Small group workshops with a handful of attendees are one of the most fun, the easiest, and the most cost-effective ways to establish your credibility as a true expert. They allow you to get the message about what you do and how good you are in front of business owners, and at the same time provide real, usable and monetizable value to them.

For small groups, you don’t need a big meeting room. A hotel boardroom like the scottsdale meeting rooms or conference room that seats 10 -12 people can be secured for $150 – $200 per day, and other than printed handouts or materials that you provide them, there are no additional costs.

Some rooms are equipped with a wall-mounted big screen television. If you will be using PowerPoint slides or connecting to the internet, you won’t need a screen or projector. Another advantage to using a small room is you can eliminate incurring the costs and inconvenience of setting up and using a mic, mixers and sound system.

Conference or board rooms provide a more intimate, informal, and personal setting as opposed to the larger, more traditional seminar-type rooms, and positions you closer to your attendees so you can develop a more personal relationship with them.

One-Day Interactive Intensives

One of the most fun, effective, and productive ways to use small group workshops is to conduct a one-day interactive “intensive” for 12 local business owners. Each attendee is allowed 30 minutes. For the first 10 minutes, they tell the group the ONE thing that they are doing in their business that is creating the best results or success. The next 10 minutes are used to tell the group what their biggest challenge, problem, or sticking point is. And for the final 10 minutes, the group gives the person on deck ideas, thoughts, and suggestions that could help them fix, solve, minimize, or eliminate the problem they’re having difficulty with.

You price the workshop at $997 per person, and provide the room, give each attendee a few pages of handouts and buy them lunch. Your total expenses (other than marketing) should come to less than $600. You can do the math to see the profitability of this type of event. Not a bad return for one day of work, and because most of the input comes from the attendees, very little involvement or participation – other than moderating the comments – is required from you.

Now put yourself in the place of one of the attendees. You show up, tell the group about something that’s working in your business, let them know what you need help with and then take notes of the things they tell you to do to solve or eliminate that problem.

Let’s say there are 10 attendees… you and 9 others. You’re getting input from those other 9 business owners plus the organizer of the meeting (the consultant). Every one of them is focused on helping you solve your biggest business problem. It’s a sort of mini mastermind session.

These attendees are business owners with various levels of experience. They may have had a similar problem or challenge at one time in their own business, and they may see the thing you’re having difficulty with differently than you do. It’s difficult to put a price on the value of the help these business owners will give you, but surely it’s worth more than the $997 you paid.

Just by attending this group intensive, you’ve now connected with 9 other business owners who operate their businesses in or around your town. These business owners are just as interested as you are in finding solutions to their problems. By listening closely to others’ challenges and problems and offering suggestions, you have established a relationship and a bond with someone like you, and that relationship may continue well past the event. You may get together on occasion to talk about how things are going, and if it’s the right kind of business you may develop some joint venture or strategic alliance deals.

How You As The Consultant Benefits

Now let’s shift gears and look at this from you – the consultant’s point of view. You just had 10 business owners spend a day with you, helping them solve their biggest business problems. You not only had a pretty nice payday, but you connected with the attendees. They saw you in front of the room conducting the meeting and giving them additional ideas that could help them – ideas that they hadn’t thought of and had tremendous value. In their eyes you were positioned as THE expert.

Throughout the meeting, you occasionally “seeded” your other work and offerings. You might say something along the lines of, “That was a great suggestion, Britni, and it’s something that we really dig into in our 4-Week Workshop sessions because it has such a high potential for adding additional profits to your business.” Or you might say, “That’s one of the biggest challenges most businesses have, and when we work with our one-on-one personal consulting clients, it’s one of the first things we address.”

And you leave it at that. You’re not there to “sell” them on attending another workshop or a consulting arrangement. But you’re “occasionally” – not often, but once in a while – dropping hints or “seeds” that you do other work. Then if they’re interested, they can inquire about it.

Of course, at the end of the day, you’re going to give them an evaluation sheet that asks them what the biggest “Ah-ha” they got was, what they would like to have spent more time on, what they would tell someone else who might be considering attending and what additional help they would like from you.

This is a very easy way to not only get started, but to introduce yourself to other business owners in a beneficial and cost-effective way, and make yourself a few bucks as well.

A Sample Invitation Letter

Here’s a sample letter that you can use or modify to let others know about your event. Give it a try and let us know what your results are.
===========

Dear [First Name],

Because you’re a member of the [Name of Chamber / Group / Association / Organization], you are cordially invited to join a carefully hand-selected group of exceptional entrepreneurs and business owners in a closed-door, invitation-only 2 ½ day Business Explosion Mastermind.

(Alternate first paragraph: “Because you’re a client of [Name of JV Partner], you are cordially….”)

Unlike other seminars you might have attended, this event will not have you sitting in boring presentations and it certainly won’t be your typical “pump and dump pitch-fest” with multiple speakers trying to sell you something with every breath.

Instead, you’ll be actively taking part in a hands-on, lets-roll-up-our-sleeves-and-get-meaningful-stuff-done-that-will-make-a-significant-and-positive-impact-in-your-business session.

In order to ensure the ideal mix of entrepreneurs and business owners from a multitude of fields, and to create a truly remarkable, meaningful and positive-ROI experience for all attendees, consideration for admittance will be by application only.

The Business Explosion Mastermind will be significantly more intimate and more productive than any of our other previously sold-out events. Instead of the 100 to 150 attendees that we normally have, we are limiting this event to just 8 to 10 carefully selected attendees.

If you would like more information, go to: [YourSqueezePage]. (Or you can send them to your online calendar to schedule a time for you to speak with them.)

============

Obviously, you will change the name and the number of days for your event and any other information or details to make it fit your offer.

Don’t Limit Yourself To What You’ve Always Done

There are a number of workshops that you can offer to small groups such as Introductory Seminars; Executive Roundtables; CEO Roundtables; Lunch ‘n Learns; 4-Week Workshops; Build It, Keep It, Grow It Seminars; Build It, Keep It, Protect It Seminars; and Full Day or Half Day Consults.

Keep an open mind and always be on the lookout for new ideas, new things you can offer, and new ways of making your services available. Small group workshops are an excellent way to make one presentation to a number of people, provide them with valuable information that they can use and that will benefit them and their business, demonstrate your expertise, establish your credibility and authority, and generate leads from people who have just witnessed you in action. Good luck.