Listen Now:

Want to know the truth about what it takes to launch a summit? How about 2 of them just a month and a half apart from one another?

In this episode, Jennie & Alyson will give you the real, behind-the-scenes information you’ll need before you launch your first – or next – summit. From the hard to the worth it – we’re sharing it all.

Episode 50 – Which List Build Is Right For Me? Is Right For Me?
Episode 37 – How to Successfully Use Upsells to Monetize a Free Event
Episode 36 – How To Engage Your Audience For Maximum Results During Your List Build
Episode 32 – How to host a list build and still run your business
Episode 19 – Nail your ads with FB and IG advertising specialist Michelle Bridger
Episode 016 – Good Funnel, Bad Funnel: How to tell if your funnel works and what to do when it doesn't
Episode 011 – Size Matters and Other Big Lies About Your Email List
Episode 010 – How to Engage Your List (after your list build) To Create Raving Fans
Episode 007 – How to Promote Your Next Launch WithOUT Paying For Ads with a Promo Storm

Alyson Lex 0:00
Just going you've probably heard about online summits, especially if you've listened to any number of episodes of this podcast because we talk about them a lot. And if you're in the online marketing online business world, you hear about them from people other than us. Alright, so at their core, summit our list build events. They leverage the expertise in the following of experts that are in your niche, niche adjacent, Nisha, Jason, as Jenny might say, who serve the same audience that you do, but maybe in different ways. And I can tell you from close recent personal experience, they are a beast to plan, they can take on average three to five months, although I've seen people saying like, you can plan a super successful summit in 90 days. I am not going to offer my opinion on that at this moment. But they are generally regarded as the biggest list builds on average of all the other types. And from that, we're talking about challenges and webinars and panels and giveaways and all that stuff. Jenny is the summit Queen, I'm just gonna put that one out there, she's done like 300 of these things, produce them, strategize them, implemented them, hosted them for her own business. She's watched her clients launch businesses with summits, build huge lists of engaged registrants generate 1000s and 1000s or 10s of 1000s, or even $100,000 in revenue from VIP sales, and from the sales done afterward. Okay, and the thing is my summit and Jenny summit both launched about six weeks apart. Jenny's was in mid-April. Mine is in early June. And today we are going to talk about how we've managed this because we've both been highly involved in each other's events.

Jennie Wright 2:03
There's a lot here, when it comes to launching a sauna. I love that intro, by the way, it was just really good. There's gonna be there's there's thing, the first thing I want you to consider is your mindset, before you put pen to paper on what it is you're going to offer as an online summit. First, I want you to think about the mindset and how you want to look at this thing. So summits are marathons, they're not sprints. And if you can't handle an elongated project, like this summit may not be the thing for you at this particular time. But it might be in the future, start with something a little bit smaller, maybe a challenge or a webinar. But summits are a marathon, but they also Garner incredible results. Understand that the path that you're about to take, when you're looking at launching us on it is going to be creating not necessarily the big list, but the engaged list. So you have to kind of wrap your head around that this is not going to be the event that you're going to go from zero list to 100,000 and make a million dollars in, you know, five weeks. This is not that event. Now Tony Robbins, yes. But Tony Robbins has an established business. And he has a huge ads budget. And he has a huge team. Right now I have launched summits where the mindset of the client going into it was an issue. They really didn't spend the time understanding. So a lot of my time when I work with clients and stuff like this is actually doing a little bit of the the mindset work right at the very beginning. This is the first thing we want you to tackle. So again, before you do anything, before you do any planning, make sure that you sort of get your head around the fact that for the next five months, you're going to be working on this event. consistently. Now, it is not going to be eight hours a day, wrap your head around the fact that you're going to probably work on average. And Allison can attest to this anywhere between 20 minutes, 30 minutes, or even an hour a day. Now how you spend that is up to you, you might spend an hour each day kind of plugging away at it. Or you might decide that on a Friday, you're going to spend four or five hours on it. As you get closer to launch, the time investment does increase a little bit. So you have to make sure when you're looking at the mindset of this thing that you're really, really engaged in terms of what you're going to be able to do. So summits are not for people who have an insanely crazy schedule, but do not have the team to help pick up the slack. So think about that. And be realistic. So mindset is being realistic

Alyson Lex 4:45
when it came to planning our events, so I just you know, Jenny held a summit I'm hosting a summit. And yes, we are two separate people. And they were two separate events but we promised Behind the scenes, so we are both very involved with each other's event, I wrote all a copy for Jenny's event I helped with organization, I helped with Speaker search, I helped kind of figure out some graphics situations, I helped with some of the, like the layout and the strategy and all of that. And then now that it's time for mine, Jenny, is just as involved with mine, she's doing all of my setup, because we'll get to this in a little bit, there can be a little bit of a spiral when Alison and tech get together. So she's handling all of that she's helping me with this strategy. She's, she's keeping me on track, because I'm leaning to her as the expert. So even though we're two different people in two different businesses with two different summit hosts, essentially, we are still both juggling both of these projects. And Jenny is now in post summit, where she's actively engaging her audience. She's working to close some sales, so on and so forth. So things still are happening. When it comes to this, and we're going to talk about it in a minute with the planning, you really have to set some priorities, some of those priorities are going to be time based. I knew that the first thing I had to do was get my experts on board. So while I was helping Jenny with the copy, and all the fun front, and stuff of her summit, I was sourcing experts for mine. Now I did pull double duty, because I was able to say, this person is not a fit for me. But hey, Jenny, she's a fit for you, or he's a fit for you. Because the topic is just slightly different. And so in that instance, we were able to team up, but we divide and conquer a lot. So you really have to have the mindset if you're going to be doing multiple lists, build events. And I'm talking a summit and then maybe a challenge or a summit, then some webinars or some webinars that a summit, if you're including a summit in a lineup of list builds the list build lineup, like that we should coin that. You really have to say, Okay, I'm going to spend 20 minutes today on this, and then I have to shift my focus over to this thing that's a little more pressing. Before I can go back to this, it's going to be easy to get into the rabbit hole, and spend all of your effort trying to plan one thing. But you have to have that priority as well.

Jennie Wright 7:35
A great, there's something that I wanted to bring up about the mindset. I'm wondering, I mean, this is behind the scenes, so let's be raw and real. And that is that if you've had a past experience with any type of list building that didn't go well, that didn't go exactly how you wanted didn't bring in the list build that you thought it would. Maybe you tried to run a summit in the past. And it didn't, like your experts didn't help you. And I know Allison's gonna say something here because she's, she's, I mean, I was actually this is me, teeing it up for her actually, because I wanted her to talk about this more. My first summit was a complete and utter

Unknown Speaker 8:18
failure,

Jennie Wright 8:20
complete failure. And part of that has to do with me. And part of it has to do with some of the experts, but honestly, the ball, you know, the the, it all kind of lands on me. And that is because I chose the wrong people. I had the wrong mindset. I did a whole bunch of stuff wrong. No, I didn't let it stop me from doing more obviously, because I've done 300. But it can easily stop you from doing more.

Alyson Lex 8:49
Jenny wants me to talk about my first summit, which was in 2013. And I say my first summit because right now, it's still my only summit until this one goes live. So it wasn't a complete failure in that I did make a couple $100. I made just a couple 100 bucks from sales. I put myself out there. I did something bigger than I'd ever done before. It was terrifying. And I did it anyway. And it was overwhelming and confusing. And I learned a lot. However, it did not have the financial and business result, an implication that I wanted it to have. And some of that is because I was being I was really following more of an outdated model at the time and not looking forward and trying to do things a new way. But I had to get over that and it took me what eight years to get over that. Don't be Allison. In this instance, if if you have a experience, just pick yourself up, keep going, because you are going to learn things from it, you're going to get good things from it. But those things aren't going to matter if you don't do anything with them.

Unknown Speaker 10:11
Yes, yeah, I

Alyson Lex 10:12
think you did like that part. Alright, so I want to talk about the planning. Because one thing that I realized, actually just this morning, as we were getting up to record this, is when I first started planning my summit I gave myself, how long did I give myself? Five months? Yeah, they're both five, maybe five and a half months. I remember that first month or two. I was like, Oh, we have so much time. We have so much time. No problem. There's so much time. And do you know what I'm saying? Now I am out of frickin time. Holy guacamole. There's no time. things. It's it goes quick, because you're planning your summit. At the same time as you're running your business. If I told you everything I've been doing over the last five months, you you'd wonder when I slept? The answer is not a whole lot anymore. Because it is a lot. And I'm lucky enough to have people on my team helping me. But that does not mean that there's not still a lot for me to do. Even just sourcing and communicating and landing the right experts. takes longer than you think. And it should. Because I'm making really I mean, I was really very intentional about my experts. They had to be very well aligned. I was intentional about it being a completely global event. I was very intentional about a good representation of different subject matters and backgrounds and points of view. And with that intentionality comes additional time.

Jennie Wright 11:55
Sure, you can fill a summit with experts in a week, if you just want to be willy nilly about it. If you just want to go for you know, whatever, if you if you just don't want to be as intentional if you're trying to make sure that you include diversity and making sure you have the right representation of people and topics, and understanding and backgrounds and all that incredible stuff that we need to be doing. That's what takes longer. Alison I, Allison Allison and I've had so many conversations where she's like, Do you know how hard it is to find somebody to talk on this topic? Who isn't a cisgendered, white person? And I'm like, yep, I do. I absolutely do. There's a there's a misrepresentation or under representation of people of color and different backgrounds. In the online speaking community. It is vastly, vastly underserved to that audience. And that takes more time to make sure that you have an audience or that you have an speaker panel that represents diversity and inclusion and the right speakers. Right. So that takes extra time.

Alyson Lex 13:02
Yeah, and it gets to the point where So, you know, without getting too much into the nitty gritty like there are two ways that you can get speakers, you can do a call for speakers, review applications and take whoever applies. Or you can do intentional outreach, and get your stalker hat on and start looking for people and reaching out to them. A really good strategy is both you start with your call to speakers, yes, call for speakers, see who comes in, who's a great fit, who's going to confirm and then start your outreach. The problem is, you can't wait too long to start your outreach because great experts are busy. If you say I'm hosting this huge event in a month, they're gonna say, Yeah, my promo calendar is full. Sorry, dude.

Unknown Speaker 14:00
Exactly, no, I

Alyson Lex 14:01
had four or five months until the event. I still got people who had planned out their promo in advance, and I totally get it and it's totally fine. I expected that. Being ahead of the game is a big deal. building those relationships is a big deal.

Jennie Wright 14:21
It is. And if we sound like we're kind of Pooh poohing a little bit on the area of summit or how much there's involved in this, I do absolutely want to emphasize that these are incredible events, to build your your build your list and build your business and to create scale, and JV opportunities and up all of your skills. And can you know, it's just it's an incredible, incredible modality of list building. But it does involve additional work. So if you're determined to do a summit and I think you should be this is just the realness. I don't want to sugarcoat it. Alison and I were both taught how to do summits under the sugarcoated The fairies and unicorns, aspect, eight or nine years ago, this is why both of our summit's struggled, mine was, you're gonna, you're gonna do a summit you're gonna get, you're gonna get 5000 people to register, no problem and you're gonna make $100,000 in your first year, and it's all going to be rosy. Nobody told me any of the stuff that we're telling you today. Nobody told you any of that, you know, nobody told me this stuff. Nobody told me how hard it would be. But also, nobody told me how rewarding now. We'll talk about this a little bit later. This is the spirally stuff that we'll talk about.

Unknown Speaker 15:35
But it's

Jennie Wright 15:37
Yeah, that happens. And we'll talk about that in a second. But summit's do take planning, we want to talk about that in a little bit more detail. Allison was making a really good point about getting on people's calendars. Here's what I've seen people do very successfully, you can start planning your summit anywhere between six to you know, six or seven months out. And by planning, I mean, you can start connecting with experts, it does not mean that you need to hire your VA, or build your funnels, or do anything like that as of yet, but you can start to connect with experts and get on their promo calendars. I will tell you right now,

Alyson Lex 16:10
my,

Jennie Wright 16:12
my summit ended in April, I'm going to do it, you know, kind of again in the fall. And I've already asked some of my experts to come back. But that is really, really based on the fact that I created some incredible relationships with the experts that I had. So let's talk about that a little bit. I can't emphasize this enough with you. But building relationships with your experts is essential for success. Even if you think you may or may not be doing a summit in the future, this quarter, next quarter end of year doesn't matter. Start building up those relationships with those potential experts, the people that you really like and hope that they will say yes, because if you show experts that you actually care about them, that you like and comment and share on their posts, that you engage with them that you register for their webinars and show up in, you know, engage on the webinars, read their book, and leave them a review on their business site, then you're creating those relationships and the person is not going to feel like when they get that email, they get that reach out of you know, hey, it's Jenny, and I'd love to see you as a featured expert on my upcoming grow and profit online event. They're not going to go who the EFF is Jennie Wright? They'll be like, oh, okay, yeah, that's the, that's the person who has been commenting on my posts. She was I remember her she was on my webinar, she left a review on on Apple for my podcast, right? And those were all honest things that I do I connect with people over the long term, because I want to build these relationships, again, can't emphasize it enough, build those relationships, make those connections.

Alyson Lex 17:46
And you know, what's so funny is a lot of my speaker outreach was done with people I did not know. And so I actually use this to build relationships. So I'm a little bit different with than Jennie in that, of course, I'm building relationships as I go. And I always tap my own network first. But when I'm looking to go outside of my own network, sometimes you just got to go in cold. But I will tell you some of the relationships that I've built with my experts, I have one expert who now wants me to go live in his facebook group weekly, his multiple 1000 people Facebook group and teach about copy. Because of the relationship we've built throughout this process. I have another expert who has said, hey, I've got a whole roster of clients that could use some copywriting. Okay, because right, because of the relationship that we've built during this process, I have other experts who are commenting on my stuff, joining my facebook group, lifting me up, as well as themselves, were able to have that kind of interaction, because I've treated them like people.

Jennie Wright 19:02
Yeah, experts or people to, like real people. I went in cold with a couple of my experts. And notably, one of my experts. Actually, I went in cold with her, she came through my call for speaker. So let's explain that quickly what a call for speakers was because we never did. So Allison and I both created a page, like a landing page using clickfunnels. And we had a Google form. And the call for speakers page was like, Hey, I'm hosting this event. It's happening here. It's about this. I'm looking for experts to talk about this. If you're interested, click here and fill out this form that was attached to the Google forum, the Google forum, ask them questions with like, what's your name and title? And what would you talk about and all this kind of stuff? And people fill that out? And then we review those applications got in touch with those people and was like, Yeah, you're a fit, let's talk. And then we would agree to have them on the event. Now I had over I don't know, I think I was somewhere in the range of 75 applications, and a whole bunch of those were not a fit, and that just happens. But one of them. I'll give you An example was Abigail, Abigail defund dollar, okay, and she's going to be a guest on our on our podcast coming up in the future. I had never met Abigail before. Now we have run in the same circles. I have seen her name many times, but we've never connected once. She actually turned into somebody who was connecting with me on a regular basis. During promo, she joined my facebook group, she was talking about me on you know, sometimes on social and stuff like that she was connecting, she was liking my posts, she was commenting on my posts. And we've built a bit of a rapport. One of my other experts, that was a previous guest on our podcast, and I asked her to be on my summit during the podcast, I was like, Oh, I gotta have you. This person checked on me almost every single day. And has since, you know, we were looking at a joint venture collaboration later on this year. So it's so important to build relationships with these people and treat them like human beings with, you know, one of my, one of my one of my experts was moving. At the time of my summit, one of my experts, parents passed away during just like, just during the end of promo in the beginning of the launch. And they were like, I'm so sorry, but I have to go attend a funeral. I'm like, Are you kidding me? Right? These things happen, the real people stuff happens. So make those connections as much as you possibly can. And the result of this, and here's why. The result is you get a better promotional period, if your experts feel engaged, and they think that you know, there's a good relationship happening, and that you care about them. And they start to feel that sort of reciprocal caring about you, and who you are. And what you do, you're going to have a better promo period, because of their feeling invested. They're vested in who you are, they're invested in the event. And if you include your speakers, and we're going to talk about that, actually, I want to talk about that a little bit. This inclusion piece, most people run a formal event. Thank you for being an expert. Here's your promo copy, promoted as this date to this date, and have a nice day. That's the way that Allison and I were taught the way that I do summits. And that's how I've done my 300 summits. And this is how I supported Allison during this and how she supports me is we created regular updates. Allison, have you ever done regular updates like this before?

Alyson Lex 22:19
No.

Unknown Speaker 22:21
Why don't you tell them what I mean?

Alyson Lex 22:23
So pretty much every milestone. There's a Facebook group for my speakers. It's our speaker lounge. They know my speakers know not every one of my experts is in this group. Because not everybody uses Facebook the same way I do. And that's fine. The ones that are get the mini updates, the ones that aren't get the email big updates, okay, so once twice a week, I'm in there, I'm saying hey, and then the last one was, Hey, guys, if you hadn't already created your affiliate account, I've gone ahead and done that for you. The login is your first and last name, you know, whatever. But let me know if you have any questions. That's all it was. But it kept them in the loop. And they all liked it. They all saw it. They all Hey, thanks. That's awesome. Before that, it was guys, I'm so excited about the graphics, I wanted to let you know, you're gonna start seeing x y, z soon. Before that, it was Hey, you know, we're finalized. We have all of our speakers. Awesome. I'm super excited before that it was this is the charity that we're going to support with, with the percentage of our revenues, because we were very loaded on it prior beforehand. I involved them in choosing that charity. We're in this together. Yes, this is out of my part of the money. But we're a global event, I want us to together choose a global organization. And I asked for their input.

Jennie Wright 23:58
So you created relationships, you got them invested into what it is that you're doing, you celebrated milestones, and you got them to see the inerts. So if people see this, and they see the work and the effort you're putting into it, they feel a lot more compelled as a human being to get behind and you know, you know, really start to help push the event forward, because they understand it better. They have a better view of it. So this is an essential part 100% let's talk about delegating. Oh,

Alyson Lex 24:29
I like this. I like this more now than I did six months ago. I've gotten better at it.

Jennie Wright 24:36
delegating unless you are all things unless you know how to copyright do tech marketing, find a book all your experts, record all your videos, edit all your videos, create worksheets and VIP packages, promo on social media and everything unless you know how to do that at a very high level. You should not be doing all of it. You need to delegate this out. also knows how to build landing pages. I do also knows how to create Salesforce. I do. Allison knows how to edit videos. I do. She's not doing any of that.

Alyson Lex 25:11
Not now. Because that is not where I need to be spending my time guys. My am I writing all the copy? Yes. Am I recording the videos? Yes. Am I putting together the VIP package? Yes. But we'll get back to that in a minute. Am I doing some social promo? Yes. Beyond that, now, I'm not doing my own ads. I'm not doing the editing. I'm not. Right. Like I built the relationships. I'm the face of it. I wrote it because that's what I do. The promo that it's personal, right? Like there's some personal part to it. And when it comes to the VIP assets, I'm creating some of that. And I'm outsourcing some of it.

Jennie Wright 26:14
Yeah, outsourcing. Some of that is me.

Alyson Lex 26:17
Well, not just that like, so part of my VIP offer is the transcripts for the like, and those need to be edited and formatted. Well, I'm not doing that. No, hashtag transparency. I hired my mom. Actually, I think that was really smart. She's so smart. She's so good at this. She's smart, she gets it. She has her stuff on her deadline, I'm good. That's my mom. There you go. Plus, it's my mom. Sure.

Jennie Wright 26:47
If you don't have your mom, you can do that. And if you're not a copywriter, and you're not a tech person, the thing, the thing that we want you to focus on is finding booking, onboarding, creating relationships with your experts in doing your interviews, those those are the main things, you do not want your you don't want to put all this effort into building on an event, and then have it follow on the fact that you're not, you're just not a copywriter. And if you write your own copy, it's just not going to convert, you know, that's the thing. So if you're not good at that, find somebody who is it's not going to have to, it doesn't necessarily have to cost you 1000s and 1000s of dollars to do it. You can find reasonable options or different options. But I'll tell you, we're not to skimp. Don't skimp on your funnel, on how it looks and how it converts. Don't skimp on your copy on how it looks and how it will convert and I'll mean looks I mean how it reads. And don't skimp out on good looking graphics. Now, luckily, you can use things like Canva Pro, I think make some pretty damn good looking graphics. And you can use that. And you can actually find somebody very reasonable to help do that funnels, you get what you pay for you really, really do. get what you pay for with that, if that's what if you know you have to save money. And if you have if you get to be able to invest, make sure that you're investing in the right spots, just gonna say delegation, delegation. If you can do all that great. Delegate what you can't.

Alyson Lex 28:21
The other nice thing about delegation is that when you have snap Foos, when there are things that don't go the way they're supposed to, you don't always have to be the one to figure this out. And I'm bringing this up at a very crucial point because we are about to talk about spiraling. And the reason that Jenny is very quietly laughing to herself right now is because Alison just had a very recent pretty impressive spiral episode.

Jennie Wright 28:58
It's impressive for a couple of reasons, though. It's not only impressive for the actual spiral itself, but it was also impressive how you got out of it. I'll give you I give you credit.

Alyson Lex 29:07
I therapy man therapy helps self. This was last night. We're fresh off of a spiral. Last night, there were a couple of different tech things that were going wrong simultaneously. One was with ads, and one was with the funnel. And by going wrong, I mean little tiny things that were much more frustrating than they should have been. Because this is not excuses. This is reasons because there's no excuse for failing. It was Friday afternoon, evening, after a long week. So I'm tired. And I'd been up for a long time. My child was especially high energy. And my husband, I love him was especially annoying. So in my own life, I was overwhelmed and then in my business life I was struggling to set up something with ads, because it's not very user friendly. And then there was a weird glitch on the tech side. And I discovered both of these issues at the same time. So I'm spiraling with my ads person. And I'm spiraling with Jenny, who was running all my tech. But what's more is I was in there trying to fix it. And that I loved me so much, she, she messaged me, and she's like, you need to stop and walk away from your computer. Because if you don't get out of this platform, in the next five minutes, we're gonna have problems. Get out. I'm trying to fix it, stop it. Like, I'm paraphrasing, but that was the attitude behind what she said, which I needed. And she knew that as someone that has a relationship with me, she knew that I needed to be told enough, you needed the snap,

Unknown Speaker 31:02
like you needed the full,

Alyson Lex 31:04
you know, like in the movies, when they slap the hysterical person in the face. That's what I needed. But you know, COVID, and distance like borders closed, and

Jennie Wright 31:12
I would never hit anybody. Right. But you need it you needed the snap out of it moment is what I'm saying you needed to snap the break, because you were like, and this is going on, and this is going on and this is going wrong. And it was spiraling. When we say spiral, it wasn't staying in the context of the things that were happening. It was starting to spiral to other things that we're starting to look at. It was starting to it was starting to encompass the whole summit, the success of the summit that listen to that. And it needed. spirals are brutal. We all do them. I did it during mine, I had a moment, several actually. But the way that you deal with it is what's impressive as a human being how you're able to pull yourself out is an impressive feat. Because the spiral can can take you away. And if you can stop it, or if you have somebody to help you stop it. Or if you've had enough understanding or therapy or both to know and recognize what you're doing, you can stop it. So we want to prepare you for the fact that oh my gosh, I really hope people don't look at this and go I'm never doing a summit. This sounds

Alyson Lex 32:15
insane. Right? here's here's the thing. summits push you really hard. They push your comfort zones. They push your abilities, they push your capabilities, your knowledge, your visibility, all of it. And the abilities, all the abilities. And anytime you do something big in your business, there is going to be an underlying cause of fear, fear of failure, fear of inadequacy, fear of unimportance, all of those things, and when you feel that, but don't acknowledge it. It builds, okay, when you overcome that, and do it anyway, that's when you have confidence and hope. And the feeling of being courageous and proud of yourself and relieved and all of these good things that you can then carry on with you.

Jennie Wright 33:23
And you may not even have all this crap, like the stuff that I mean, we're just being honest with some of the stuff that happens.

Alyson Lex 33:27
Oh, yeah, this is just my head trash.

Jennie Wright 33:29
Yeah, you may not have any of this. You may never spiral, you may never have a point. This might be your Goldilocks event, it might be absolutely perfect, perfect everything. And I've seen, I've had clients have perfect summit. And I'm just like, This is crazy. I can't believe this is happening. But it does happen. So not to not to deter you from doing something like this.

Alyson Lex 33:51
No, we really just want to make sure that you are prepared for the reality that it is and can be very hard.

Jennie Wright 33:59
So in launching to summit six weeks apart, Alison and I have learned a lot about each other. also true. So we've learned, we talked about this a couple of times now we talked about Hall passes. So Hall passes between Allison and I are when we know that we have a commitment or something that needs to be done. But one of us isn't really feeling it for whatever reason to tire to whatever, and it wants an out. And that's a hall pass. And it's the other person's job to either grant or not grant the hall pass. Because, I mean, it's hard to build a business, right? And it can be tough, and sometimes it takes having that person. I'm very lucky. I have two of those people. I have two people who don't give me all passes. One of them's my partner and one of them is Alison, and because we're working on but you know, because we're working on these joint projects occasionally. Also, and I have had to not give each other hope passes on things. And so you may have to look at that. We're very lucky that we've been building this at the same time because we've been able to share resources. Luckily, I've been doing this a long time, I have a lot of the templates and I have a lot of the stuff, Allison is able to use a lot of the things that I've done because I went before her with my own personal summit. And I elevated it, of course, I was trying to elevate my summit every time, Allison's able to take something from that, and use it in her own event. So she's using, you know, she's getting the benefit of what I just went through live in the moment, and she's like, oh, Jenny, just went through that, I'm gonna use that, or Jay just went through that I ain't touching that with a 10 foot pole. So she's had the benefit of seeing all of that kind of stuff happen and in the moment, right. And I think that's something worth talking about. So summits are actually really worth it, they're hard, but they're worth it, I don't want you to be afraid of them. If you're ready to go big if you're ready to grow. Planning is incredibly essential. Give yourself more time than you think you'll need. And also make sure that you don't do it all yourself. And you look at the people that you have, that you can pull in that you can create that delegation to

Alyson Lex 36:09
remember that your experts are people, they are people to with people lives and people hopes and people dreams, and you are working with them and building a relationship with them that can last and a lot of times does last long beyond the end of the summit. I remember I was a guest expert on someone's summit six years ago, seven years ago, and she was just recently on our podcast, we've built a long term friendship. It's not like we're talking every day, but we check in with each other a couple times a year, support each other where we can I invited her on the podcast. That's just how it is. Don't treat them just like a list you want to use. We didn't even talk about list size in this because I think we've mentioned it on other episodes, which we will link in the show notes. But don't treat your experts just like, hey, you're nothing more to me than a list of people that I want on my list. treat them like real people with whom you want a relationship. Also, hashtag mental health spirals might happen. It's okay, it happens. Sometimes you just have to have what I call the big girl breakdown, or the big guy break down. Okay, try to have someone on your side to pull you out of it, or do what you need to do to get the tools to pull yourself out of it. Because it's a really classic form of self sabotage, and an expression of fear. And the last thing we want is for you to go through all of this stuff, all of this effort and energy and all the hard but worth it stuff we just talked about, and sabotage yourself when you get close to the finish line.

Jennie Wright 37:50
Absolutely. We've also added a whole bunch of episodes to the resources section for this absolute like this episode. So go and check it out. It's at System to thrive.com, forward slash 66. So that's the number six, six, to get all of that it'll all be there for you. I want to actually mention that on episode 68, we're going to be talking about this information overload thing. So if you're listening to all these episodes, and you want to launch a summit, we want you to listen to the next episode that we're doing just also in line number 68 to get you out of the learning only mode and into the doing mode. So go and check that out as well. If you're listening to this and you're enjoying what you're hearing, please do follow this episode are so this podcast so that you can catch us anytime that we're actually sharing these we've got lots of great content coming your way. And we wouldn't want you to miss it for the world. We also have an incredible way that you can get some really good content happening for your business struggling with figuring out what to write things to sort of start off a blog post or an email or a post on social, go get our content generator. If you go to System to thrive.com forward slash content. I always screw that up. But I think I got it right this time. You can go and grab that 128 content starting generating like it's a content starter generator, pop your information in and it will actually pop out great starts for different types of content that you can write for your business. So go and check that out. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back again soon answering another big question.