I hosted three events in three weeks recently. The first one was fine. The second one crushed it. The third one (the most complex one…) taught me the most. I wanted to write up the things that I have been learning in hopes that (a) I can remember them better, and (b) perhaps you can take something I screwed up and do it better the next time you try.
The roundtable
A buddy and I co-hosted a CMO roundtable. We invited marketing VPs and directors from around Atlanta. The problem? Neither of us actually had a deep Rolodex of those types of folks. We got a small turnout.
Also… We both forgot about the food until the evening before… And then, no one actually ate it. Here’s the takeaway of the ENTIRE article. You ready for it?
If you buy food, no one eats it
If you don’t buy food, everyone is sad.
There is no middle ground, folks 🙂
But, back to the roundtable. One or two of the people who did show up were really well-connected around Atlanta. And those introductions ended up springboarding the next two events. We even said during at the close of the event: “Just go to Top Golf. That’s all people want.” So, we did. And if we didn’t try the CMO roundtable, Top Golf wouldn’t have happened.
TopGolf without an agenda
We scrapped the roundtable format and just invited marketing leaders to come hang out at TopGolf. Zero agenda. Zero sponsors. Zero advertising. Just “come have food and meet new people.” That was it.
We got about 20 people on a random Tuesday night with about three weeks of planning.
I was honestly surprised how difficult it was to get people to start swinging golf clubs. Everyone was there having a GREAT time, but no one was signing in on the tablets to start playing. It took the better part of an hour to an hour and a half to get people playing.
But, that made me realize that simply having the backdrop of TopGolf was the differentiator. We could have done this in a bar (and have it cost us next to nothing with people picking up their own drinks and snacks). But TopGolf provided the backdrop of “fun and relaxation” — even if only 10 people actually took advantage of golfing. Heck, someone came out a few days after he messed up his leg. He couldn’t golf, but wanted to be around good people.
The thing I kept hearing from folks is: “I met someone new today.”
That’s the thing I want to keep doing.
Then we went to New York
Bowling on Night 1
What I didn’t realize while I was planning TopGolf was that our NYC Agency Leaders’ Field Trip was literally a week after this… (anyone who is introverted can feel my pain)
So… The following week, I co-hosted what we called the Agency Leaders Field Trip with my buddy David Ries up in New York. We’d met at a conference the year before and realized we both thought the conference sucked. All we actually cared about was the after-conference hangout at the bar. So we thought, what if we just make that the whole event? Would people actually show up to a day and a half of just hanging out with other agency leaders?
Day one was bowling. We had 15 people across 5 lanes. The food was great, the staff was quick, and everyone was talking to someone at all times. Bowling ended at 8pm, but the waitress moved us to a table so we could keep going.
Nobody left until 9:00 – 9:30ish.
That feeling of people not wanting to stop the conversations they’d started was the highlight of the whole trip for me.
Coffee Shop Hopping on Day 2
Day two was Friday. We picked four spots across New York City: coffee shop, lunch, another coffee shop, and a bar. The goal was to let folks drop in, drop out, come to whichever ones you want. These are all agency folks that we had — we know how hard it is to steal away for an entire day. We intentionally built in flexibility (and having all the locations off the same subway line)
We had about 20 unique faces throughout the day. But seven of us were at every single stop. So we had this core group of seven people together from 9am to 9pm. Twelve straight hours. That’s a fairly long time to be with the same people (without the backdrop of “fun” – like bowling the week prior).
Each stop, maybe two or three new faces trickled in. But for the most part, it was the same group all day.
And look, I don’t care how much you enjoy each other’s company. Twelve hours at small coffee shop tables is a long time. There were definitely lulls. The conversation energy would spike when a new person showed up, and then settle back down.
And by the way… all of that is OK. The seven folks that hung out the whole day enjoyed it. I’m just super-sensitive to conversation lulls and it personally bugs me. I think that’s why I enjoyed TopGolf the week before so much, because there were ever-changing pockets of people chatting with one another.
How do we fix that?
Instead of four planned group stops, do three, with built in empty time.
Morning coffee together from 9 to noon. That’s the big group hang. Then pick a marketplace-style lunch spot with a lot of options, but don’t make it a group thing. At coffee or bowling the night before, figure out who you want to grab lunch with. Go eat with two or three people, not the whole crew.
After lunch is free time. Go explore. Go take a client call. Go sit in a park with someone you just met. Whatever you want.
Then in the evening, everyone reconvenes at a bar with some music to wrap up the day.
Same amount of time together. Way less burnout. And lunch becomes its own mini-networking moment instead of hour seven of the same conversation.
The format I’m using for everything now
Between TopGolf and New York, I landed on a framework that I think is repeatable.
Always co-host. Honestly, I don’t want to pull all the weight, having a co-host doubles the network, and you can split the cost. Each of us invites six people. And when we send out those invites, we tell each person to bring one friend.
The message goes something like this: “You’re one of my six invites. My co-host is inviting six people too. All we’re asking is that you bring one friend with you. If everyone does this, there will be at least five to ten people at this event that you don’t know.”
My goal here is to get people bought into the idea of “meeting new people” is the key (and I know this is what people are looking for because I’ve been asking them at each of these events). So, if everyone is willing to play a small role in making sure everybody meets somebody new, that changes the whole dynamic. It’s not just “come to my event.” It’s “help me build a room worth being in.”
I’m also thinking about a small ticket. Something like $30 that covers you and the friend you bring. Not to make money, but to offset costs so I’m not eating $1,500+ every time I host something.
We’ll see how it goes. But I’m doing this again. And again. And again.
