Building a Support Team for Your Seminars

Today’s question comes from Rona, and she asks “How do you build a team of people for your live events?” I am going to share with you the logistics and the aspects of that.

There are seven specific roles that have to be done at every event. It does’t matter if the event has five people in it, five thousand, even five hundred thousand, there are always seven things. These seven roles may have twenty other employees or volunteers underneath them but there are seven main things. The first one is the administrative services coordinator. This is the person that basically sits down every day, imagines everything that could go wrong, and then spends the whole day to make sure that none of that happens. They are the real detail oriented person making sure that everything is in place. Many of the other titles may actually look up to that person or are even organized by that person. The next thing we have is the registry/registration coordinator. A registration coordinator is the person who is in charge of making sure that there is the same number of seats in the audience as there is the number of people in the registrations, they should know how many people showed, how many didn’t show, and they should be able to have all the contact information or call people if they’re missing.

The third one is the PA or the Personal Assistant to the speaker. I call this person the speaker shadow. The speaker shadow is the person who is literally an arm’s reach away to the speaker at any given time; during breaks, even during the seminar. They literally sit there for the whole seminar and do nothing other than wait for the speaker to say “Uhh, I need some water” or “Uhh, I need some Red Bull because I’m starting to yawn” or “Uhh, I got to go pee, escort me through the group”. The next one is product sales, if you are selling things at your event, you want to make sure that when people attend the event they have some way to take a piece of you home. It will reinforce learning and space repitition. It might be a whole group of people but you want to make sure is that person has some experience in sales training. The next one is your AV Coordinator. You have to have somebody who runs the sound. You don’t want to be doing that yourself.

The next one is security. So for example, if you are selling stuff, that person has to be able to escort whoever is in charge of the money back to their hotel room or out to their car to make sure that they stay safe. That person might actually take the funds every day and protect them and give them to you directly. They can also service security for you if you’ve got some stalker that’s there I suppose but generally I always tell people that if speakers have body guards, they are usually pretty full of themselves. If you’ve got an audience of ten thousand, you have to have a body guard, you have to have security there. If you are speaking to a couple hundred people, get over yourself; you don’t need the security, and if you do, you’ve pissed off a lot of people; not the best speaker. The next one is the event manager. They are the boss of all the other six roles and they’re the boss of you. Make no mistake; you should never be in charge at your own events because if you are, people will skip all those in administration and ask you to do special favors. You want to look like the nice guy and so you are probably going to sit there and make policy changes.

You need to have somebody who is your boss and has the authority to tell you what to do and tell you to shut up and “Nope you cannot do that, that’s not allowed, alright?” We speakers always get a little bit out of hand there. If you want to find out more about these, let me share with you where to go, I already wrote up a whole chapter on this inside my free living eBook called “The Professional Speaking Secrets of Topher Morrison”. You can get that at www.bulletproofspeaking.com. This is chapter twenty in the eBook. It’s there, it’s free and also in addition to this, in the eBook we have a product that we sell for $29 dollars, and I call it my seminar management toolkit. It has every single one of these roles with a pre-flight, a flight, and a post-flight checklist to make sure that these people that are working for you do everything that they’re supposed to do. You might only have one person do all seven but at least they need to know what hat to put on at different times in the seminar. Depending on the size of the group, you’ll need more than one, two, or three people to help you out and they need to split those roles up.

Go to www.bulletproofspeaking.com, sign up for the free eBook. You will get a write up on all of these different details and everything that you need to know about them and you can get the toolkit as well. If you are a member of my Bullet Proof Speaking Membership site, inside the chapter it’s free! Good deals there as well. Also, if you have a question on professional speaking, ask me! Here’s what you do; go to facebook.com/professionalspeaking. Make sure to “like it”, and watch the free videos there, and leave your question; any question that is asked on Professional Speaking Facebook page, I am going to answer for you. Until next time take care. Dare to dream and make each day an epic adventure.