Scarcity Increases Demand

 This is an episode that has been on my podcast ideas list for over a year. It's funny to me that I was afraid in the beginning that I might run out of ideas to keep a viable podcast about cleaning. I was bad wrong as my list of ideas is over 200! I've been wanting to tell this story for a while and now is as good a time as any. In May 2019, I attended a conference called Growth Now hosted by my friend Justin Schenck. At this point, Justin's Growth Now Movement Podcast had over 2 million downloads. He built had a tight community that Justin brought together in Reading, Pennsylvania for a weekend. I found out about this conference from my friend Andy Storch. He lives in Orlando and said this. "Ken, I just interviewed this guy Justin for my podcast. Cool guy. He's having an event in Reading. You wanna go with me?" My response was this. "Reading! There's nothing in Reading except a Pagoda and outlets!" I yielded as the event was an hour from my house and Andy was flying in from Florida. I had no excuse not to drive 60 minutes if Andy was flying across the country! Not long after, Vincent Pugliese joined the fun and drove in from Pittsburgh. That turned Reading upside down with the 3 of us walking into this conference. I don't know what Justin was thinking inviting us! It was a fun event and it turned out that Reading was a much cooler town than I remembered. I'm only poking fun because my mom lived in the Reading area while I was in college. The 3 Amigos absolutely had a blast that weekend, plus we made the walk to the Pagoda for our epic selfie.  

Why am I telling this story? Something really cool happened during the conference. Vincent won a Tarantula for his son because he was the only one willing to go to the front and hold it. Yes, that happened. There's more. On Saturday morning of the conference, Andy Storch showed Vincent and I his phone. He had just sold his first ticket for his Talent Development Hotseat Event that was only 6 months away. Rewind... Andy has been a talent development product salesman for years. He moved from employed to self-employed in his niche and made major strides. In 2018, he started the Talent Development Hotseat Podcast with the strategy to use the podcast to pass the gatekeepers. People that were untouchable, unreachable to a sales pitch at large companies would bend over backwards to be interviewed for a show to showcase their expertise. This played on their ego and that is powerful. It was brilliant and the first time I'd ever seen anyone market a podcast like this. These interviews gave Andy great content and connections with other 100 influencers in talent development. Andy went all in at the start of 2019 and set a BHAG to have his own conference and selling tickets for $2,000 each. It was out there, but we rooted him on. When Andy showed us his first sale in May (5 months after announcing and planning the event), we were psyched for him. Andy then said. "That's 1. I just need to sell 49 more to cover the cost of the conference and 99 more to sell out and 6 months to do it."

Read the rest of this article at the Smart Cleaning School website