Expat Creates LGBTQ+ Events and Community

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Hello, hello, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. This is your host, Chris Guillebeau. Here are a few comments from today's featured case study. I like this sentence.

It's actually two sentences. She said, "Unless you are literally on your deathbed, "you still have time to make a change. "Even if you just try once, "you're already ahead compared to most people." I make this show for people who want to make changes. So if you're out there hoping to improve your life in some way, begin a new habit, stop doing something that's dragging you down, perhaps, or just explore your creative side, or of course just make extra money, all good options. But in all these things, you wonder, where can I find the time?

How do I fit this into my busy life? How can I accommodate the requirements for my job, my responsibilities to my family, but yet also do something for myself? Well, that's what Side Hustle School is all about. Now, as for today's story, she was living the digital nomad dream, but something was missing, and that was community. When she discovered there were no LGBTQ conferences focused specifically on women entrepreneurs, she made one.

It's now not only a conference, but also a paid mastermind group. So how did this come to be, and what did she learn? That's coming up in today's episode. Stay tuned. [Music]

Beck Power seemed to be living the digital nomad dream, building a diverse business from exotic places around the world.

She wrote an ebook for finding cheap flights. She dropshipped bean bags from China. Eventually, she ended up starting a content marketing agency called Power Creative. It was nice to make money while traveling, but like many a nomad before her, she started to feel like she was missing something. It's hard to build meaningful relationships when you move every few months.

So on a beach in Mexico, Beck realized that she had to be intentional about creating her own community. And before long, she had an idea. That idea was to start a conference. The idea lined up with her love for bringing passionate people together and her own needs. It seemed like the right way to move forward.

The only question was, who would this conference be for? Beck began to do some research and discovered that there was not a single event or community just for women entrepreneurs who identified as LGBTQ. This was the community she wanted and needed to thrive personally. So surely there were others out there who felt the same way. She called it Queer Hustle and set a goal for her first live event to take place in just three months.

Los Angeles seemed like a good location. The city was large and LGBTQ friendly. So Beck made a Facebook group and invited people she already knew who would be a good fit, six people to be precise. She then found and joined some other groups based in LA and started connecting. Her Facebook group grew to 30 people the following week 50.

Then some of them started asking for more specifics on the event she had mentioned and where they could go to purchase tickets. Beck started calling around to venues right away. It didn't take long to find one, set a date and pay the small deposit. From there, she built a simple website to accept credit card payments and added a few sparse details on her own journey. And that was it, it was pretty basic.

The lack of details didn't seem to be a huge barrier to her audience. Within a week, she had sold 10 tickets at $200 a piece. To her, this was validation. People needed the event. Beck is not afraid to say now that she developed delusions of grandeur.

She wanted the posters to be big and beautiful. She wanted really fancy name tags, sponsors, big parties, the works. She spent dozens of hours on calls trying to get everything perfect. But in the end, trying to do everything was just too much. You see, Beck is an excellent planner, but she's just one person and three months, which was now closer to two and a half was not enough time to do it all.

Fortunately, she didn't need to do it all. After a couple of weeks of scrambling, she realized she just needed to ace the essentials and then grow from that success the next year. Building an audience, setting up great speakers, selling tickets, and that was the foundation everything else was built on. And for this event, that's where she needed to give her focus. To generate buzz, Beck started to think outside the box.

She wrote some parody songs, performed them on her guitar and uploaded them. Those got her group a bunch of new members. She also visited the Facebook pages for other LGBTQ events in LA and invited people who had RSVP'd to join her own group. These unconventional tactics worked, and the group swelled in size to over 400 active members. Speaker commitments began to come through and other women asked if they could help, so Beck signed them up as volunteers for the day of.

Things were starting to look good. She had over 60 tickets sold, halfway to her goal of 100, and food. She had nearly forgotten about that. There wasn't time or money to hire caterers. A DIY sandwich bar seemed like the best idea, so she made a grocery list.

As the event approached, Beck hopped on a plane from Mexico to LA, checked into a cheap Airbnb for a couple of weeks, and started running errands night and day. The first Queer Hustle event was held with 78 attendees. As a first event, it had some stumbles. Not all of the speakers came through with great advice, and she says now that she could have vetted them better. And those sandwiches weren't a big hit with everyone, but the attendees loved being there together.

They were like-minded with shared experiences and a dream of building a sustainable business. The secret wasn't the workshops or name tags, it definitely wasn't the food, it was the community. At the end of the event, Beck launched the Queer Hustle Collective, a paid online community where people who were really engaged could keep the momentum going for $29 per month. That was two years ago. Since then, she's held another conference in New York City, launched a different paid mastermind group, and planned her 2020 event in Austin, Texas.

Total revenue is around six figures, with much of that going to fund the live events. It's still a side hustle in her eyes, but she's dreaming of the day it takes over her agency's income. The greatest reward for now is knowing she's found what was missing on that beach in Mexico, a supportive community, and a new role as the organizer. [Music]

Well, congratulations to Beck on that event, the community, the collective, the membership site, and so on, and I gotta say as a fellow event organizer, events can be tough, like events are hard. My number one advice to anybody who wants to run an event as a side hustle is go for it for sure, but don't build your financial plan on them.

Don't base your financial future on it. Use them as either a catalyst for something else, which is what Beck has done here with their membership site, or as a way to support/deepen relationships in an existing community. This is just because it's hard to have sustainable ticket sales. You can have a big success with one event. That doesn't mean that the next one's going to be a success as well.

It doesn't mean that people are going to keep buying tickets, and pretty much anyone I know in the event world will testify to the difficulty of it. It can be very rewarding, it can be a lot of fun, but it can also be stressful. I just wanted to make a note for anyone out there interested in that world of event planning. All right, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes, including links to everything I mentioned, are at sidehustleschool.com/1169, 1169.

If you've got a comment or question for the show, love to hear from you, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. Pretty simple. I'll be back tomorrow, so be sure you're subscribed. Thank you so much. My name is Chris Guillebeau.

This is Side Hustle School. [Music]

From the Onward Project.