How To Host Free Company Events?

 

I moved to East Texas in 2012. When I got here I went to a lot of events. I knew networking was the fastest way to get into the know of my new surroundings. There were a lot of East Texas cultural ways I had to learn because well let's be honest us Orange County, CA girls are just a little different.

Over the past several years I learned what is important to East Texans. I know they love the community and they love local. However, apparently, no one on my new planet had EVER heard of cross-branding. I mean I said cross-marketing and their eyes crossed, heads cocked, and they were very very confused.

Ok, I am going to have to teach y'all a couple things. If you are hosting an event with 300 people and a brand new bakery opened, they are going to trade cupcakes for exposure. It also means you have higher quality appetizers than a tray of kolaches. Business is business. Everyone around here paid. for. everything. It literally drove me crazy. I was like I can throw a better event with my hands tied behind my back, half asleep and the thing would be free. So I did. I started an event and exposure company that hyper-focused on cross-branding. 

I was going to start a blog, I needed legitimacy. So I went to our local mall and started networking with the directors on a fashion show. At the same time, we shot a William Rast t-shirt and William Rast picked it up which blew our Instagram up. Great. Now I needed income. So now that I proved we could through a successful event we got media exposure and literally paid 0 dollars everyone was like can you come to do that for me. Awesome. Over a year we spent pumping out content and shoots every single day. We made sure our 1st major full day show with over 1 million dollars in merch, 5 shows, and over 60 models in a community that has never seen anything like that before. All the stores promoted the event. We held it at a restaurant so no overhead and no catering costs. The media attention and attendance were standing room only. We spent 0 dollars and made cash out the door. The merch and the overhead were all at others' expense. They received unreal exposure and sales. I call that a win-win situation.

As our business progressed we took a back seat and started shadow planning. That means another event planning company did the grunt work, again no overheard, all we managed was the entertainment of the fashion show and we were paid as Directors. They knew we could throw a show and I knew I couldn't be the Directors and the planners on the same day or I would want to jump off a cliff. Win Win.

When our business was a couple years old a top readers magazine approached us and in a nutshell said you produce better fashion content than our entire media team. If we give you 12k in ad space will you produce out editorials? In exchange, they would produce the film crew and media as well. Done. for 12 months we Directed the most mouth-watering content East Texas has ever seen to this day. We had models lined up for hours waiting to model call for a chance to be in our content. 

As the content continued brides sought after the same level of production. We used wedding income to purchase new cameras, gear, and sets for content shooting. We were not your average mason jar wedding duo. We PRODUCED weddings. Belly dancers, hookah bars, antler alters from outside the country. We had timelines down to the second you tie your shoes and again we made sure we worked closely with the venues so we could tag each other's work in our photos and gain exposure. We used our timeline formula to position ourselves in the political world and business world. Our team's functional structure was so deliberately successful that one of my biggest clients called me and begged me to take a full-time position branding his company by doing what I was already doing just for him.

Ok, fast forward 2020 and Covid baby. We got this. We had a board meeting. We understood what the world was coming to. We also knew some things were not going back to live events anytime soon. So being ahead of the curve, as we usually are, we did what we do best. We expanded our team and expanded our services. We worked to expand our fingerprint in what it means to get EXPOSURE. This new digital world is fast and it is overloaded. Everyone wants things faster and smarter. Done. We tested a new magazine release on TikTok and got 15k likes in less than 10 hours. Beautiful, we know what we have to do. We are going to take exposure in cross-branding into the new century. The question is are you doing ANY cross-branding? Because I have literally built my company on 0 debt, 0 investment, and 0 overheard. I'm just saying maybe you need to spend less and show up smarter.

-Izzy Gentry

clvplanners.com