Rich Brooks

I went to the Westin last year because I've always wanted to.

We just got our Westin here in Portland, Maine.

And I always wanted to have the event in town because this is just outside of town.

But like you were kind of hinting at, they said, yeah, that's not a problem.

But we can only have 200 people in here and you're going to have to book 100 rooms.

The rooms were going to be about $300 a piece, and I had to basically take about 75% of their rooms.

I mean, it was going to be like $20,000, $25,000 right off the bat.

And that was before food.

And before marketing and anything else.

So it was a non-starter for me.

Maybe if you're in New York, maybe if you're in LA or Boston, it's a different story.

But I know that most of my attendees are local.

90% of people live within 50 miles of this conference.

So for me, that didn't make any sense because they weren't going to rent any rooms out.

So that was kind of a wash for me.

But there are other places.

I mean, you can start building your audience in something as small as like a room in the library.

You know, I actually taught a beta class on how entrepreneurs can put on live events last year.

And some of the people were starting with 12 or 15 people, but those were the exact kind of people that they wanted to be in front of to grow their business.

Exactly.