Ep 562: How to Sell Out Live Event Tours with Lesley Logan

RV (00:02):
It’s one of my favorite things when one of the people that we get a chance to teach becomes one of the people that we get to learn from. And that’s what’s gonna happen today with my dear friend Leslie Logan. She has been a long time brand builder. She was a, a brand builder for years, and we absolutely adore her and her husband. And she is one of the world’s leading experts, if not the world’s leading expert on Pilates and how Pilates changes your life. So she’s the, the Chief Pilates [email protected]. She has taught thousands of students, trained hundreds of Pilates teachers, led dozens of workshops at global conferences. We’ve had her do stuff at BBG. She’s done stuff for the Associated Press. She’s been featured in Sports Illustrated LA Magazine. She’s been on Fox and CBS and KTLA. She also has certifications in trauma informed breath work mindset, habits, coaching, and a number of things sort of just related to health and, and physical health and mental health overall.
RV (01:06):
I think but the reason that I invited Leslie to come on the show is there’s a piece of her business model that is doing live event tours. And that is something that we haven’t talked a lot about on this show and is actually a big part of how when we launched Take the Stairs, we don’t tear this, we don’t tell the story very often, but one of the ways that we launched the Take the Stairs book was we did a 23 City nationwide tour. And I really haven’t had anyone else talk about it. And so I was like, oh my gosh, Leslie, you gotta share what you are doing. And anyways, Leslie, welcome, welcome to the show.
LL (01:50):
Oh, Roy, thanks so much for having me. And I love that you did a 23 city tour. We’re about to do one, and I think that this is hopefully gives people some ideas on how they can get themselves out there without waiting for someone to ask them to come to their, to their stage.
RV (02:04):
Yeah, I love that. And it’s, ’cause you know, when, when you think about, all right, how do I monetize a personal brand? You, you know, there’s like or, or, or just how do I get traffic and awareness for what I’m doing? There’s sort of like the online world, which is ads and webinars and funnels and social media and podcasting and YouTube and all, all things that can work and do work if you know how to do them right. And then there’s sort of like you know, this offline world of like hand to hand sales and referrals and there’s that, and then there’s speaking and speaking at events. But when you’re first starting out, you go, nobody’s really calling you, inviting you to speak, and you’re not famous. They’re not paying you to come speak on their stages. And so the idea of building your own stage, building your own event is so powerful.
RV (02:57):
And, and that is what we did with Take the Stairs. We had a tour bus actually, and, and, and did it. But even before that, when we started our first company, we were early twenties, nobody was paying us to come like teach our, our, our pearls of wisdom. And so we were doing our own events, we were doing public seminars and we would sell tickets to them. So, but a completely different vertical from you. So tell me, what are you doing? Like how many years have you done this exactly? What do you call them? And just like, tell me what the, what the big strategy is here?
LL (03:33):
Yeah, so originally I don’t even know what I, what I thought the strategy would be, but I was actually in like one of the first coaches I ever hired as dear friends of yours, I’m sure. ’cause That’s how I heard about you was Brad and I were in Rory and Lori Harder, and Chris Harder’s like fast Foundations group for like newish entrepreneurs. And someone asked a question like, we wanna go on a book tour. And I just wrote down, how do I go on a book tour
LL (04:17):
We’d done 145,000 miles that year. And I was like, I just, there’s, I’m not
LL (04:57):
Ideally not charging us our rent. And then we put tickets online and then we sold them and we did it through those events were like just people who were big fans of us who wanted us to come. And we also hit cities that people just don’t go to. Like a lot of big huge events happen in the big cities, but no one is going to these smaller cities to do an event. We actually did a stop in Nashville on our first tour, and we had 25 people there. And and so that’s kind of how it started. And then because of that first year, people want us to do it again. So the next year, obviously 2020, we didn’t do it, but in 2021 we were able to do it again. 2022 got bigger, we got sponsors in 2023, and we can talk more about that. And then 2023 is also our first year we did two tours. We did a summer tour and a winter tour. And this year in 2024, we did a, a summer tour. We were about to adore our winter tour, and they just keep getting bigger each time we do it. And we’ve gotten more sponsors to join in on the fun.
RV (05:54):
Nice. This is so cool. And it’s so simple and everybody is like, there’s so many people that are waiting for like, someone to wave a magic wand and say, you deserve to speak at my event or my company or my association, not realizing you can wave your own wand, build your own freaking event and do it the way you want it. So I wanna talk about the venue. Okay. So you, you, you, you know, you talked about the Cali City selection. It’s funny that when we did our tour, we were getting like 50 to 75 people every night. But then, like we were selling, 50% of the audience was buying, were buying books, and many people were buying more than one book. The biggest event we had was like 450 people, and it was in Salina, Kansas. Like
LL (06:37):
I’ve been, I’ve taught near Salina. I know that well,
RV (06:40):
It, it, it was crazy because it was like we went to LA and Atlanta and like these places and it was the smaller cities where people totally showed up. So that’s interesting about the location selection, but I, I found that the, the key to the whole thing was getting the venue and like you said, is going a place that will host it and not charge you or not charge you much. How did you go about doing that? Like how did you find the location?
LL (07:13):
Yeah, so in the beginning we had to really rely, and we still do this to an extent, we rely on the, the local person who is like excited for us to come. And so we used our members, so on, on OPC with members all over, we use our members like, Hey, we wanna come to your place. We wanna see you in person. Do you have the location? Do you know someone who does? So we are able to find hosts in each city to kind of be the ambassador of that city. And they either found us a, we use their space or they found us a space that was rent free or because we actually do a rev share with all of our hosts because it helps us, like, yes, we could, we could spend money on ads, but that cuts into all the margins.
LL (07:55):
And to be completely honest, like we try not to do ads unless we really, really need to. And what we found is we usually have to do ads when it’s a big city. Like you’d be surprised at how hard it’s for me to sell Los Angeles when I lived there for 14 years. Mm-Hmm.
RV (08:38):
Person in direction. What’s the difference between a class and a workshop and yeah’s the prices?
LL (08:42):
Yeah. So the classes range from 25 to $45 a person and a class could, because a class could have 30 people in a mat class or an equipment class might be limited to the amount of pieces of equipment that a studio has. Usually 12 or 14. So we don’t pay a ton on those. Also, people of all levels and, and Pilates can come ’em to a class will or will come to a class, they’re like, oh, I wanna learn from this teacher, or someone tells me that they should come and they’ll come where a workshop that’s limited to someone who’s super dedicated. So that’s just like people who pay for coaching, that’s a, there’s a small percentage of people who are like, yep, I’m gonna invest in that. Gotcha. So the price point on those, we try to keep around one 50 because again, I want as to be as accessible as possible, but it’s obviously going to limit some Pilates levers are not going to pay that kind of investment.
LL (09:33):
So we do our payer hosts more for a workshop, and that is to encourage more sales. ’cause There’s a bigger tire ticket on those. And it works well for everybody. We’ve had hosts, we paid out $1,600 because they sold out all of their events that was in Boston last, last winter. Don’t tell me people don’t do things on December 14th, you guys, we sold out all three events in Boston. So, so that’s how we find locations. Now we have done some that are like public, like in Scottsdale there’s this really cool container park and they had heated it was, it’s an outdoor indoor kind of a thing. So all the walls are containers, all the stores are containers, but you’re kind of outside. But they had those like heated lamps and we did a, a New Year’s Eve class in Scottsdale, outside
RV (10:44):
Mm-Hmm.
LL (10:58):
Yeah, so for the workshops, we we’ll do two to three people per piece of equipment. So I can have up to 30 people, which is why we don’t always have, like, I don’t think I’ll ever have a hundred percent sellout of tickets because the workshops can have often have even more people than a class just because of limitations on space where on a workshop people can be standing so I can have more people on a workshop than in a class. And that’s that we deep dive on a topic that would be like, if you were a, a breath work presenter and you did a breath work class, but then you did a workshop on like the importance of, of doing belly breaths or a lateral, like you could find something to be nuanced and then teach people who wanna go even deeper on a topic.
LL (11:40):
And that’s what we do. And here’s what’s so cool is at every event, because they’re not a hundred person, of course, of, although I’m sure I could, I could figure out a way to do like a wanderlust version of this and make them the venues even bigger. And that would be super, super cool. And we are trying to figure out things with our sponsors on that. But what is cool about these intimate settings is they have, they’re with us for an hour to three hours in a day, and we actually get to talk to them about our other stuff that we don’t promote so much because we, you know, you’ve talked about it, you like, you don’t wanna confuse people. You gotta make sure that you’re really specific what you do. So we try really, really hard to promote Pilates and OPC as much as possible, but at these events, we can actually talk to ’em about the retreats that we offer and we can talk to ’em about my mentorship program. And so we actually sell out our higher ticket stuff from these smaller events that are in person without ever having to market them.
RV (12:32):
Yeah, I love that. I mean, it’s just basically paid. That’s what speaking is. I mean, live events is, you know, I call it speaking in my world, right? I’m not doing Pilates, I’m not, I’m not doing that. But the, it’s like paid prospecting. I mean, you’re getting, you’re, you’re finding a way to pay to be there, but really you’re just forming a deep bond with these people and then the opportunity to go, Hey, let’s, you know, I have all these other things. So I, yeah, I I I love that. So you’re leaning somewhat heavily on the local person, it sounds like, for finding the venue and then also helping get the word out about it, and then you’re sharing in that with them.
LL (13:11):
Yeah. So especially in the beginning, that’s how it worked. And it, and I will say in the beginning, there’s a lot of, like, I would, anytime anyone was a new follower, I was like, where are they from?
LL (13:59):
I’m sure similarly to you, every book tour gets bigger because the people from the past books are coming and they’re telling their friends about it. So, so that’s been really helpful. And then now since 2023, having sponsors different sponsorship levels, one of the things we look at before we sign on with them and agree to a price is like, can you help us promote this? Mm-Hmm.
RV (14:56):
Yeah. And I’m just doing the math in my head here. You know, if you go, if you sell a hundred dollars ticket for 30 people, yeah, that’s $3,000. And if you do that, you do that in 20 cities, that’s 60 grand and you can do 20 city tour in a couple months, I guess like a, a month or two
LL (15:19):
Mm-Hmm.
RV (15:24):
But yeah,
LL (15:24):
You totally can. This is what’s like, so our, we are our goal for these tours, and, and if anyone is listening who’s coming to my tours, like our impact is always like the, the reason why we do this, right? But our goal for like, as a business for doing them is how can these make us 50 plus grand as a company? Because they do take a lot of time to put together. Like, that’s time, that’s the, you don’t like, what people don’t see is like, and I can go into more detail of like what the back end looks like, but there’s lots of hours of reaching out now that we are on our seventh tour, we have people who, we have a sheet that they can request us to come to, so that makes this a little easier. But, you know, there’s, there are contracts that have to go out.
LL (16:06):
There’s all the, the planning beforehand, there’s logistics. We use a really cool app that allows us to plan it out literally where we’re sleeping, where we’re eating, where we’re stopping, who we’re seeing for lunch when we’re getting there. So it’s, it’s a whole, it’s like if I was going on a call, what is it? The, the app? Yeah, we use, we use Wander log and you guys, the free version, like you don’t
LL (16:54):
Maybe you want to do it where you don’t have a high ticket fee like I do. But what we what we also can do is I make money on affiliates. So one of our headlining sponsors I’m an affiliate for, so I get sales off of Pilates equipment from them. So at the end of a tour, I am getting paid still on the affiliates from different events. And then all also the other sales that we can make on that. So there’s all these, you, the more you do it, the more you can think like, oh, okay, I can bring this company in and they can be the, I can be affiliate for the blankets people are gonna sit on, or, you know, so that people are trying things out. And we just really keep trying to figure out how do we make this better for the person coming? And then how do we make sure that, that that also benefits the company that we’re working with. And then of course our company. So everyone is winning.
RV (17:42):
How do you, how do you manage the ticket sales? Like what, how do you collect the money and like, schedule, like here’s our tour dates and like all of that. Is there a tool that you use?
LL (17:53):
So we, two things we use, so we use monday.com as a like project management tool. And the way it is used, like I can literally look at the board and has every city, we will have every single person who buys a ticket. So we, our, our websites are built on WordPress, so we are gonna use probably WooCommerce on that, but sell the tickets through our own site so we’re only losing money on the strike fees. That’s, you know, which is like the best thing you can do. We also, this is something that’s really important. We make sure everything is a non-refundable, but it can’t be transferred to a friend. So if somebody can’t come like
LL (18:42):
But it’s something to think about with your event. Like, do you need to have waivers? And so we, we have all the tours all the stops on the site. We’re trying to get better with just the layout of it because the, the, the current tool we use shows like every single event. So if you are the last stop, you’re going through like 60 events. Mm-Hmm,
RV (19:47):
Got it. Yeah. So, so an Eventbrite, can you collect money through Eventbrite or Mm-Hmm.
LL (19:54):
I’m sure they take a cut of it. Uhhuh,
RV (20:23):
LL (20:36):
Yeah, so this is something that we are obviously like learning as we go. And what I will say is like every time we’ve had a sponsor sign a contract, we’ve then updated the contract for the next time
LL (21:24):
I will say that it hasn’t, we’ve only gotten one through her. So as far as like, can you pay to plate? You can, but it doesn’t mean you’re getting anything. So we have been able to get one because she put out like, Hey, we’ve got this tour and they’re willing and the, their, the ask is $5,000. So so that there are different things like that where publicists for different companies are looking to see what they can pay for. But how I got our biggest sponsor is relationships. And I think that’s probably how you do a lot of your things and a lot of the coaching, and I I’m sure everyone listens like, oh, this is so annoying. I have to network, but like truly like go and and network. So I’m already hired to speak at conferences. So I went to the person who hosts those conferences and I said, Hey, you’re never gonna go to Spokane, Washington.
LL (22:11):
Like, we already know you’re not gonna do Bend Oregon. You’re not like, you’re not gonna do these places because the, the, the, the draw isn’t as huge. You’re not gonna get hundreds of people to go to this. So what if you sponsored our tour where we’re going into smaller cities, we’re doing these events and we’re putting your product already in front of them. We can do it on a bigger scale if we have your help. And so that’s really how we got our first sponsor. And then what we did to figure out like what can we offer them is first of all just sit down and write down everything you could do. Like what would, like, first of all, what,
RV (22:43):
Like for the sponsor? Like what, that’s what I was gonna ask. Mm-Hmm.
LL (22:49):
Yeah. So, and again, we didn’t have a sponsor until our fourth, fourth tour. Mm-Hmm.
LL (23:29):
So we could go to them with three tours and say, on average, this is what our current ticket sales are, and this is who’s coming and this is what we are charging, this is what our payouts are. And then this is by the way, like what we’re already doing. We’re already putting their product in front of them. We’re already putting this in front of them. So really having that information. But then what do they get in exchange for their money? So what I would write down is like all the different ways you could promote a product, not just on your event, but, or at your event, but like before and after. So we wrote down like, what do we have access to already? What do we have? So at the time, we had just launched an app, guess what, every time we open an app, there’s two seconds where you look at a logo.
LL (24:11):
We could sponsor that. We could put that as the sponsor’s
LL (24:58):
Mm-Hmm.
RV (25:56):
You tell ’em most recent sponsor the price before the call.
LL (25:59):
Yeah. It’s all, it’s, it’s all on there. Like, so you have
RV (26:01):
Key packages, like this is what the package includes. Mm-Hmm.
LL (26:04):
RV (27:25):
I love that. I love that. Yeah. So and so then you just did it, and then you do the event. You do an awesome thing. Mm-Hmm.
LL (27:39):
Fun table.
RV (27:40):
You just have a table, bring
LL (27:41):
A table. Yeah, we bring a table. We got one of those little covers. You know, like, again, every time we go we like upgrade. We feel like, you know, we’re like becoming one of those booths that we had a conference. But we have a table has the things people can take away. We take pictures with people, we do a group picture, which was really fun. Then we can airdrop it to everyone. And then as soon as they leave within two hours, they’re sent a thank you text and email that has a request for a testimonial. Mm-Hmm.
LL (28:25):
So they’re really important. Then we actually send emails for four days after the event. So they’re getting a, a testimonial one, then they’re getting one that’s a thank you from us and our sponsors. They’re getting one that also is upcoming events and things like that, that they can get involved in. And then the last one is like, by the way, here’s all Leslie’s favorite things in case she missed it. Which is again, sponsors affiliate links. And this is where we insert other affiliate links of mine and where we, that again, can be additional income on the, on the tour.
RV (28:56):
Yeah. And you know, there’s a part of this that you’re saying here, kind of saying without saying, which is there’s nothing more powerful than an in-person event in terms of building trust with people. It’s like you’d have to watch, you know, a hundred, 200 social media videos, listen to 10 hours of podcasts or, you know, spend 45 minutes in a room with someone. Like, it’s so powerful. You build, you build, you build lifelong fans and customers. Yeah. This is really, really cool. What, what, so first of all, so I got one last question to ask you before I do that. Where should people go, Leslie, if they, if, you know, if they happen to be listening and they’re a Pilates fan and like they’re going, oh my gosh, like you are the, you’re the, you’re the Pilates queen of all the
LL (29:51):
Oh, go to opc.me/four zero and that’s going to take you to online plus classes.com. It’s gonna allow you to try us out. You’re gonna be able to enjoy the different things that we have. You do not have to know what pils is or how to spell it to start out. We have really amazing products and support for you
RV (30:09):
LL (30:37):
Be easy for them. ’cause Like you just, like, they’re
RV (30:54):
Is that, is there anything else that we need to know about, like, if, if we were gonna try to pull this off and make it reality?
LL (31:00):
Yeah, I think, I think I would probably, what I think I would ask anyone listening is like, why are you doing your personal brand in the first place and how would an in-person event accelerate that? And because you just said it, like there, you cannot, like the in-person trust that you build, you, you can’t even put a price on it. You like the, the, I can’t wait to see like the lifetime value of clients that we have at, if they go from a tour stop to what happens next. And what I truly love, and one of our, one of our values as a company is community. And these in-person events, even though our online platform is the only one that allows for community to exist and to support each other and do Pilates, you know, even though they’re on demand, there’s, they, they have that community.
LL (31:51):
There, there is something so special about these in-person events that allows our online community to come together. Hmm. And then they actually hang out afterwards. And of course I wish I had the time to go with them. Like sometimes I can, but truly like the fact that I can go to a city, do an event, hug all of them, and then they go off and have happy hour together. Like that is like, that is ma that makes the impact that I wanna have with my Pilates. It makes it, it accelerates it on such an amazing level and then they’re doing it right. And so then they have this empowerment, this agency. And so I would just ask yourself like, why am I doing my personal brand? Like what is this, what is the goal of this was the impact I wanna make? And how does in in-person accelerate it? And then start with what you got. So I did not start with the 13 event. We started with eight cities. I did not start off with a huge team. So with three people I did not start off with sponsors. It was just us. And then, you know, in the beginning our goal was just that it paid for itself. And now our goal is that it does, that it actually is our, one of our top products of our business because we know down the road the impact it’s going to have.
RV (32:59):
Mm-Hmm.
LL (33:17):
Aw, thank you for having me. Thanks for letting me share this. This is a lot of fun.