Selecting a City/Location
TRANSCRIPT:
Avish: So Fred, how do we determine what city to hold the event in?
Fred: Well, the first thing is, if you’re testing your event, you probably want to hold you first event as near as possible to your own, you know, home or location. The reason for that is obviously, you’re trying to expenses and won’t have to incur a lot of expenses which might occur, you might incur if went travelling about.
So I would start out with your own home city now. If you’re in a smaller town or area and you think you want to test yours in a large city which obviously stands out as close as you can. But that’s where you want to start, but you also want to understand that just because a seminar works in a big city, it may not work in smaller cities. But again, determining which cities to do yours in has, you know, is based on a lot of different factors.
Avish: Okay, so are there resources to figure out which cities aren’t bad for some reason?
Fred: Yeah! And for many years, they still produce it. They have still have, it’s called “Places Rated Almanac” that Rand McNally puts out. And you probably have heard of them without knowing it because every year they do a lot of present publicity around their Places Rated Almanac book which based on 13, 14 different criteria including weather, crime, education. All these things, they rate up the SMSAs, which stands for Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas. And what results is they is they give you a, a city that is the best city living in the United States. And they do that based on their computation and their waiting on these various elements. And so, the Places Rated Almanac is a good resource.
So now I’m always suspicious of these guys, and again forgive me, but you live in Philadelphia, not in Pittsburgh so I can use this as an example. When one year they come up with Pittsburgh as the best place to live in the United States. Frankly, I’m a bit confused. Now if you’re from Pittsburgh I’m sorry, but still, yeah, the best city question mark? I’m not sure.
Avish: (Laughing) Got it. So it’s a good place to kind of get some ideas, but do your research?
Fred: Yeah, the reason why it’s good is it, I can, when they-when you’re looking on 14 or so different criteria, you may want to take a look at what a topic is on your seminar and ask yourself “Is this the type of seminar or topic that would appeal the people that are highly educated?” Because you can get an idea on how educated an area is. Is this something that would appeal people very sports-oriented? They have something in there on recreation and sports. You know, so you can sort of, match the criteria that Places Rated Almanac has. To kind of persons you’re going to attract to see whether or not you’d have a pretty good match.
Avish: So that brings another question. It is, how do you, you’re trying to match your client demographic or attendee demographic to the city?
Fred: Yeah, so in other words, we’re thinking to ourselves for example, if you wanted to, you know, if this is some kind of a seminar that had to do with, you know, orchestral chamber music, whatever. You probably aren’t going to smaller cities. You’re going to cities that are indicated. They have symphonies and orchestras and things like that because people are a lot more likely to attend something like that.
So again, you can look at what your topic is. What your target demographic is in terms of an attendee, and then try — and this isn’t to say that the only people that attend your events will be coming from the local area that you give the seminar. But it does mean that the bulk of those people because when people make a decision to go to a seminar, most of them say to themselves oh well, they compute the facts, “this is only 20 minutes away, I can drive over there by car.” If there’s the city of Philadelphia for you, your chances of attending a seminar go way up. Compared to, if you’ve got to travel down to Sarasota, Florida, spend all that money on air fare and hotel, it’s a different decision that goes into that.
Avish: Right, right. Make sense. So what about what you call second or third tier cities? And all like the big ones like York, Vegas, Los Angeles? But are there a lot of smaller city seminars, correct?
Fred: Yeah, and the reason why I learned this is that I worked during a lot of seminars way back when for a company called Career Track. And one of the things Career Track did, was they sent us as speakers and trainers out of the hinder lands into the smaller tier cities as in the Albany, New Yorks, the Midland, Texas. Those kind of cities. Because a lot of people, a lot of bigger companies are raving in the big cities. So if some guy that lives in Midland, Texas had to make a decision on where he is living: does he go all the way to El Paso? Or drive 6 or 7 hours or fly to Houston or Dallas, which is actually a lot longer than that to get there, or does he just not go?
So what happened was, Career Track made a real business out of taking the seminar to the people. Because they pay their trainers so little and all they had was direct mail costs. Is they would put on these seminars on the smaller towns because, of course, hotel space is incredibly cheap to rent a room and to pay for the speakers’ room was very much. So there wasn’t a whole lot of big cost of all because, usually, a seminar would break even like for 4 or 5 people for these guys so you know, not quite, almost. And so you should – if you’re working in putting together a seminar, don’t discount going to the smaller cities and to smaller locales.
Avish: Okay, great! Any following words to selecting a location to do your seminar?
Fred: No, that’s pretty much it.
Avish: Super.
