Meet Jason and Cecilia Hilkey. They’re not your typical online marketers. They don’t sell courses on “how to get rich quick” or promise to teach you the “secrets of internet millions.” They’re just two parents in the parenting space who, until recently, had a modest email list of 3,000 people. Then they did something that blew my mind: they added 104,000 new subscribers in just two weeks using a virtual summit. This strategy is hands down my second favorite way to explode your email list…and this episode will show you exactly how they did it.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Links Mentioned in this Episode
Jason and Cecilia’s Virtual Conference Workshop
TEXT ME: +1 (260) 217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
 |
 |
|---|---|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
How Affiliates Can Profit from Virtual Summits (Without Being a Speaker)
How Affiliate Managers Can Beat Burnout
Lessons from a Record-Breaking Affiliate Launch
Avoid These 5 Big Mistakes When Recruiting Affiliates
AI for Affiliates: What’s Working Today (Part 4)
How Two Parents Added 104,000 Email Subscribers in 14 Days
Matt McWilliams: I want you to meet Jason and Cecilia Hilkey. They are not your typical online marketers. They don’t sell courses on how to get rich quick or promise to teach you the secrets of Internet fame and millions. They’re just two parents in the parenting space who did something that blew my mind. They added 104,000 new subscribers in just two weeks using a virtual summit. This strategy is one of my favorite ways to explode your email list. And this episode will show you exactly how they did it.
So picture this. 104,000 new email subscribers in just 14 days plus instant authority, massive recognition, flood of sales. That’s exactly what today’s guests pulled off in a niche most people think is impossible to monetize online. virtual summits, ah, are one of my favorite ways to explode your email list to lead to sales. I mean, obviously my first is affiliates.
That’s of course, but we’re actually going to talk about how to incorporate affiliates into your virtual summit. And last week we talked about the other side. We talked about, you know, so if you missed that episode, make sure you go listen to it. We talked about being an affiliate for a virtual summit and why that’s such a good promotion. And today you’re actually going to get to meet two of my former clients from our, your affiliate launch coach program.
This is an interview I did a few years ago after one of their virtual summits. it’s a husband and wife team, Jason and Cecilia Hilkey, who are absolutely crushing it. And they told me something that just, completely stopped me in my tracks. I said virtual summits have been the most reliable, consistent way for us to grow our business, make money online and change lives, period. Jason and Cecilia there, as I mentioned earlier, they’re in the parenting space. You know, the niche that everyone says is too saturated or too hard to make real money in. But here’s what makes their story incredible. They are not like they’re good marketers, but they’re not slick Internet marketers.
They’re not professional speakers, they’re not industry celebrities. They don’t have a, you know, virtual Rolodex of a list influencers they did this as just two regular parents who figured out how to use virtual summits to absolutely blow up their email list and working with a bunch of other regular parents and people in their niche to be affiliates. And so we’re going to talk about how to go from a few thousand subscribers to possibly hundreds of thousands.
The numbers are going to blow your mind. And in this interview, you’re going to learn exactly how they did it and how they, how they structure their summits, why this strategy works so consistently, and most importantly, how you can copy their blueprint and make it work for your business, too. So let’s jump right in. Well, Jason and Cecilia, welcome.
Matt McWilliams: Thank you. Thanks for having us, Matt.
Jason Hilkey: It’s great to be here.
Matt McWilliams: Awesome.
Matt McWilliams: So, guys, I’m really excited about this. Just to give everyone just a very quick background, Jason and Cecilia are our clients in our, your affiliate launch coach program. I’m also joined today, as you can probably tell by our head coach in that program, Mark Severkrop, who also happens to be our resident summit expert, and he’s been working with Jason and Cecilia. I’m sure we’ll talk about, that as we go. But, I mean, let’s start at the beginning, what with that being a good place to start and all. how in the heck did you guys get started doing summits? Like, tell us a little bit about your audience first and who you serve, and then we’ll kind of transition into that.
Jason Hilkey: Sure, sure. so we got started online because we wanted to teach parenting classes. We were preschool teachers teaching in the same preschool classroom, and we discovered that parents need a lot of help. And we were parents at the time, and so we wanted to teach.
Matt McWilliams: Are you still parents now or did we. Yeah, still hasn’t changed.
Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!
Cecilia Hilkey: We have since sold our children.
Jason Hilkey: They’re just a little older now.
Matt McWilliams: They’re still working.
Jason Hilkey: It’s different. Anyway, so we’re trying to teach parenting classes online, and we’re getting into coaching, and we were kind of like, really trying to figure out the whole online thing.
Matt McWilliams: Let’s say struggling might be a word.
Jason Hilkey: Struggling. We’re just like, slowly watching our bank account get smaller and smaller. and after a couple of years of doing that, one of our friends was like, hey, why don’t you guys do a summer or like an online conference? And we’re like, oh, okay, we’ll try that. And so we didn’t really have any training from anybody special.
Matt McWilliams: We’d seen a few.
Jason Hilkey: Yeah, we’d seen it. We’d Seen a few, we, didn’t know any famous people or anybody that was well known in our space, any authors or experts. and so we started, yeah, I.
Matt McWilliams: Just finished reading the book 12, week year. And so we thought, hey, here’s a chance to actually put that into effect. So we started, and from day one when we sat down, we said, okay, let’s figure out a summit. That was day one of 12 weeks. And the summit went off 12 weeks later. So we did it from absolute nothing, figuring it all out on our own to now we’re what this is. We’re coming up on our ninth summit right now. and we have, you know, we’ve, we’ve got people from over 190 countries that show up for these things. we’ve grown our email list, and we’ve increased it 30 times.
I mean we’re over 100,000 at this point. And it just keeps growing each time. And it’s like our favorite part of the business. I mean, that’s really the thing about it. And it took our business this whole nother level. Like we realized when we were doing the other work, the coaching, doing online products, doing all that stuff that really, to go to another level, we needed to increase our audience. And one way for us to increase our audience very quickly was with conferences or with an online summit. And that’s really transformed the other parts of our business as well. And so, we now have a much larger audience that we can then use, for, all kinds of different marketing.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, that’s awesome. So let’s define summit. Let’s go back to that first summit. I don’t want to focus on your ninth summit. We’ll do that later, of course. but let’s go back to that first summit. What is a summit? As best as you can remember, you understood it back when you were doing that first one. And then, we’ll transition to what did that actually look like for you guys in that first one?
Matt McWilliams: Sure.
Jason Hilkey: And you’ll hear that we use summit and conference kind of interchangeably. Those are the same thing in our book.
Matt McWilliams: and the reason, just real quick, the reason we do that is because most of our audience, like parents, are.
Jason Hilkey: Not at the time, teachers and professionals.
Matt McWilliams: Weren’T very online savvy or Internet savvy. So the idea of a summit was something that they didn’ really understand conferences they could relate to. And so we’ve had in the back of our mind the whole time as we’ve Been developing these is what’s it like to go to a real conference, like an in person conference? What are the benefits? What are the experiences? And so that’s always something that we keep in mind as we develop our online conferences and our summits.
Matt McWilliams: There’s an important lesson there. Real quick. I don’t want to pass by understand your audience’s language. It’s the same reason why we tell people don’t use the word affiliate if they don’t know what the heck affiliate means. Call it a partner or ambassador. and I don’t want to like just gloss over that because that’s super important when people say, oh, we can’t do summits. Summits don’t work in my niche. Have you tried just changing the word? You know, because it will work if you know your audience’s language. So kudos to you guys for that one. That’s good. Okay, so let’s take, let’s take us back to that and tell us what that meant for what that was like for you guys and how you understood it.
Jason Hilkey: well, we, I don’t know if this is exactly what you mean, but we do use this pretty specific formula that helps in getting everybody really excited about the event, getting lots of interaction happening, making it be something that’s profitable. we can go over that formula so that when people listen to this, they know exactly what we’re talking about.
Matt McWilliams: It’s not that different than what we do now. Even in the first one we just found it worked so well that we’ve kind of just continued to use the same formula. We’ve tweaked it, we’ve experimented, we’ve tried things that are different, but we keep going. For the most part we’ve kind of kept the same formula of five days of pre recorded videos. And so these are pre recorded interviews that we’ve done each day. We have five speakers that we’ve interviewed and during that whole day all five of those interviews are available for people to watch. And then the next day five new ones.
We do that five times. And then, we usually, and so far every time we’ve been able to add like a bonus day at the very end which makes all 25 videos available for the day. we keep that kind of in our back pocket because there are, there could be technical problems and we don’t, we hate to promise that kind of a thing, but it also ensures that people are going to really work to show up for the event because it’s the event that makes it exciting. Like if this is available all the time, or if it was available for like three weeks or four weeks, it loses some effectiveness. So really we concentrated it down into a short period of time and made an event out of it. And then what people can do is they can buy the recordings during the event at a discount and, then they can watch them for a lifetime at any time on their own. They, they can just log into the site and watch the videos. but then the price goes up after the conference is over and the.
Jason Hilkey: Whole event is free.
Matt McWilliams: Oh, yeah.
Jason Hilkey: So, that’s a key part. That’s a really key part.
Matt McWilliams: Good price for most people.
Jason Hilkey: Yeah, lots of people come in, they’re really interested, they watch a few videos. Maybe there are a few people that are able to get through the whole thing, but most people aren’t able to. And they discover, oh my gosh, this is such an amazing experience. I want to have it all the time. So, I don’t like being salesy, but this is something that we do that sells itself without us having to push it. and people just enjoy it. They enjoy the free experience. They want to pay for it to get that same experience. So it’s really exciting to be able to provide that as a service and also to be able to make money.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, I think that’s the thing that I’ve said. There’s a few things we keep in the back of our head, and one of them is also that we’re being of service in our world. We really want to be serving parents around the world. And this is a way for us to be able to do that, where it doesn’t cost them anything. They show up for free and they get great content. we also are there to serve, the people that we’ve interviewed, these authors, these experts, all of the people we’ve interviewed, we keep in the back of our head. How are we serving them? How can we just lift them up and expose them to this audience that they may not have had a chance to before? And how can we best serve them? So those are things that we keep in the back of our head throughout the whole development of the conference.
Matt McWilliams: So, Mark, I don’t know if you noticed this. I want to clarify something. How far into your business were you when you did your first summit?
Matt McWilliams: That’s a good question.
Jason Hilkey: We had been struggling to build an online business for a couple of years.
Matt McWilliams: We started kind of slow, but yeah, it was about two to three years.
Matt McWilliams: What was your list size? Two years in, before you did your first summit, and I know you already mentioned the revenue, which was, you know, negative, basically. So what was the list size, though?
Jason Hilkey: We had about 3,000 people.
Matt McWilliams: Okay. So, I mean, very slow growth, and that’s. That’s the norm. we’re gonna. We’re talking today about things that aren’t the norm. We’re talking about how to explode your list with summits. But there’s something I noticed there. So prior to that two years, you were both preschool teachers.
Jason Hilkey: Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. You kind of both seem to have a certain level of marketing acumen. There’s a reason why I asked you to go back to when you started. It’s because you talk to somebody who’s been around for four or five, you know, six years, and we’re talking to them at a different place in their life, and it’s great. You want to talk to experts. I love, you know, sitting down with people who’ve been doing online marketing since the mid to late 90s, you know, before I ever had my first computer. You know, that’s. That’s fun because they have experiences that I don’t, and they have, you know, I can learn from them. But it’s also good from a story standpoint to hear kind of that origin story. And, Mark, I know you weren’t around for that origin story. but does it seem like Jason and Cecilia have, like, a certain level of marketing acumen that, I’ve already noticed two things. The thing about calling it a conference and then you said, make it an event.
Those aren’t things that tend to, you know, come natural ly to people. I don’t know, Mark, is that. Am I right there, or are they actually just total idiots? I’m just kidding.
Matt McWilliams: We have been exposed.
Cecilia Hilkey: Well, geez, I feel like I’m put on the spot now.
Matt McWilliams: I should say something nice about them. No.
Cecilia Hilkey: I mean, I think. Yeah, I think it’s interesting because I think people look at, you know, Jason, you and Cecilia, and say, oh, I can never do what they do, but, you know, it’s cool to see that.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah.
Cecilia Hilkey: You started off and kind of what you said with the language, Matt, but the same thing. I love how you guys took something that you knew, conferences and people going to conferences, and you just said, how can we apply that online? How can we apply that in an online business? And I think that’s something that a lot of people miss. It’s like you can take from other parts, other industries, other modalities, and apply it in a different way and have it work really well. And it seems like that’s what you guys did really well. It wasn’t a, it wasn’t that you knew how to create an online summit. It was that you said, I know that our target market likes conferences. What’s a conference? Like, how do we create that environment in this modality? And that’s the thing that I think is really cool because I think more people could do that and realize. Kind of like you said, Matt, it does work in your industry.
This could work in any industry. It’s just how do you frame it? How do you show people this is the value and this is what it’s like? My question is, did you frame it that way to people? Did you say, hey, this is just like the conferences you go to in person. It’s just online. I mean, did you tell people that or did you just call it a conference and they got that?
Matt McWilliams: well, I think we didn’t say outright in the very beginning this is just like an in person conference. We actually, it took us a few times to figure out that we needed to say that because it was in the back of our heads and people were having these experiences where they’re like, I can’t see every. I can’t fit all this in every day. Like, there’s so much coming, there’s so much content. And so we framed it as like, it’s just like as if you went to an in person conference where you can’t go to every single talk. So you choose who are the key talks that you want to go to and how are you going to spend your time and really go deep on those talks and choose. So we had to sort of frame it a little bit, but that took us like listening to people. I think some of what’s happened is in our figuring out marketing is just listening to people. I think that’s been the most.
One of the most important parts for us is listening to people. And, and honestly, we have gone and sought out training and good coaches and, the training and the coaches is what’s really helped us. And we’ve taken what applies to us and we leave the rest. We had some coaches that actually we had a coach, someone who’s really well known in the industry, say, yeah, the parenting niche, that’s hard. Like when he found out what niche we’re in and we’re like, oh my gosh, like, this is the first, like early on and we’re like, have we goofed up? Like, maybe we shouldn’t be trying to do this? And then we Also heard from almost the same person, summit, summits don’t work anymore. Like don’t bother with summits. And so we heard this from both, you know, twice. And we still.
Matt McWilliams: He’s no longer a coach for you, is he? Because he’s 0 for 2. At least based on the two things you’ve told me.
Matt McWilliams: And I would say that what’s taken us to the next level, you know, like we said, this is coming up on our ninth summit. working with you guys took us to the next level. Like Mark, working with us on how to do summits with affiliates at a more in depth level has transformed how we do summit. So the coaches have been very instrumental in us figuring things out. It’s not like we just figured it out as we went. We weren’t like, yeah, we definitely got good training and good coaches.
Jason Hilkey: I say, yeah, we studied a lot of online marketing. Like we were teachers. So we’re also good students. I like to deep dive into stuff. But we not ever studied exactly how to do a summit. We just kind of copied other people and made it up and found something that worked.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, that is, that is studying. you know, I mean good artists copy, great artists steal. I said that I was the original person to ever say that. I’m taking full credit for that quote. no, it’s Picasso actually. and we say there’s a training I’m doing, this weekend for a mastermind group. And I say by the end of this presentation, I want to convince you of two things. Number one, an affiliate program is the best way to grow and scale your business. Number two, the best way to learn how to run an affiliate program is to, model and copy others. so you guys are doing the same thing with your summits. You’re modeling, you’re seeing what they’re doing with this little piece here and how they lay out their page and all the little things like what their doing the day before, what emails they’re sending, how they’re running their ads. but you touched on something there that, let’s go back to that coach, I’m going to use air quotes there. That coach, who said two things. Number one, parenting is hard.
I have friends, including you guys, who prove that otherwise. I don’t believe there’s any niche that’s harder than any other to break into and make money in. maybe the ceiling is lower in some niches, but you know, we’re talking millions versus deca. Millions, you know, that’s my spiel there. So if you’re out there listening and you’re in some obscure niche, not that parenting is obscure, you know, but you’re in some niche where you think it’s not possible. you’re wrong. And so is that, coach. Secondly, summits are dead. you just did your eighth summit earlier this year, right? It was your eighth. You’re going on your ninth. Okay, you did your eighth. of those eight, which one was the biggest this past one?
Matt McWilliams: The eighth one.
Matt McWilliams: Okay, so before that, which one was the biggest?
Jason Hilkey: The seventh.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, you can see where I’m going with this. I’m gonna spare everybody the rigmarole here. Actually. Before that, which one was the biggest? They’re not dead. My personal opinion is we think they’re dead in marketing world because there was a period of time where everybody was doing them in the marketing world. Here’s the thing. Your audience isn’t in the marketing world. And you know that your summit, your ninth summit. Your ninth summit. Not even like the ninth parenting summit. Your ninth summit will be the first summit that probably half your people have ever even heard of, let alone attended. So keep doing them, you know, and no, they are not, they are not dead. So what’s been a curious question here? What’s been. I think it’s obvious that the benefits are growing your list and you make sales. what’s been one of the benefits that surprised you about summits?
Jason Hilkey: I didn’t realize that many of the speakers that we’ve had over like three, maybe four or five times that we’ve talked to them, that now they’ve become our friends. They used to be these people that I admired and I looked up to because I studied their books and I.
Matt McWilliams: Still admire them, maybe, but I do.
Jason Hilkey: But now, like, we, like some of them, we’re on text messaging basis with, or we, like, have, you know, coffee zoom time calls and stuff, we get together with some of them. I never imagined that, that I would get to hang out with these people that I had, like, just admired from afar, and to see how human they are. So that’s one of the. One of the big benefits for me.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: And I think the thing that surprised me and it really was it just after the first conference, it immediately became evident. But before the first conference was I didn’t recognize the. I think we call it like the Oprah effect of, like, the credibility of what happens when we start talking to these people that are recognized by our whole audience. We’re talking to them we’re interviewing them and people then elevate our credibility because we’re being associated with them. And that was not immediately obvious to me. we got lots of things that were like, oh, I didn’t expect that to happen.
Jason Hilkey: The other thing that happened immediately that I didn’t expect was I didn’t expect it to be so successful so quickly. And all of a sudden we’re like, wait, we’ve done something that’s actually like, in our little own, tiny corner of the Internet, it’s actually worked. And we were having the impact finally that we wanted to have and really helping parents and like, getting back testimonials, getting back emails and comments on social media from people about how it’s changed their parenting. They’re doing different things in their family. It’s healed stuff.
They’ve, you know, done had this miracle happen with their child or even with their spouse or even a grandma that’s trying to do something with her kid, her grandchildren, or a teacher or a therapist or a coach. Like, we were like, oh my gosh, this is actually having the impact that we, that we want to do. Like, it. We had to like, not read our email for a few days because we almost couldn’t run the summit because it was so. We were getting so touched and moved by the response from people that it would, like, distract us too much. We could function.
Matt McWilliams: I can see you lighting up. I mean, and I can hear it in your voice, like you’re lighting up about this. And it also sounds like, I mean, you can get that. We’ve gotten that from our little corner of the interwebs, you know, with pre recorded videos. And when I say pre record, I mean like just the two of you and, you know, some B roll and some music playing in the background. but it sounds like these are just fun. Sounds like you guys actually really enjoy these. Is that, Is that the case? I know there’s some stress and some stuff that goes in, but sounds like these are like, it’s a really fun form of marketing for you guys. Is that, Is that the case?
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, that’s what I was gonna say. That’s the other.
Matt McWilliams: There’s like a lot of your sadomasochistic. Because if you’re doing a ninth one and this isn’t fun, what’s wrong with you?
Matt McWilliams: That was one of the other things that surprised me out of it, is how much fun it was. And we didn’t have some special training on interviewing people. We just talk to people. That’s all we do we, say this often to the speakers? Like, we’re just gonna have a conversation and see where it goes. And, you know, some people are gonna watch this eventually, but we have a lot of fun, and we definitely recognize, like, this is the most fun part of our business. Like, we have completely shifted a lot of things around this because it ended up being way more fun than anything else that we were doing in our business. And people come to us and say, you guys really are great at interviewing. And we’re thinking, I don’t know why. I don’t know what we’re doing.
Jason Hilkey: It’s because of all the prep work I do beforehand. It’s not just to show up and have a conversation.
Matt McWilliams: It’s true.
Jason Hilkey: Read their book.
Matt McWilliams: Jason, she just, like, yeah, steamrolled that whole thing.
Cecilia Hilkey: And she just took credit with pages of,
Matt McWilliams: She does.
Jason Hilkey: And questions.
Matt McWilliams: And the joke is that when we interview, Cecilia is totally prepared. Thank goodness, because I’m not. And that’s kind of the way we run our business. Right? She does content. I do like the running of the business and some of the tech stuff. But what happens in the interview is Cecilia’s all prepared. She has done her homework on this, right? She knows the people, she knows their work. She gets a question in, and then I usually send us down some tangent and we go somewhere completely else. But it’s important because sometimes we get stuck and we have these questions to.
Jason Hilkey: Go back to, and I arc it back in a really nice way and wrap it all up and tie a bow on it.
Matt McWilliams: I just thought of something that applies to Jason and it applies to me, and I’ve never heard this phrase used before, so I’m gonna, I want somebody to like, Mark, can you tweet this? Put a dash next to my username, and, like, we’ll just make a shirt out of this. The shortest distance between two points is a suggestion. I think that’s totally how you and I both operate. I want to go there. This is. We’re going to get off summits for just a second because of the direction you guys just went. so I totally blame you guys for this. what’s it like working together? I mean, I know we have people, we have listeners. We have, you know, people in our audience who, they’re either starting a business with their spouse or they already have one, working together. And there are certainly unique challenges and unique benefits that I’ll let you guys cover. But what is that whole thing?
Matt McWilliams: Like, you want me to start? You Want to start?
Jason Hilkey: You can start.
Matt McWilliams: You can start.
Cecilia Hilkey: And then she’ll bring it back and round it up.
Matt McWilliams: Okay, so Jason’s going to start talking about it, then talk about something else. Go over here. And then Cecilia is going to repeat the question I ask and actually answer. Good. Got it. Okay.
Matt McWilliams: Figured this out very quickly. yeah. So, it’s really cool to be working with my best friend. You know, Like, I get choked up about it because I never thought that I’d be able to do, something so meaningful, with my spouse, my best friend. And there’s definitely challenging times, you know. But what really makes it all worth it is that we, together, are creating something that we get to share, and we both believe in it deeply. And, it’s our passion. And, so above everything else, in all the difficult times that we have, we always come back to that. And what’s funny is that we could be having some kind of major disagreement argument, but we have to go into an interview, and we come out of that interview so connected, and we’re like, yeah, what were we arguing about? Like, I don’t remember what that was. That’s cool. Been really good for us just to be able to work through our stuff.
And we understand each other better now because, we work closely together and we do stuff that’s pretty, intimate when we’re talking with someone. We understand each other really well. so I would say that we’ve done a lot of work together to develop our relationship, and the business has been the catalyst for that to happen. That’s the short answer. We could do a whole interview, a whole talk, just about working with your spouse.
Matt McWilliams: I’m just gonna, like, invite you guys back in the future and we’ll talk about working with a spouse. But I just couldn’t let that go. When you guys said that. That was really cool. I noticed that about Tara, and I, too. It’s like, well, we gotta. We gotta show up for this thing. And then, yeah, you know, there’s something about working together towards a shared. You know. Like, in the old days, I feel like we would have built something, you know, together. Or, like, gone and milk some cows, I don’t know. and then we would have forgotten about it. But you guys are, you know, running a summit, you know, or doing something, like doing an interview, you know. That’s really cool, Cecilia. yeah.
Jason Hilkey: So absolutely everything that Jason already said, it’s like, the most fun and also, like, the hardest thing to do. but when. When I look back and think well, would I. Would I want it any other way? No, I wouldn’t. and I get to work with my best friend. it’s not always pretty. sometimes it’s kind of messy. And that’s. That’s our own opportunity to grow and to show up. Just like parenting is a messy process, it’s your opportunity to show up and to, like, do the hard work. so it’s been a wonderful, Our business, our marriage, our family are all opportunities for us to grow. And part of it. Sometimes it’s like honoring, and trusting in the other person, in their expertise, and recognizing which things in the business are better to. To have somebody else do. Because it’s sometimes cheaper to hire somebody else than this to do marriage counseling. Not that we’re opposed to marriage counseling, because that’s awesome, too. But just know there’s, some things that are good to hire out.
Matt McWilliams: Designers are way cheaper than a marriage counselor. We found.
Matt McWilliams: I found that hiring a painter is cheaper than marriage. Like, the level of marriage counseling that we would have to go through. If I ever paint again in this house, because I painted one room, it was the worst three weeks of my life, I think. I’m kidding. It took me three weeks.
Matt McWilliams: I could completely believe that just from experiences we’ve had. Totally.
Matt McWilliams: And, how much cheaper it would have been just to hire somebody. And I mean, on all levels. That’s why I’ve never done it again. I know, Mark, you’re the same way. You’re like, I’m never painting again. Paintbrushes are banned in your house. All right, so you mentioned having fun with these speakers and getting, you know, the Oprah effect. That was really cool. I never. I. I thought about that. Like, there you’re. It’s almost like, I don’t know how much you guys. You guys have children, even though they’re older. You watched a lot of animated movies. It’s a hard word for me to say there. And, you know, like, in the animated movies where, like, the evil guy discovers, like, this secret gym and then, like, all these, like, things, like, he, like, sucks up the life force of the gym and, like, achieve superpowers. I feel like your credibility is the same way with the speaker.
Like, you have these 25 speakers, and you get, like, a little bit of each of their credibility that gets added to you. so, of course, that begs the question, how in the heck do you find speakers? What’s been that process, like, for you guys?
Jason Hilkey: And I want to, like, twist the metaphor a little Bit because you just compared us to the evil guy.
Cecilia Hilkey: I was going to say they’re not evil, just to clarify.
Jason Hilkey: So here’s how.
Matt McWilliams: Didn’t really think that one through now, did I?
Jason Hilkey: Here’s a different metaphor. I think there’s an Amish saying that, you lift me, I lift you. Together we rise. That would be more of our model is how do we find people that maybe they’re, like a voice that needs to get turned up on the volume. They get the volume turned up on them. They have an awesome message, but they don’t have a big audience. But we really believe in that and trust in them. So we find those like little hidden gems. even with the bigger name people, our focus is continually on what can we do to serve them, how can we grow their list. And sometimes we even have marketing conversations with them and talk to them about their website and talk to them about different things because we want them to succeed. And coming from that service based perspective on how can we help the speakers, get. Sell more books, sell more products, get more coaching clients, then makes it a natural partnership.
So I think that’s one of the reasons why people tell us they’re like, you’re the only parenting conference that we do. You’re the only summit that we do. We don’t talk to other people because we come from that perspective. but your original question is how do we find speakers?
Matt McWilliams: you’re doing what Jason normally does there. What was the quote again that you shared?
Jason Hilkey: I lift you, you lift me. Together we rise.
Matt McWilliams: And you said that was Amish, right?
Jason Hilkey: I think it’s Amish.
Matt McWilliams: Well, it doesn’t matter because the best thing about quoting the Amish on the.
Jason Hilkey: Internet is they might not ever find it.
Matt McWilliams: They’ll never know. it’s like misquoting, misquote the Amish all day long. And the good thing is I can say that right now and nobody is offended. Literally, nobody listening is offended. Right.
Jason Hilkey: Because, I love Amish people. I think it’s like really amazing.
Matt McWilliams: We’re surrounded by and the houses they make are unbelievable. Oh my goodness. Yeah, our next house.
Cecilia Hilkey: And now Matt’s doing what Jason does.
Matt McWilliams: Okay, so back, let’s talk more about the Amish.
Jason Hilkey: So how do we find speakers?
Matt McWilliams: Can I just say real quick? One word? Bookshelf. I mean, really, that’s. I’m looking around at our bookshelf. The way we found our first speakers is we looked at the books that we were reading and we just reached out to them and really like Email or call. Like, it’s really amazingly easy. That’s where we started. And then we also. Well, that was the one thing I was gonna say. That was more than one word, wasn’t it?
Jason Hilkey: It was amazingly easy. And I was the one that did the work.
Matt McWilliams: Absolutely. So it’s much easier for me.
Jason Hilkey: yes, but it was. How many people were willing to. To do this?
Matt McWilliams: even when you first started, when you had. You were, like, total nobodies, right?
Jason Hilkey: We were nobodies.
Matt McWilliams: That was one of the shocks.
Jason Hilkey: Didn’t really know what a summit was at that point. Like, was only four years ago. but it was a long time ago in, like, Internet history. In our. In our space, the parenting space is, like, a little bit less developed than other, marketing spaces online. So there was a fair amount of education that we had to do with our speakers to help them just explain what it was that we were doing. And I think one of the things that made the difference was one coming from service, but also explaining to people how much they’d impacted our lives. Like, we knew their work. We’d used it in our family, we’d used it in the classroom. We’d been impacted by it deeply. And so for them to then kind of partner with us and for us to interview them, they trusted that we were going to honor their work. it wasn’t like, oh, I’m going to use this person for a big name. It wasn’t that. it was.
No, we already love you. We’re already like your superfans, and we want to see if we can help get more attention. No matter how big your audience is, maybe we can get it a little bit bigger.
Matt McWilliams: And I think that was. What was surprising to us, is the number of people that just said yes. I remember. Do you remember, like, when we, like, some of the bigger names that we get?
Jason Hilkey: Oh, yeah.
Matt McWilliams: We were like, oh, can you believe that? He said yes. Like, we were just shocked. And the reality is they’re just. They’re just people, right? They’re like, people like us. And it actually. I say it was easy, but the hardest part about it was actually making that initial contact because of feelings. I think the feelings that you had. You were so scared. Even still, there’s times when you’re like.
Jason Hilkey: I had to, like, really get on, like, my big girl panties and do that. Like, do that work and feel, like, honestly, like, have the mindset to feel like, that we’re. We’re worthy enough to go and do this.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, that’s awesome. So summit number seven. let’s go from. From one to seven. No summit number one. You had about how many people?
Jason Hilkey: Oh, number one was we. Our list size was 3,000.
Matt McWilliams: Yep.
Jason Hilkey: And then we increased it to almost 8,000, almost 5,000 people.
Get my #1 affiliate recruiting email (the one I’ve personally used to recruit thousands of affiliates in dozens of niches). Grab your copy here!
Matt McWilliams: What was this last one?
Matt McWilliams: hundred and I don’t remember. It was over a hundred thousand. I don’t remember the exact number.
Matt McWilliams: Four, I believe, is the number I heard. Yeah, I mean, that’s. I generally don’t ask questions that I know the answer to, but I do know the answers.
Matt McWilliams: Could I ask you some questions?
Matt McWilliams: how many do we have again? yeah. So, anyway, how you doing today? How am I doing today?
Matt McWilliams: You’re doing great so far.
Matt McWilliams: Room am I staying in? Oh, boy, this is deteriorated. All right, so she went from 5,000 to 100,000 plus. I mean, what was that progression? Like, what were some of the. I want to look for, like, the two, maybe three things that made the biggest impact to go. Because that’s crazy. That’s in less than four years. You know, 5,000 is amazing for a first summit. You know, usually we teach. You can get about two, maybe three, and you guys did five, so that’s awesome. But clearly, you know, 25 times more is, well, better. that’s. How did you guys do that? everything.
Matt McWilliams: One of the things that we kind of failed to mention that is, like, for us, it’s just. It’s an assumed thing that we didn’t explain in a summit, is that it’s an affiliate program. I mean, that’s what. That’s what it’s all about, right? Like, everyone that’s speaking or is a speaker for it, we automatically make them affiliates, and we let them know, hey, you can spread the word, and you can get a percentage of any sales from it. So that’s like another added benefit for them. But it’s because that’s the reason it grows so much is because it is. one of the reasons it grows so much is because they’re all affiliates, and we bring on additional affiliates on top of that. But that’s what’s really had it get bigger and bigger. the other thing I would say is that it’s an event.
And because it’s an event, that experience, once that flywheel kind of got going, of the word gets out, and the word’s getting out by these affiliates or by the speakers letting their audiences know, that flywheel effect just kept going and going because it was all focused on an event. And, so I think that’s really Made a big difference in growing it. And we run ads, but the ads are not the thing that are driving the incredible growth of it. Really.
Jason Hilkey: Yeah. About a third of our traffic comes from affiliates. About a third of our traffic comes from ads. And then a third is just organic traffic. People that are excited about it, they’re sharing about it on social media or even people will just email their friends and I guess, yeah, that it’s just they’re touched and moved enough that they and have found it to be valuable enough that they just share about it organically.
Matt McWilliams: And it’s easy to share about because it’s, you know, if someone has an audience, like if they’re going to affiliate, it’s easy to share about it because it’s just nurturing their audience. It’s already, it’s a free nurturing for their audience. So it’s easy for them just to say, hey, this is something. They have all this great information and it’s free. So it makes it very, very easy to share about.
Matt McWilliams: And they’re a part of it. And I think now you guys have reached the point where they’re getting some, some of that rub off, you know, like credibility because you guys are the experts and your other guests are the experts. And I know me, when I’m a part of a summit, I’m like, yeah, I’m a part of this summit with these seven names that you’ve all heard of. And I’m not necessarily promoting it because I hope to make a few thousand dollars. I’m promoting it because I want my audience to know that I’m in a summit with those seven people that they’ve heard of. You know, like that’s how we all operate. So you mentioned affiliates. Well of course affiliates need to make a commission. but it’s a commission on what? Because you said it’s free. So explain how that works.
Matt McWilliams: Sure, sure.
Jason Hilkey: Because people can buy the recordings. the live event happens where you only get access to five talks each day. but anytime during that event, including the sixth bonus day, they can buy the recordings and own those recordings.
Jason Hilkey: on their own listen to them. They get transcripts, they get an audio only version of the recordings. There’s some other bonuses and things that.
Matt McWilliams: We get the video of course with.
Jason Hilkey: It and they get the videos, they can download them, they can keep them.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. And so that’s what we sell. And then we have upsells that go along with that. So we might have like an added, like get the last conference or get the last five or get this best of or some things like that that we add in there. And then any affiliates get a percentage of those sales.
Matt McWilliams: Nice.
Cecilia Hilkey: What’s the I’m just curious. And again, Jason, I don’t know if you’ll have this number off the top of your head, but what percentage of people take that? I mean what percentage of people say I want the recordings, I want to be able to. Matt, what’s that number again?
Matt McWilliams: I know industry standard numbers on that, but I don’t know yours.
Matt McWilliams: For us it ends up being about 3, a little bit more than 3%. it depends on how they come in. You know, if they come in from an affiliate, it’s a little bit higher. If it’s cold traffic, they don’t know it’s, it’s a little bit less. But it averages about 3%.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, highlight that number right there. I mean that is, that’s, that’s an important figure. Not only.
Cecilia Hilkey: Well, I think it’s not have to.
Matt McWilliams: Pay for the traffic on the front end affiliates, but they actually do. In summits we found they convert about 25 to 30% higher. so what we found. I’ll just share industry numbers for anybody listening. We found that with social media traffic, ad traffic, the conversion rate’s about two and a half percent. With affiliates it’s a little bit north of four. and so we just always say about four, you know, is what it is to be. And you guys are at three and that’s not that far off.
Cecilia Hilkey: And I think the value of that and the value of the summit model is the fact that, you know, 3% are basically funding it for you and you’re providing enormous amounts of value for free for 97% of them, you know. And so it’s like this win, win on both sides. The people that say I want to be able to dig deeper, they get to, you know, and the people that say, hey, I just want, I just want to, like you said, you know, pick the three or four that I’m really interested in and watch them and I’m good with that. They get to do that too, which is really awesome. I mean for me, anytime I get to a summit, I almost always buy the all access pass because I know I’m not going to watch them all and I know I’m going to be able to go back and watch. And so I think some people will do that. But you know, I just, I love that that it allows you to serve both groups in the way that’s best for them.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah.
Cecilia Hilkey: And. And still make, you know, a good chunk of money and, you know, to be able to fund your business and impact more lives. but I guess, you know, there’s a lot of moving parts. There’s a lot of things, you know, you guys, like you said, you. Oh, go ahead.
Matt McWilliams: Can I say one thing about that?
Cecilia Hilkey: Yes.
Matt McWilliams: Because I think it’s important. There’s two things that came up. One was that.
Matt McWilliams: Oh, no, sorry. Different thing.
Matt McWilliams: One was that, many. We had heard that summits weren’t. You couldn’t make money on summits. And you had asked earlier what was one of the surprising parts of running of us doing these online conferences. It became like, one of the most profitable parts of our business, which I don’t. I have not heard that from anyone else that we’ve talked about, talked to, that does summits, which is surprising to me because we’re not doing anything impressive. We’re not. We don’t have, like, amazing conversion rates. Like, you know, we just went through them. But it’s. It’s like the most. One of the most profitable parts of our business. And the other thing is that we look at lifetime value, and I think sometimes we forget that. But, like, it’s also bringing in potential customers for the future. We’ve just kind of glossed over saying, yeah, we’re growing our audience and we’re making this much in the conference. But it’s not just about how much we make in the conference.
It’s how much we make for the lifetime of those people that then are on our email list or that become our audience. So I just wanted to point those two things out because I think they’re important. I think it’s one of the reasons people discount, summits oftentimes.
Matt McWilliams: Well, they’re starting off that relationship with you where you’re the Oprah. You know, they’re starting off that relationship with so much value that you gave. I mean, look at the emails you’re getting and the test, you know, all those stories that you’re getting, and that’s how they’re starting off the relationship with you.
Jason Hilkey: yeah.
Matt McWilliams: So even if they don’t convert into an upsell like that, when you offer them something three months from now because they applied something that either you taught them or a speaker taught them, you know, for 90 days. I mean, I always just use the example, like, imagine that bedtime is total chaos for you and for the. And you did, and you taught something that for the next 90 days made bedtime Peaceful. You could sell me anything. You know, bedtime actually happens to be pretty good for us because I learned a few things. But, you know, as an example, like, if you suddenly are sleeping through the night because your children are sleeping through the night, I mean, what would you pay 90 days later after getting 90 consecutive good night’s sleep? Anything. Anything. Cecilia, you were going to say.
Jason Hilkey: Something there, and it makes it so much easier, to your point, for us to sell coaching or other parenting classes or any of those other things. Because of that positioning, the credibility, the relationship, people feel like they know us because they’ve read our emails, because they’ve seen us talk with, different speakers. We tell part of our story. we ask our own parenting questions in addition to the parenting questions that people send in to us. so it really just helps build that relationship.
Matt McWilliams: Mark, I think I cut you off and I’m sorry.
Cecilia Hilkey: I was very offended, but I’m slowly getting over it. no, I was just gonna, you know, you guys make it look easy. You know, you’ve done, you know, eight of these. You’re going on your ninth. You know, you’ve had massive success with them, and it just looks easy. But I know that there’s a lot of moving parts. We’ve helped you with yours, we’ve helped other people with theirs, and there’s a lot of moving parts. So if somebody is watching this and they’re thinking, man, it’d be really cool to do a summit for my business, what would you tell them? I mean, what are the things that you would either warn them about or you’d say, hey, this is what you absolutely have to do?
Matt McWilliams: yeah, so that’s a great question. It’s a question we get often. we actually, Well, can I, Can I have a little spoiler and say, we’ve been asked this question so many times that we’ve decided we’re actually going to do a class on this.
Matt McWilliams: But we can still idea this is coming as a total shock to us. We did not schedule this interview as you have a class about summits coming up. That’s not how we work in marketing.
Matt McWilliams: We’ve been avoiding it for years. Honestly, like, we’re just. We’ve avoided, like, okay, fine, we just finally gave up. but it’s. The nice thing is that I actually find it fairly simple. and what’s nice is once you figure it out, it’s just copy and paste. You just take the same thing and you do it again and you just change the name. I mean, really, we’ve done that with our design, we do that with the back end. We do that with just everything. Ads, all of it. Yeah, you have to tweak copy, you have to tweak the images. But the nice thing is, once you do the work, that first summit that we did for 12 weeks, the next one did not take 12 weeks to do. And every one of them gets easier and easier and shorter and shorter because we just have mastered it. but just to start with, you.
Jason Hilkey: Want to say, yeah, I think that’s one of like the myths of doing summits. A lot of people say, oh, I don’t want to do that. It looks like so much work. But then if you think of, okay, you’re going to sell a product, you’re going to sell a parenting class, you have to not only design that program, but you have to design all the marketing. And you got to make sure you’re nurturing your list while you’re also building your list. And there’s a lot of moving parts in that. Whereas doing a summit or a conference, it’s all of those in one little unique package. It’s growing your list, it is nurturing your audience, it is the pre launch content, it’s also the product. It’s so many of those things in one. It’s like a one stop shop. So, yeah, it does take a little bit of time to get the speakers on board and do the interviews.
And, it totally pays off in the end because you can use those for the nurturing, for the product, and even then continue to reuse them after or beforehand. So it just totally pays off.
Matt McWilliams: And it’s flexible. You can use what you’re comfortable with. I mean, that’s, you know, we didn’t have formal training on how to do a summit. Like I said in the very beginning, we just were like, okay, we need to record video of these interviews. So what do we got? Okay, well, we know how this works. So we started using this thing called Zoom, which the whole world knows about now. Right. But at the time, we’ve had a number of people come up to us. Now they’re like, so do you, have you been using this Zoom thing all this time? We’re like, yeah, so. But it’s something we knew, right? Cameras, we just used what we had. Okay, we need to put the videos up. What do we know? Well, we know how to do this. So we just put it up and we figured out what we were comfortable with. And it’s the format and the communication and the relationship that really make it work. we give you the whole formula.
We can say do this, do this, do this. But it’s really about just figuring out what are you comfortable with and how can you best present it and figure it out, with a way that is easy for you. Because people are going to be in different levels and in different places.
Matt McWilliams: and I think this training is going to be, amazing because you take a lot of things that you can train people on, and then there’s. You also got to have this, this, this and this to be able to execute. Most of us have a fairly functional 720 or 1080p, you know, webcam. If you don’t know what that means, just look at your webcam. It’ll usually tell you. Like, mine says 1080p HD. You know, I think this thing costs like 50 bucks on Amazon. You know, it’s like four years old. I haven’t felt the need to upgrade, you know, and it plugs into the computer. Most of you have one of those. And here’s the thing, believe it or not, if you don’t, if you have this little magic. I called it the magic rectangle. If you have one of these, this actually takes better video quality than this camera. It’s just easier for me to use this. Go get a tripod also. Probably you can get one for 50 bucks on Amazon.
Set it up like this on the tripod and you can use Zoom on your magic rectangle. Okay. Like everything. You have all the tools. Zoom. Yeah. You’ll need a paid account. But I mean, heaven forbid, if you really are on a budget, you can use Skype, which is free, and then there’s a way to record it. There’s like 17 different ways to do that, some of which are very, very low cost or even free. Like, you have the tools, you know, if you don’t have a good microphone, which my microphone is only 75 bucks on Amazon, if you don’t have a good microphone and you’ve got a decent computer. Or again, the magic rectangle, the audio quality. I mean, you can do a 2, 3, 4,000 person summit with stuff that you probably literally already have in your pocket or on your desk. And that’s what I just want to point out. There are no limitations, guys.
Matt McWilliams: We didn’t have a studio that we were doing this in. We literally did it in a laundry nook next to the kitchen.
Matt McWilliams: That’s next level right there. I was just going to say, did you do it in like a bedroom? But no, you.
Matt McWilliams: Oh, no, we didn’t have a house.
Matt McWilliams: Washing in the background.
Matt McWilliams: We didn’t have room in our house. We had a small house. So really, like, we. We just totally, like just MacGyvered everything.
Matt McWilliams: And tide as a sponsor.
Matt McWilliams: I could just change laundry, fold laundry.
Matt McWilliams: You MacGyvered it, dude. You just use one of my favorite verbs. Oh my goodness. That is one of. Mark knows this. That is one of my top three favorite verbs. oh, we’re gonna have to MacGyver that landing page there, you know, that’s awesome.
Matt McWilliams: And MacGyvering, it was like setting stuff on top of books and holding stuff.
Jason Hilkey: Like putting up the curtains.
Matt McWilliams: That’s what we do when we’re. I was talking with Joe Fear, who’s the host of like one of the top podcasts in the world right now. He was talking about when they first started their podcast back in 2010, they had microphones on mattresses. And he was like, I don’t even know why we used mattresses. Why didn’t we use a table? I said, easy soundproofing. He’s like, oh, yeah, that’s why we did it. I’d forgotten. It helps mute some of the sound when in this, like they were hardwood floors in this bedroom. And I’m like, you know, you think about those things or when you, when you like, you know, we were talking about earlier. I’ve said this publicly. This table, guys, you know, this looks great. It’s studio, right? It’s sitting on top of paint cans. You know, there’s blue painters tape all over my carpet to tell me where to stand. I don’t have like fancy stuff. It looks great, but it’s.
You know, sometimes we have to MacGyver things and just don’t let that hold you back. There’s nothing in here except for, I don’t know, 30 or $40 sign that my wife bought. there was nothing, there’s literally nothing in my studio that we didn’t already have in the house.
Jason Hilkey: Our picture.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, it was just in a different location. Like now we don’t have an entertainment center. No, I’m just kidding.
Jason Hilkey: our preschool students in our classroom. M painted that picture.
Matt McWilliams: It’s actually m really good for.
Matt McWilliams: It was a year long study of Jackson Pollock, but it’s. It’s. The nice thing is it’s meant to us.
Matt McWilliams: And preschool were you guys running?
Matt McWilliams: It was. We worked at a very different kind of preschool.
Matt McWilliams: Okay. You’re learning about Jackson Pollock and I was learning how not to pick my nose. But hey, you know, potato, potato.
Matt McWilliams: But it’s like, original. It’s, like who we are, and it’s part of our.
Jason Hilkey: Yeah, it’s homegrown.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, I love it. And it kind of represents what you guys were talking about earlier about the, you know, the messiness of things and how, you know, how Jason goes all over the place and then, you know, you bring it back in and here and there, going all over the place, and then you end up with something really cool, you know, Mark, there was something you wanted to say there, and I. We started talking at the same time. So.
Cecilia Hilkey: Yes. No, you know, I acknowledge Jason when you say it’s actually pretty simple, but I think one of the things to hone in on. And yes, you guys, you have this training coming up, and you’ve been asked this many times, and yes, I’m kind of telling you that this is important and you guys should check it out, because you should. But really, it’s simple to you because you figured out the formula, and I think that’s the key. And you talked about that with other aspects of your business of finding the coach, finding the mentor that can teach you the formula. And when you know the formula, yes, it is simple, and I think that’s the value.
And, you know, like you said, you didn’t have this when you started out, but there, to somebody on the outside, there is a lot of moving parts, and you don’t, you know, we even kind of did it just now. It’s so easy to get, sucked into. I’ve heard people call it the how hole. You know, it’s like, how do you do it? What do you use? And you get so overwhelmed by all that stuff and you miss the important things. And I think that’s the value of coming to somebody like you guys that have done it multiple times that you can say, okay, I’m just gonna give you the simple stuff. Here’s what you do. But here’s the secret sauce, here’s the process, here’s the.
Here’s the how you do it as far as the big picture stuff that makes the difference. And I think that’s the value of what you guys have done. And I think it’s so easy for all of us to get to that point. And this is. Matt, you’ve heard me say this. This is one of my biggest pet. Not pet peeves. But it just kind of makes me chuckle every time because you hear really successful people, and I would put you guys in that category when it comes to some, it’s really successful, and they just say, well, you know, I’m just like you. I’m just a normal person. And you just do this, this and this.
And there’s people sitting there thinking, no, it’s not that easy. Like, I don’t know, I don’t understand. And I think it’s so easy once you’ve done it and you have the system. And that’s really the value of what you guys are going to be offering, is that system, you know, And I think that’s the key, is, yes, it’s simple. If you have the system and this is the system. And I’ve watched you guys run summits. You know, I’ve been on the backside and we’ve talked about it. We’ve seen. I’ve seen what happens behind the scenes, the good and the bad and the stressful and everything else. But on the outside, it looks amazing.
And it’s because, you know, the system, you know, the things that are important and, you know, the things that aren’t important. You know, like you said, you know, the things where it’s like, this just has to get done and we just have to do it, and it doesn’t have to be perfect. And that’s really the key to any good system. And if anybody’s created a system for summits, I think it’s you guys, because like you said, you went from 5,000 to 100,000 plus and you’ve made money. You know, like you said, it’s. It’s one of the most profitable parts of your business. And so I just wanted to make sure that we point that out, because I know somebody’s gonna listen and say, yeah, right, it’s simple. Whatever. Like, it’s easy for you because you’ve done it nine times, you know, and it is the first time, but it’s because of the system. Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. I think that’s. I think that’s so valuable to say, Mark. you know, we’ve talked to people who we’ve supported in their summits, and it’s good to remember for me, like, it’s a reminder for me when I talk to them, like, oh, yeah, this did take a little bit of work. You know, like, this was. This was hard at first.
Jason Hilkey: It, wasn’t obvious.
Matt McWilliams: It wasn’t obvious. what’s simple is that there’s everything’s available to us, you know, and so there’s a simple part of it that’s like, you know, we have it all available and it’s not hard to get. The challenging part of it is figuring out how that all goes together and the running of that machine. I think that’s really great to point out. And what’s been, what I’ve also noticed is once we got that machine figured out, you know, after the first summit, we started focusing on the other parts that were important. You know, like, that’s when we started focusing on how can we support our speakers better, how can we do the affiliate part of it better. You know, that’s why we brought you guys on.
That’s why we’ve been working with you on this. Because like, we had that down where we were focusing on other parts of the business. We were like, what’s another upsell? You can focus on other parts of the conference at that point, once the machine’s figured out and we worked with you then to figure out like, okay, so how can we do our affiliate support better? How can we take that to the next level? and that’s what we’re hoping to do with this class is to take care of that how of it, like the whole machining of it, the recipe of it, so that people can focus on providing a really top notch summit and be able to enjoy it and be able to see how it can really benefit them and they’re not struggling with that first one and figuring out the how of it. So I thank you for that. I think that’s, that’s very, very true. Brings it back to us.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. So, tell us real quick. So this, this class that you guys are doing, just what does that look like when somebody signs up? And I know, as of when this releases. Let’s see when this releases. You guys who are listening, we’ll have a URL for you at the end of this where you guys can go to, to get, to get in on this, on this workshop. what actually are, like, what are they going to take away from this workshop?
Matt McWilliams: Sure. a number of things. One we’re going to do, we’re going to give you our recipe. Like we kind of talked about it here, but like we have that whole thing, we use asana for all of our project planning and we’ve got that whole thing mapped out. And so we’re excited to share that. we’re excited to share the actual copy that we use in emails.
Matt McWilliams: That’s huge. Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: Because that, at least for me, like staring at a blank screen is so painful. But if I have something to start from.
Matt McWilliams: Ah.
Matt McWilliams: And that’s what we’re trying to give you is something to start from for those initial emails.
Matt McWilliams: Swipe, copy it’s great stuff. Swipe copy.
Matt McWilliams: We have swipe copy for, how to reach out to speakers, what those initial emails are like for your conference. and then the format that we use for actually running the actual conference and how we roll it over each day.
Jason Hilkey: Yeah, we’ll talk about how you prepare for interviews, how you build relationships with speakers, the things that you need to do before and during and after your conference to really maximize it.
Matt McWilliams: and your mindset, I think mindset, we’ve talked about it here a little bit, is like, where are you coming from? Because. Because I don’t know about you guys or people, that are listening. We’ve been approached by many people like, hey, I got this conference, I want you to be a part of it. Or I’ve got this summit and I just need you to fill out this form and I need you to, like, tell me how many people you have on your list and I need you to do this.
Matt McWilliams: I just fell asleep when you were describing that.
Matt McWilliams: And you have to send this number of emails and you have to send these number posts, and, like, there’s like, all of this. And that’s not what we do because we come from a different place. And that’s the mindset that we talk about, is that mindset informs actually what we say rather than following a script. So, I think that’s one of the most valuable parts of the training because that will inform you on how you run, how you approach, how you experience the whole conference for the people that are coming and the people that are speaking there.
Matt McWilliams: I love that. So, guys, keep listening and I’ll have that URL for you here shortly. Cecilia, I have to assume you’re the one teaching about the, interview prep, though.
Jason Hilkey: Yes.
Matt McWilliams: If Jason were teaching, it would be like, okay, five minutes to interview. Get ready. Two minutes to the interview. Boot computer up, Start talking. M. Am I right?
Jason Hilkey: That is right.
Cecilia Hilkey: So I was wondering if we’re gonna get. We’re gonna get both. You know, we get Cecilia’s like, 15 page checklist, and then Jason’s half a page. Show up.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah.
Cecilia Hilkey: Make sure Cecilia is there. Show up.
Matt McWilliams: You have a little bit of a balance. It is interesting, but we figured it out over time. Like, I’ve got the little spiel that I say here. I have the spiel I do at the end.
Jason Hilkey: he has a whole checklist of everything that he does to set up the interview and make sure that the computer is all arranged and Cecilia’s here. We both play our parts.
Matt McWilliams: That’s awesome. Okay, so we’re making fun of Jason, but it’s deserved.
Matt McWilliams: Okay, so I’m an easy target.
Matt McWilliams: So let’s finish up with, our last question, because we started at the beginning, and then we’re gonna finish at the end. that’s how I do interviews.
Cecilia Hilkey: Genius.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. I’m curious, because we were talking before we went on live, and I joked that I was gonna take something that you guys said and put it in the outtakes. But you know what? Let’s talk about it. What are some of the weirdest things you have seen doing summits? Like, you’re doing these live interviews with people. Tell us a few of those things, because I know these are fun for you guys, but part of the fun is just what ends up happening. So tell us some of those things.
Matt McWilliams: I mean, there’s the obvious ones. We didn’t mention this to you. The obvious ones of, like, when we have a table that we work from here, when we’re standing and doing the interviews, and my water bottle just, like, flies off, and, you know, it’s spraying water everywhere, and we’re just like, yep, this is fine.
Matt McWilliams: Everything’s good.
Matt McWilliams: Or the bug that flies in and lands on Cecilia, and I’m like, I’m just gonna take that off her. We’re gonna keep going.
Jason Hilkey: Or. It landed on my forehead one time.
Matt McWilliams: Oh, yeah.
Jason Hilkey: Yeah, that was awesome.
Questions?
Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.
Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Matt McWilliams: But with our. With our speakers, we’ve had some funny things. one of our speakers was trapped in, up at a ski resort in Canada. They, got snowed in. And so she was sitting there interviewing, and in the middle of the interview, just, like, an avalanche of snow just flew off and, like, went by her window. And it’s like the big rut. She’s like, wow. And so we just, you know, we talked about it, but that. That was a little bit startling. we’ve had the dogs. Dogs freak out the couch behind a speaker one time.
Jason Hilkey: Yeah, I mean, it’s just like these. These folks are just normal people, and they’re all doing all the same stuff that we do before we get on camera. They’re fixing their hair. They’re making sure that the.
Cecilia Hilkey: It’s in the background.
Jason Hilkey: Exactly. He’s fixing his hair.
Matt McWilliams: Or they’ll have their tie on. I mean, again, this is like a different era right now because so many people are used to zoom. But, like, they got their shirt on, their tie, and then they stand up to go change, and they got, like, shorts and flip flops on, you know, like, now we’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But back then, that was like, oh, my gosh, really? Or the person who’s like, hold on just a sec. I smell smoke. And so we’re like, yeah, okay, we can edit this. Don’t worry about it. Go figure out what’s on fire. The others that I’m missing there.
Matt McWilliams: It’s hard doing an interview and your building’s burning. Did they just leave something in the oven? Did they ever tell you?
Matt McWilliams: Never told. Well, my kids are by themselves. I need to check on this. They’re like young kids. Never said what it was.
Matt McWilliams: My kids are by themselves, and we have a lot of matches in the house. I mean, cooking something. Oh, my goodness. Oh, speaking of smells, we got to wrap up because I smell garlic chicken. Just being honest. That’s why we need. We could go on all day, but I have to end because I’m hungry. Oh, my goodness. Jason, Cecilia, Mark, this has been awesome. I mean, if people listening aren’t convinced that virtual summits are the future, they’re the past, but they’re the now.
That’s the big thing is they are the right now. They are still huge. You’re about to do your ninth one, which will be your biggest one. I’m so proud of you guys, because watching your success has been an inspiration to me personally, and I know to our whole team. so, guys, go check them out and, make sure you hit them up on social, media and tell, them that you were listening to them. Say nice things about them, make fun of them, whatever. and make sure you get in on this workshop. Jason, Cecilia, Mark, thank you guys so much for being here today.
Jason Hilkey: Thanks for having us, Matt, Cecilia, you’re.
Matt McWilliams: Breaking my heart, my confidence daily. That was awesome. you can see why I love, Jason and Cecilia so much. Why they’re. Well, they’re such great clients of ours. Like, they get it, right? They get it. They execute. So your next step is to go to mattmcwilliams.com/summitworkshop to register for Jason and Cecilia’s summit. And we’ve been working side by side with them for this whole year now, and I can tell you they are rock stars. you could tell that just from listening to them right now, from the interview. Right. So this training is going to be awesome. They put their hearts and souls into this stuff. So, Again, go to mattmcwilliams.com/summitworkshop to register, and I’ll see you in our next episode.