Local Marketing – Seminar Promotion is a Goldmine

You Don't Have to Hold a Seminar for it to be Profitable

- Lessons Learned, episode 65

by Karl W. Palachuk

 

When I started consulting fulltime, it never occurred to me that I’d be holding marketing events such as seminars and “tech days.” But sometimes, timing is everything. There are three ways that I used local seminars to attract new clients. I’ll cover one of those in this installment and the other two in the next two installments of “Lessons Learned.”

Y2K Seminars. In 1998-1999, the world was getting ready for the big Y2K rollover with the fear that the world would come to an end, or something akin to that. Today many people call this a fear-based “nothing” event. In reality, it was one of the first big examples of IT consultants saving their clients so successfully that there were no big disasters.

Having recently left the world of “big iron” mainframes, reel-to-reel tapes, and Cobol programming, I assure you that big companies spent billions of dollars fixing legitimate problems before the old code caused major problems. And that was back when a billion dollars was a lot of money. 😊

For smaller businesses, built primarily on old Novell networks and newer Windows-based networks, there were only two big things to worry about. First, old hardware simply had no way to store four-digit years at the CMOS level. Second, really old programs, often ported over from Cobol-era programming, did not account for four-digit years. These were generally easy to find so business owners could address the problem.

We made a lot of money running very simple software that detected 99.44% of these problems and generated a nice report that could be presented to a business owner. The easiest (and only permanent long-term) solution for the hardware was to simply replace it. So we made a lot of money selling new hardware, primarily desktop machines.

Software issues needed some coding attention, which could be quite expensive. Business owners often felt obligated to do this. Luckily for some, newer software and off-the-shelf software updates fixed a lot of problems. Again, we made a lot of money.

When it became obvious that we would be busy with these fixes, I decided to hold Y2K preparation seminars. I had a very good but unexpected response: Several business owners contacted me to tell me they were too busy to attend the seminar, but wanted me to come by and evaluate their preparedness. They assumed I was the one to call since I was putting on seminars for this stuff.

By the time 2000 rolled around, we had added several new clients to our “as needed” client list and a few signed contracts because we promoted our Y2K seminars. And we never actually held a seminar. We would have held them, but no one signed up. They just hired us!

 

The primary lesson I learned from this is that you can always position yourself effectively if you are willing to take on a new challenge and offer to address the big problems. People will assume you are competent until you prove otherwise. And somewhat related to that: If you offer to stand up in front of a room and teach people about something, they will assume you are the expert who knows about this stuff.

I cannot say it was my strategy to not hold these seminars. I fully intended to, and had prepared materials and handouts. And I was surprised but pleased when the first business owner asked me to just do the work rather than make him sit through a seminar. Overall, it was a great lesson about positioning my expertise.

It also solidified something I already believed: Business owners value their time more than anything else. If you can solve a problem so that they can confidently just turn it over to you and spend zero time worrying about it, they will happily pay for that.

 

In the next installment, I learn some lessons from being part of someone else’s seminars. Stay tuned for that.

 

Feedback always welcome.

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This Episode is part of the ongoing Lessons Learned series. For all the information, and an index of Lessons Learned episodes, go to the Lessons Learned Page. 

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Karl W. Palachuk is an executive coach and author of several books, including Managed Services in a Month and Relax Focus Succeed. He has built, bought, and sold several businesses, including two successful managed service businesses in Sacramento, CA. He advocates a holistic view of business, viewing the company as a system. You can find him at karlpalachuk.com or on LinkedIn. No artificial intelligence apps were used in the writing of this post.

:-)