← The Journey with Morgan DeBaun
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Morgan DeBaun
Hi friends, it's Morgan debann and I have some exciting news. My book, Rewrite youe Rules the Journey to Success in Less Time with More Freedom is now available for pre order. Pre orders are so important, not just for me as a first time author, but for the message of this book. Ordering this book helps amplify the message that more people can break free from the grind, rewrite their own rules in life, and live a rich, juicy life full of joy and empowerment. So if you resonate with any of the content that I put out over this last few years, this podcast, any of the stories I share on social, and you've been inspired by my work at Blavity or Afrotech, pre ordering is the best way to show your support and your gratitude for any of the work that I have done. Plus, you'll be the first to get your hands on the book when it launches next spring. And that will mean literally the world to me. So make sure you check out morgandebond.com to secure your copy and join me in this movement to create a life of freedom, abundance, and more importantly, to have the tools and the frameworks that you need to take control of your life. Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Journey podcast. I'm your host, Morgan Dubon and we're here with an episode today that's been highly requested which is how to build a Profitable Conference Business. Now, conference businesses are incredibly risky and a lot of people fail. And so this is a really important episode if you want to figure out how to build an experiential business. How to build experiential business that can be supported by sponsors, but also from consumers. So let's get into it. Hey everyone. I'm Morgan DeBaun, a passionate entrepreneur and life advisor. With the Journey podcast, you'll discover that success isn't about the destination, it's about the journey. I'm sharing stories of amazing people who've taken control of their lives. Join me on my own journey to discover the secret sauce behind reaching success. With permission from no one else. I don't know if you guys know this, but actually the first way that Blam made its first six figures was through a conference. We had a conference called Empower Her. It was based in New York and it was a women's experience. I don't know what your girl was thinking because New York was actually the most expensive market to possibly do this. And that was the first place where we did an event. We had Levy speak. We had Elaine Welter off before she was even teen. Vogue editor. We had an incredible diverse set of women. Talk about how to grow your brand again. This was like what, 2017, maybe 2018. I think it was 2018, spring 2018. So this was like before influencers were like a career, you know, it was really incredible. We had a few different sponsors. We had Southwest as a sponsor. We had, I think the Kaufman Foundation. No, it was the Knight foundation. Actually. We had a few beauty brands like Cover fx. And it was one major room upstairs was tables, and then there was a secondary, super small room for more gatherings. And we had a happy hour the night before. We had two ticket levels the size of Blavity at that point, I think was maybe eight or nine full time employees. We weren't that big. We had our office in downtown la and that was basically the people who were putting it together. The reason I did a conference business was because we were reaching out to advertisers and brands and we wanted them to buy advertisements with us to reach the black millennial audience. And they were saying that we were too small to warrant the type of investment that I was really looking for. So I said, okay, well, it's going to take me a while to get to the type of digital scale and impressions that these brands require. So what else would they be willing to buy that's not necessarily tied to spots and dots? And when I say spots and dots, I mean like literally they look at the number of impressions that you have online. So the number of ad impressions, the number of people that you reach, how many ads those people are reaching every time they visit your website or they open up your newsletter. And the minimum threshold at that time, I think, you know, was 5 million, 10 million monthly ad impressions. So we weren't there yet. So I said, okay, what is the one thing that people will buy that even if it's small, if you have the right people in the room, they're not going to necessarily count the spots and dots because the people that are in the room influence so many other people that it's worth getting in front of and having their attention. So events. Events was one of those things. Now, as a Silicon Valley technologist and innovator, I did have to do some my own set of work to say, wait, I spent all this time to build this huge millions, millions and millions of people online and y'all want to go in person and do an event? So it was really weird, the economics of it. But the first sponsorships that we sold, I think were in like the 10 to $25,000 range. And it worked. It was a profitable event. We had, I think a couple hundred people. I can't even remember how many, but it was enough, like over a hundred people there. And we got back from that experience later that spring, early summer, and I told the team, okay, we're going to do another event. We're going to do an event in San Francisco for the black tech community. And that was the beginning of Afrotech. So my team, in less than five months, built the first version of Afrotech. We were in downtown San Francisco in the Westfield Mall. It was about, I think we planned for 300 people, but the ticket sold out like two or three days in advance. And so we scrambled to get another venue. And so we wound up in a venue that could fit, I think around like 500 people. And it was so sold out that people were trying to sneak into the conference. In fact, my friend Dave Salvant snuck into the conference. That's how we met. And he was like, hey. I was like, how dare you say hi to me when I know that you did not buy this ticket? Because I was nuts. And I memorized everybody that was a ticket holder. Anyways, we're really good friends now, but that is how we met. So Afrotech was this idea of same but different as empower her. But basically if we bring all these people together in a room and they are super impactful because there's only a few hundred thousands of black people that are in the technology industry at the time. Again, this was seven plus years ago. And certainly when you look at Silicon Valley, there weren't that many of us. I mean, we had like Google listservs and kind of like Facebook groups and different ways to connect with each other because it was not easy to like run into to another black person if you were just living your life in downtown San Francisco. So we started Afro Tech and we went out to sponsors. And the idea with the sponsors was you should hire and recruit these black folks because they're incredibly smart, incredibly talented. A lot of them are entrepreneurs. But we also knew, hey, most startups fail. So these are really entrepreneurial, smart people. You're going to want them in your companies. And we had a lot of sponsors, actually. We had Google our first year. We had PayPal our first year. I believe we had Oculus. I can't remember if Facebook owned Oculus at the time, but Facebook on Doculist now. And it was really fun. We had a great experience. People really got a chance to get to know each other and build real relationships. We had a lot of Cool conversations. I think we had, like, Quinta B Speak that year. I think she was maybe early at buzzfeed. So we've always been really good at curating groups of people as they're building, as they're the early innovators in their industry. And I think that's one of the key things that you have to do if you're building an experience or conference that you want sponsors to be with. You need to be really good at curation. You need to be really good at finding people that other people haven't heard from or they don't hear this kind of conversation, like, on stage or in conversation with publicly. So even like, Issa Rae spoke at Afrotech last year, and people were kind of hating on us. They're like, well, she's not in tech. Why do you have Issa Rae? And our pushback was like, look, what are you talking about? Issa started, was one of the OG YouTubers, and she started on the Internet, building an audience that all of us were resonating with on YouTube, sitting in our college dorm rooms, because there wasn't conversations and web series were one of the very few places in media that we felt like we could be represented in the conversations and the lifestyle that we were having as young black girls in this world. So Issa absolutely is an innovator and a technologist. Then she built an entire empire. She's not just an actress, she is a creator. She is someone who leverages her community in order to build more products and offerings and entertainment for us. So Afrotech has always been about shifting with the times to make sure that we're creating platforms and spaces for people to be discovered or for them to share their enterprise, their innovations with us and help teach us how they did it. So that would be my first tip that's really important, which is, how are the people that you're bringing together hard to reach? Or if they're not hard to reach because they're everywhere, then what is the conversation that they're having that they don't have anywhere else? And south by, for example, started because south by was a place to discover musicians and artists. This was way back before discovering music and artists was easy to do on the Internet. And then as it grew, they added film, they added technology. People used to launch their startups at south by because it had such a big audience, and all the venture capitalists would be there and all the ad agencies would be there, and then you would discover. Oh, Lyft, for example, was a company that spent a ton of money. Back when Web3 was really popping up, there was a ton of DAOs and NFTs that would launch and do huge activations of Southwest because that's where the early adopters were. And so if you were able to get in with the early adopters, then hypothetically there'd be this halo effect that would help you drive your growth in your business or your brand or whatever it is that you're trying to grow. So same thing for conferences. If you can curate groups of people that are kind of the hub and spokes, the trendsetters, then hypothetically, brands and advertisers and clients and companies should be willing to pay you because they're going to get ahead of the game. It's going to be a really efficient spend for them. So that's one thing that you really got to figure out. When I see people and they pitch me, oh, my gosh, I want to do this. I want to do like, xyz, like for tech, but for this sub demographic, or I want to do this for this. I'm like, okay, let's really talk about if this is a demo that's hard to reach. The next thing that's really important when you are trying to build a conference business is how you build your budget. So my general rule, especially for the first few years of a conference where you are just building your business and you're trying to grow it, is that your ticket sales should be the base price of your budget in terms of how much you're willing to spend. In other words, you should not outspend what you can support through ticket sales alone. So if you can only get $50,000 in ticket sales, then your budget for Your event is $50,000. If you can only get $5,000 for your ticket sales, then your event should only cost you $5,000. And the reason for this is because in the beginning, events are really risky businesses, and most event businesses fail. And also most event businesses are not profitable. So when you guys see a bunch of conferences out here, particularly in their first year one, year, two, a lot of them are like, losing money. They're doing it at a loss. And that's totally fine. Some people can afford to do things at a loss, but for most small businesses and most entrepreneurs and startups, you can't afford to do it at a loss. And therefore, what you should do when you're modeling out your experience is, how much revenue do I think I can get, how many people do I think I can get, and what's the ticket price? The Ticket price actually is really the most important thing here. So you can have a high ticket price but low number of attendees. You can have a low ticket price but a high number of attendees. And then you also need to think about is it a corporate swipe, like a corporate credit card, because people are using it for learning and development, they're able to get their companies to support it, or is it a entertainment fun conference and therefore it's their personal money? People being willing to spend with their personal money, the threshold for the experience has to be really high. So that's why a lot of people, they might spend that on festivals, you know, film festivals, music festivals, et cetera. But using your personal money for professional development is sometimes a bit of a stretch for folks. So if you're going to go after the corporate attendee, then you also need to think about the curriculum and the information that you actually have in your conference. And this is why Afrotech has continued to grow year over year. Because we work in partnership with our clients and our corporations to say what are the functions and the skills that people need to know and that you're getting feedback from hiring managers or senior executives of. These are areas where we need people to be stronger in, whether that is executive presence or technical skills or an awareness of trends like AI. We get that feedback constantly from our partners and we're doing surveys and we're asking them, what are you interested in? So it may look kind of random when you look at Afrotext schedule and be like, why are they talking about this? Or why did they all of a sudden create an AI stage? Or why did they all of a sudden create a cybersecurity and risk stage? We created an entire track of programming this year called cybersecurity and risk. And that is very niche tech, if you will. It's not like consumer tech, it is hardcore tech. The reason we did this is because you don't need a college degree to get a lot of these high paying jobs in cybersecurity. You need a certificate, you need certifications, you need to have gone through programs and you need to have skill based training. Also. Risk is one of the fastest growing areas of growth for technology companies and crazy large contracts. So they're looking to hire and the pay is incredibly good. Five years ago this was consumer tech. This was your Google's, your metas, your Twitter's, your, well, Facebook obviously, WhatsApp, right? These were companies that were building the products and the platforms when they were in their high growth period. That was a different type of engineer that was a different type of pm, that was a different type of product person. That has changed. So we want to stay ahead of the trend. And also it's our responsibility as a business to ensure that we are bringing the most responsible content to you all because we're also signaling, hey, this is the information that you're going to need to know. Or like, this is the vocabulary so that as you rise through the ranks, you are conscious of cybersecurity and risk, you are conscious of the other parts of the business that are also growing into this industry. So you should be in conversations and dialogue with your potential sponsors and partners. If you're building a business conference or something, that's a business swipe. It's very important I view my clients that sign our contracts at Afro Tech as my partners in growing Afro Tech. My job is to serve them and help them grow. Now we also do the same thing with venture capitalists. So I'll meet with VCs and say, okay, what are the skills? What's the information? What kind of companies are you trying to invest in? What are the trends in your world? So then that's the same thing. We then signal, okay, these are the kind of startups that we're trying to attract. These are the kind of skills we're trying to equip founders with so that they can be more likely to get money from these VCs. So again, cybersecurity, risk, enterprise, AI, these are all trending categories for venture backed bull startups as well. You're not going to see too much on social media, you're not going to see too much about social capital, social networks this year at Afrotech, because that's not what people are trying to invest in and that's not what businesses are growing. So this is all really important for you to think about as you're building your conference or events business. If you're going after the corporate consumer, if you're going after just the everyday person and it's their personal money that they're swiping, then that's a different equation. And your ticket price is probably going to be lower and you're probably going to go after massive amounts of people instead of a small amount of people who are in corporate roles. Okay, let's talk about location, city and how we decide on where conferences are going to be. So we look at a few different factors after tech is planned at this point, two years out. So right now my team is building me the plan for 2020 and 2027. So I built the Vision with our head of Afrotech. Her name is Simone. You guys have heard me talk about Simone before. She's an OG at Blabity. And we sit there and we say, okay, what do we want the future of aprotech to look like? What are the trends? So, for example, one of the trends is that all of these younger folks that are coming up in their early 20s, when you ask them, where do you want to work? What do you want to do with your life? What are you trying to build? How can we help you? They say, I want to be a content creator, I want to work for myself. They don't necessarily aspire to go and work at these big tech companies anymore. That's different than when our generation, we said, where do you want to work? People are like, I'm trying to get this Google Bold internship. I'm trying to work at Deloitte, I'm trying to work at J.P. morgan, I'm trying to work at, you know, Wells Fargo. Literally, those were the places that we were working towards when we were in college and recent college grads. That's shifted. And it's always going to shift. There's always going to be cool kids and there's always going to be not cool kids in terms of companies that people want to work for. And right now what's trending is that people want to work for themselves and they want to figure out how to monetize their brands in partnership with these platforms. So people want to work in partnership with YouTube, TikTok, other platforms, Patreon, etc. So we're like, okay, well if you're going to be that, you're actually going to be an entrepreneur, all these people out here talking about, I want to be a content creator, I'm like, you are saying you want to be an entrepreneur, you want to be self employed, you want to employ yourself, you're getting 1099 back from all these platforms or these brands. You are not getting a W2. Okay, so we need to equip these content creators, these people who want to work for themselves, AKA entrepreneurs, we need to equip them to be small business owners. So we added this year a thing called the Founder Summit, which is to help equip people who are being entrepreneurs with the basics that they need to be successful. So we have conversations on platform, we have conversations on business, we're bringing people in from insurance, from legal resources, so that people understand what it takes to be self employed. And they're not just going into this with a pipe dream and they don't actually have the ability to sustain themselves and scale their business and have the stability that is required when you're self employed. That's going to be a two, three year journey. But it's important for us to start now so that by 2026, 2027, when those 25 year olds are in the pipeline to be future aphrotech attendees, we have enough curriculum relationships with partners to be able to support them. Another trend that we have really committed to is health equity. When you look at the future of this country and you look at things like global warming and environmental justice, it all comes down to health disparities for us as a people. We are the ones who are adversely impacted. We have the worst air quality, we have the worst food quality, we have the worst pollution, most exposure to pollution. We have the worst set of resources that are being reinvested to help us manage the fact that we have all these adverse health outcomes. Because of the systemic racism in this country, technology and health companies are an incredible way for us to be able to level the playing field. Because over time, these health companies no longer are going to be siloed in these big insurance functions you're seeing now more than ever, people are able, everyday people are able to get access to health care remotely. Telemedicine is huge. As long as you have access to the Internet, you are able to get access to information and that is really important for our community. But we have to influence and work in partnership with these health tech companies to be able to ensure that they are being equitable in how they're building their product. There really is two different types of things. There's healthcare companies that are healthcare first. These are your big companies, these are your health insurance companies, you know, your Kaisers, your Blue cross brief shields, etc. And then you have companies that are tech first, that are tech, health tech companies. These are telemedicine. This is your calm apps, your 23andmes, your hims and hers, right? These are companies that have leveraged technology first. And there's a different role for Afrotech in both of those. But either way it's important that they have a diverse workforce because they're building products and tools that impact all of us at scale. And if we can get ahead of the trends instead of what happened 15 years ago where everybody didn't care about equity inclusion, when I talk about equity inclusion, I'm not just saying like, oh, it's the right thing to do to like hire all the black people. It's the right thing to do. But that doesn't actually move the needle in this enterprise world. Black people, people of color, people of lower socioeconomic status in this country, which are not. I'm not saying that all black people. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying these different categories of people represent business growth opportunities for these enterprises. And if they're building products that is not accessible, relatable or on brand for any one of those three demographics, they're missing out on market share. And we can, as a corporation, as a company, and as a conference and as a brand in a community, help ensure that as these communities continue to grow, their product and their service and their company is in alignment with us as consumers. In order to do that, you need to have culturally relevant marketing. You need to have products that are inclusive by the nature of how they're built. And I'm not just talking about a surface level like make sure that your products are available in Spanish. I'm not just talking about that at that level of inclusivity, which is important. I'm genuinely talking about when you're building algorithms and you're doing things like machine learning and you're building your engineering prompting and you're building, building all these tools, making sure that there are a diverse set of people working on those products because they're going to come up with use cases that the average white boy is not going to come up with. And so they're going to be able to test to a market that is more reflective of the general consumer base, instead of you having to work backwards and fix a bunch of stuff that you messed up, which is very, very expensive. So that is our proposition to these companies. We have moved beyond it's the right thing to do and we've moved more towards this is going to help you grow your business and it's better defense as you are scaling and growing these companies. So we've added a Health Equity Summit. This is our second year doing that and it's been fantastic. Last year was sponsored by our good friends at Bayer Health. This year, Eli Lilly. We have a variety of health companies that work with us. And it's not just about the sponsorship. It's also about the conversations that are happening at the summit and then also behind the scenes. So you'll see as we prep for 2025, 2026, 2027, you're going to continue to see these themes show up. And that is my challenge to you, my friend. As you are building your experience, what is your vision? What is your vision? And how are you actually thinking through at the strategic level how you're contributing to society with your event and what is the end goal? How do you know when you've hit your end goal? How have you decided to make something that is genuinely impactful in our community that's not just noise. A lot of times people create these events and I'm like, nobody wants that it's not going to win because nobody wants that. It's not a big enough why. So you need to be ambitious with your why? Let me tell you some events that have done an amazing job changing culture and setting up new enterprises that I think are very successful. Culture Con. Culture Con has been successful because Imani Ellis, the CEO and founder of Culture Con, was strategic about saying there is no space for black creators that are professional creators to come together to gather and to have shared community. And then also there's all these corporations that want to work with these creators that have skills. These are not just quote unquote influencers, people who just take pictures all day. These are the people who are producers, designers, directors, stylists. These are the industry of being a creative coming together. There was no space for them. That was brilliant. Abdullah Founder of Afro Chela now Afro Future Nobody was bringing thousands of black people from the US to Ghana. No one, no one was doing that effectively. He did a great job. Is it hard to scale? Absolutely. You're bringing people across the country, across the continent to Africa, to Ghana specifically during December, a busy time of year. Incredibly difficult, incredibly ambitious and it's continuing to grow from there. There are people in our community that have done this really well, non black folks who have done this really well. Crate Cultivate Jacqueline Johnson, she created Crate Cultivate. There was a time when Crate Cultivate was like the it girl spot to be because there wasn't that many gatherings. Again, this was before the influencer. Things really went over deep but like there was no place for people to gather. There was no place for people to come together and meet other women and collaborate and learn how to be these entrepreneurs. Crate Cultivate was the first to do it and she did a fantastic job, which is why she was able to successfully sell her company. Well, I'll tell you a business that does a good conference that I think is really smart for their business. If you're a business and you want to do a conference that supports your business growth, like to know it. The like to know it. CEO and co founder. They're married, they're brilliant people and their annual conference is like so good because they bring together all of these women who are their major creators on their app, give them more opportunity, and then it just is a network effect platform, basically. So the bigger these creators get, the more they have their online shops on, like to know it, the more they're able to monetize their business, monetize their brand. Everybody wins. So you can also think about businesses and conferences that were able to grow and support the enterprise themselves. I'll give you one example of a conference, and I know these founders. I think they're awesome. That I feel like could have made it, but somehow dropped off because they didn't keep up with the trends, which was Blog Her. Do you guys remember Blog Her? I used to love Blocker. I never went because I was never big enough, but Blog her used to be when blogs were that content distribution arm. Blog her was the place that all of the top bloggers went. And it was such a good moment of social capital in one place. Since then, you know, blogs obviously have decreased in terms of usage and relevance. And so blogger, I don't think, kept up with the trend, but in the moment, that was another example of something that was really, really good. So hopefully this is helpful for you as you're thinking about building your conference business. You know, think about your audience. Are you going corporate? Are you going consumer? Think about your ticket price. Build for your revenue at the ticket level. Do not build assuming you're going to get a certain number of sponsors, because that is a very quick way to lose money. A very quick way to lose money. It is incredibly risky business. Think about your strategy. What are you bringing into the world? Is it unique enough? And if you are building a event as a marketing tool, that's fine. But you still need to be very cautious of costs and really make sure that it's a network effect platform that you're building. And again, a network effect is basically a flywheel where the more people that participate, the more the value is, which brings more people to participate, which creates this cycle and this circle of value for your business, for yourself as entrepreneurs. All right, y'all, I hope this was a helpful episode. If you like more content like this, make sure you sign up for Worksmart Pro, which is available in my Patreon. It's a monthly call where I go through a topic of the month. This month's topic, of course, will be events, businesses and conference businesses. So we'll go into more of this episode, give you a chance to ask me questions, I'll answer them, and then throughout the rest of the month. There's always downloads, information, articles, books that I'm reading. So it's basically an entire little Morgan verse available to you. And I'm only opening it up for a few months. We'll shut it down and open it back up later next year. But it's really fun way for me to get to know you and to support you and also to be able to answer some of your questions directly. So I'll see you guys next episode. And thank you as always for listening to the Journey Podcast. Bye. Thanks for listening to the Journey Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you leave a review and head to our Instagram and YouTube to leave a comment. I look forward to hearing how this podcast has made an impact on your own Journey.