eMarketing and Branding Workshop

After Iceland, it was a bit of a challenge to come up with something off the charts.  But I had to do something.

So I called my dear friend who was incredibly generous and let us use her mansion for the week.  And it was a totally bad-ass mansion! lol

The event started in Niagara Falls.  We did a few hours of totally new content, including a new process called “The Four Questions”.  I like to invite new people to the first day of our events just so they can get a taste of what we do.  At this event, we had two new people show up the first night -two beautiful ladies named Lynn and Sandra.

I put Lynn in front of the room and did the Four Question process with her.  It identified exactly what had been stopping her from getting to where she wanted to be business-wise.

Then the moment of truth.  I had to burst the surprise on everybody that we were leaving.

So I used a cool metaphor that I thought up about five minutes before I went on in front of the room! lol

I was describing how if you wanted to live in a mansion, you just can’t go to the store and start buying wood and a hammer and start building the thing.  You have to spend time up front designing it and planning it.  I compared getting the hammer and wood to people who just jump into social media stuff like Facebook and Twitter with no high level plan on what they’re going to do to create they’re business.

So I painted this picture of how one would go about building an incredible mansion, beginning with picking the site, getting an architect, etc.  Nobody had any idea why I was doing this.  They probably just thought it was some sort of lame-ass metaphor I was trying to make up.

So then at the end of the story I asked them if experiential learning or whatever was a way they liked to learn.  Of course they said yes.  So I told them they were going to experience first hand living in this bad-ass mansion for the next 5 days.  (One of the coolest things was the 35 seat movie theater.  One of the un-coolest things is they had some DVD of a scary-ass movie that gave everybody the willies…. ok, ’nuff about that part of the trip lol).

Only problem was it was already close to midnight, and we had a four hour drive ahead of us.

So I gave them another surprise.

I had recorded 4 CD’s of pure content on marketing and branding so everybody could listen to the CD’s on the drive to the mansion.

Oh yeah, and I wrote a book just for my mastermind group called “Million Dollar Profits.”

By this time Lynn and Sandra were IN!  Well Sandra not so much lol.  She said she was going to go, then she said she was going to stay, then she said she was going to go, then leave, and finally she left.  Then about 5 minutes later she came back in the room and said she decided she would go.

By the middle of the weekend, as we were cruising up this mountain in a caravan of snowmobiles, I was sure that Lynn and Sandra were very happy they came.

And like Iceland, the content was killer.  We went to around 4 am each night with hardcore marketing and branding strategies, case studies, the whole works.  Not to mention some of the most memorable and emotional interventions you could imagine.

What I’ve discovered after years of doing this is that what stops people is never what they think is stopping them.  We dug down to the root of things.  Sometimes it isn’t easy, but it’s always worth it.

And we had some other special surprise visitors as well.  Billy Brown, who organized our Healing the Gulf tour with Anandagiri in 2010, as well as Ashwin from One World Academy.  And my two oldest daughters drove up too.

I’m not sure, but I think I might have had less sleep at this event than the event in Iceland.  At least that event I slept on the plane!