If you're like a lot of entrepreneurs right now who regularly run in person live events, the chances are you're having to go virtual. In this video and blog post, I go through my entire setup we used for our very first virtual event and it was a massive success!
I'm going to be talking about one really major change that we've had to make to our ecosystem as a business, as well as what that means for our coaching clients as well.
Here at Youpreneur, we’re a business education company that focuses on helping people build profitable future-proof businesses that are based around their expertise, personality and the people that they want to serve so ultimately, they’re personal brand business owners such as: authors, coaches, speakers, content creators and anyone really building a business based around them and their tribe.
IT’S TIME TO PIVOT
Now, part of our tribe are also coaching clients and normally we would love to be coaching our people in person, as that's what we've done for a long, long time – almost a decade! From six to twelve people around the table for an entire day masterminding with each other, right up to our annual Youpreneur Summit which takes place in London, England, every November where we have over 300 people from all around the world flying to London to spend a weekend, learning, networking and masterminding with each other.
However, because of everything that's been going on, we've had to make some changes and very recently we decided that we didn't have much choice in the matter and that we were going to have to take our April Youpreneur incubator mastermind day, which would have been in person in London and turn it into a virtual event instead.
Many of our coaching clients even said it was better in a virtual setting over an in person one for a number of different reasons! The team and myself put a lot of time and energy into preparing the setup to ensure we could show up for our customers, just the same virtually as we would have done in person.
THE TECH SETUP
To start off the day, we actually had a lot more stuff out on the desk like extra monitors, iPads, messaging devices, phones and microphones etc. that ended up being removed after the first morning session as it was just overkill and we didn’t need it.
The first thing I did was bring down an extra 48-inch TV so that I could have a bigger view of all the attendees. To do this, I connected an HDMI cable to the laptop and used an attendee link so that I could have the same view as everyone else tuning in.
We also used a Rode Procaster Production Studio and of course, you don’t need to go super pro like this with this device, but we use it already for recording podcasts and it’s great as it has lots of presets for things like music, stingers or intros. It also includes all the different levels for when you bring in guests on your podcast etc. It retails for about $600, so it’s not cheap, but I think it’s something people are going to take seriously and start diving into.
The microphones we used are a Rode Procaster Dynamic Microphone, which retails at around $200 each, but the quality that you get out of them is just phenomenal! They’re dynamic microphones which means you need to talk directly into them to have that broadcast quality, but let me tell you, the difference is night and day, they’re just beautiful!
We also had a Neewer Ring Light for some extra ambient lighting as we get a certain amount of natural light in my office anyway, so it doesn’t need to be focused on us all the time. There’s lots of different settings you can use, so it’s great if you don’t have a lot of light coming into your room or just want to warm things up a bit.
I used my 27-inch iMac for my main screen as my Logitech Webcam sits right above it and I wanted to be able to see everyone right in front of me. I used my iPad Pro and live streamed it directly to the Zoom call so that I could draw on the screen with my Apple pencil to highlight any particular important details.
One other main kit I use on a daily basis are my Swanwick Blue Light Glasses. I usually wear them from about 4pm onwards to make sure I’m blocking out all blue light so that I can sleep properly. They’re great.
The last piece of real kit we used was just another MacBook Pro, but what we did was created two separate WhatsApp groups: one for comments and one for questions, and my wife pulled out any comments and questions from the Zoom chat box that attendees sent through. Those messages would then pop up on the screen right in front of me to enable myself to address each person individually and answer their questions or any topics they were struggling with. It worked out really well and it was a lot easier for me to answer everyone by doing it that way as the chat box moves so quickly.
That’s it! I hope this gave you a little bit of an idea as to how you can set things up for yourself so that you can run that live event properly, as well as obviously for the attendees to see that if you put in the effort, generally can be a pretty seamless operation!
Resources Mentioned:
- Swanwick Blue Light Glasses
- Rode Procaster Production Studio
- Rode Procaster Dynamic Microphone
- Logitech C922x Pro Stream Webcam
Chris founded Youpreneur® in 2015. He is a serial entrepreneur, keynote speaker and author of the bestselling books “Virtual Freedom” and “Rise of the Youpreneur”. He hosts our podcast, live events and coaches our clients inside the Youpreneur Incubator. Chris is based in Cambridge, UK.
