I promised that I would write up some feedback on my day out in Cambridge yesterday, so here are some thoughts.
First, to set the scene, the event itself was being run by the Cambridge Business Academy (Kevin Potts’ company) and held the promise of both Russell Brunson and Chris Farrell speaking at the same event. Some of you will know that Chris is still in the US, as his wife is ill, and so this changed the format of the day slightly.
The venue was the Cambridge Corn Exchange, a building (presumably with amazing history) right in the centre of the town itself and I’m going to talk about the building here as a bit of a metaphor for the whole day. If I had to some it up, I’d say that aspects of it were superb, with a whole load of disappointments that dragged it down. Hopefully, what I learned about it all will help all of us put on better events.
First up, as a presentation venue it was excellent. High ceilings, banked seating, good-ish acoustics and a screen and stage setup that rivalled some of the best places I have ever spoken. This really was gold standard stuff. If you ever put on a show with low ceilings, small screens and even worse, long thin meeting rooms laid out lengthwise so the folk at the back can’t see, then the gods of presentation management should smite you where you stand! Higher, bigger and wider is the way to go for a comfortable audience. Even laying out your long room widthways with repeater screens is better than lengthways.
OK, so that was a plus point. Good presentation venue.
Flipside: As a conference venue it was mediocre at best…poor in places. It’s not just about the presentations folks! Your audience has to get there and stay there for a significant amount of time while you show them your awesome presentations. In this respect, the Corn Exchange is a dog.
Yes, it’s nice that it is in the heart of historic Cambridge – and maybe it is good to get away from London every now and again, but getting into town for a registration time of 9.30 is enough to try the patience of a saint…and the cost of parking is enough to make a grown man cry. Going with an out of town venue with parking onsite or nearby just makes more sense. Most big hotels can cope with conferences these days – just bite the bullet and book one. (Bearing in mind high ceilings etc etc.)
What do hotels also provide for their guests? Yes! Toilets!!
700 people packed into an auditorium for a day are going to want a comfort break at some point and it doesn’t matter what your audience breakdown (male/female) is, there just have to be enough places to pee! No excuses. In guy’s terms (as that’s what I’m qualified to comment on), 4 urinals for 500 men and a 10-15 minute break is a logistical calculation that only works somewhere like the Matrix where you can freeze time. Not only that, but when they’re done and they want to re-fill with coffee, a 2 spout coffee machine is also not up to the job.
Finally (for the venue). Try to get your audience inside the venue as fast as possible even if you have some monster logistical nightmare to handle for each person. Don’t funnel everyone through a linear bottleneck that is based on a split of surnames. This is guaranteed to be slow, as those whose name begins with W can’t see the desk for the queue and so never make their way to the sadly underutilized section with their name on it.
Scarily, this goes right back to my time in IT. We called it MSMQ…..multiple servers, multiple queues. It shortens the length of each queue but it does rely on folk finding their “server” for themselves. So, put a big letter sign up above each server (e.g. Surnames P-T), put them all round the room and just funnel folk into the room, telling them to find their surname letter for themselves.
Not only that, but let nearby queues interact. If one is empty, let the servers handle the overflow from next door – a simple duplication of namesheets lets this happen! Yes, I know it’s more work collating the sheets at the end, but as organizers you have all day while others speak. Take the burden on yourself and you won’t end up with people queuing out of the door and down the road on what was a pretty miserable, damp and cold October day in Cambridge.
And another thing! Don’t then film the queue you have generated! “Here’s a bunch of miserable people that we forced to stand in the cold at our last event” doesn’t feel like a good advertising ploy to me 🙂
Alright. Enough of the venue. What about the day itself?
Strangely, it had the same kind of Jekyll and Hyde character. Kevin and Russell Brunson did the first two slots, delivered some good solid content and generally got the thing going very well. Some nice reminders of basics in marketing combined with a few hints and tips that had everyone writing notes. (Sidenote – damn, Russell speaks fast!!). When I look at what Russell delivered for the day, I’d say that this was the content that got me there and kept me there.
We moved on after the break to Paul Lynch. Paul’s grasp of traffic generation looks astonishing and as a lowly starter in this field I have almost no place to comment on his techniques for doing this – he’s a smart guy. What I do have the right to comment on was his delivery yesterday. I don’t know what posessed him to play videos at us for the whole of his speaking slot! Yes, they were very slick and showed a lot of relevant material but I could have sat at home and watched videos.
The pleasure (and the pain) of being on stage is that you get to be a real person. Your triumphs and disasters are both “writ large” for the world to see and I, for one, would have like Paul to actually speak to us. One of the videos was even one I’d seen in the previous week as a result of the promotion for the event. That’s 30 minutes or more of my life that I’ll never get back! Paul, man up. Do it live! I’ll train you myself if you feel you need it.
The other session of the day was given by Ian Judd(?), who works with Kevin and Paul. Along with Paul, he pitched a “done for you” business and traffic system that had some ups and downs for me. Traffic from Paul (up), membership site description (down) – and so it went. The components of the system seemed interesting, but we had another video and their passion didn’t come across for me. Not only that, but this was a seriously high ticket item. You need something a bit special going on in the presentation to sell something up in the stratosphere….no matter how much of a good deal it is.
I’d put it all down to it being the first time they’d sold from stage, if it weren’t for the religion factor. If you don’t know, Kevin came out of some kind of religious ministry when he started doing this. Ok, nice branding feature for the business, but it seems like everyone involved with CBA was in the same boat. So I was expecting much more of an “altar call” for the selling, as they’ve all patently had practice before with speaking to congregations 🙂
So, there you have it. A mixed bag of a day, really. Learned a bit of stuff and spoke to some fellow attendees – as usual that can be the best bit of any event – and came away to face a stiff car parking price and a long drive home. Glad I went to see Russell and Kevin but I won’t be doing Cambridge again in a hurry.
Were you there? Let me know if you agree/disagree violently with any of my points.
Hi Martin,
I was looking for Ian Jupp’s email to ask for tips on putting together a membership site following his ideas at the Corn Exhange, Cambridge, when I spotted your critique.
I agree that there was good content and am still looking forward to word from Ian about the project in the pipeline about membership sites which i thought he mentioned. Yes, the offer was very high ticket but very good. However, asking for a refundable deposit for the day of ÂŁ97 (efficiently reimbursed) may have proved we had some money in the bank but most would have been a few pence short of ten grand in their back pocket or handbag, having attended to try to earn much-needed money!
Whereas the toilets required cunning timing strategies, there were plenty of places round and about if need be and good refreshments at painless prices were readily available in the market only a few seconds away! They served a beautiful tea and quarterpounder cheeseburger there, in fact so good I’m tempted to catch the train to Cambridge one Thursday just for the lunch! What’s more, the colleges just off the market were breathtaking!
The first thing I commented on to my neighbour was echoed by your approval of the venue for seminars. It was so refreshing to have a ceiling high enough for us to see the screen! Hotel conference rooms just do not offer that luxury!
A very enjoyable day with impressive organisation, and I am sure your useful tips on registration techniques will be digested gratefully!
Having read my response, there is one tip I meant to include about events in Cambridge!
Next time you go by car, use the Park and Ride just off the motorway. It simply costs ÂŁ2 for the Park and Ride bus, I believe.
Convenient, hassle-free and low cost!
Hey Graham, none of it was insurmountable, I agree. There were just a few things that could make it even better if they ever do another.
I genuinely tried to be green and do the Park and Ride thing, but I had no change (no money at all in fact) and the machine and bus don’t take plastic in any form. The helpful gent told me that it would only be a 15 minute hike to Waitrose and then the same back, but when I realised that the ticket dispenser didn’t even take notes I had a bad attack of grumpiness and got back in my car!
The one aspect of the pitch that made me suck my teeth a bit was the idea that you could get a front page link to your site from a PR(whatever) site, when in fact you’d be one rotated URL among many, with a fairly small chance of being on the page when Google comes to visit. This felt slightly disingenuous to me.
Anway, if I find Ian’s address anywhere, I’ll get it to you.
Ok, it’s a day for replying to yourself! I had a quick scout around and Ian has an entry on LinkedIn. No email or phone number, but you can get him through an inmail. Let me know if this isn’t going to work for you.
I got feedback from someone who went, most seems to agree with Martin, we are/were? waiting for the promised video of the day but now all is seemingly closed down. Wonder what happened there, it was back in October after all.
I went to this event. The morning was good. Agree with your comments about Paul Lynch – not very inspiring but some useful info. I can’t even remember Paul Judd providing much useful info, but I do remember his hard sell, which the event organisers promised not to do. The cost was extortionate – ÂŁ10,000 if I remember correctly. I feel sorry the less savvy people in the audience who probably spent their pension on it. The end bit was awful – Russell Brunson and Send out Cards. He showed some lame American over the top video and tried to convince the audience it was some kind of charitable venture when in fact it’s some kind of MLM scheme. And yes, where’s the video they promised. Plus Paul Lynch keeps sending me emails on a daily basis even though I never signed up to anything apart from the event itself which was organised by the Cambridge Business Academy (Kevin Potts’ company). He never sends me any emails. Funny that!!!
To be fair, I think that Paul seems like a smart guy…he has released a couple of pretty useful videos on his blog recently. It was the wholesale regurgitation of video content that cheesed me off on the day.
Hi Martin,
A bit of a late comment but I’ve only just found this post as I was doing a search for the CBA as I’d seen a comment about it closing down and that Kevin had allegedly gone AWOL?
I was just curious as to what went wrong?
Anyway I agree with nearly all of your post and the Paul Lynch presentation was cringeworthy watching him watching his own videos from the stage … like you I had already seen a lot of it 🙂
Then the high ticket item that was a lot of money for what appeared to be not a lot (a bit like the Churchill Apprenticeship) but then again I went mainly as Russell and Chris Farrell were on the speaker list.
Cambridge was a nightmare and my parking came to ÂŁ22 !
I made the effort to get there and it was good experience just getting out and meeting people within the IM arena.
Russell’s ‘Mentored By A Millionaire’ MLM Gift Cards option went straight in the bin once I got home as I’m not a fan of MLM any more but the whole thing was too sickly sweet and I couldn’t see it competing with Funky Pigeon or Moon Pig anyway ? LOL
Gary
I didn’t go to that event although I was invited, as an SEO guy I was put off by some of Kevins comments, as far as SEO was concerned he was trying to get people to his biz by not giving the whole picture, for an ex mininster I thougt that was not good, however I digress,
The churchill offer was outrageous and I suspect it was that that imploded. The offer letter said from the headline onwards “we build a ÂŁ6 figure business for you” repeated many times – note a business, not a website or product. It gives him nowhere to hide. That can only lead to disatisfaction, and I suspect it has sent his erstwhile marketing friends running for cover and distancing themselves, as the cracks began to show.
Whilst the CBA site now points to brunson, it was done in such a clunky way, with no announcement or use of the email list, it is no kind of ordinary site sale.
Hey Gary, I’m slowing down in my old age….can’t think how I missed this. I think the whole CBA thing is just not to my taste….although, like you, I went to see Russell and Chris.
Oh well, we got one of them and he was quite fun on stage.
I see Paul has just released his visitorsdotcom stuff. I won’t be signing up, but his Flippa video is well worth a watch.
Hi John, yeah I think Kevin needs to regroup and concentrate on getting his business back on solid ground.
There were several holes in the day, as I’ve already detailed. I just felt like it all could have been so good and
then it was just a bit away from that ideal. I guess it gives us all a salutory lesson in running our businesses.