The Cancelled Retreat Went Ahead As Planned

The Leading Advisor Retreat January 11th – 15th went off as planned – well almost.

Not for our clients, for Laura and I.

Here are the details.

Let me take you back to January 7th when I left for Toronto & London, Ontario to deliver two Financial Advisor Speaking Presentations on January 8th & 9th in Toronto & London respectively and while away I coached all my clients for the week over the phone from my hotel suites in Ontario.

It was a jamb packed week and Laura suggested that instead of just picking me at the airport at Comox, BC at noon on Friday, January 12 and driving straight home after being away for a week, we stop at the Kingfisher Resort & Spa for our own retreat and debrief of the previous, prepare for the week ahead and again get some rest and relaxation. This really made sense as I had to turn around and fly out again on Sunday, January 14, 2007.

(I’m writing this Blog on Sunday evening in Calgary, AB.)

Choosing to stop at The Kingfisher is ironic as one year ago we had previously made plans for a Leading Advisor Retreat for our clients this very weekend. We cancelled the Retreat back in October of 2006 because we didn’t have enough enrollments to fund securing the venue and guarantee deposits on 20 hotel rooms. For perspective that’s 20 hotel rooms times 5 nights at $200.00 per night and when most of the fee was for accommodations – well you get the picture.

The sad part is that right after we cancelled the Retreat, enrollments started to trickle in right up to a few days before the Retreat and we were sad to advise the clients that we had cancelled the Retreat.

You might say that we should have done a better job of marketing and sales then.

No – one of my rules for doing the Retreat was to have the Retreat enroll by attraction.

This means we posted The Leading Advisor Retreat on our Web Site. The intention was that if prospective clients saw value then they would take action and enroll.

This ties in with our sales philosophy that clients will buy from you when they know you, trust you, like you, get value and when they are ready.

Another reason for this strategy is we are too busy looking after our business on other fronts.

At the same time, there is a theory that you have to have critical mass on a web site to create the type of web site enrollment that we were looking for. This means that a realistic enrollment from this sort of scenario would be a half of one percent so we need about 5000 readers to attract about 25 enrollments. Given that we currently have about 2500 readers for our e-newsletter, we just didn’t have the critical mass.

One of the things that came to light during our retreat over the weekend is we will likely hire a Marketing & Sales Associate to start in September 2007 to focus on the sales of;

– One On One Coaching
– Public Speaking Marketing
– Removing Your Roadblocks Workshop
– The Coaching Gym
– The 2008 Retreat

We will be scheduling The Leading Advisor Retreat for January 2008 shortly.