Case study of how to earn ‘eye-watering’ extra fees off the back of seminars
23/02/2010 16:26:00

GreenStones is a Peterborough based 17 person practice with one principal. This case study explains how they have used seminars to win new clients and earn additional fees from existing clients.

Excellent results from monthly seminars

For several years they had used the monthly Business Builder Forum (BBF) CDs from AVN as the core material for their monthly business club meetings. Typically they had between 10 and 20 people attending each month, with six regulars paying £50 per month and the others coming as guests.

Club meetings were structured in the way recommended by AVN – ie starting at breakfast time with a 45-60 minute presentation on a key business topic using the ready-to-use slides and other material on the BBF CD, followed by a break for coffee, and then resuming with a “Strategic Board” session where members used their combined experience and expertise to help each other to solve their pressing problems.

According to MD Simon Chaplin:

“These events were a real success, helping us to enhance our reputation as business advisers, add value to our existing clients so that they were more loyal, give us more referrals and sell additional services, and convert more of our prospects into clients. They were also really enjoyable to run. But eventually we decided we needed to shake things up a little to prevent it becoming stale.”

Making running seminars much easier

From September 2008 they made two big changes. Firstly they switched from a monthly to a quarterly cycle. And secondly, instead of the presenters being from the GreenStones team (MD Simon Chaplin and Customer Manager Mark Wrigley), they began hiring nationally-recognised keynote speakers. To help differentiate the new version from the old, they also changed the name to the “Grow Your Business Forum”.

So far the keynote speakers have included:

• Will Kintish on how to increase sales and profits by becoming much better at networking
• Philip Hesketh on psychology of influence and persuasion
• Paul Shrimpling on how to use One Page Plans to make better business decisions and get better business results.

And most recently ...

• Steve Pipe on how one small business owner added £2.3 million to their business and personal bank account by using a Performance Measurement and Improvement (PMI) system, and how GreenStones could help delegates do the same in their businesses

As a result of these changes, with more time between events, and free from the need to prepare and practice the content, they have been able to concentrate on getting more paying delegates to attend each event. The main techniques they use for filling the room are:

• The next event is always promoted heavily at the end of each event, so the marketing cycle effectively lasts three months.
• An A5 flyer is professionally designed and sent to all customers at every opportunity.
• Details of the forum are posted on the website and promoted via Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook.
• A5 flyers are distributed at all networking meetings.
• Details are added to all team members’ email signatures so they don’t have to remember to ask customers.

Commenting on the impact of the changes Simon Chaplin said:

“They have made our life much easier. It is much easier to organise 4 events a year than it is 12. It’s much easier to fill the room. It’s much easier to get non-clients along to hear a well-known speaker than it is to hear what they assume will be a boring accountant. It’s much easier to recoup your event costs because it’s much easier to get delegates to pay. It’s much easier to prepare and practice a short Chairman’s introduction and wrap up than it is an entire 60 minute presentation. It’s much easier to focus on looking after delegates on the day when you aren’t distracted by your speaking duties. And it’s much easier to follow up afterwards.”

Getting much better results

By way of example, let us look at GreenStones’ results for their most recent quarterly seminar on 20 January 2010.

As mentioned above, I had the pleasure of being the keynote speaker, and my presentation was based around a case study of how one small business owner has got an extra £2.3 million of cash in their business and personal bank account with the help of a great accountant, and how they could do the same.

The key results for that seminar were as follows:

• 35 delegates attended – with most paying £50 plus VAT to be there
• 20 separate businesses were represented – including three potential new clients
• 15 of the businesses present ticked a box on the feedback form saying they wanted to pay £250 for a meeting with GreenStones to discuss the issues raised at the seminar. So the practice lined up an extra £3,750 in immediate meeting fees, and no doubt much more to follow as a result of the extra services to be discussed at the meetings
• Two of the three prospects requested a meeting to become a client
• One existing client wanted to talk seriously about some advanced EBT-based profit extraction planning featured in the seminar that will generate very substantial tax saving for the client and a very substantial value based fee for the practice
• Another long-standing client has already signed up for monthly One Page Plan meetings at £6,000 per annum. (NOTE: For more on One Page Plans see the related case study explaining how Mayes Business Partnership banked £149,400 in extra fees from their One Page Plan service in the 7 months to December 2009)
• And 25 tickets were sold on the day, at £147 each, for the next quarterly seminar

Commenting on the results, Simon Chaplin said:

“Yes, it takes effort to make our events a success, but these results speak for themselves. Not only do they represent a really superb immediate return on our investment, they also give us the very real prospect of eye-watering additional fees in the future. And remember, we achieved all of this in the middle of the January tax return season, which is traditionally a bad time for practice development.”

How to copy their success

If you are an AVN member… full members already have access to all the systems, guidance notes and ready to use presentation material you need to run the “How to get an extra £2m” seminar (and there is also a cut down version for AVN Compliance Users). Please contact Sarah Cross on sarah@avn.co.uk and she will email them to you.

If you are not an AVN member… please contact me on stevepipefca@avn.co.uk, quoting “GreenStones seminar success”, and I will email you a free pack of guidance notes showing how you could get a full house at your seminars and turn that audience into very significant levels of additional fees and new clients.

And regardless of whether you are an AVN member or not … GreenStones have kindly agreed that you can witness how they do things at first hand by attending their next seminar on 29 April 2010. It features the truly incredible former AVN conference keynote speaker Michael Heppell, author of “How to be brilliant”. Tickets are £147, but you pay just £97 for the first place and £50 for any additional places as long as you book by 19 March 2010.

So if you want to see how to make seminars a real success, see Michael Heppell for the first time or take some team members to see him who missed out at the AVN Conference, all you need to do is email Michaelheppelllive@greenstones.co.uk and the GreenStones team will organise it for you.