emphasize the quality of the hotel. I think that might have been the nicest hotel I've stayed in.

Jay Clouse [00:20:40]:
It was at least the most beautifully designed and comfortable. So, yeah, big props to the team at Hotel Renegade. One thing I will always do for any event is in conjunction with a conference or some other event that's happening is do it beforehand. People loved that this happened before craft and commerce, because then they went into the event with a whole bunch of friends that they already knew. We had a group WhatsApp for the offline event, and we kept that active through craft and commerce. And that was probably my favorite part of the whole conference was just the, like, back channel chat room that we had the whole time. A lot of folks mentioned that as well. And by doing it before the conference, everybody who stayed for the conference said it just made the whole trip feel like a success already, no matter what happened at the conference, how much time they spent at the conference, and that was really, really fantastic.

Jay Clouse [00:21:31]:
I think one of the things we did really, really well with the structure of the event was focusing on what makes in person experiences special before planning the agenda. I reread Priya Parker's book the Art of Gathering, and this is one of her biggest points in that book is basically get really clear on your purpose for gathering. And I wanted to get clear about our purpose for gathering. I also wanted to focus on the things that you can uniquely do in person that you can't do online. So our purpose for gathering, I wanted to give people a chance to kind of reflect and see am I headed in the right direction for the rest of the year. I also wanted to give them a chance to make a new friend and ultimately fall more in love with their business. I don't know if it's just me, but I was starting to feel a little burned out. I was starting to feel like I was a little bit in a job.

Jay Clouse [00:22:21]:
And so personally I knew that I wanted to fall more in love with my business again. And so I wanted to create that experience for others as well. And I believe we did that really well. What I think in person experiences can do really well is unique transparency between people. When you're just talking face to face with somebody and you don't have Like a fathom note taker standing next to you, you're more likely to be transparent and honest and real. I think it's increasingly difficult in an online world where you feel like everything is recorded all the time. So I really wanted to create space, hold space for these very real conversations that gives people a better opportunity to connect with one another. I've said for a long time that if you have an online community, it's really important to create opportunities for people to interact in real time, three dimensionally.

Jay Clouse [00:23:15]:
I mean, I'm talking about like zoom calls. It's not completely three dimensionally, but it's more three dimensional than a name and an avatar in a community. When people understand the person behind a name and avatar online, they're just more invested in that person's success. They want to be more helpful, they want to spend more time with them. So I knew that connection is something I wanted to create between people in this event. I think you can talk more quickly when you're in person. The speed of conversation is just faster. You cover more ground if you give space for that.

Jay Clouse [00:23:47]:
Creating open space on people's calendar. When you operate online, sometimes you go call to call to call, like your whole day is booked without any buffer. So I actually wanted to create a lot of open space during the day. I, I knew people would block off these two days to be here, but they wouldn't block off like hours within the day. So I could basically force people to have open space. And then again I wanted to recharge people's enthusiasm for their business. Things that you can do really well online are knowledge transfer. You know, I think what's common for offline experiences, in person experiences, conferences, is we feel like we have to program every minute and every hour and it turns into this dynamic where you're sitting and like watching somebody present.

Jay Clouse [00:24:31]:
But it's actually better to receive information online because I can start, stop, go back, listen at one and a half or two times speed. It's a really poor use of in person time, in my opinion, to have presentations because when someone's presenting, what's not happening is conversation. And the point of being in person is connection and conversation. So I didn't have presentations during this event. There was no me teaching during this event. The agenda was this mix of structured and unstructured. We started every day at 8 o' clock, but that was an optional hour to come and eat breakfast, chat with people. By that time Mal and I had set up, we started setting up at 7:30.

Jay Clouse [00:25:21]:
We honestly should have started setting up at 7, because setting everything up in 30 minutes each day was too tight of a window. But people would get there at 8, they would chat. We would start the programming at 9. And we had five tables in this room. Each table had eight chairs, which is perfect because we had 40 people. Actually 39 people made the trip. One person was unable to make the trip last minute. But at those 40 chairs, table settings, I had assigned seating that I went through.

Jay Clouse [00:25:50]:
And I matched people based a little bit on vibe, if I'm honest. Like, I just think these people will get along. These people have similar businesses at every table. I actually tried to pair a couple of people who I knew already knew each other. I wanted people to, like, be a mix of comfortable with somebody that I thought they already knew and then forced to meet other new people. But what I got really good feedback on from people is sometimes, especially introverts, going to an event, you have this pressure and anxiety of who am I going to sit with, who am I going to make friends with? And having assigned seating really takes that out of the equation. You just sit where you're told and if it's curated intentionally, that's going to be a really good thing for you. During our programming, I had a bunch of individuals exercises, basically saying things like, what is something you love about your business? Because again, I wanted people to fall in love with their business.

Jay Clouse [00:26:46]:
So I asked people to write down what is something you love about your business? What do your customers love about your business? And then I invited people to share that amongst their table, which I thought would be a good way to introduce each other, learn about each other's businesses and spread some positivity to start the event off. So we had a mixture of these individual prompts followed by group sharing at their table. On the second day, the major group prompt was what are the major revenue drivers in your business? What are the major cost drivers in your business? What feels suboptimal right now? And then we set aside almost three hours to do hot seats for everybody at each table. I broke it up into 18 minute chunks and I had a timer on the television screens. Every 18 minutes I would stop and we move on to the next person that seemed to be people's favorite part of the experience. Actually, I had people rate their favorite parts of the experience and based on that feedback, the small group mastermind was people's favorite part. So I think that is certainly going to stick around and be a large part of these events in the future. And then I tried to create some serendipity we had one exercise where we had these big yellow post IT notes.

Jay Clouse [00:28:06]:
And on the top of the post it note, I encourage people to write something they're trying to figure out. Right now I'm trying to figure this out. I'm trying to learn about this. I'm trying to meet somebody who can help me with this. Basically just answering that question, put it up on the wall with their name, and then other people in the room could go up and write their name on the post it if they were somebody that could help solve that problem. We also did on the back of people's name tags, everyone's name tag had a backside that said I want to learn about and then fill in the blank. Okay. We basically just wanted to create these surfaces throughout the event that allowed people the excuse to make conversation, if that makes sense.

Jay Clouse [00:28:46]:
Trying to generate serendipity. We had three off the record fireside chats. So on day one, we had an hour with Nathan Barry, the CEO of kit. We had an hour with Barrett Brooks, who is a coach for basically like high level professional creators, folks who are doing a million dollars and more in revenue. And on the third day, we had Onlor Leconf, who you may know from Nest Labs Online or her book Tiny Experiments. All of them were great. They were very generous in sharing. And the vibe, when you're sharing something that's not recorded for public consumption, but just in this room, it's just better.

Jay Clouse [00:29:24]:
You get real honesty. Stuff that people wouldn't feel comfortable sharing publicly where they don't know who else could see it. It was really, really great. And then in early afternoon, we would break for optional afternoon experiences. Basically, we had reserved time at KIT Studios for people to record. We booked out all their studios for a couple hours each of those two days. People went and recorded podcasts together or some type of content. Others went on these afternoon experiences that we had planned.

Jay Clouse [00:29:58]:
The first day, we rented out an entire block of escape rooms. There's a business that does escape rooms in Boise and they have four different escape rooms. We rented out all of them and did that for about an hour and a half. That was really fun. That was my first escape room. Big fan, really fun way to collaborate and work with people. That was really fun. And if you weren't recording or doing the escape room, we basically gave you the afternoon off to go, decompress, catch up on work, exercise.

Jay Clouse [00:30:26]:
People were going for walks and things. Then we would meet up for private group dinners in the evenings. The first night at a cocktail lounge, we have These like custom cocktail menus with really fun, cute names. And the second night we had this like whole wing of a restaurant to us and it was beautiful, super fun. We chose the playlist. It was just awesome. So the dinners were rated as the third favorite part of the event. The individual writing exercises were second, guest Fireside chats was fourth, Afternoon activities was fifth.

Jay Clouse [00:31:06]:
Stuff that other people organized was sixth. And seventh was a recording. So not to say the recording was not valuable, but that is a good note that if we do the event elsewhere or don't have access to recording studios, that was not part of the event. That really made the experience special for folks. All the things that we planned went well. And I mentioned already the group WhatsApp having that real time chat based experience was awesome. We thought about doing it as a group direct message in circle, but circle DMs I will just continue to say are just not good enough yet. Certainly not as real time or exciting or lively as WhatsApp.

Jay Clouse [00:31:47]:
So breaking my own rule and using a second community tool, not something I want to do, but I think it made the event and the experience so good. We will do that again until circle makes their DMs a little bit better. Okay, after one last break, I'll share what we'll be doing differently for our next event, or at least what we'll consider doing differently and some of the other hiccups that happened in the planning. So stick around, we'll be right back. Okay, last leg of the episode here. What would we be doing differently the next time around? Even though this event again was rated a 9.4 out of 10 by the attendees, not everything was perfect. Not all the feedback was exclusively positive. There were areas for improvement.

Jay Clouse [00:32:32]:
So here are some of the feedback we got for areas of improvement that I'm taking into our next event, our next planning. First quote is it would have been nicer to have more opportunities to connect with other lab mates than those at our tables. Even with a small size like 40, there are many I didn't even get to say hi to. Totally hear that. One of the things that I will mention we're going to do differently is have greater changes in the seating charts or maybe even more frequent changes in the seating charts. We basically had two different seating charts, one for Monday, one for Tuesday, and we didn't like mix everybody up entirely. We kind of like moved half of each table elsewhere. So I think we could have mixed that up a little bit more.

Jay Clouse [00:33:16]:
Next point of feedback was I'd like to see pre event Survey on prompts for things to think about, like what are you struggling with right now? Even if the data isn't collected in a survey, just a prompt on what to think about ahead of time would have been nice. This quote went on to say basically that the prompts were really thoughtful questions, but because I shared it like moments before I asked them to write about it and then share with their group, they didn't have as much time to process and think about it as they would like, which meant that they weren't able to be as active of a listener as they would like. I think that's really great feedback, getting ahead on some of these question prompts, because it doesn't need to be a surprise to have people think about this and have some intention going into the event. I think this is really, really great feedback. Feedback. Third quote is some sort of protein option at breakfast would be my only feedback. Or just knowing what kind of breakfast there was before arriving. One of the absolute necessities for any event is to understand people's dietary restrictions and allergies.

Jay Clouse [00:34:14]:
My wife and I both know this. We, we thought we were doing this well, but the result was especially our breakfasts were very light. There wasn't as much food there as we thought there was going to be. It was basically like light pastries, coffee and orange juice, and it just wasn't. It wasn't good enough. So that is something we're certainly taking. And if we look at the data on how people rated breakfast, it was pretty bad. 4.9 out of 10.

Jay Clouse [00:34:41]:
That was our lowest rating of anything in the event. Lunches were 7.1. Both of those things were from the hotel and we couldn't have outside catering, which is a challenge. I think if we go elsewhere or go to a different hotel in a different city, we're certainly going to look at the food requirements and see if we can cater in somewhere. Because I think there are just limits of what you can do with your budget with hotel food because it tends to be priced at a premium and not the greatest food in the world. Next quote of feedback was, you kind of ruined craft and commerce by setting the bar so high. And there were a few people who said this, which is both a compliment and something I don't really want to do to an event that I love and respect. I don't want people to have a negative craft and commerce experience because they're comparing it to the offline experience we had immediately beforehand.

Jay Clouse [00:35:34]:
So this is another reason why we'll be looking at whether we keep Doing this model of doing it on the front of another event because I certainly don't want people to end the week feeling disappointed. I want them to end on a high. And I also don't want to take customers and positive experiences away from other businesses, other conferences. So this is an interesting point of feedback and I'm still trying to figure out how to hear it and action it. Then the last point of negative feedback that I pulled from the survey was the biggest area of improvement is communication prior to the event. This likely means planning more in advance. There was a missed opportunity to drip info in advance to build anticipation for the event. This includes what to expect around format and content as well as logistics like dress code, meeting locations.

Jay Clouse [00:36:23]:
I'm all for surprises, but honestly the lack of info came across as last minute planning and banking on trust and reputation to deliver. Which to be clear, you did deliver. You could even release a little bit of information along the way just to keep it front of mind, like a teaser obscuring photo of the swag behind the scenes, yada yada, when you finalize the venue, et cetera. This is extremely valid feedback. Candidly, my biggest challenge with this event was planning the agenda. And not because I didn't know how to fill the time, but because when you actually got down to it with what we were doing, there wasn't that much time to fill. Between the afternoon experiences, the fireside chat guests, the dinners, the actual experience of sitting in the venue where I knew we wanted to have some sort of programming and direction, there were only, gosh, I want to say, less than 10 hours of activities to plan. I guess it's like nine to two each day, so about five hours each day.

Jay Clouse [00:37:25]:
But again, there were three fireside chats. So we were talking about like six, seven hours of activity that I had to plan and there was a lot of stuff that I wanted to do. So the last thing that was totally locked in was actually the agenda, which meant that I was not communicating the agenda super well in advance cause I didn't have it totally done. I was really toiling over this detail. Now that we've done this and we have some clarity on what aspects people really liked, I'll be able to lock that agenda in sooner and certainly do a better job of building anticipation, painting expectations, helping people feel prepared. And I do also agree that by doing that more in advance, it would be easier to get more people interested in the event and probably get more people to come along. So based on all that feedback, here are the top points of what I think we might change or explore the next time around. Number one, we've got to increase the budget a little bit.

Jay Clouse [00:38:24]:
We were low on the total cost for this event again by somewhere between $25 and $200 per person. I don't think our travel costs will be as high for everywhere that we go. So I think we wouldn't have to increase the budget. $200 per person, I don't think. But if we did increase the budget a little bit more, we could also get better food. All of this of course pending if we want to try to save money elsewhere in the experience. Can we find a cheaper venue? Can we find cheaper dinner venues? Can we find cheaper activity venues? Can we release having a videographer this next time around? All these things are possible, but I think the priority is to have better food for the next event and we have to look into how to do that. But it's probably going to require a small increase in the per person budget.

Jay Clouse [00:39:18]:
Next, I want to add more serendipity. The post it exercise that we did, I think there are several variations on that that we could do and we should do it earlier in the experience because those post it stayed up for those couple of days and anytime we had a break I encourage people to go look at it, write their name on anything that could help start conversations. But I think we could have more padding for those conversations to happen and I think we could have those prompts earlier in the experience. So want to create more serendipity, bring it into the structure earlier. I already said that I want to do more frequent or larger changes in the seating charts to give people the chance to meet more new folks. That that's direct feedback from the survey. I will look into whether we want to do three days. People in the feedback were a little bit mixed.

Jay Clouse [00:40:08]:
Some people said three days would be great if there was not a conference on the back end of it. One day felt like it would be too short for some folks. Although I think I could do like a one day mastermind heavy experience before another event. We had some feedback that folks wanted to start the first day in the afternoon so they could fly in the day of that's valid. So yeah, we'll look at one day versus two days versus three days the start time, whether we want to continue having precede another event because again staying there for a full week certainly felt long. And staying there for a week with the hotel block math that I explained earlier makes that hotel block tricky. If I were to do it again, I would Give the hotel a smaller headcount than what we're expecting, knowing that we want to cover an average of 80% of the rooms. And if we fill the rooms, we can certainly go back to the hotel and ask to expand the block.

Jay Clouse [00:41:04]:
And typically they will be happy to do that. So I think the move is just to underestimate your head count early on and expand it as you hit that attrition total. But yeah, we'll look into whether or not we even want to do it on the front of another event. I don't know if that is the go forward model every time. Again, we had a fair number of people who said they would like to have a more destination style experience. And I think it would be so fun to plan something in a resort that's like all expenses paid, that's half vacation, that encourages folks to bring their significant other and you know, even have activities for the significant others to get together. I think would be super, super fun. And that probably wouldn't precede another event, if that makes sense.

Jay Clouse [00:41:46]:
Something I haven't told you yet is that my family arrived in Boise on Sunday evening, you know, the day before the event starts. All of our printed materials, and we had a lot of them. We had trifolds, we had those cards that we had together. We had menus for the cocktail party, we had customized fortune cookies, fortunes that say things like, your email will land in the primary tab of the inbox. All of these things were in a checked bag that got mistagged in Columbus and ended up in San Francisco. And we had to have a very stern conversation with the gate agent at Boise airport, convince him to call San Francisco airport because we had an airtag. They located the bags in real time, got super lucky that they went to San Francisco, which is on the west coast, and that they had landed at a similar time as we did. And then they got those bags on the next flight to Boise.

Jay Clouse [00:42:38]:
We drive back to the airport and pick them up. But if we didn't have our bag of materials, we would have had a bad time. It would have been such a bummer because all the stuff we spend the most time on was in that bag. Such a bummer. Our hoodies arrived a day later than they were supposed to. We were supposed to put them out on Monday. We didn't get them until midday Monday, so we put them out on Tuesday. So all this to say, if we did another event, I would actually prefer to get to the location, set city early, several days early, maybe have an Airbnb so that we can collect all of our materials and kind of relax into the event rather than have the super high pressure, get to the airport, can't have any delays.

Jay Clouse [00:43:22]:
Everything needs to arrive on time. Then we need to get into prepping. It was just kind of stressful. So I think we would probably arrive earlier to make the lead up to the event feel a little bit less stressful. And maybe we look at renting a house. If I'm bringing my wife, my daughter and my mom, maybe we get a house around the event or some other sort of accommodations that isn't too expensive hotel rooms because for the cost that we put into just our hotel rooms, we could have booked a really nice house. Probably it wouldn't have been as convenient to not be in the hotel, but with the amount of people that we had there and trying to have a baby, feel comfortable and also not get into trouble. Hotels aren't ideal for a week.

Jay Clouse [00:44:08]:
So we're looking at that. We're also looking at how many events do we want to do per year. This is a question I asked in a survey. My assumption was that we'd probably try to land on like two per year. And based on the survey results, 53% of people said two is how many they would attend per year, 36% said one. And then there are only three responses total between three and four. So it looks like the top end is two per year. If we want people to feel compelled to join multiple of them.

Jay Clouse [00:44:37]:
And I think that's about all we could plan. The question is will we do another one this year or not? And I'm kind of leaning no. I'm kind of thinking I don't want to commit to doing another one this year. Although there's a really good case we made for doing like a, an annual planning summit at the end of the year for the following year. And maybe we don't do it to the full degree that we did this event. Maybe it is like a day of masterminding and annual planning. Maybe we could descope it so it didn't feel as intense, but I don't know. I'm going to rest for the next week and think about it, talk to the wife about it.

Jay Clouse [00:45:14]:
Will we want to do another one this year? We're going to figure that out. But it feels like at most we would probably do two of these events per year. I am also kind of interested in doing a larger scale event under the broader Creator Science brand. I just think that the bar for making a unique event experience is pretty low. The trouble is logistics, cash flow. Those things are so complicated and stressful. But I think we could plan a really unique event that creators would love. And then of course, we could have a separate special track or pre event for folks in the lab in particular.

Jay Clouse [00:45:53]:
I think that could be really interesting. But is that a this year thing? Definitely not. Is it a next year thing? I don't know. Sort of depends on how this book project progresses, but definitely looking at that. In a world where we do two events per year, though, I really want to do one of them internationally. We have a lot of folks in the community who are not US based. Several folks who are not US based came to Boise. We had folks traveling more than 20 hours, shout out to Ivan and Josh and PRNA, huge amount of travel, and I'm so glad they had a great experience.

Jay Clouse [00:46:26]:
But man, that's tough. I think if we did something in the Europe area, one of my leading ideas is Lisbon, actually. I think that could be really fun. I wouldn't mind getting out of the country for a little bit, but again, then we would really want to get into the location early to make sure that we have everything we need on location and ready to go. So that is what we're thinking about for the Lab offline. Again. That's what we're calling these experiences now, the Lab offline experiences. Extremely successful first event.

Jay Clouse [00:46:56]:
It's very clear from the feedback and the data that people are gonna be coming back, and that's exactly what I was hoping for. If you have been considering joining the lab, this is a great time to do it. Would love to see you in there again. I think just these offline experiences would make the. The cost of admission worth it for you, year in and year out. That is the goal. But man, there's a lot of value in this place and I am really focused on making the lab a place for my peers. I don't want to be the teacher of all the things.

Jay Clouse [00:47:27]:
There's so many people in the community who are more experienced, more successful, more financially prosperous than I am. I just want this to be the best online and offline community for professional creators. If you're on the fence, allow me to gracefully push you off of it. You can go to creatorscience.com lab to learn more. There's a link in the show Notes. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and letting me know. I really want to get to 500 reviews on Apple Podcasts. We're not too far off now.

Jay Clouse [00:47:59]:
It goes a long way. And if you want to learn more about some of the events that other folks have have run, I have linked in the show notes my episode with Dan Andrews, Ryan Hawk and Justin Moore. Check it out. Otherwise, thank you for listening and I'll talk to you next week.