Fill Your Courses & Programs In Just 90 Minutes With A Virtual Workshop with Liam Austin – ep 71

Mostafa Hosseini    0:02 

Welcome to daily confidence for entrepreneurs. My name is Mostafa Hosseini  . In this episode, we’re going to talk about how to get clients in just 90 minutes a proven workshop system that makes it easy for you to create your own high impact virtual workshops with an end goal of selling more of your signature offer. Welcome to the confidence Mustapha here, my guest today is Liam Austin. Welcome, Liam.

Liam Austin  0:29 

Thanks very much for inviting me on.

Mostafa Hosseini    0:30 

Great to have you, my friend. So, as usual, please make sure to like and subscribe the show. Stay tuned for the period of our conversation, we’re going to talk about some real actionable advice and tools that you could basically take home and start practicing today. If you have any questions, put them in the comments below. And we’ll make sure we will cover it if you know someone that could benefit from this conversation, which is creating workshops and filling them up and selling your signature course and offer which is basically everyone needs that.

Tag your friends as a comment so they could benefit from this conversation and they can connect with Liam, and we will go from them. From there. Now the topic today is Phil your courses and programs in just 90 minutes with a virtual workshop with Liam Austin. Welcome Lim.

Liam Austin  1:25 

Yeah, thanks very much. Intro mate. Yeah, good to see you.

Mostafa Hosseini    1:30 

Let me do the proper introduction. We’re gonna dive right into it. So Liam Austin is the co founder of entrepreneurs, HQ, and a virtual event strategies, having launched over 15 virtual summits, dozens of quick workshops, and many more online events, hosting over 400 speakers, while educating 100,000, plus business owners through his programs, virtual events that sell as his six week Implementation Program, which makes it easy for you to create your own high impact virtual events, from workshops and Masterminds to summits and conferences, with the end goal of selling more of your high ticket offer, including how to blueprints, validate and sell your new program, as well.

Liam is also the creator of the million dollar virtual summit program, where he partners with select clients to generate seven figures. Great to see you my friend.

Liam Austin  2:30 

Yeah, yeah, this is this is a topic that I’m pretty excited about, like I know, virtual events with everything that’s going on is kind of come top of mind for everyone. But I’ve been doing this for several years now. And I just get excited every time I get the opportunity to speak about it because of the opportunities I see in this market.

Mostafa Hosseini    2:51 

Absolutely. And it’s an important topic. And with COVID. And what’s happening in the world. virtual events are aren’t a thing now. I mean, this is not something we can ignore. So the more we know about it, obviously the veteran Don’t worry, we could do more we could practice. So Liam, what is your story?

Liam Austin  3:14 

My story? Where do you want me to begin with

Mostafa Hosseini    3:17 

the story behind how you got into this whole world? Yeah, sure. So

Liam Austin  3:21 

it started back in the year 2000. Like yet to triple zero. I was working for Internet startup out of Sydney, Australia. Who was in the dating market? So online dating? Yeah, over two decades ago. Crazy way before Tinder, it wasn’t cool.

Well, a lot of my friends at school and university at that time. Were like, what are you doing in this dating, business. But like, I was behind the scenes, I was seeing hundreds of 1000s of people getting matched, finding love getting married. I mean, we were getting invitations to weddings around the world, people sending us videos and letters, how they fell in love. And just the transformation that we were providing for people through the internet, through online, just opened my eyes up to the opportunities of connecting people and making an impact in the world.

So that’s where it really started my entrepreneurial journey, if you like.

What worked then was we had a great technology that powered a lot of the dating websites at the time around the world. So I’m talking about MSN. So yeah, Microsoft, Yahoo and some of the other big players in the world. And this was a little startup out of Sydney, Australia. But we were doing this in all the big countries of the world because as soon as like MSN Australia saw the success they wish writing that all across the world.

And so what we were doing, were leveraging joint ventures, we were leveraging partnerships. And I’ve taken that throughout my journey as an entrepreneur as a business owner. And the biggest success that started this business was when we launched our first virtual Summit, virtual summits. It’s a big collaboration event, you invite other speakers to come and speak at your event, they promote the event and share that they’re speaking on your stage, transfer the authority to you, you build your email, list, your own credibility, and then from there, you’re able to bring more people into your courses and programs.

Mostafa Hosseini    5:42 

Love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. So what do you do these days? And who do you serve?

Liam Austin  5:50 

So now, like, in 2015, when we ran that first summit, we were like, 15,000 people to our very first online event, like, This is crazy. Like, this is super cool. The impact that we’re having 15,000 People had an online event in 2015. Yeah, I was like, wow, as well, I pretty crazy. And then we’re like, Okay, well, this is working.

Let’s, you know, I’m a believer. And if something’s working, double down on it, like, you know, do more of it, see how you can scale it. So I did our next event. We had 13,000, for the one after that 22,000. And now I’ve hosted over 15 of these online summits, averaging about 10,000 attendees. But I also do short 90 minute workshops, which is the opposite end to the summit, which is like a multi day multi speaker event. The other end is these 90 minute workshops.

But essentially, people were seeing the success, we had over 100,000 people attend our events in under two years. And so since then, we’ve really been teaching entrepreneurs, small business owners, people who are just getting started in the market, how to launch their own virtual event to build their email list, build their authority, so they can sell more of their courses and programs.

So from that, you can probably understand that course creators, coaches, consultants, service providers, podcasters, authors, speakers, anyone who wants to be an expert, or seen as the go to expert in the niche, we really serve them to help build their list and authority.

Mostafa Hosseini    7:28 

Amazing. Well, 15,000 people is a lot of people, man. Did your did your server not give up on that? Like without that many people?

Liam Austin  7:38 

Yeah, luckily, like, I’ve worked, you know, back in 2000 for a startup. So I just made sure we had the, the right web hosts so that we could scale on the spot like instant scaling within just a few minutes. So luckily, we were prepared for that. And, yeah, it’s something you need to look out for when you are running an event that you will get this big spike in traffic for your first launch.

Mostafa Hosseini    8:03 

That’s like the size of events that Tony Robbins kind of runs, right. 15,000 people or something? That’s yeah.

Liam Austin  8:11 

Yeah, it is. And like some of my clients now we’re doing that for their events. I’ve got a client who runs the migraine World Summit. He’s been doing it for a number of years now. He gets 100,000 people to his event. And we’re talking about like, Mo COVID lag is there a saturation of online events now, these people coming to the migraine World Summit, a migraine sufferers. They get a headache from looking at a screen too long. Or yet they’re attending a virtual event.

And they’re and it’s a multi day event, multiple sessions, maybe there’s 2030, even 40 sessions that they can attend. And if if the markets saturated, I tell you what someone with a headache is not going to be spending their time on a virtual event.

Mostafa Hosseini    9:00 

Absolutely. So tell me about the definition of a virtual event. What exactly is a virtual event?

Liam Austin  9:07 

Well, virtual event comes in so many different ways, right? What we’re at right now, as we’re live is a virtual event, right? Webinars can be perceived as a virtual event. What I typically like to focus in on is workshops. So that’s the 90 minute workshop, where it’s just you being the expert being the teacher, to an audience.

And the other end of that is the summit’s where you’ve got multi, multiple speakers across potentially multiple days, it could only be maybe a half day or full day. But those are the two ends of the spectrum if you like and then it’s like everything in between. One of the things that I’ve got as part of my resources and our members area for our customers and clients is a list of all the different types of sessions that’s possible to be created at a virtual event.

And I’m talking about from Like entertainment such as musicians, magicians, jugglers, like clowns, whatever it might be, but all the way through to like interviews, q&a, panel discussions, presentations, keynote speakers, there’s, there’s over 100 of these different session types, depending on, you know, what your outcome is, or what you want to deliver in terms of the experience and engagement from your event.

So what is a virtual event, it’s literally just a gathering of people on a specific topic, who are learning from either one or multiple speakers

Mostafa Hosseini    10:39 

love it. So it could be webinars, could be zoom could be different webinar platforms, maybe a Facebook Live or different types of just online virtual events.

Liam Austin  10:54 

Yeah, cooking classes. You know, there’s so many people that came up with these new virtual events, because they weren’t able to do their in person events anymore, right? You think about the people who’s showing up for their fitness training, weren’t able to do it in groups anymore. So they’re doing it online at a specific time.

And potentially, these are recurring events, like showing up every Tuesday at a specific time to attend that event. And I would probably position an event as something that happens at a specific moment in time that differentiates it from an online course, or a video series. Now, one thing that I want to point out here is, I firmly believe that if you are running a virtual event, and you’re running the event, it’s recorded, and the content is valuable enough that it’s still valuable tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, then we should record it.

And we should be allowing people on demand access to the recordings from that event forever. So as long as it’s relevant, which means you can get consistent leads into your business, you can build rapport as people are watching and attending your recorded evergreen event. And ultimately, you can start generating more income and clients on a more consistent, predictable basis.

Mostafa Hosseini    12:22 

Love it. Love it. Now, Leon, what is your secret sauce for filling out these events? Like in 90 minutes?

Liam Austin  12:30 

Yes. So the great thing about the quick workshop when is you’re just giving one simple, quick win, right? So something that you can teach someone in maybe 10 minutes. But of course, you’ve got a workshop. So you’re workshopping on this across 90 minutes, right? But it’s something you should be able to teach them super quickly, in 510 minutes, that gives them a quick way, and it gives them a specific result. So that’s the content, right?

And that draws them in, like, what is the promise of the quick win. That’s the title of your event is what draws the person in. So we’ve got the title, it should be something that you know, really well that maybe current customers or past clients have told you a while, that specific thing you taught me was a game changer was such a simple thing.

But it just changed the whole trajectory of my growth in my business. So we’ve got we’ve got the actual the topic, now we need to go out and market it. And since we’re only teaching first 90 minutes on something really no, we don’t need to spend too much time on that. We want to spend most of our time on the marketing. And you can launch this in the next seven days. So we want to spend typically seven days marketing this thing.

So how do we how do we go out there and start marketing it? Look at low hanging fruit, look at your existing relationships, and your closest relationships, people who trust you, right? So it’s like family really at the center of the circle. And then it’s your best friends, people who you’re seeing, like at least maybe a couple of times a week, and then it’s outside of that. It’s like weekly, its monthly, right? And so where are these people hanging out?

How can you get in touch with them? How do you normally have conversations with them? Let them know that this event is happening, and to share it with anyone who they think may be interested in attending. Typically, it’s like okay, let’s give a free ticket as well as an upgraded VIP type experience.

 So we’re selling tickets, we’re making money from the actual workshop itself. But we want to be marketing this and typically where our friends hanging out most of the time it’s communicating with them via messenger or WhatsApp, right or via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. We share it out to our communities and let them know that we’re holding this event, if they’re interested to come along. and grab their free ticket or ultimately upgrade to the full experience.

Mostafa Hosseini    15:05 

God. So now we have to have the one topic, the one thing that you’re going to teach, and then spend seven days marketing this virtual training that you’re going to do. Now, I have a question for you if you have multiple things that they’re gonna get out. So just to clarify this, this workshop is a 90 Minute, say a webinar that leads to another workshop.

Liam Austin  15:29 

No, it’s literally, it could potentially be I shouldn’t say no. But ideally, it’s like someone attending the workshop, spending 90 minutes with you. You’ve gotten them a quick win, they now see Oh, wow. Okay, I know now that Liam can get me a result, he called me a result in just 90 minutes. Super powerful one as well imagine what it’s like if I spend 90 days, not just 90 minutes, but 90 days with Leon, imagine all the results we could get together across that time.

So by the end of the event, the way we’ve structured, the quick workshop win is that they’ve got the quick win, and they want more quick wins, right? That’s just the first step in a much longer journey. So as we’re doing the workshop, we’re kind of seeding that, okay, we’ve got this quick workshop, we’ve got this quick win right now.

But you know, that’s just the first step. And if you ultimately want to achieve your end goal, whatever that may be for your, your audience, well, there’s there’s a few more steps. And yes, we can talk about what that may be like to work together for 90 days or nine months after this session. But this session is something people pay for, right.

So it’s not a webinar that’s just free. It is a paid workshop, it should be valuable. Remember, we ran it once it’s recorded, we’re going to sell it as an online course forever. So it needs to be valuable. And it’s just seeding the relationship saying this the first step, if you want to talk about or discuss how it might look to work together further, let’s jump on a call, let’s jump into messenger, right or go and watch his webinar.

Mostafa Hosseini    16:59 

Got it? Alright, so it becomes a 90 day mark. So how do we Okay, so because the 90 day workshop, for example, on how to do Facebook advertising, and they would have a quick win, where you show them how to set up your ads, or how to create your D art art did graphic for your ad. And then he would say something like, if you actually want to take this out to the market, and go launch your ad on Facebook and multiple platforms, then you could join this 90 Day implementation bootcamp where we can hold your hand and walk you through the rest of it. Mind right track. Yeah,

Liam Austin  17:36 

exactly. The one that I normally explain the example I like to share, because it relates to the very first summit that I did, the first time I was on LinkedIn, the LinkedIn Success Summit. It’s how to generate three referrals in just three minutes.

So that’s my 90 minute workshop, how to get three referrals in three minutes. And I teach them how to do that on LinkedIn, I can, I can show exactly how to get three referrals in three minutes, via screenshare using LinkedIn, but I’m going to take 90 minutes to make sure that they’re doing the right targeting the right messaging, to be able to go out there and do this confidently every single day.

So if spending three minutes to generate three referrals every day, that’s a quick win. Right? Three referrals potential clients,

Mostafa Hosseini    18:26 

to where do I sign up for that, bro?

Liam Austin  18:29 

Exactly. And that’s if you’re, if you’re designing one of these workshops for yourself, you can see how powerful that can be. And it’s it’s valuable people will pay for that, right? It’s a paid workshop, it’s going to sell forever.

And then yeah, if someone wants to work with me further, we can talk about All right, well, let’s talk about how it’s going to look to work together for the next 90 days or nine months to turn these referrals into actual high paying clients.

Mostafa Hosseini    18:56 

Love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. All right, so So another question, let’s say that you have multiple things that people could get out of a training, let’s say you have seven options. How do you go about picking that one hot, desired topic that people will go?

Oh, like your three minute in three, you know, three referrals in three minutes via LinkedIn training? How do you go about identifying the one?

Liam Austin  19:26 

It’s the one that hopefully if you’ve done this, you know, seven steps, you’ve done this training. When you do it live a lot of the time you get the reaction from people the reaction like you just had, like, where do I sign up for that? That’s how I knew, right?

Because I’ve heard that before. And I knew that that was going to be the one that I could use in the future to be that that workshop topic for me now. I’ve got dozens and dozens of these workshops out there. But this is just identifying Well, what’s that aha moment? What are people constantly coming back to you and saying, yes, that that training was amazing, or I get it now. That is amazing. They got results for it, they come back and they say, hey, thanks so much for teaching me I got these results from these lessons that you provided.

All right, dig into it, like what specifically was it about the training that allowed you to get these results. And, you know, they’ll tell you. So essentially, it’s about understanding your target market, your audience, your customers speaking with them. And over time, it will come become apparent to you what really is the standout performer that’s really going to allow you to put your best foot forward for these new people that are coming into your world to learn about you, because you can give them that quick win that big.

I mean, it’s not a big, it’s a quick win. It’s something super, super simple, super short, we can teach in five to 10 minutes. But if they can see how simple it is, I want to work with this person, because they make it super simple and deliver big impacts.

Mostafa Hosseini    20:57 

Oh my God, would you ever suggest doing like a poll about the different ideas on on LinkedIn or Facebook? Say, which one of these topics would you be most interested in?

Liam Austin  21:10 

Yeah, sure. I mean, I think you could do that. I would, I would do it in a way that who’s interested in a workshop that gets this quick win? All right, and posting that out? And seeing how much reaction how many people are interested? And how many people actually sign up for their tree ticket and purchase the offer?

And you know, what if if you do say, 1020 of these ideas, and there’s one outstanding performer, that’s the one that you evergreen, you record it, and you keep sending more and more cold traffic to it more and more traffic into this funnel? Because you know, it’s working.

Mostafa Hosseini    21:51 

Love it. Love it. Can you share with us some of your best tips and some of some of your secret sauce? on creating a virtual workshop? I mean, you already touched on it. But could you maybe expand on that?

Liam Austin  22:06 

Yes. So I think this is beneficial for anyone who’s doing any type of virtual event. And I’ve touched a little bit on it before, which is just this asset, this event that you’ve spent time planning, marketing, promoting, delivering? It’s, it’s something that shouldn’t just be a one off, right, double down on it. If it works, if you look at the numbers and the conversion rates, and it’s getting new clients, you’re making money, it’s profitable.

Like how can I keep doing this and do it even better? So okay, we’ve we’ve done it, once we did it live, it’s now recorded, I don’t have to worry about creating new content, or going live at a certain date anymore. I’ve done that, right. So I never have to do that, again, productivity, increase your time freedom. So we’ve got this asset for ourselves, this event that works, its recordings, it’s the it’s 90 minutes of the workshop, it’s now a recording that we can sell forever. And you guys can get a bit of an example of this. I think we might be talking about this a little bit later on.

So you can see this in action. But once it’s, it’s done live, we’ve got the recording, we can now go out there and promote it. And now we can focus in on spending all our time. And how do we drive more traffic into this funnel. We’ve got the landing page already, we’ve got all the emails set up, we know that it works, because we did it right live the first time now it’s just about more putting more and more traffic into it. So I think the biggest takeaway for anyone here who has done a virtual event, I mean, people have done webinars and you turn the Evergreen, like creating an ever webinar, but do it with your workshops with your summits.

 I’ve got dozens of workshops I’ve done over the years that are now out there in the world generating leads and sales for me every single day because people are able to access them on demand. Same with my summits. They’re out there in the world, there’s a free ticket, you can go grab one, and it’s making ticket sales on the upgrades every single day. That’s leading people into the funnel.

 They’re getting on the phone and they’re deciding okay, yeah, I’d love to join your predictable income freedom coaching program because predictable income freedom, our coaching program is about predictable income. And if you’re doing launches, from launch to launch event to event like I was doing when I first started 2015 2016 It’s tiring because you’re only ever making money when you launch a new event and then the traffic the leads the income just as soon as the events over it disappears. So why not just turn this asset evergreen and sell it every single day into the future.

Mostafa Hosseini    24:52 

So the idea is to run the workshop, 90 minutes, two hours, whatever that is recorded, make it available so people can access it by later, create an evergreen funnel. And all you have to do from there on is just send JV traffic or paid traffic and bingo. You’re like making money while you’re sleeping.

Liam Austin  25:11 

And you’ve got a new information product and asset online course that you can sell. And it took you 90 minutes, right to record it and create it and go out there and create dozens of these like I have, but you only really need one one that works really well. And you’re off to the races. Oh,

Mostafa Hosseini    25:30 

my God, I You just gave me I just had an aha moment. And that is I run a workshop called simple marketing formula. And it’s got six modules. Each module is actually a standalone course. And we’ve got a ton of recordings where we could just have gold, the goal setting module, and here’s a course, target market and other course, offer and others. There’s six courses in there basically. All right, cool.

Liam Austin  26:02 

Cool. And the great thing about that is right, say you so it can be any of them any of the seven steps, whichever one gives, like an aha moment, if you like the best one, put that out there. And then yeah, that’s just one step in the whole series of our system. Right? If you want access to more of our system, yeah, let’s talk about how that might look to work together.

Mostafa Hosseini    26:22 

You just gave me a good a good idea there. I love it. I’m actually going to test that and see make one of them my front end offer like the 90 minute workshop. And I’d be like, You know what, come join us for the to finish this up to all the six steps. What do you think of that idea?

Liam Austin  26:40 

I think it’s, I think it’s awesome. And another kind of bonus here is you can turn these workshops, these recordings, these 90 minute online courses that give you know, a specific outcome like goal setting your example, as a bonus to other programs that you’re selling. So suddenly, it’s like, I’m trying to sell this, this online course. But I don’t know what bonuses to give away.

Well, if you’re doing these workshops, and you’re creating potentially new content on top of your existing, you can start selling these as bonuses and offering them as new entry points for people to come into your world into your high priced programs.

Mostafa Hosseini    27:25 

Absolutely love it. That was another great idea, like give them away. And each module that I workshop has like a good three to four hours, I’m sure there’s like multiple courses within each of those four hours that we could just chop it up and you know, sell it as a or, you know, listed as a different course, or bonus. Yeah,

Liam Austin  27:45 

and I think like if you can really narrow it down to like a 10 minute section, or a 10 minute teaching and then just a really deep into that 10 minutes during the 90 minute workshop so people can really understand your depth of knowledge on that one topic and how you can take someone from zero to complete, like the quick win within just 90 minutes that that confidence in you.

And your ability to get someone results makes them think, yeah, that next conversation like if I’m going to be working with someone, it’s going to be someone that I trust and know for a fact can get me results because they’ve got me results in the past. Yeah, yeah, it’s gonna be you,

Mostafa Hosseini    28:25 

huh? What are some of the mistakes that people can avoid when it comes to creating their workshops?

Liam Austin  28:34 

spending too much time worrying about the tech and the actual content creation like this. If you’re thinking like what the topic should be, it should be the one that first thing that comes to your mind the one that like, people come to you asking advice for maybe it’s like outside of circles, maybe it’s family asking you the same question, you just know the answer off by heart, simple solution to a common problem.

And just just teach that. Don’t worry about spending too much time on that. Go out there and spend the time marketing fill the room, get bums on seats, because at the end of the day, like if no one’s there to hear about your quick win, or no one gets a quick win, then you’re nowhere. So just get as many people there as possible with with our first event we had 15,000 people to our summit in 2015.

But with these workshops, you don’t need that many you may need just half a dozen or a dozen people because they’re paying to attend and they’re qualified, highly qualified prospects that are getting to know like and trust you massive amount of authority and credibility because you’ve gotten a result for them and they’re more likely to buy so higher conversions into your your next offers.

Mostafa Hosseini    29:54 

Love it. So couple of questions. Speaking of pain qualified leads, what are What would be some price range suggestion for what people should charge for this 90 minute introductory workshop? Ah,

Liam Austin  30:07 

yeah. This it shouldn’t be a profit maker for you. It’s really about identifying. Wise. Yeah, exactly. So whatever can really pay if you’re going to be doing paid ads, right, you want to make sure that it’s kind of covering that or getting close to covering that. But I’ve seen anywhere between $7 up to $97, right, somewhere in that bracket.

However, I have seen people that run these workshops as a complete paid workshop, which may have go a little bit longer than just the 90 minutes. If but if it is like a profit maker for you, and you don’t have things off the back end, then you could be charging up to 234 $100, even up to 900. Dice.

Mostafa Hosseini    30:58 

Guy. So if it’s like, three to four hours, it could be up to 1000 bucks.

Liam Austin  31:04 

And yeah, half half day workshop. Yeah. Like, you can only charge you know, a few 100 bucks for that.

Mostafa Hosseini    31:12 

Got it. Got it. Now you talk talk touched on the technology aspect of things. And you said, if we spend more too much time on it, they’ll be a mistake. Right? So what’s the what what in your mind? What do you what should people do? Or don’t do with technology? Like, if I’m not spending time on technology? What do I spend my time on?

Liam Austin  31:35 

On the marketing completely on the marketing? So just to give an answer for people who are thinking, Well, what tech could I potentially use, here’s what you’ve already got, if you haven’t got anything yet, like, go grab yourself a free account with Zoom. And use Zoom for the live training, and you can record it there as well. And then it actually accepts registration.

So it’ll collect the registrations for you. And then you can just set up a PayPal account or a Stripe account and just send your personal link for people to pay. That’s really all you need. You need to you need to send emails to people, but just use your personal email to send out you know, six emails, if you’ve got six buyers to attend, or it’s a dozen, that’s 12 emails of your attendees to make sure that they show up on time.

So you want to be able to send emails, accept payments, and then deliver the actual presentation.

Mostafa Hosseini    32:34 

I love it. Love it, I absolutely love that approach. I’m I’m actually working on a minimum viable product, basically as we speak. And that’s exactly how I’m doing it just to test out an idea. Basically, just to see if it if it’s going to work or not. And I totally agree with you, like people spent two years on technology, figuring out all the different aspects of the funnel and affiliate tracking and all that. And they haven’t even validated the idea.

They don’t even know if people are going to pay for this or not. While just like you said, with a free account on Zoom, you don’t even have to like you can ask people to just send you money via PayPal, they don’t have to go on a fancy foxy shiny, you know, you know checkout page and click here to check out you could just say, hey, the first time or two that correct me if I’m wrong.

Just run run the workshop and see if people will actually show up? Do they find it valuable? Are they willing to pay for this? Before you spend on I’ve seen people spending 10s of 1000s of dollars on technology. So that’s a big mistake.

Liam Austin  33:48 

Yeah, people think they need a website to get started. And as you said, like minimum viable product like lean startup, just get going, just put the message out there, market it and then if you’ve got buyers, you’ll figure it out quickly. And it’s that simple. Really decentralise paper link to pay and jump on Zoom to deliver it like most of my audience.

And our clients that we serve our experts, their speakers, their authors, they just want to share a message they want to teach the world. They don’t have to worry about the tech. But that’s the last thing that I want to put my head into. So it makes everything in terms of the tech side of things. We try to make it as simple as possible.

Mostafa Hosseini    34:32 

Okay, love it. You know that Liam my favorite companies are the companies are seven, eight or nine figure companies that don’t exist in terms of a website or some big technology piece there. Right? Like you look them up. There is no Facebook page. But when you talk then there’s this this massive giants that don’t they just take care of people’s problems. Right. And they get referrals. And oh my god,

Liam Austin  35:04 

you know what you’ve just given me or reminded me of something that’s probably really valuable actually, for the audience today. So pre virtual events and online events, I used to run events like in person. I worked in Barcelona for a UK company, running events in the UK out of Barcelona. These are in person events, I was flying in between Barcelona, Spain, to London in the UK to run these events. And we had to come up with the idea for the event, because it didn’t exist.

So we came up with the idea for the event, it was the international trade awards program. I managed to get Royal Bank of Scotland to sponsor the event paying us like it was 30,000 pounds at the time. And then the next following year, we got HSBC on board. That was 30,000 pounds. And then year after that they they returned and sponsored the following year. And how did we get them to pay us 30,000 pounds, we created like a just a, a Word document PDF, showcasing this concept.

And this idea that we’re about to create, we didn’t go out there and create a whole website or actually run trial events or anything like that, like we sent them a Google Doc, essentially like and I’ve seen that. And I’ve done that myself where rather than go and create a sales page, people want more information about your workshop or your event.

Here’s here’s a Google Doc, you can go read more.

Mostafa Hosseini    36:41 

Yeah, here’s that. That’s, by the way, probably another training idea how to get 30,000 pounds in sponsorship with a freebie PDF using Google Docs.

Liam Austin  36:51 

Yeah, I could could I do that in 90 minutes I’ve taught. I could tell. I can take part of that 90 minutes for sure.

Mostafa Hosseini    36:58 

I think you could you could you get to somewhere in 90 minutes. And

Liam Austin  37:02 

like with our online events, like we’ve had Vimeo, Vimeo comm and sponsor, one of our summits in the past, they paid us five figures as well, five figures to sponsor an online event. This was in 2016. I knew how to deliver results for sponsors. I’d previously to this as well, I’d worked in Australia’s largest email database list for consumers.

We had over 500,000 people on that list, which is big for Australia. And I was selling into like all the big automotive brands, the big banks, the travel companies, like all the big consumer brands, McDonald’s pizza hot, right. And so I noticed something into corporates. So when it comes to video, I knew how to deliver results online.

So when they sponsored the event, they paid us five figures. They then came back and said before the event even finished, like Liam, we want to renew this, like, what other events have you got coming up because we want to be involved. And they ended up sponsoring in the next 12 months of our events. So and paying us another five figure some, right?

Yeah, and this is the exact same system the same formula one I’ve been using for years to bring sponsors on one page, what it’s called a one sheeter to one page PDF, super, super simple concept of your event that brings on board Yeah, five figure sponsorship deals for your online events. Oh,

Mostafa Hosseini    38:39 

my God, man, that’s like you’re speaking my language, because all of our brand is about one page and simplicity. So one everything one page, right. So I would I would promote that all day long.

Liam Austin  38:55 

We’re recording this right. Yeah.

Mostafa Hosseini    38:58 

I will know if you have that. If def does training on the sponsorship like that, I think that’d be a viable thing like five bigger five figures sponsored formula in 90 minutes on a one sheet using a free PDF and Google Talks. Oh man, that’s like a no brainer.

Liam Austin  39:17 

Yeah, I suppose I suppose that’s the thing. Like when it comes to doing these events, like I talked about, like joint ventures and partnerships, and we talked really only about speakers before but then that brings in another element sponsors. Right so here you’ve got speakers who are essentially when when they invite you invite them to come on, potentially you say okay, I’ll share some of the Commission’s on any sales you make.

So you end up paying them. You pay speakers to speak, you can invite them for free and they get some commission so they earn that as that money as well. But then you’ve also got people wanting to be involved, and they’ll pay to be involved so you’re not paying them They’re paying you to be associated with your event.

So two opposite ends of the spectrum, right? Wanting to be involved in your event, how can that be like some people you have to pay to be involved, others will pay to be involved. Right. And then you’ve got everyone in between, like media partners and affiliates, essentially, I normally break it down to those four people, speakers, sponsors, media and affiliates. And it’s the same approach really, with all of them, just making sure that we make it a win for them. And that’s what joint ventures really are all about making sure that it’s a win for both parties.

But also that it, it lasts way longer than the event. So how can this work? How can we work together over the next 12 months in the following years, so we want to make sure whatever that first interaction is, that it is a quick win or a big win? It has big impact on those jayvees so that we can continue that relationship and it can grow.

Mostafa Hosseini    40:59 

Absolutely. Now, Liam, I understand you’re sharing a gift with our audience here doll ultimate virtual workshop checklist. Could you tell us about that, please?

Liam Austin  41:09 

Yeah, sure. So keeping it simple, again, right, one page checklist. It’s actually a Google Sheet, Google Sheets, Google Sheet. Kit, keeps it really simple for people. There’s some actual bonuses like describing how to use this checklist. But it’s just the checklist of everything you need to market the event, to deliver the event, and how to create it or the technology side of things.

So each step along the way, what you need to do to deliver a quick win, that will bring you more clients, clients that you love working with, ultimately. So if you go to quick workshop when.com, you’ll be able to grab that checklist. And a few of the extra bonuses

Mostafa Hosseini    41:58 

are beautiful. So again, grab this, where the ultimate virtual workshop checklist, which is a free PDF download, the link is in the descriptions, the link is in the comments. Click on it, download this. It’s a one pager, and it will save you probably a few years of headache and use and tap into Leanne’s experience on how to run a workshop. And it’s pretty valuable. I’m a checklist guy. I’m a simple everything one page guy. So I’m definitely getting that. And we’ve got a checklist for every little thing that we do. So

Liam Austin  42:37 

makes life easier, doesn’t it when it’s just like, Oh, what am I meant to do next? I just the next thing on the checklist. And when it’s when it’s a proven checklist or system as well, like, I mean, learning from experts. I mean, that’s why we’re all here today, after all.

Mostafa Hosseini    42:51 

Absolutely. Now, Liam, a big concern for people in the virtual world in this COVID madness is standing out from from all these events out there, because there’s a lot of them. Right now. Do you have any tips for how people could stand out from all this? All this? I mean, there is like daily invitations to events, how do we stand out?

Liam Austin  43:21 

Yeah, so solve a big problem. And it’s essentially the quick win. So we’ve covered this already, like deliver the result that people really want. And you’ll attract people, right like migraine sufferers. They want to get access to expertise that they’re not able to get access to otherwise, because all of the experts are booked up for years, you can’t get a consultation with them, right?

The only way you can get access to their information and the latest latest data and cures. Well, there’s not really that you curious, but the the things that can help you make life better is if you attend this virtual event, the migraine World Summit. So if you if you are solving a big enough problem, delivering the right result for people, people will show up and really just focusing on that quickly. And

Mostafa Hosseini    44:11 

I love it. Love it. So the code is solve a big problem and you attract people. Period. Love it. This is going to be highlighted on our blog for sure. So can I share on what I’m doing on this actually today as we speak? Absolutely. It’s interesting that we’re talking about this as I was thinking of breaking down the idea of six modules for my workshop. I am literally doing a poll on LinkedIn as we speak, asking people which one of these topics are you more interested in?

And if they give me the top two or three out of six that I know what’s going to be the front one that I’m going to just put forward that’s going to turn into this 90 or 90 minute or two or three hour workshop that we could just put out there and marketed separately and heavily in an all day.

Liam Austin  45:06 

Perfect Man. And this is this the way it should be like, it’s called Quick workshop when for a reason, right? Do it quickly, it should be something you should set up and learn quickly. Like, within seven days, you should know whether it works or not, you’ve got a brand new product for your business. If it doesn’t, no worries, we’re going to the next week, the next seven days to try and create something new.

But what you’re doing right now is you’re validating you can validate within the next 24 hours, which which idea is going to work better than other

Mostafa Hosseini    45:34 

apps, you could even I think you can do it on multiple platforms, like go on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, you could do it in a group, and just get some a few different. If you have an email list, email the list and say, give me the top two topics that you’d like to see here. And you’d like you set you have some friends, you could email them or message them on the Facebook Messenger and say I wouldn’t I want your feedback.

If if I offered any of these workshops, which one would you be interested in? There is your validation? And you’re just I think you’re one step closer to instead of spending six months draw to try six different things.

Liam Austin  46:12 

Yeah, do it quickly. I mean, that’s that’s part of the thing that we we learned from our audience that you know, this the summit, the other end of the spectrum is like a multi day event, multi speakers, there’s a few more moving parts, it’s maybe a bigger commitment and a bit more work than the the 90 minute workshop. It’s literally 90 minutes.

Like if you wanted to run it tomorrow, you could you may not you only have like 24 hours to maybe promote it. But now we’re giving you seven days, if you want 14 days, sure, 14 days, but spend it on the marketing and promoting.

Mostafa Hosseini    46:43 

Absolutely. Can I share one more thing that I’ve done to add to? Oh, I

Liam Austin  46:48 

love that you’re an action taker. Yeah.

Mostafa Hosseini    46:51 

So it speak speaking of decide today and running by tomorrow, last year before COVID. I literally it was a Thursday that I decided to do a workshop. Friday, I emailed the list saying if I offer this workshop on Monday, will you join? Like 15 People responded and said, Yes, I’ll be there. Bingo, we launched the workshop on Monday.

There was just one email. Going back to the idea of validating and asking, and if nobody responded that I knew that. It’s this is not the idea. I could have sent another message, right?

Liam Austin  47:30 

Well, yeah, like we’ve I said that we’ve got we’ve got dozens of workshops out there in the world generating leads for us. And I can tell you right now, there’s, it’s the 8020 rule, like 20% of them perform? Well, way better than the other 80%. Right, they deliver 80% of the results. It’s even more than that.

I’d say like, maybe the 5% Deliver 90% or 95% of the results. So So you just you got to go out there and test these things. And even though I’ve done this so many times, like Yeah, we get better, and they improve and markets change. Targets changed as well.

Mostafa Hosseini    48:08 

Love it. Good. What is your number one success tip in 15 seconds or less.

Liam Austin  48:20 

Partner with other influences in your marketplace, become friends with them, build relationships with them, and really find a way to support each other and make it a win win. Because rising tide lifts all boats.

And it’s more fun when you’ve got, you know, not a shoulder to cry on. But you’ve got support there if you need it from someone who knows your market and target customers intimately.

Mostafa Hosseini    48:49 

All right, for someone that wants to get started with that, do you have a tip for how to find an approach and make friends with some influencers that you want to

Liam Austin  48:57 

invite them to be a guest at your event. So whether it is a podcast, a workshop, a summit, right, a YouTube video series that you’re creating, like invite them to be a guest and interview then build the relationship that way. And the great thing about that is that you’re inviting them to speak on your stage in front of your audience.

And that’s a huge compliment. And it’s something that as long as you make it easy, simple for them and you make it fun, you’re able to build that relationship with them. That’s the thing that kick starts the relationship and we can have discussions from there about what it might look like to you know, partner and do more things together.

Mostafa Hosseini    49:42 

Love it. Love it. No. Let me dive into some personal questions. Early on what’s a new thing that you have tried recently

Liam Austin  49:53 

paddleboarding down a stream in southern Sweden

Mostafa Hosseini    50:04 

I must have been fun.

Liam Austin  50:05 

Yes. And I say stream because literally, it was only about one one half meters wide in some places and overgrown with trees. So you had to lay down lever the board to get under them stand up and jump over certain branches to Jamaica to you.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, it was it was good fun. It was very, very slow stream it wasn’t there’s no rapids or anything like that.

Mostafa Hosseini    50:32  

Love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. Give me Give me your top two or three favorite books that have made a massive difference in your life or business.

Liam Austin  50:43 

Oh, books. Wow. All right. So I think like the lean startup is amazing, because we’ve touched on so many aspects of that here. And it’s just a philosophy of, you know, testing and iterating and doing things quickly. And one thing that I’m one book that I’m reading now is from impossible to inevitable.

And it’s about just making sure that you are doing things in a way that allows you to have more predictability and consistency that ultimately it’s inevitable that your goals and dreams and desires or whatever you’re creating in your business will come through because you know, part of my business predictable income freedom. I’m all about that. And I support that. So that books been super interesting for me right now.

Mostafa Hosseini    51:33 

Love it. Love it. What is one advice that has made a massive difference in your life? Or massive change or difference in your life or business?

Liam Austin  51:48 

Can I can I share a quote? Yeah, okay, so you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. So I used to play professional soccer a little, you know, fun facts,

Liam Austin  52:04 

and we’re getting personal. Back in Australia, so I certainly wasn’t getting paid the big bucks or anything like that I was still at uni. And it was true. My dad used to tell me that growing up as a kid, if you don’t take a shot at goal, you’ll never score. So I’ve I believe in that with business as well. Like with these workshops, give it a go.

Take the shot. It’s just seven days if you miss a well, but if you never try it, you know, you’ll never know whether you’ll you’ll score, and it’ll be a big win for you.

Mostafa Hosseini    52:38 

Love it. Next one, what advice would you give your 20 year old self

Liam Austin  52:46 

do a virtual summit today. Only because, well, I mean, it’s just like the ability to what it does, it’s like it’s a whole business in a box like you’re able to enter in a brand new market without knowing anybody suddenly build relationships with the top influencers in your market. build your email list and not just an email list, but an email list of people who have been recommended and referred to you by influences, which increases your authority with that email list.

So now you’ve got a warm email list of people who know like and trust you see you as hopefully the go to expert you know, you’ve performed well in interacting on your Summit. And you’ve delivered results for them. Hopefully a few quick wins within there.

And then from there, you can anything’s possible. Once you’ve built up your email lists your audience, you’ve built these relationships with influences in your marketplace, you can pretty much go out there and and sell and do anything

Mostafa Hosseini    53:47 

of it. And this has been an absolutely amazing conversation. Is there anything that you’d like to add that maybe you forgot to talk about? Or mentioned?

Liam Austin  53:59 

I don’t think so. I think we’ve we’ve covered most of it here. But you know, go take action. Like if you guys are following this show, I’ve been listening to other episodes with Mustafa, like he’s obviously an action taker. He lives by, I think some similar beliefs of myself. Just go out there and give it a go. What’s the worst that can happen?

Like, you know, you fail and then you come back and it’s not a failure? It’s actually a learning process. So like, go out there, try it. Give it a go. One story. Can if I can quickly share it. Absolutely. We

Mostafa Hosseini    54:38 

got time. Okay, so

Liam Austin  54:39 

my partner in the business and in life, Sarah, we met in 2014. In Sydney, Australia. She was studying university there. She was on our student visa. She’s from Sweden, where I am right now. But back then she was like, Well, my visa is running out. I have to return back to Sweden like What are we going to do? And I was like, Well, I want to live Australia. And she’s like, Yeah, I want to kind of live in Sweden. But how are we going to make this work? Right?

Like, we’re in love, we want it to make it work, how are we going to make it happen? And I’m like, Well, we’re going to make money online, let’s create a business together. And so we tried a few different things. And none were ultimately working until we ran our first virtual Summit. Like we got 15,000 people that are from like, we had maybe 100 200 people on our list from what we’d been doing previously, but like, it completely changed our life in our world.

Now, like we, yeah, we live, we’re in Sweden, but I’m Australian. And most of our clients are in the US. And we’re traveling around all the time. But we live in Malta, most of the year. We were we hopefully can go surfing in Portugal, some time soon in the future, like, we live this life where we can earn income anywhere in the world by as long as we’ve got internet connection, and a computer. And it all started with a virtual Summit.

So if you’ve got a reason, that motivates you to create a lifestyle for yourself, where you’ve got a dream of, you know, predictably, making $10,000 months like, like, go ahead and creat create, not just the virtual summit, but make sure you’re designing it in such a way or whatever virtual event, you’re doing design in such a way that it creates a journey for people so that by the end of it, they know that you can get them results, and that you are the person to help them further along with the next steps in the journey.

Hence, let’s work together again for the next 12 months. So I just wanted to share, share that story because of what I’ve done with our virtual events, like it completely changed my personal life, my business life, everything and now I’m teaching others how to do it, because I know what an impact it can have, like on myself on, you know, I’m helping Kyle with his migraine World Summit and helping all these migraine sufferers out there in the world.

So you do so much good by just hosting one of these events. So go out there and just Yeah, take that shot.

Mostafa Hosseini    57:20 

Are you helping people with migraine sufferers?

Liam Austin  57:24 

I’m not personally but via helping him create and launch these events, right? We’re having bigger and bigger impacts every year, which I love that I’m supporting that one of my other clients is in dementia. Right? These are health ones. But I’ve also got people who a business focused who just want to generate more clients or help people in in their market. And just being able to help people overcome stressful situations, challenges, struggles, pains, and instead experience these results and outcomes and benefits, like How good’s life?

If you can you can create a business that has that carbon impact? And essentially, that’s what a virtual Summit.

Mostafa Hosseini    58:11 

Absolutely, yeah, the reason I asked that is because I used to work with some of the world’s world’s top chiropractors that specialize in migraine headaches. So I’d be happy to introduce you to them. If they could maybe join your friends to maybe share if your conversations about overcoming micro migraine headaches.

Liam Austin  58:29 

Yeah, cool. For sure. I think yeah, it would be helpful for him, I’m sure.

Mostafa Hosseini    58:33 

Some that wow, man, this was like a really a really good conversation. I really enjoyed it. I was totally relaxed during this episode, which tells me about how awesome this conversations was. So thank you for joining us, I really appreciate it gang. If you’re watching or listening, make sure to go download Liam’s gift, the ultimate virtual workshop checklist, which is a free one page download gives you the checklist that you need to use to run your virtual workshop on how to set it up and the rest of it. And we’ll go from there.

do reach out to Liam and his team and learn how to set up a virtual workshop. His I mean, you don’t just invite and like 15,000 people or half a million people event those aren’t That’s not a joke. So the guy knows what he’s doing knows what he’s talking about. do reach out, tap into his wisdom and potential and launch your workshops and start you know, creating passive income and reaching out establishing yourself as an expert and all the goodies that come along. With that. Thank you for joining us. Thank you Liam.

I know it’s like evening time in Sweden. So I want to get that you go back to you know hanging out with your family and gang gang. Make sure you like to show subscribe to whichever channel you’re watching. Tag are friends. If you have any questions for me or Liam, make sure to put in a comment and if you’re watching or listening on any of the podcasts, please make sure you subscribe, leave a comment and rate the show that helps us reach to more people and make a bigger impact. And we’ll go from there.

My name is Mostafa Hosseini  . Thank you for joining us. We’ll see you next week with our next episode. Bye now.