Seminar Design

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TRANSCRIPT:
Avish: Alright, Fred. Now let’s talk about the seminar itself. So for you to do the seminar, you obviously have to put it together and design it?

Fred: Yeah, and I mean, what I think about is when I think about seminars and seminar promotion, I think of it in terms of three stages. Number one is before the event itself, which is primarily your marketing efforts to get butts in seats. Then at the seminar. And then what do you do after the seminar. So there are three portions. So now we’re talking about that middle portion, or at the event itself.

Avish: So as most seminars do, I’m assuming you suggest you start with an outline?

Fred: I mean, in terms of designing it the best thing to do is to come up with a detailed outline. And again, looking to come up with all of those major headings. Very similar to what I recommend to people to put their books together. You know, you brainstorm as many topics as you can, you write them all down on index cards. Every single bullet of information you can even think about. So let’s say if you wrote everything you could think about for your seminar on 300 index cards, then the next thing you would do is you would take all those index cards and put them into stacks of cards that were sort of related together.

So then let’s say that you made it easy for purposes of examples, so 300 cards, you came up with 15 stacks, so you now have 20, assuming it was exactly equal distribution, you would have 20 index cards under each of the stacks. Then what you need to do is come up with what is the title of that particular stack. What is this topic that you’re talking about with all of those particular cards? So now you would have 15 stacks with titles to each one of them and 20 cards underneath each.

And your final task, in terms of the outline, would be to put them in the proper order. So after that, you’re basically ready to go, assuming that you can just fill in the gaps as you go, you don’t need more detailed information when you actually deliver.

Avish: Ok, so just for people listening, for the sake of the example, we made it very clean, 300, 15 topics, 20 cards per stack. So it’s okay if it’s not that even? If it’s like you have 300 cards but it’s 23 categories, some with 6 cards, some with 25 cards?

Fred: Yeah, absolutely. So in other words, this example was just to make it easy for people to understand in terms of the explanation of both creating the stacks of cards and then putting them in the order. And then putting a title on each stack. But we want to make sure that people aren’t constrained by feeling like they need to have a certain number of cards or a certain number of stacks.

Avish: Ok, great. So you’ve got all this information in stacks and neatly organized. And I know that you recommend this method for writing books as well?

Fred: I do, same exact thing.

Avish: But the one difference between a book and a seminar is that a seminar has to be delivered in a fixed period of time. So how do you deal with timing out your seminar?

Fred: And that’s a good question and the answer really is, you never know until you start delivering the seminar, exactly what the timing is going to be. And as a result, you sort of have to be flexible. That’s why I always recommend that people do their first three, five, or ten seminars in environments where they really have the ability to not be concerned about exactly how it’s going to be delivered or in what form. You can get your timing down without having to worry that you are going to screw up. But the one thing that I always recommend that people do, is to make sure when you start putting together the seminar itself that you always, until you know your timing, that you err on the side of having a lot more time sort of left over for questions, if you will, then having it filled with your talking. So that you — and I usually say that if you have 10 hours or let’s say that you have 5 hours, actually put together 4 hours of information so leave about 20% of your time sort of open. That would be my suggestion.

Avish: Okay, that makes sense. And obviously when you’re talking time, you want to budget in the time for breaks and things like that?

Fred: You do. You want to budget in the time for breaks and so usually, in terms of breaks. I try not to ever let the longest I would ever go without having a break would be 90 minutes, preferably more like 75, so let’s say you went 90. So let’s say you’re doing a seminar and you start at 9 in the morning, go to 10:20, take a 10 minute break. So that’s about an hour and 20 minutes. So then I come back and then you go another hour and 20 minutes and have lunch kind of thing.

Avish: Okay. And I’d like to touch upon something you mentioned before a little deeper just is organizing your information in a logical order. And this always came kind of easy to me, but I worked and talked with some people, who for some reason, this is the hardest point. They brainstorm their lists but then they get really stuck on how to organize it step by step. So do you have any advice if people have an issue with that?

Fred: Well I think that some people even get stuck before that, Avish, that they get stuck with the actual brainstorming because they are too concerned about which topic should I include and what shouldn’t I, how should I do this or that. I think that people should just do a complete brain dump and not worry about how granular you’re getting with your information. So when I came up with 300 cards, someone might be thinking to themselves, “Wow, that’s a lot of cards! I would never come up with that many cards.” Well you might. So, after you come up with all that brain dump, let’s say you have 300 index cards. You’re right, a lot of people then have a little bit of a problem putting them in order and that’s your point. In other words, the next step after getting all the cards down and getting all the information down on the table, if you will, is deciding which little silo they go in. And in our example we came up with 15, with 20 cards under each. I’m not sure then — are you saying that people have a problem at that stage or at the next stage which is putting all the silos in order?

Avish: I was actually talking about the next stage. But if you want to talk about the first stage as well. Because sometimes people will talk about how this could go into section one or section four, so maybe we should talk about both of those.

Fred: Yeah, well I think that the decision of which sort of silo to put the information in is really irrelevant because then you are then going to be splitting hairs. Unless it’s completely obvious that it should go somewhere else, in which case you would have moved it already. But if you’re not sure, just put it somewhere and see how it works in the seminar itself. And then you may want to move it for your next seminar or two seminars after that, whenever you do it. So that would take care of that issue.

Then deciding what order things should go in, I think that the best example I can give people, on what order to put these in is, think of Ikea furniture. When you get Ikea furniture, you guys, if somebody doesn’t know what that is. It’s a furniture shop that they have all over the country, these big – picture Costco, but with furniture, even bigger. Huge mountains of furniture in boxes that is unassembled. When you get some unassembled furniture from Ikea home, if they don’t give you good directions on how to put it together, you’re going to end up with a pretty funky looking couch or a bed.

Instead, make sure that when you order your seminar, that you put it in the order that really follows logically like you would if you were putting a piece of furniture together. Making sure that if you put step two here and step five here, that step five really isn’t happening before step 2, in which case it is out of order. So the crucial thing is to go through it as if it were a map and determine, so the question you ask yourself on every silo of information, every silo of index cards you put together, “Does this step logically precede or follow this one?” and that’s where you should put it.

Avish: Ok, and what if it doesn’t matter? Like you talked about your different marketing strategy. There’s online paid, online free, offline paid, offline free. You can probably talk about those in any order. So how do you decide which one of those to cover first and so on?

Fred: I think that if it really doesn’t matter, you know, have at least some sort of logic in your head for the order, even if it’s just which one you prefer to talk about first.

Avish: Okay. Got it. And what about meeting and greeting? You factor that in the design of your seminar? Like your chance to meet your attendees?

Fred: Yeah, one of the things that I do, if the seminar is going to start at 9 o’clock, I try to make sure that I have all of my prep and set-up ready by 8:30. So the people coming in, I have a chance to go around and say hi to, and introduce myself, shake their hands, do whatever I can. And if I’m in a big group of people, I mean, I want to at least want to circulate to a number of the people, try to remember a couple names.

So therefore when the entire audience is filled, at least I have a few people that I’ve met that I can even refer to, talk about, or mention their name.

Avish: Okay and so what do you find to be the benefit of doing that meet and greet?

Fred: I think two things. Number one, if you have a small group, you know, you’ve already established rapport with the people, because usually if you don’t do that, as some speakers do for seminars. They show up like two minutes before the start. They get up on the stage, sort of like I’m the big shot, you’re the peons, listen to me.

But instead if you adopt this sort of system, what ends up happening is that the people feel more connected. Whereas in the other scenario it takes people a while for you to get connected to them, for them to feel a connection to you that might have to be established through you getting them to relax, telling them a few jokes, or you being funny, whatever. They may already get to that sort of relaxed state. And being in that relaxed state is important because learning definitely takes place better in that kind of environment.

Avish: Alright, great. Any other final words on putting the seminar together?

Fred: No, I think pretty much you have it there. Doing the index cards is a great way to go, so do that.

Avish: Super.