How They Built a Big Marketing Conference From Zero! Big Domino Theory

a note to event organizers who might be listening to this take some notes Here everybody don't capitalize on the hype if you've done a good job people will buy we've sold 1100 tickets already within the first week within the first week how do you guys keep this together does it feel like B and pom Simpson then we weed back out after that event hey do you want us to speak they said no the plan is going great I can tell they changed the Mind CH mind oh they changed their mind okay there's a big Point here okay hold on when you reach in to something big you have to put in the effort for the ask as well what is up everybody I've had the pleasure of meeting our next guest I guess two years ago when due to unforeseen circumstances they had a last minute cancellation for the keynote speaker and lo and behold here I am in Newcastle expecting very cold wintry weather you know how they say this is the north I went to the north with all these layers and I was just begging maybe it was because it was a really hot event paron the pun but Andrew and Pete welcome to the show thank you so much for having us Chris thank you everyone for listening excited to be here I know you guys just wrapped up another season of atomicon before we get into who you are and your story and what you want to share with us tell us a little bit for people who don't know what the heck is atomicon yes so our brand is atomic for the small and mighty entrepreneur and atomicon is our Atomic conference so atomicon and it's for small business owners who want to grow make lots of money money I want to live that life of freedom and essentially we bring in some of the best speakers from around the world including the wonderful Chrystal here and we bring everyone together and it's such an amazing amazing experience it's become one of Europe's largest events for sales and marketing for small business owners and it's just growing and growing and growing it getting bigger and bigger and better and better and more and more fun every year yes and it is a hot event it usually in the summer that helps it was crazily hot though the one that you spoke out very very I I just want to say something briefly before we get into the meat of our conversation today that I I go to speak at many conferences mostly as a speaker sometimes and as attendee and I say that you guys have a very special formula for running events there's the pre-party the pre pre party and then the party and then the post party there's a lot of networking there's a lot of networking and people feel really welcome and I notice this about conferences that are kind of off the major cities where the community really comes together and they're super appreciative of you guys doing what you do and I have to say it's it's like there's an expression the fish rots from the head so I think what happens is you guys attract a certain type of people that want to share to be open and super friendly I remember walking to the bar thinking to myself I'm in the right place and you guys are hey how's it going good to see you and that was kind of the tone of the entire event so so talk to us a little bit about that DNA that you have that makes it so inviting for people to to feel so at home there the beauty of the event is that it grew from a community so we had the online community for two or three years before we actually launched the conference and like in our mind the difference between an audience and a community from day one has always been this can't be just about me and Pete it can't just be about people coming to this event to see us especially if we want to grow this and scale this so very intentionally from day one we have tried as much as possible to connect our members together online so when it comes to the big event it's homic con people are just as excited to see each other as they are to see us and like this at the very very first atomicon we knew we had nailed it because somebody came into the bar just like you did and they acted all they saw us and they acted all excited and then they ran right past us to someone that was behind does and like gave that person a big hug and they were like Andrew P I'm going to say hello in a sec but like I've been speaking to this person for like two years now like this is the first time we've met in person and like that is just like that story is just the tone of the conference and the tone of atoma so when when people come now to the event people you know flying from all over the world it's not just a local event and we want that same welcoming Community Spirit to also affect everyone one that comes so when people come we want them to have already got to know people in the online events building up to it we do a lot of pre- networking and then they get to the event and there's all these little mini Events first and then the main event and by the time people get to the main day they out buzzing like they've met loads of great people like they've met their new best business best friends you know and collaborators and potential referers or potential clients and in the vibe it on the day then is just so much more magical and everyone comments on it only so it's yeah it's really special so thank you for picking up on that um it's not something that we're there to go hey our event's amazing and like it's way better because of this and this but um we do put a lot of effort into it so when someone like yourself mentions that then we really appreciate that well I have to mention it because it's an introvert the scariest thing for me is to go to a new city to new event and not know anyone reminds me of Junior High all over again and those are not fond memories let me just tell you okay so the fact that you make everyone feel welcome and I remember the year that I went it was like it had like a carnival vibe to it like the activations you had in the lobby so if you know if your brain is fried you can just hang out and do silly things with people and then there was the mirrored man walking around doing his moves and it just just like that's the whole ethos and I think it's so wonderful so I had to share that a no to event organizers who might be listening to to this like take some notes Here everybody it's not just speaker after speaker it's the community that you build the vibe that you put out there and to make people who are a little bit weird maybe introverts and just socially awkward feel welcome and safe and I definitely think you guys do that it's one of those things where we have uh we actually have like the quiet spaces for introverts but then we also have like Cyclone machines wave like Sur surfboard mechanical surf for Rance and things like that so and now I have to ask you this other question is I've struggled with working with someone uh I don't play well with others I have a way of moving in the world and I just I just found out that I'm just not a good collaborator I'm a good leader I think and I've had many failed Partnerships what has been the secret to you guys I know you've met in school and you've been doing this for quite some time how do you guys keep this together are there moments when you disagree and how do you resolve those con kind of conflicts there's a few like thought and pom Simpson moment I think our key to success is being friends first which is always good typically speaking most Partnerships that we see don't end up going very well uh they always end up splitting for some reason all this conflict so it's not something that we always necessarily recommend um and a lot of people say to us you know it's so much easier cuz there's two of you but it doesn't necessarily mean things are easier we've got like twice the amount of people to please and decision Mak him becomes maybe harder and we have to make twice as much income and you know all this sort of stuff you don't get twice as much time as everyone what it does do is it allows us to be very creative and cheer each other on and I think that's crazy important in business I think knowing each other's strengths and working through things has been great like we've done a lot of like profiling and things like this to assimilate what style of communication we both respond more to it's really interesting cuz we are very different people so Pete is a extrovert that is very detail orientated and I'm an introvert that's very big picture thinking so it's like those two opposites of like the same car it can cause and definitely caus more friction especially in the early years as we were like working out how to best communicate cuz we were like 21 when we started this like we had we were like kids essentially like we had no idea how to communicate with like adult like Al our was self putting ourselves in this really stressful situation but just doing like a lot of self-work like working out who like how we were communicating if I wanted to explain something to Pete he was going to need the details if he was going to explain something to me he would need to give me like top level first for me to grasp it if he was going to like kill me with like all the details and like just getting through that but also just recognizing those strengths in each other and like knowing it was much stronger because we had those strengths at like networking events for example like I would be in the corner talking to the people I already know and like deepen in those relationships and I would send Pete off to meet all the new people at the end of the night we would like come back together and you would say right I've met this person I've met this person I've met this person I'm like great I've set up this collaboration with so and so we've already like met a few times it's kind of interesting because you guys started this when when you're really really young at 21 if I'm reflecting back on my own life I'm not sure who I am when I'm 21 there's still a bit of an ego in there that's trying to figure itself out so if I were to partner with someone thoughts in my head would be like what are you doing I feel like I'm doing all the work or why' you just undo that and it just becomes really difficult especially because both of you share the stage and you speak and you co-author books together does it ever become a thing when it's like like with no doubt the band Gwen Stefani gets all the attention and literally they they make music videos about this and the rest of the bandmates kind of get shoved in the background does that happen and how do you reconcile that that's funny that's one of Andre's favorite B was T she was all over my bedroom walls as a kid I feel like because we've both we were both had the exact same dream like we both knew what we wanted to do like we've never really been on separate pages where it comes to the end goal no and we we do tend to do a lot of things together publicly like we'll do like podcasts together for example but then behind the scenes we will brainstorm and and strategize together but we might go away and work on separate things together so for example I will do like sales calls or like all the like sales emails or things like this or processors or production I will do a lot more of the team management stuff and Andrew will take care of like the bigger picture thinking stuff or the planning the atomic on lineup stuff so we've we've we W it out it's it's a smooth machine though if you are interviewed and you both can't be in the same spot do you make a point to make sure to mention the other person or talk about them in ways so that the other person doesn't feel slighted how do you work that part out we never do anything like this apart although in the future we yeah we might do more in the future just to save time I guess but typically we'll always do it together yeah yeah and like Pete is a bit of a digital Nomad so he'll like go in trouble we just like every morning we'll just boot up Zoom like we work together we even know like who would be best to answer what questions like you're asking this you're asking questions and and we already know who's going to answer the question I think the the really good thing about having a partner and is the accountability like we hop on Zoom every day 9:00 a.m. and we work together on Zoom like all day and we can work on different things but we've always got each other in the little window in the corner so we never we can never you know like play hockey what's what's the word hocky play hooky and just Sky off for the day like we have to work and we can encourage each other and help each other if we get stuck and that's magical because how many times have you come to do something that's important and then procrastinate it just because it's tough It's scary it's hard it's it's daunting so you just off right but if you've got someone with you you can cheer each other on and say all right I know that's tough I believe in you like like what's the first step okay let's do this in the next hour I'll help you with this bit and then you can get on from there like especially in the beginning just having each other just having that camaraderie you know like egging each other on in the beginning pushing ourselves to go for bigger things pushing ourselves to go for bigger podcasts or bigger speaking gigs or just like raise our goals like that was Gold Dust so here's my summary on how you could possibly work together and not kill one another number one be friends first develop a deep lifelong friendship and know that you're compatible in that way before venturing into business I think that's a critical step that most people skip number two is the way you avoid the conflict is do everything together there's no like it's somebody getting more of the Limelight than the other and number three is know your strengths and where they complement with the other person and be sure you acknowledge each other's strengths thanks for sharing out with me now I have one more kind of nerdy conference question as an attendee and as a speaker I often will make notes about what has worked and what could be better I know you've done the conference many years now what was the biggest lesson coming out of 2024 what would you move forward into 2025 the thing for us in terms of selling tickets we have moved from a model of always trying to sell tickets to just doing two or three big launches so we used to absolutely kill ourselves and promote the conference constantly and what we found was after some analytics was that 80% of our sales came from two launches and the other 20% of sales came from like reaching out to communities and doing a little like project here and doing a webinar there and like little bitty things what we've done this year and for the last year is we've just streamlined everything into like two or three big launches and then not sweating the rest of it a few ticket sales will trickle in here and there and we can set up automations to help with that but essentially if we put more of our time and energy into that then we can get more ticket sales in those launches and we don't have to have the hard work in between which means that then we can focus that time on other things to sell so we've got we've got like 80% of our time on that promotion throughout the whole year which is a lot of time and therefore we've been able to utilize that for other launches and other sales to make more money and the first launch is the most important launch so we've sold 1100 tickets already for 2025 within the first within the first week of the conference tickets going on sale and when we go to the conferences some do it really well but most conferences we go to like don't capitalize on the height and we've tried like promoting other things after the conference the best thing we found in our experience to sell is just a ticket to the next year if you've like showed everyone a really great experience like they don't want it to end like give people a really good deal at the end of the day with a bit of a deadline and if you've done a good job people will buy to come back what was your rebook percentage from the attendees from this year um I have to look at up I think we've got about 50 to 60% of people will come back yeah right immediately which we used to think was low oh my God I know until we started like talking to other conference organizers they were like what and we were like well why aren't the other 50% coming back are the are rents are like five for 10% it's like people want to come back like if you build a community if you build an event that does actually connect people and that actually has a great time people will come back year after year after year and fly back let's say I know nothing about atomicon give us your two sentence pitch for why you should show up if you want to create an avalan of sales in your business and be able to scale that Beyond Your Capacity that's why you should come to atomicon you'll get the inspiration and motivation to like go hell yeah let's puty do this you'll get the Practical advice and steps together in of strategy and then you'll also meet the connections that will help you get there people that come to the event meet people that they'll collaborate with that they'll do podcast interviews with people will make loads of money just from that alone and that's not even like tapping into like the learning and the inspiration and all that kind of stuff after so yeah if you want an avalanche of sales come that was two sentences just with lots of commas maybe a couple of run on sentences there what's interesting to me is your big Insight is like the paral principle in practice there a lot of peas where 80% of your sales come from 20% of your efforts and realizing where those things are are part of being a prudent business owner and being a true entrepreneur so wonderful there and then putting your energies towards people rebooking means like you you kind of have to be really good at designing the user experience because if you think that they're going to rebook a year in advance not knowing where they're going to be you have to deliver for something special and that goes beyond I think just the programming it's all the little things that most people don't pay attention to that create the overall experience and you're absolutely right collaborations Partnerships friendships like your best business partner friend that you're going to meet I want to transition then from this idea of avalanche of sales maybe into something that you've been talking about this kind of like is it you call it the big domino effect or the small domino effect yes the big domino effect so I think a lot of people have had of you know the Domino effect and they think that taking a series of small actions is going to get them to this place that they want to be eventually and yes that kind of works but it takes a long time and small dominoes don't knock over big dominoes and what we want to do what would me and Andrew been absolutely obsessed with our whole life is getting to that end point getting to that dream goal quicker why would we do something have it take us 10 years when it could take us 6 months okay or 2 years let's say so this is something that we've applied to pretty much everything now this works for goals it works for projects Etc so we can give you a demonstration we wanted to become well like really well-paid International keynote speakers and to get to that point what most people do is they will spend years and years and years of their life building up to that point so they'll they'll do some local events first then maybe they'll get some like slightly bigger gigs in their country and then they'll build up and maybe one day they'll get to do like a Kyo tour rather than a breakout tour maybe if they're looky they'll get paid to do that maybe one day they'll like do some International ones and get paid a like expenses for that maybe if they're really really good then they'll get like a keyote abroad and they might get paid for it they might not the time in between this takes time you have to prep you have to own your skill all of this stuff right and the biger audience the the B the speaking gigs will come let said but if you don't have a big audience growing your audience takes years okay so what if what if that 10year goal could be reduced to like 2 years right or even less so that's what we became obsessed with so we thought what is the best way to get to that point and the best way to get to that point is to do something do a big enough gig that everyone wants you we set our sites on a really big marketing conference in America it was one of the biggest so social media marketing events in the world 5,000 people attending and we were like holy smokes if we can be on that if we can be on that stage that would be amazing like everyone else would want us because we've been on that stage that is like the legion event if we can go to other events and say we've been on that stage do you want us we'd have a much much better chance so we set our sights on that now at this point we had not a lot of money this is like a couple of years into our business we started from scratch we were 20s in our early 20s we had no money no investment nothing like this right so we looked to each other like hm how can we even get to this event never mind speak at it Andrew turned to me and he said maybe next year right we'll save up we'll go next year I was like no so I stayed up all night planning and finding out how to get to this event I managed to get like a two for one deal by emailing them I managed to get a cheap flight I also managed to find like some grant funding to help us fly us over there and pay for the flights I stayed up all night I found the cheapest hotel in California like way away from the venue and I came back the next day like look we're going to go we're going to go to this buddy event so we went it was incredible we had a great time we got to find out who we needed to meet and all this kind of stuff this is our big Domino if we speak at this event hopefully it'll help us knock on some other big dominoes okay we don't want to build up for 10 years so so what did we do over the next 6 months Chris we we wrote a book we niched down our business we got into their community and did a master class for their community and we wrote blogs for them and we also launched a YouTube channel that we were religiously posting videos to and we reached back out to them and said hey we're awesome now like do you want us to speak and they said no so we went back to the event after we went back to the event we got to know some more of the team by the way if you want to speak at event a great hack is to get to know the team because the hosts of the conference are always busy and inundated with people and nobody pays any attention to the rest of the staff or team whereas when they get back after it's those team members that are going to sing your Praises so that is a good little tip by the way we reached out to some of the speakers we did collaborations with them and we got the speakers in turn for those collaborations to write as a little video to say hey Andrew and Pete will be really good as speakers you should get them okay so people that they knew recommending us then we reached back out after that event hey do you want us to speak they said no the plan is going great I can tell it's going great yeah and then they changed the Mind Chang mind oh they changed their mind okay there's a big Point here okay hold on what happened between no and yes I don't we don't know we got a no and then a few weeks later we got a yes we got a yes we were like okay W great so so 18 months after we heard about this event we were invited to speak at this event okay so we went and spoke we were the breakout speakers at this event we spoke at the event we recorded it we made a huge song that dance about it online like look at us we're speaking that it's International Event is the biggest event in our industry so much kudos from that it was amazing that was the first conference we we had ever did yeah we' we'd never spoke at another conference before and to go from nothing to like the world's biggest stage like with a huge audience it was is phenomenal so then we then basically went to a ton of other conferences and said hey we spoke at this event do you want us and then we got to Kino all the events in the UK we got paid International speaking eggs in like place like um Bulgaria Prague Germany like all the cool places yeah San Diego Columbia like all these amazing places we got paid speaking gigs and we've got International kot speaking gigs like straight away we we even got a gig that was like 17 and a half thousand and to go from zero to being paid 175,000 is pretty huge leap some people never get to that stage and this is what we mean by a big Domino what is something that you can put 110% effort into now that will knock over all those big dream Ginos in the future so much quicker than you could ever have imagined and it doesn't need to be an event it could be maybe a dream client or getting on a dream podcast or winning a dream award like what is the big thing that you really want that you've maybe got on like your 10e plan and what would it take to do that sooner what would it take to try to achieve that now for example we wanted for our conference we wanted some of the world's best speakers and we knew that if we reached out to speakers they would not want to speak at our conference because it's never been done before there's no previous history of it why would they come and speak at our conference and also may I add we wanted them to come and speak for free right this our this year we needed to like save a lot of costs right so how do we get amazing people to come speak at our event what is the big Domino so the big Domino was to get a celebrity speaker so if we can pay let's say £30,000 or £20,000 for a celebrity and then go to all the other speakers and say do you want to speak at our stage we've got this celebrity speaking they all say yes now all of a sudden we've got a free lineup which is amazing and they're going to promote it because they're going to be next to a celebrity we've got loads and loads of examples of this but it's something that you think is potentially a little bit out of your league out of out of your grasp but something that if you put 110% effort into you canot just knock over that but knock over your dream goals like so much faster like you are saving 10 years of your life and it's very intentional so people take small steps thinking hopefully one day I am going to achieve that big thing so to speak of uh the marketing conference there was lots of small steps that we needed to take we needed to like map out what the book would be we needed to work out how to self-publish we needed to work out YouTube like there was lots of small steps but there were small steps with this greater shortterm goal of knocking over this big Domino faster and like that's the biggest thing that frustrates us like when working with our client now their dreams aren't big enough in the short term they all have great dreams longer term that they want to get to but like we think it's going to take them like twice as long to get there with that kind of mentality and like we were remember when we were doing this we were in our early 20s we had nothing to lose we weren't jaded we were just like hungry and we were like going for it and like that kind of youthful nothing to lose kind of energy is something that we never like now we're in our mid 30s and like we're still trying to channel like early 20s Andre repeat with every single project that we're doing because the alternative is to take lots of small steps also gives you an excuse to procrastinate and all the things that are important and impactful because it's like you believe that right now you don't need to be doing those big things you don't need to be behaving is if you are that person and so it gives people like this escapegoat to kind of not do those big impactful things because that's what happens in the future you know but why not why not do it now people hold themselves back so much even when people pitch to speak at atomicon they'll put themselves down and I'm like why do you putting yourselves down in this pitch you know like people need to believe this M El and reach for something that just slightly beyond what you think they're capable of because you all capable of more I have a lot of follow of questions the first one is this is why was it important for you guys to be a big International keynote speaker before we get into the components of like achieving that result what is it in the mind of a 20-year-old who wakes up one day and says hey buddy I know you're an introvert but let's let's go for this big thing this thing that's super scary why would you even want to do that in the first place it's really interesting actually because now we are not trying to grow the speaking part of our business and we do very little speaking gigs I think for us well for me and this maybe slightly different for us both actually for me like the speaking was almost a means to the end like I knew I wanted to grow Atomic I knew I wanted to grow like our own conferences and our own personal Brands and I knew that would be one of the quickest ways to quickly put ourself on a pedestal as young people I think I think there's definitely an ego thing when we're younger and we wanted to prove ourselves when we walk into a a networking room people think that they've brought the kids we're in our own business promise like it's and it's really good like we make more money than you like trust us right nobody would trust us because we were young or that was at least in our the story we told ourselves in our head we had to overcompensate with being on the stages that's kind of how it was but over the years we've kind of matured and sort of going well actually we don't need to do that anymore and we could probably make more money just sat in our office like being focused rather than spending time traveling and rehearsing talks and stuff like that we probably just make more money like this and we have like every year we've since we've stopped speaking we've made a lot more money however we don't regret doing it because it did help us build a lot ofit pability and Kudos and grow our audience just for context here because you guys talk about how young you were then you still look really young now how old are how old are you well no both 12 have you cracked 30 yet we are 34 34 yeah just 10 34 yeah okay cuz there are people who are 43 and like what are these what are these kids talking about come on they're still young today okay so to combat this perception of you being really young and not being taken seriously you thought what is the fastest way we can counter that and you pursued this thing there's a lot of questions to come up usually when somebody does something and becomes really successful there's always an eyebrow like like why would you stop doing that thing like if you got on this International stage and spoke and got you a lot of credibility and social proof why stop doing it I mean it seems counterintuitive right most people you have success do more of it not less we have this thing called the 19 10 rule which is you should focus 90% of your efforts doing one thing remarkably well and 10% of your efforts experimenting with other things and you can only move on to the next thing when that one thing that you've done remarkably well is 100% delegated and processed this is the same with all content channels and like everyone that we've ever everyone anyone that's ever had a success story with content they always started on one platform first and then eventually they moved out and it's the same with offerings and things like this so me and Andrew we looked at our income streams and we had nine different income streams there was affilia income there was speaking gig income there was our membership there was one toone coaching and there was group programs and there's all these things and atomicon the event we looked at all these things and we thought what if we just cut it all down to one we thought okay that would be brave we extrapolated the income projected income of all the income streams over the next 5 to 10 years and our course in membership and the event had the biggest potential for scalability and making the most amount of money in the future then what we did was we looked at where our where our customers were coming from and a lot of it was from our YouTube channel and email list and fourth on the list was speaking gigs where people first came across us okay now I'm not going to deny they didn't have any impact but it was fourth on the list what we did was we literally stopped all everything that we did in fact we even combined at that point the membership and the event we had to uncouple it after the pandemic because no one wanted to buy a course attached to an event we essentially cut everything down into one offering that we did remarkably well and we made so much more money doing that now it was tough because we had we had to fire be like our clients like a one toone clients who literally fired them which was the hardest thing we've ever done in our lives to stop all the other income streams suddenly was kind of daunting we had to say no to paid speaking gigs and it was very very scary but the moment that we just focused on one thing everything improved for us like our our mental health improved our profits improved our Revenue improved our audience improved like just everything grew so much quicker and I think that's a really valuable lesson for people as well just do one thing remarkably well or at least 90% of your efforts some quick housekeeping things in terms of just keeping up with the story here what is the name of this International event that you spoke at that was like the leading thing it was social media marketing World which happens in San Diego are they still going on today they're still going yeah we still actually go back we go back as attendees now every year because we have so many friends out there and we just yeah love San Diego we ended up actually keynoting that whole event as well in front of 5,000 people and then next thing is you said well when you put on your event you needed a draw speaker a celebrity speaker who was the first speaker that you had in that year one the big celebrity speaker that we got was debah Meen he was a panelist on um dragon's danad which is like a TV show in the UK and the equivalent in America is Shark's Tank so MH you may have heard of that what was this person's name again Deborah Meen so she's a dragon on Dragon stand so she's made you know multiple hundreds of millions and very well known very well known and then she goes on to this show and she invests in other businesses that pitch well I'm very familiar with Dragon's Den I think shark tank is a direct ripoff of Dragon's Den as many American shows are we're we seem to be pretty good at seeing what works and then just replicating the same thing again making drama for this day yeah a little bit more drama I want to just quickly summarize some of the things that you talked about in this idea I think the biggest idea that you mentioned is intentionality is to make sure you know where you're going to be and then mapping all of your decisions towards that and aiming really high a wise piece of advice that A friend gave me is whoever you want to work with just go to the top of the industry and work with them and everyone else follow suit because of massive social proof we like to think we're really independent free-spirited free willed ing human beings but we're all just really sheeple so when you're like well we have this speaker everybody else like oh my God you got that person well you're legit I will sign up right now and so we've had the same thing if you want to work with clients in the sporting industry just go work with Nike or Adidas and everyone else will just work with you because of massive social proof and so I think the failure that a lot of people have is they think too small they play small and they they win at the small Stakes game they're not willing to have a big bet and that is a lot to you guys and your confidence confidence and your self-belief your determination even if it's overcome some kind of imposter syndrome you you took the antidote to that which is to play big and you win big and I'm super happy for you guys now there's a story here I wanted to share with you that Ben alick and Matt Damon having come to Hollywood had tried to get into movies and failed miserably and they came to the conclusion that the entire Hollywood structure is broken so what they did was they broke it one more time to say you know what we will write our own script called Goodwill hunting and we are attached to be the key actors in it and they got Gus Van to do it and as they say the rest is history it's a very similar move it's like when you want something you figure out a way and you work around the system otherwise you wind up becoming a victim to the system okay beautiful there and I love the little things that you said about how you um were able to hack your way into being a international keynote speaker quickly to summarize get known by the community get known by the team grow your social following especially on podcasting in YouTube understand and focus in on your Niche and then do everything you can to become known writing books blogs running master classes and get people that they know to recommend you I think I got that right yes yes and do you know like what's the what new wants to all of that as well when you're asking people for stuff make sure the ask is remarkable so we got like really good at working out how to get people's attention so for example that first year we were going to social media marketing world and we were spending all this money we looked at the lineup we thought who are the key players in this we created them a landing page online to invite them to a coffee so it was a landing page we spokely created for them and we tweeted them a link We interacted with them for a bit actually before like two weeks before we interacted with them on Twitter so they would get used to seeing our Avatar and then we tweeted them a link and we set up like four or five coffee meetings at that first conference just to get to know people so like we've done it for when we've wanted to get on Big podcasts when we've wanted to invite people onto our podcast like we've use some of the same strategies like we'll do something remarkable to get their attention like for example we wanted to speak at this one event really wanted to get to know the owner so we created a landing page and a podcast like a captur podcast so just a small series and we invited we put on this page 10 people we thought this person would respect we basically invited them to the podcast and we said hey it's going to be a great podcast we're going to invite all these other people to it so you're in great company like you want to be on it they said yes we invited the other people they said yes because he said yes which is a really good way to get people on your podcast by the way and then we got to know him on the podcast and then after the podcast we asked him how do we speak on your stage like can you help us with the pitch and he he goes yeah you guys are great like here you go here's the advice and we pitched and we got that gig it wasn't easy in terms of we had to create a whole podcast but the podcast had lots of other benefits and we collaborated with some of the other people right it's just one of those things where people would typically go I'm a nobody how why would that person ever collaborate with me why would they come on my podcast and there's something about just being cheeky and asking them and hopefully they'll say yes but there's also this huge part about the big Domino about the remarkable ask doing the whole podcast thing first was remarkable sending them a landing page after replying to everything they ever tweeted for two weeks in a row straight is remarkable and what people don't get is to reach to make that leap sometimes you need to do something a little bit more remarkable and out of the box you can't just ask them just like you would ask like in a simple email sometimes it might work sure but the majority of the time is going to get ignored so when you're reaching for something big you have to put in the effort for the ask as well there's a couple things I wanted just to highlight I like this idea of the remarkable ask you remind me of a few entrepreneurs who remind us if you if you want conventional results do conventional things but if you want unconventional results do unconventional things there's something about us I think that's hardwired to kind of play Within the rules to say like oh you can't do that you're not supposed to do that and then you guys just say forget that F that we'll just do whatever we need to do to get the results that we want and so I want to make sure the audience is listening to this part and there's a story Jesse itler tells this story and it's a beautiful story he's an amazing speaker and he tells this story about how he had this private jet company where you can I guess book flights on his private jet and he had a hard time getting customers so he thought you know where should I go I should go to a Ted conference and try to bring some of people into becoming my clients so he's trying to get into Ted and he can't cuz the thing is sold out so he goes to the nearby cafe and he's sitting there kind of thinking about conspiring about how we can get in and meet all these people and you notice that during break everyone leaves the conference and goes in here and has a coffee and a muffin a coffee and a muffin then one after the other he's like okay so the next day he shows up again when they open up he goes up to the cashier and says you know what I want to buy all of your muffins so he cleans them all lot of muffins there's no more muffins and he puts them all underneath the table and he just Waits there so sure enough the first customer comes in and says I'd like to get a coffee and a muffin and the person behind the counter says we're out of muffins and they're like what do you mean you guys just opened he goes well they're all gone and then Jesse gets up from his table and says um excuse me I couldn't help it to over here that you're looking for muffins he goes yes he goes well come over here he brings it back over to the table he pulls back to the the tablecloth and shows him all the muffins he has how many would you like they sit down they talk and that person wind up using his service and then ultimately later on buying the company from him for like $800 million and it's the power of remarkable thinking the remarkable ask doing something wild and extraordinary and when I hear stories like what you guys do and Jesse it reminds me man I think I'm a big thinker I think I'm not playing it safe but it reminds me of like maybe I am still playing it a little bit safe I think it's okay okay to take it in turns so me and Andre have this where we do a big push for something and then we have a moment of like C down processes like let's build on those like infrastructure and and Foundations Outsource things process things and then let's have another period of big growth and I think that's kind of the way we think about it like another another story uh the big do domino effect in order is um we wanted to grow our email list and that's really really important to us and we had like a tiny email last like a few hundred people so what we thought was we'll put on a big online conference so we were like okay let's do this big online conference and what most people do with their online conference is they invite speakers and then tell the speakers that they need to promote it when this first came about years and years and years ago like that was kind of popular but then now speakers are like look like I'm not promoting another online conference I'm I'm not doing that right why would I just give you all my audience and we knew that we weren't able to get big names onto our online conference if we were to approach like that especially because we had an email list of like 300 people or something right so we're like okay what do we do we went and had a meeting with we bought this guy lunch someone who we thought had big email list and another person and another person and what we did was we said to them we will give you free sponsorship on this event these are the types of people that we are wanting to invite all you have to do is just promote this conference to your email list three times soless email and you get free sponsorship so they said yes and they had an email list of 100,000 people by the end it was like 150 or two 200,000 people that this was going to be promoted to so then we could go to all these bigname speakers and go hey do you want to speak at this event we've got an email list of 200,000 people that will promote this to and they're going to say yes of course they're going to say yes now in that lineup we also had a big Domino like the first speaker was like the biggest name we could think of and he was so big in fact that the other people on the that we invited were like have you really got him speaking because he never does it like he'll never do this sort of thing think how have we got them um but we showed them proof and they were like okay I'm in so again like there's big dominoes everywhere but what we ended up doing after that conference is growing our email list by like a ton like thousands and thousands of people and that took us 3 months from start to scratch now how many people are going from like 300 to like let's say 3,000 subscribers in 3 months like nobody's doing that you know that's that's like 5 years some people never even get that so again what do you want to do what you what aligns with your goal and then find a way to leap frog that with something more remarkable I get the feeling like in another life if you were born in La you two would have been amazing Hollywood agents leveraging and brokering things oh you want this star you're going to have to give us the cover to this magazine and because we have this cover to this magazine we're going to produce this movie and we're going to sign the100 million deal hey we're only thought before this could be this could be this life just chapter one okay I get it I love it and I think maybe I'm going to challenge you guys to think even bigger than that whatever that might be now I have to ask a slightly uh selfish question here I I I started the conversation by saying I was the last minute replacement speaker because somebody had a family emergency I was grateful for the opportunity stress out of my mind but whatever I'm just curious how is it that I became one of your keynote speakers and if there's more story to that you were on our list for a long time I remember seeing your video where you were in a conference room and some guys like challenging you on the price of his logo and like you like clap back and we were like doing we when we first got started we were doing like web designning logos so like you were on our list for a long time yeah like 10 years like we've known about you like looked up to you and thought Oh this presentant is so awesome yeah so when that very last keynot had to like in the original lineup is like so hard so we like go back and forth and then when that keyot dropped out we were like if we're going to replace this keyot like it needs to be with the biggest domino we can find so we went to that person's agent and we were like this is our list it was like a list of like three or four people that we wanted to just go to our attendees and say look this person has dropped out however like isn't this even cooler and you were on that list with a few other the people and thankfully the Stars aligned and we could make that work and like that was really good that was really good for us actually it gave us like another reason to promote it like two weeks before the event or whatever it was yeah yeah so what had happened was it was in my inbox but I was traveling through Europe and coming back to America I'm like I don't have time to read these emails and so I sat on it for a few days my my my business manager said hey Chris you want to do this thing like uh oh I got to tell my wife I just got home but I'm going to be here for 3 days and I'm getting on another plane back out so I was sitting there thinking is this worth it should I do this and I'm like you know when am I going to be in Newcastle let's go and I said yes and I'm I'm so grateful for the opportunity to do this with you guys and I mean this from the bottom of my heart guys if you are remotely thinking about a business conference that it has equal parts Community fun lots of parties did we mention lots of parties inspirational and practical things that you can learn from keynote speakers I highly recommend you guys check out Tomic con they have cently already sold over 1,000 seats I mean what is the capacity for you guys it's 1642 we know that number off my heart and it's a really cool venue too it's actually changed name since you spoke so now it is called The Glass House and it is a it is a glass house isn't it it's it's like a beautiful it's like a music venue um so they do lots of conferences there which means all the rooms are super cool uh really nice perfect it's on the Newcastle key side so some great views as well and what's next for you guys well next thing for us is we are going to go on a big audience growth push we have our offers in place we have processes to sell them our sales are doing amazing we've got a sales team in place and over the next year we're going to do a massive Orin growth push so we are going to Big Domino that uh as we do and yeah um it's going to be really really exciting there's a question I have for you which I forgot to ask earlier is you said you you w up doing the keynote for social media marketing world what was the topic and and what what did you guys talk about oh it's actually a great story on that as well so we we uh the the topic was the 910 rule which we did which we talked about earlier so it was how to get um how you should 910 your content strategy and do one thing remarkably well we actually created that PO because we saw do you know a guy called Drew Davis or Andrew Davis he's a he's a speaker that we saw he blew our socks off at a conference and we were like we need to get that good at speaking so we thought right big Domino if someone can teach us to be that good at speaking he can so we bumped into him and we went up to him we said like Drew like how do we get that good like you blew you blew our minds and he showed us exactly his process he like said send me your send me your recording I'll critique it I'll tell you what to do and he kind of took us under his wing and he was harsh in a very fair way about the type of talk we were doing and how to up our game out of like the expert Ville talk to more of a Visionary changing the way people are thinking about a certain topic and we had a conference coming up didn't we I think it was like two or three months after we met Drew and he said the talk that you've pitched for that conference we're not going to do it we're going to do this me one so it was like two months of hard work we just absolutely power all into creating the keynot talk that was going to get us the keyot gig at Social Media Marketing world every every day we sent him a recording of what it was going to be what it was like the first 5 minutes and he would be like no do it again this is what you need to treat is not hitting it do it again and like every day we spend like 2 hours a day sometimes like 6 hours redoing this talk working it reworking it reworking it but we knew at this conference somebody that was really good friends with Mike stalon who runs social media marketing world was going to be there so we were like this is our big Domino like if we can nail this talk we'll get there and the guy came up to his after and he said guys that was like one of the best talks I've ever seen I've just texted Mike sta to tell him you should key out social media marketing world and at that point we were like oh my God could this actually happen so once we got the recorded and we emailed Mike and we were like this is the talk we'd be open to it we'd love to do it let us know I thank you both Andrew Pete for coming on the show and once again thank you for having me at your event I know it's a great event so I can I can support it wholeheartedly and encourage folks to check it out if people want to find out more about you guys and what you're doing where should they go they should check out www. Atomic doite all of our conference information is on there all of our program information is on there atex socials too Instagram is probably our favorite social network so if you are listening to this do slide into the DMs to follow tell us your H us on this show and if you want our very very best advice then join our email list uh it's called the Revolution and every week we send really really helpful tactical advice and Powerful stories to help you grow scale your company faster wonderful and I think everybody does want an avalanche of sales or at least opportunities that go Beyond Your Capacity so we'll be checking that out can I assume that all of this will be linked somewhere in the atomic do site yes if you go to. site you'll find all the links Andrew Pete it was a real pleasure chatting with you thank you very much for doing this we are Andrew and Pete and you're listening to the Future