From In-Person Rooms to Screens and Zoom

Through our first several years of attending the semi-annual International Maxwell Conference, where we completed our initial licensing with Maxwell Leadership then pursued all the continuing education and mentorship we could absorb, Cindy and I were very intentional to get involved behind the scenes wherever we had opportunities. Not only did we want to give back to the organization we had learned so much from, we knew it would provide experience we’d be able to apply as we hosted events of our own. And it absolutely was. Not so long ago, I was talking with someone and mentioned the 500+ hours Cindy and I put into each of the annual events we had hosted since 2015. He looked at me like I had an elbow growing out of my forehead and asked, “Why do you put so much time into it?” I responded by saying “You’ve never done something like that, have you?” He clearly had not… Having just limited involvement in room set-up, run-of-show, and various other pieces of a three-thousand person event taught us a ton about what we’d need to do for 200-300 people in our rooms, especially when the team handling all the details (and finances) leading up our events consisted of only me and Cindy.

We’ll circle back to a few other seeds we’ve since pulled for the many adversities we faced as event hosts. For now, let’s stick to how tough maintaining self-control and a pleasing personality can be when you go from selling out a room for 225 attendees six weeks prior to the 2019 event to being capped at a maximum of 50 people on the premises the following year. What folks who have never planned or hosted events like this often don’t realize is that many of the arrangements have to be made six months to a year in advance; the venue, catering, licensing, and support for the day of. None of that happens a few days or even a few weeks before the event. In 2020, we had all that in place by the end of February. When all our existing plans began to evaporate on March 11, our costs - as well as our obligations to our partners - were still very real.

Cindy and I were using tools like Zoom long before it was cool, so we didn’t experience the personal learning curve that many others did when the lockdowns started. Quite honestly, using virtual tools served as the seed for our January 2020 conversation with DPOR and led to us becoming approved recertification providers with SHRM and HRCI. However, we had been doing sessions with small groups, not hosting events for hundreds of people. Not only were we now responsible for figuring out how to do that for our clients and partners locally, we were also serving as volunteers who supported several hundred other folks around the world who hosted events similar to what we had been doing.

That volunteer role provided more opportunities to look for seeds in a short period of time than I could have imagined. For time’s sake, I won’t go cover all that in detail here, but I will share that even an organization with the strongest history and clearly stated values can suffer significantly when just one person in a key role chooses to skirt those values to appease a select few. And as frustrating as that was to deal with in a volunteer role, Cindy and I pulled a powerful lesson from it that’s opened doors to far greater opportunities ever since. It also helped us know exactly what we needed to do to deliver the best possible experience for our event locally in October 2020.

Regardless of the cap on attendance, forty percent of what we could have in previous years with several added expenses we didn’t have before or since, we pushed forward. Just in case you’re wondering, we still have a few boxes of N95 masks and a case or two of hand sanitizer left over all these years later. Pivot was the buzzword of the year, and pivot we did. We didn’t make a profit on that event, and I’m fairly sure we didn’t even cover our costs, but the people who were able to join us had a great experience. And like we were doing with each of our more focused courses - Emerging Leadership Development, Leading At The Next Level, and our still new Executive Leadership Elite Think Tank - we found ways to move from just in-person rooms to screens and Zoom.

Definiteness of plans and mastery of detail, two of the leadership attributes we’ve looked at repeatedly leading up to this point, had become survival skills. Thankfully, we had been honing those skills for other adversities for years by then and were prepared to pivot with the best of them. The habit of doing more than paid for was alive and well, too, especially considering the painfully small amount we invoiced in the final half of 2020, and it allowed us to keep the influence we had worked so hard to earn alive when the model we had been leaning on disappeared almost overnight.

Driving away from that small in-person event, we knew we did everything we could to deliver an exceptional experience. We closed the year by offering similar experiences virtually a few more times, publicly and for a couple of private groups. But the cash register still wasn’t ringing so we had some tough decisions to make. We’ll look at some of those next. Before that, I’ll challenge you to identify a current delivery or communication method you depend on that could actually be fragile. If you suddenly found yourself in a scenario like we did with our event in 2020, what’s one clear step you could take immediately to be more adaptable?