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What I’ve learned about conferences (so far)
It’s all about airplane economics.
Michael Girdley
February 08, 2025
Howdy Girdleyworld!
I’m hosting a holdco conference in the spring! And it turns out: it’s pretty darn complicated.
So today, I thought I’d give you a little inside baseball on how these things work:
6 things I’ve learned (so far) about hosting a conference
Hopefully this is interesting whether you’re coming or not — but of course, I’d love to see you there!
A little context:
For a couple of years, two friends have been putting on an event called HoldCo Conference. I spoke at it in 2023. It was a great fit for entrepreneurs like me, and the conference was a big success.
But my friends came to me last year and said, basically: we’re not going to keep doing it alone. They were getting busy, and either they needed a partner to come in and take over, or they would wind it down.
Overall, conferences can be good business. There’s an opportunity to put on something valuable for the community while making some money along the way. On the other hand, they can also be disasters.
But I was sad to think of it ending.
So I jumped in, with my team at Girdley Media, and we decided to bring HoldCo Conference 2025 to life. Here’s what we’ve learned so far.
—
1. It’s hard!
Maybe this isn’t a big surprise to some of you. But from the outside, you might think: how hard can it be? Just rent a venue, organize speakers, and sell tickets!
But look: anytime you need somebody to pull out their credit card and take action, that will be hard. It's even harder when it also means they have to block off time in their calendar.
And these are busy people we’re trying to cater to — they’re running businesses, taking care of their families, and doing all sorts of stuff.
Also, the revenue model is challenging. It’s not a recurring SaaS rev, where you have a pretty good idea of what’s coming in the door month to month.
Conferences are eat-what-you-kill: you get one-time revenue selling tickets. And you have a hard deadline: once the conference date arrives, you’re not making another cent.
2. Everything has to go right
So much can go wrong when you’re putting on a big event.
Making a conference great is a mountain of details. And there are so many failure points, where a screwup can ruin the whole thing.
One of my favorite conferences was called Web Summit. Back in its heyday, they actually did studies on little details like, “what’s the best font to use on nametags?” Stuff that makes a difference in the moment, but you’d never think about.
Perfect name tags is obviously not a must have. But bad ones can actually ruin your event. Imagine if you showed up on the day and your nametag vendor misspelled everybody's name or misspelled the name of your event — suddenly you’re running to the store to buy stickers and markers, and writing everyone’s names by hand, and your high-ticket, professional event looks like amateur hour.
Or your speakers could get sick. AV problems. You could have a pandemic. In our case, we’re doing an all-inclusive package, so we’re also figuring out rooms and meals and all sorts of stuff.
There is a lot that can go wrong.
3. The feedback loop is slow and difficult
In most businesses, you get to collect data and iterate on a pretty short timeline. You might get to tweak your model on a monthly, weekly, even a daily basis.
Not with a conference. Let’s say you bring in a speaker and they bomb. You don’t get to incrementally fix that. You have to wait until the following year to hire someone else.
So, no matter how much you learn while it’s live, it’ll be 12 months until you can put anything into practice.
Rough.
OK, THIS PART IS A STRAIGHT-UP AD
The best conference for multiple business owners.
Speakers include Michael Girdley, John Wilson, Walker Diebel, Jesse Tinsley, Sieva Kozinsky, Reg Zeller, Logan Leslie, Kelcey Lehrich, Chris Munn, Nik Hulewsky, and Chris Koerner.
Connect, learn, and get inspired at a stunning Utah resort.
There’s no better way to close out Q1.
4. It’s all about sales
They say in sales, the average customer takes six points of contact from a salesperson before the deal closes. The same applies to conferences.
For most people, the inertia of what's going on to not sign up for or do things is extremely high.
It’s difficult to get people’s attention and to make them commit, even if it's the absolute perfect thing for them. They believe in it, and they want it.
All the conferences I know of have sales teams and sales engines that are just trying to win enough customers to attend and make the event succeed.
I’ve learned that just talking about it online and in my newsletter… that doesn’t sell tickets. Or, it sells some — but by and large, if you want your event to fill up, you’ve got to get proactive.
5. Know your ICP (and how to talk to them)
Communicating well with your Ideal Customer Profile is essential to selling tickets. You need to know precisely who your event is for, and what they’re looking for.
Are you holding a high-end event with tickets costing thousands of dollars, or is it a low-end, widely accessible event? The former requires a lot more commitment than the latter, and speaking to those two customers requires very different conversations.
What are they solving for? Why would they come to a conference? You're sunk if your programming doesn’t speak to their pain point.
(I think we’ve got room to improve on that for HoldCo Conference — it’s a high-end event where tickets cost thousands of dollars. We might have positioned it too casually early on!)
6. It runs on airplane economics
Conferences are high-fixed-cost businesses.
The analogy is an airline. Say you’ve got a flight planned, and there are 100 seats on that airplane. It might cost you the first 70 seats to pay for the fuel, the pilots, the staff, etc.
So you need to sell 70 tickets to break even. But every ticket after that is pure profit.
Conferences are the same way. Your return on investment swings depending on how many tickets you sell. The difference between selling 65% and 80% of your tickets could be huge — between a significant loss and a big success.
We’ve got a big block of rooms reserved. If we don’t fill them, we’re still on the hook.
It's pretty scary when you think about it. But without risk, there is no reward. (And honestly, things are going pretty well — we’ve got less than 25 tickets left!)
In the end, a conference can be pretty darn rewarding as long as you don’t kid yourself that it’ll be easy.
And I’ll be honest: as an introvert who likes making YouTube videos, I get a lot of anxiety going to events like this — even when I’m putting them on. What if people ask me weird things? What if there are uncomfortable moments?
But I always leave super inspired by the connections I make with people.
So, hopefully, we can do that with the HoldCo Conference and leave people with the same joy, breakthroughs, and inspiration that I seem to get from it—even though I’m a little scared going in.
If it sounds like your cup of tea, I hope to see you there!
(If it’s not for you… I’ll let you know how it went afterward.)
—
I hope you learned something from this, and it didn’t sound like one giant infomercial.
And if you’ve put on an event like this, hit reply and give me advice!
3 things from this week
Appetizer: Gen Z and Boomers are both out to lunch when it comes to salary expectations. Here’s my (Gen X) take on why people are so disconnected from reality. (YouTube)
Main: Got some interesting discussion going around this problem on LinkedIn. What’s your take?
Dessert: Love you, boys.
Thanks for reading,
Michael
P.S. Come and buy your freakin’ ticket already so my sales team can sleep at night!
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