Mastering Live Event Production: A Deep Dive into Planning, Managing and Simplifying Events

Ever wondered what goes into producing a live event? Strap in as I take you on a whirlwind journey of my time as an On-the-Road Event Producer. From planning to prepping to managing live, you'll get the full picture of what it takes to put on a show. Plus, I'll share some priceless lessons learned from the three-day event I produced for my dear friend, Heather Sager.

The heart of any event, whether live or virtual, is its content. And managing time is critical when it comes to creating content that hits home. I'll let you in on how setting time limits ensures your content is just right, not too long, not too short. 

Plus, you'll discover how important it is for the audience to fully receive the message you're sending out. But wait till you hear about how our Airbnb turned out to be the perfect solution for Heather's virtual event.

But as the saying goes, 'Less is more.' This couldn't be truer when it comes to event planning. I'll reveal how simplicity can truly maximize impact. Take a peek into my experiences, the trials, tribulations, and triumphs, and how, with a dash of creativity, you can achieve more with less. 

So, whether you're an event planner, a content creator, or looking to host an event, this episode offers a treasure trove of insights you simply can't miss! Tune in and take your event management skills to the next level.

How to Start a Podcast Guide: The Complete Guide
Learn how to plan, record, and launch your podcast with this illustrated guide.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

So one of the job titles I never thought that I would own is On the Road Event Producer, and it's not something that I intentionally set out to claim this role. But it is absolutely what happened whenever my good friend, heather Sager, reached out and said, hey, can you come help me produce this three-day live event that I'm throwing for my community members. And I didn't really know what I was signing up for or all the different twists and turns and things that we would face, as we committed to being in an Airbnb together for a three-day straight of full, intense training. But today's episode is kind of a overall lessons learned of what it's like to produce a live event. And if you are someone that does webinars or you want to do events in the future, or you want to know what it's like just to do an in-person podcast interview, you're going to find so many incredible things to think about and takeaways that I cannot wait for us to cover. So let's get right to it.

Speaker 1: 1:10

Welcome to the Profit Podcast, where we teach you how to start, launch and market your content with confidence. I'm your host, crystal Prophet, and I'm so excited that you're here. Thanks for hanging out with me today, because if you've been trying to figure out the world of content creation, this is the show that will help be your time-saving shortcut. So let's get right to it, shall we? So, hey everyone? Crystal here today and we are just going to dive right in because Heather actually has a podcast called the Hint of Hustle. So once you go check it out, she and I recorded an interview right after we were finished with her live event Like it was five o'clock on day three. We were exhausted and I'm not even really sure that a lot of the things that we said made sense. I mean, it did go back and listen to the episode and I was like, oh yeah, that makes sense. But we were on our last legs, like I got my pajamas right after we recorded that and I was ready to go to bed Like, eat my leftovers I don't remember what we had from Uber Eats that day and crawl into bed, watch the latest episode of the Morning Show, watch a little bit of Friends and pass out because I had an early flight the next day. But I'm going to link to there's a YouTube video and a podcast episode I want you to go watch. It's Heather's perspective and it's our takeaways from what we did together in person.

Speaker 1: 2:41

But I thought this is so interesting because I, like I said, never set out to have this type of role. I didn't say, hey, who wants me to come produce their show or come produce their live event. But this is how the universe worked and I actually ended up flying to. She lives in Bend, oregon, which is a part of the country I'd never been to. I flew into Seattle and then flew to Bend and we did a three-day live training and I was there from Monday through Friday. Our training was Tuesday, wednesday, thursday, flew out early bird Friday morning, got home in time to make it to the football game with the kids, and I was exhausted for an entire weekend. It really took it out of me, but it was so much fun.

Speaker 1: 3:29

So there are three main things that I want to talk about that. Once I kind of debriefed from the whole thing and I asked myself, well, if I were to do this in the future, what would I want to take into that? So I'm creating content for you, like everybody watching and listening, but I'm also like this is a record keeping of what we did, what we would do differently, lessons learned and all the incredible things that happened while we were there. But I want to talk about three important elements. We're going to talk about planning and prepping. We're live, meaning what do you do when you're actually live at an event like that? And then the third is an overall event debrief. So let's just dive right into the planning. So, planning and prepping, what does that look like? So, because this wasn't my event, this was Heather event.

Speaker 1: 4:22

Heather's event, this was she was doing the signature talk accelerator, which I'm sure you've heard me talk about Heather many times. She's my speaking coach. She's what has helped me speak on stages, pitch to stages, create incredible webinar presentations. If you watched my recent training on how to get your first or next 1000 downloads, I used everything I've learned from Heather to craft this incredible talk that I got tons of emails from. She helped me when I did my podcast movement evolutions talk. That was in Vegas earlier this year. She coached me through that and again I had multiple people reaching out to me later and saying how did you do that? Like, how did you give this incredible keynote on stage? So she is the real deal. If you are looking for someone to help you with speaking on stages, getting on stages, she's the one to go to.

Speaker 1: 5:13

But let's talk about some of the basic planning and prepping that she did. So the first thing, the location. So when she talked about doing this because this was a virtual event, this wasn't an event where everybody was coming in person. We had to set up, like conference rooms and hotels, like we didn't do any of that and this was all a virtual event she knew from the beginning it was going to be like zoom. It was all on zoom and we'll get into the details of that.

Speaker 1: 5:38

But what she did is she wanted to have a great location and she has small children, she has two dogs, she has a family life at home and she runs her business out of her home. And so when she started thinking about, okay, well, what is, what is the stress level really going to be like if I do this all out of my home? There are some variables in there. I get it. I have three kids, a dog and a cat Like I know that things happen and I have noisy neighbors that will decide it's time to mow the lawn at a time that they typically don't mow the lawn, and then you're like, oh, what is happening? What's going on?

Speaker 1: 6:17

So she had thought about renting a co-working space before I decided to come help her, and so it was kind of a win-win whenever I said, well, I'm going to need a place to stay whenever we come in or I come into town, and she's thought, oh, you know what Airbnb would have more reliable internet. So this was the other thing that she took into consideration is she knew that her home internet she lives a little bit out of the country, like out of the city, out of the country. She lives in the country outside of the city. And so she said you know, my internet like sometimes like it just gets really crappy and I like this has to go off without a hitch and I want to make sure that it has reliable internet connections. So the location was really important. So we didn't run in any kind of those hiccups. So she mostly picked out the Airbnb that we were going to go to, but I'm so glad she picked the one that she did. It was in this cute little neighborhood. It looked like it was just a small community. It was very quiet.

Speaker 1: 7:14

There was the only thing that I really really loved about it, other than like the actual like oh, it's cute, and everything inside it was on trails. So I am a walker, I used to be a runner, now I'm a walker, I like walk religiously. And when she said, oh look there's, you know paths that we can just go on walks either throughout the day or, you know, if you want to go work out, that's fine. So that was like a done sold, like where, where do we send payment to? Because that's the thing that I knew I needed for my mental health, because I was going to be out of my element for five days straight. I'm going to be away from my family. I wanted to kind of keep in, not to mention a totally different time zone. So where we were in Oregon is two hours ahead of Houston, and so I was like, okay, I need to be as like cognizant as possible of my own mental health and routine, and with that comes walking. I need to walk, I need to exercise. So that was just the other thing that I loved about the Airbnb that we chose, but it was super cute.

Speaker 1: 8:14

We'll get into all the details of what we did to make this Airbnb really work for what she was trying to accomplish, but I mean, let's talk about the second thing. We already kind of talked about internet. So the first thing was location, the second thing is internet. If you're going to do a virtual event, this cannot be an afterthought. You cannot think like, oh geez, I wonder what my internet's going to be like.

Speaker 1: 8:35

It's also the same if you're listening to this and you record remote interviews and you know you're going to be out of town. Right, you're going on vacation or maybe, let's say, you're just going to visit your parents, you're not going out of the country or anything. But I mean, y'all have heard me. If you listen to the potty report, you've heard me record at my parents' house and I'm recording on my phone and I mean there's roosters in the background and all kinds of crazy stuff because they live on a small farm and so I knew that when I record those episodes I need to record them locally.

Speaker 1: 9:10

I don't need to be dependent on the internet because while, yeah, they live in an area that gets pretty reliable internet service, I don't want that to be a factor. So if you are going somewhere and you're going to be on the road, I wouldn't always depend on a recording, contraption recording device that is 100% reliable on the internet. That's really for solo people, I know. If you're doing interviews, maybe you have to do your hotspot on. I mean, I've done interviews on my iPad, I've done them on my phone. I mean, this is what's so cool about technology today that you can make it work. But internet absolutely cannot be an afterthought. You must think about this from the very beginning. Okay, I'm looking at my notes here. Okay, the next thing we need to talk about is the equipment setup.

Speaker 1: 9:58

This is where everything kind of went wrong. So I flew in on Monday. I flew in early Monday morning, like I. My alarm clock went off at 3am that Monday and I was out the door. I guess it went off at 3.30 and I was getting in an Uber by 4am, like that's how early my flight was Monday morning. But because I was traveling backwards from central to a Pacific time zone, I gained two hours and that day just felt like the longest day of my life. But we were able to get a lot of equipment stuffed on on day one. So, or like my, our day one. It was the day before the virtual event and we were able to test things out Does this mic work? Is this lighting right? And that really helped. But we ended up not being able to use.

Speaker 1: 10:44

I like took my fancy camera. I bought all these like cases and like zip tie things for all of my cords to wrap them up and I took everything and I was very careful and precious cargo was with me when I was going on all my flights and switching planes. I had microphones and I had, you know, usb microphones and I had just all the things. None of the fancy stuff worked. This is what happened. So at the end of the day, I wasn't able to hook up my really nice Sony camera to Heather's Macbook. We were like downloading drivers. I'm a PC user. I didn't know any of this stuff. I mean, hello, this is like we'll jot this down and lessons learned, like make sure all of your equipment is compatible with your systems and devices. But that's where we went wrong. I tried. I bought these really cool the road wireless microphones that you could like clip onto your shirt or you can have.

Speaker 1: 11:38

I bought this portable mic where it's like a handheld mic, which is super fun. You've probably seen it. I've used it in a video too. It's so much fun and it's so lightweight and it didn't work. It didn't work for what we needed it to. At the end of the day, she used her Blue Yeti and her webcam on her MacBook. Yes, for her several thousands of dollars that all these people paid for to attend, she used her webcam on her MacBook and her Blue Yeti. Guess what it worked and it sounded freaking incredible. So while we want to say, oh, the equipment matters, like having a fancy setup matters, like I'll have to show some pictures.

Speaker 1: 12:16

If you're watching on the YouTube video of our setup on the back end, you should have seen all the different things that we had. We had board games that we were like balancing things on. We had a bar stool. We had I mean, at one point there was this little cutout window in the living room and it had this afternoon sunlight that was like beaming down, like God was booming from the heavens on Heather's face at one point in the afternoon and I was like, oh my God, what are we gonna do? So we took one of her dry erase boards and put it up in that window, but then I didn't know if the dry erase board was gonna fall or not, so I had to put this tote bag up there, and then the tote bag's not gonna hold it by itself, so I had to put a couch, pillow and books and it was just. I was filled with so much anxiety the whole time she was speaking. So if you were at Heather's event, just know I was behind the scenes sweating that all of a sudden this whiteboard was gonna collapse and ruin everything. So it was a whole thing Like behind the scenes anxiety is very real when you're setting things up.

Speaker 1: 13:23

But just know that if you're doing anything fancy for the very first time, don't use brand new equipment, okay, and then this is actually what Heather and I talked about is like when do you call it? When do you say all right, enough is enough? She told me. She was like if you don't get that figured out by 812, we're calling it. We're just going to use the setup that we have. It was so nice to have that deadline of we're not going to mess with this all day. I'm not going to spend hours working on this, because then we're wasting time, we're not getting the thing that we need to get done done and we're just. We have a backup plan, all right, we have plan A, plan B, plan C through I think, plan F that day and we wanted to make sure that we showed up for the people that were paying to be there and it ended up turning fantastic. So I'm glad that we had that deadline.

Speaker 1: 14:15

But maybe that's something you do for yourself. If you're thinking about launching a podcast or you have a webinar coming up or whatever thing that you're creating for your content and you're just like, oh, but I want to have this. But you know, I ordered a name is on, but it's not going to be here to Tuesday. My class is Monday night. What am I going to do? Ah, have a plan A, have a plan B and then have a plan D, which is, you know, record on your phone. Like it's probably the worst case scenario, but it's still a way for you to record your content, so you can absolutely make it happen.

Speaker 1: 15:21

Okay, the first segment we just talked about was planning and prepping. Now we need to talk about things to consider once you're actually live. Now I'll kind of blend this with Heather's event and my own, like recent webinar, because they're both connected and that they were both virtual events. I mean, I wasn't here with hundreds of people in the audience, like just right in front of me. There were a lot of virtual things, one of the things that I really really like about managing the audience is managing their expectations, so being very clear up front what to expect. So, for Heather's event because I was helping behind the scenes I wasn't an actual participant, but I do know that people that were enrolled or registered for this event they had homework, they had prep work, they knew what to do, when to do it and how to do it. They were very prepared, similar with my webinar.

Speaker 1: 16:17

I sent out an email saying here's what you can expect Add this date to the calendar. And this is like the button that you hit whenever we're live. And so what I did for my event recently is I put a countdown timer up on the screen at 10 minutes before the event started. Now it made for a little bit, you know, trickier on the back end, like I needed to cut off the 10 minute timer because it was way too much for someone to sit through when they watch the replay. But for the people that are there live, they appreciate it because they know what to expect.

Speaker 1: 16:49

Okay, when is it starting? I don't know when it's starting. Well, it's starting in 10 minutes, or maybe it's starting in seven minutes, because they can see on the screen that's what the countdown timer is telling them. So, when at all possible, set up expectations so that whenever you show up live, you're letting your audience know what's going on so they can plan accordingly, because maybe some people have to drop off. There were people there was one individual who was joining from I think it was Romania, so it was like total opposite side of the world. Some people were joining in Australia, where it was evening time, where it was our morning, and so there were just little things to consider and things that you have to think about when you're managing live events. So setting the expectations and being very clear on the communications with your audience can be really helpful. Okay, the second thing about what to do once you're live is managing the time and keeping the pace.

Speaker 1: 17:47

So one thing that Heather and I did this was actually Heather's idea, which was fantastic. She had some whiteboards that we took from her house. You should have seen when we loaded her car up. It was so funny. She loaded her car and she put on like this time lapse I'll have to go see if I can find it, but she put it up. I mean, we had lights, we had tripods, we had just all the things that we were taking from her house to the Airbnb. But the whiteboards were the lifesavers. Well one. You already heard how I used it in my acrobatic stunts. Did I mention I was balancing on a couch? It's not like the window was just like oh, let's walk over and put it. No, the window was like nine feet in the air and I had to do this acrobatics on the couch and stay in there and lean on the wall and put it up there. This is why I had so much anxiety, because I thought it was going to fall on me or on Heather during her presentation. It would have made the loudest noise, but anyway.

Speaker 1: 18:44

So we had the whiteboards to let Heather write out the schedule because, even though she had it right, she had the digital version. She had her Google calendar filled with everything. She had all of her notes. She wanted to have a visual representation where she could just glance off camera and see what is the time and am I on pace? Am I on track? Have we done the things that I said I was going to do before lunchtime or before this break? So I recommend to this could be a sheet of paper, it could be a post-it note, but if you are doing a live event and you need a visual cue or even a timer. So this is another thing. Behind the scenes is like how do you keep pace? How do you keep track of everything?

Speaker 1: 19:27

For those of you that were able to attend my free training, I gave a free. It was a PDF guide and it was just for people that showed up live, and at the 30 minute mark I gave them the URL of where they could go to grab that freebie and it was something that I was like okay, how am I going to manage this? What am I going to do? You know, I said it was at the 30 minute mark. I want to order that. I don't want to forget it. So I knew I've done so many live trainings that if I dependent on me to look down at the time to see like, oh, it's the 30 minute mark, I should know that would have never happened. So what I did is I set a timer on my phone before we ever even started. So whenever I started my 10 minute countdown timer, I said hey, siri, remind me, you know, at 530, to to share the show up live bonus. And that's what I did. And it set off the alarm and all the things happened.

Speaker 1: 20:22

I was wondering if any of my devices were going to start talking back to me, because I said the magic word, I said their name, but it's good, so make sure. Oh yeah, my iPad is trying to talk back to me. There we go. It was, it was. They're listening. They're always listening. So, how to keep the pace and stay on schedule? Have something that works for you.

Speaker 1: 20:41

If you're just getting into content creation and you haven't really had to deal with keeping pace, what I tell to brand new podcasters is have a time limit. And I actually teach this in my program profit podcasting, where I say have a time limit for your format. So how long are you going to record? And the reason why I have this is because, like, I'm looking at the screen right now, I can glance over and see okay, we've been recording for this long. I want to make sure that this video or this episode is this long, let's say, 30 minutes or 20 minutes or however long. When you glance over and you see that you've recorded for 10 minutes, you know like, ooh, I need to throw in some extra added stuff because I'm almost to the very end of my outline and I'm not done yet, or I'm like, oh crap, like I'm only on my first point, I'm already 10 minutes in. I need to wrap this up. I need to cut this story, or I just need to move it a faster pace, and you get better at this over time. So I want to like really pause for a second and talk to those of you that are brand new to content creation. You do get better at this. So don't think, oh my gosh, like I got to juggle this and white boards and light coming into my face, like no, no, no, no, no, no. But you do need to figure out how to manage your time when it comes to creating your content, because it will make all the difference on the back end, either when you're editing things out or you're trying to figure out well, does this fit into the molds that I really had for my content? So very important.

Speaker 1: 22:07

Now, the third thing we need to talk about when we talk about when you're live is what's actually most important, and what I mean by this is what is the thing for your event that matters, whether it's a live podcast recording, it is a live event, it's a virtual event, it's a prerecorded event. Whatever it is what actually matters and for me during my help as an event producer for Heather, the thing that actually mattered to me was making sure that you could hear Heather, you could see Heather, and she was able to get the message across that she was trying to deliver. Now her what's actually most important was different. She was trying to make sure that everybody got a ton of value and what she was saying. Nobody felt lost, people felt supported and, of course, I'm speaking for Heather. She didn't tell me. Well, these are the most important things. I just know her and I knew how she wanted to show up for her people in this specific event situation.

Speaker 1: 23:09

And those are the things that you have to think about before you ever hit record, before you ever get on stage, whatever your stage looks like. You need to think about these things Because when you're conscious about them, you can be more intentional about how you're delivering on those goals. So, just like today's video and podcast episode, I'm thinking how can I give you valuable information that can help you with your next event, your next recording, and things to consider that maybe you don't typically think about because it doesn't apply how you create content today, but as you dream about the future and look at possibilities of what you want to do. These are probably some of the things that you want to consider, whether it's a live in person event or your next free live training or maybe a live stream that you want to get into. These are just some tips that I hope will help you in your journey.

Speaker 1: 24:00

But, all right, we need to move on to the last segment, segment number three, and that is the event debrief. So what did we learn? So I actually I really want you to listen to Heather's episode on the hint of hustle podcast, and it's called let me look at my notes the three big takeaways from hosting the live three day signature talk accelerator. This is our interview. Go watch it. I would love for you to watch it because we I mean you can see our setup with our like handheld microphone that we just passed back and forth again, we recorded with Heather's webcam on her MacBook. We she recorded on Riverside, which is the platform she uses to record her podcast episodes, and we just use my road USB mic and we just passed it back and forth. It wasn't fancy, but we had the Airbnb setup the way that we wanted it and it looked fantastic. So one of my key takeaways actually is the Airbnb. This was fan freaking tastic. Now I remember earlier when we talked about Heather has kids and animals. I have kids and animals.

Speaker 1: 25:08

The Airbnb took the stress out of those everyday life things where you're just like, oh my gosh, I haven't dusted in months and there's crap everywhere, or I haven't done the dishes, or my dogs are going to bark or the kids are going to scream when I don't want them to. The Airbnb was perfect for this particular event, especially the way that it was decorated. Because we moved stuff around. We actually had to take pictures of where all the furniture was, because we're like, okay, that lamp looks good here, but that chair should move over there. Oh, no, that high back one, it needs to go over here. Let's, you know, adjust this. Let's just up that Like we moved so much stuff around and then we put it back. So a lot of Airbnb's are decorated very nicely and consider that when you're looking at the pictures of where you want to have your event, because that was something that was very crucial. So if I was going to do another event where I'm renting an Airbnb and that's what I'm using absolutely crucial to make sure that you can set it up for what you want.

Speaker 1: 26:09

She wanted a very like cozy, professional environment that didn't just feel like it was, you know, a studio or kind of like a white wash boring background. She really was able to add some depth and some greenery. She brought her own plant from home, like I mean, we just got super, super creative. I'll make sure and share some pictures so you can check out all the things that we did, but the Airbnb solution was fantastic. One of the other things was a key lesson learned is we did a really good job taking care of the audience and I can't speak for myself because I don't host events like this a lot and I know Heather does a lot of Zoom trainings.

Speaker 1: 26:51

But I think Heather was better able to support her people because she didn't have to worry about letting people in the Zoom room or making sure like can you hear me? Or somebody has like a question in the chat, like did that question get answered? Like oh my gosh, like there were a lot of things. She called me her stage mom. Sorry, people call Heather her stage mom. I've been called the conference mom by other friends of mine that they're just like you. Just, you make sure we have water, we have snacks, we have all the things, and so I'm, I'm fine, like I will be the stage mom, I'll be the event mom, I don't care, like you can call me whatever you want, but I will be there with an extra charger and ask you when was the last time you peed and have you drink some water? Because this is what I do, this is how I support my friends and my people is I want to make sure that everybody has snacks, so that that's the most like key thing here.

Speaker 1: 27:46

Did I mention that Heather was 32 weeks pregnant when we did this? I don't know that I mentioned that yet, but she is very pregnant and that was one of the things or one of the reasons why she wanted help with this event. She was like I don't know how I'm going to manage this. She was a freaking rock star. I don't understand how she had the energy to be so energetic and just the lung capacity. I've had children and just having like a baby sit like right up in your ribs, like I couldn't breathe, so I don't know how she was sitting down and able to project and do the things. It's why she's incredible and it was so much fun.

Speaker 1: 28:23

So a key takeaway for me is what I do something like this again, absolutely, like she already said, you're going to come with me from now on any time, like you're going to be my event mom. And I was like done, done, because I had absolutely so much fun and I hope to do stuff like that in the future. I was like, ooh, maybe I could be a traveling event producer. And then I told my husband that and I said, no, actually people need to come to me. I don't want to. I don't want to do that much traveling because it was exhausting. But if you're interested, I'm like, hey, shoot me, damn, you're doing something in Houston and you want me to come behind the scenes and direct you, produce you. I did tell my husband I feel like I was a movie director in another life, because I love it. I love the behind the scenes production and, yeah, let's set this up here and let's do that. And it was so much fun.

Speaker 1: 29:10

So another key takeaway is do events with the people that you love. I don't think I'm interested in this earlier, but Heather and I had never met in person. How wild is that? Right In 2023,? We have been friends since 2019, ish and we've never met in person until this year and it was incredible. So if you have the opportunity to meet your friends in real life, have real conversations, real, you know, just chats over cups of coffee and if you can do it with your friends that you're doing life with and business with behind the scenes because Heather and I and our shout out to Mel, who wasn't able to make it we missed her so much but we thought about her. You know it was so incredible to strategize and mastermind behind the scenes. We didn't get to do as much of that as we wanted because we were exhausted.

Speaker 1: 30:03

The event ran from 9 30 am to 4 30 pm every day, with roughly an hour lunch break. It was a lot. It was a lot and it was so much good information. It was just. It all hit me just at the time that I needed it in my business because I was doing my lunch, I was doing another webinar and it was just so fantastic. So thank you so much, heather, for sharing your beautiful audience with me, and shout out to anybody that was there for the Signature Talk accelerator.

Speaker 1: 30:31

Y'all were an incredible audience and I encourage everybody that's listening and watching to go check out Heather's program. It is phenomenal, and if you are recording your next or your first, very, very first live event, then I encourage you to keep it simple. I hope everything you learn here today is like the moral of the story is it doesn't have to be super fancy. You can get a lot done. You can accomplish a lot with very little. So I encourage you to explore what that can look like for you. But that's all I have for you today. So this is your first time tuning in. Make sure you hit that follow or subscribe button wherever you are watching and listening to this podcast, and make sure that you come back every single week for our brand new content. All about creating with confidence and, as always, remember, keep it up. We all have to start somewhere.