Pod Insights The $100 MBA Show MBA2687 Q&A Wednesday: What's The Fastest Way To Make Money? About this episode Looking for a way to earn real income fast, without waiting months to build a product or launch a service? If you're tired of the usual advice and want something that delivers results this week, this episode is for you. This week’s question comes from Darren, who asked about the quickest way to make money outside a regular paycheck. Omar shares a surprising strategy that most people overlook- one that’s simple to execute, doesn’t require a big budget, and can start generating cash within days. You’ll get a clear, step-by-step guide to putting it into action, even if you’ve never tried anything like it before. Curious what the strategy is? Hit play at the top of the page to find out. You’ll walk away with a fresh, practical way to make money fast. To submit your questions, visit 100mba.net/q. Watch the episodes on YouTube: https://lm.fm/GgRPPHiSUBSCRIBEYouTube | Apple Podcast | Spotify | Podcast Feed Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Small business owners, listen up. You started your business, but you can't do it alone. And that means you have to hire people to help. That's where Justworks comes in. Justworks is the payroll, benefits, and global hiring platform to unburden your brain from all the complicated small business stuff. They handle the things you can't afford to get wrong, so you don't have to worry. So you can focus on the parts of running a business that you enjoy, knowing everything else is running smoothly. You don't have to worry when it just works. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first, but didn't live up to the hype? For example, I really wanted to love the show Mad Men. I really tried to watch it and love it, but it just didn't do anything for me. As a marketer and business person, the show was a little bit of a disappointment.
0:45 Speaker 00 Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great, like impressions. But then we don't see revenue. LinkedIn has a word for that: bullspend. Instead, you can get the highest ROAS of major ad networks with LinkedIn ads. Cut the bullspend, advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/MBAShow. Terms apply. What's the fastest way to make money? That's today's Q&A Wednesday's question from Darren, and I love this one because the answer surprises most people. It's not launching a course, it's not freelancing, it's not creating an app, it's none of these.
1:25 Speaker 00 One of the fastest ways, if not the fastest way to make money, is hosting an event. Stay with me. I'm telling you right now, this is one of the best ways to just understand how to make money outside your paycheck and build a viable business. I'm going to break it down step by step and how you can get paid as quickly as this week. Let's do it.
1:53 Speaker 00 Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to help you start, grow, and scale your business.
2:07 Speaker 00 Before we jump in, can I get 30 seconds of your time? We love guiding you on your business journey, and we want to help even more people build their dream businesses and lives. So if you could hit the follow button on this podcast app, it would be greatly appreciated. It's completely free, and it helps us out more than you know. Thanks. You see, events really flip the script. Instead of you chasing customers, you create something people want to be a part of. That's the beauty of events. People love to have a good time. We're talking about network mixers, dinners, or rooftop parties, meetups, industry roundtables, even destination trips, or events that you do overseas, or even within
2:49 Speaker 00 your country. You sell tickets first, you collect the money upfront, you don't spend a dollar until you lock in revenue. It's fun, it's energizing, and it's profitable, and it works fast. I've done dozens of live events, here in Sydney, in New York City, in cities that I've been to around the world when I travel. Every single time, I'm reminded, this is one of the easiest ways to generate cash. So one of the easiest things to sell, because people love having a good time, like I mentioned. I'm actually running an event, a Christmas party for entrepreneurs, called The Crazy Ones Christmas Party. And as I'm running and preparing for this event, and selling tickets to it, I'm again reminded,
3:31 Speaker 00 man, this is so easy, and it's so nice to sell something that people are happily looking to spend money on, right? They're just throwing money at the situation, throwing money at us, because this is sounds like a good time, it's gonna be fun, it's gonna be interesting, and people love to socialize. This is something that we learned in COVID, that people love to get together now, and see people in person, and just have a blast. But how do you pull it off properly? Let me show you exactly how to do this, so you can start next week, if not this week. Week, even if you've never done it before. The first thing you want to do is choose your event type. What would your ideal attendee absolutely love? And there's a lot of options out there. It could be just a fun networking event with drinks or nibbles, right?
4:15 Speaker 00 It could be a chill dinner with just 10 people in a nice restaurant with deep conversations. It could be a themed rooftop party with speakers and a DJ. It could be a hackathon where you build an app in one day or something, right? Or you work on your software in one day, whatever it might be. The point here is that it could be whatever you want, but you have to understand who your audience is and what is most likely to sell out. What I have found is a good mix of fun and purpose really makes it happen. So fun being that whatever you're doing, it's just like a good meal, a good time, activities that people are interested in doing. And good purpose, it could be as simple as just getting together with people they always wanted to meet,
5:01 Speaker 00 to network, to catch up with old friends, to just have a moment to enjoy being a business person or being an entrepreneur in my case, where I gather together other entrepreneurs. The key here is to pick something that feels exciting for you and the guests that you want to invite. And don't overthink it, okay? Just remember, people crave connection. Make sure it's fun, make sure it has purpose. That's it, okay? And you can start small with a little meetup if you want to. It doesn't have to be a full day event. It could be something that is very valuable, but maybe a short period of time or maybe a few hours, like a dinner. Now, we're going to talk about booking a venue next, but before that, in a bit, I'm going to talk about the cost of these events and how to price these events so that you, one, are making money,
5:45 Speaker 00 but two, it's easier to sell because you can afford to make it better. I'm going to explain it. But first, let's talk about booking a venue. This part is actually a lot easier than you might think, okay? You can call your local cafe, restaurant, hotel, rooftop, even coworking space, right? Tell them that I'm looking to bring 10 to 20 people, whatever number of guests you want to have on a weekday. Weekdays are a great time to have an event. A lot easier to get the space on the weekday. And people want to spend their weekends doing other things, or maybe with their family, or have other obligations. Another reason why the weekday is awesome is because most of these venues will give you
6:24 Speaker 00 the space for free, or for a small deposit, if you book a month or two in advance. Why? Because these venues need foot traffic, right? And often, if it's like a restaurant or a cafe, you're buying food from them, you're buying drinks from them, so therefore, they're happy to have you as a customer. You can take the space and they'll give you an area, some places have private rooms even. And as long as you are spending money there, they are happy. For example, Nicole and I are running the Crazy Ones Christmas Party for entrepreneurs here in Australia. And for our venue, we chose an entertainment park. Basically, an indoor facility that has like go-karts and mini golf and bowling and arcade
7:05 Speaker 00 games and all kinds of stuff. And they cater food and they have nice party rooms that you can use. The point here is that they're happy for us to use their space for free because we're going to be spending money on games and go-karting and food and all kinds of stuff. So we have the space to do the announcements and to get people together and to hang out because the venue is happy for us to spend money with them. Now, when you speak to the venue to book your spot, ask if they supply insurance. Some of them do. I would say most of them do. If they don't supply insurance for people that are in the venue, get event insurance. This is something you could do just one-off for one day. It's going to be very inexpensive. When I looked into it, less than a few hundred dollars. Sometimes, depending on the insurance company, it can be fifty to a hundred dollars.
7:50 Speaker 00 Pretty inexpensive. Also, ask about minimum spend and factor that into your pricing. How much money do you need to spend at the venue in terms of food or drinks or whatever it might be, in order for you to have the space for X amount of hours? These days, you can get an answer from the internet, an influencer, or AI in seconds. But when it comes to legal matters for your business or your family, a quick answer is not the same as the right answer. With 25 years of experience, LegalZoom knows how to start you off right. When you need a legal hand, visit LegalZoom. Go to LegalZoom.com to get started. LegalZoom provides access to independent attorneys and its law firm, LZ Legal Services. LegalZoom is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice.
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9:36 Speaker 00 Next, the numbers. If you take away anything from this episode, it's this one, okay? This point I'm about to make. Do the numbers before you invite a single soul. Open up a Google Sheet, any kind of spreadsheet, and list your costs. The food, the drinks, the venue, the insurance, the audio gear if you need to rent something. A photographer, maybe you want to get a photographer for the event. And then add, after all the costs, a 10% error buffer. You need room for error because there are things that are going to come up or things that you didn't factor in. And it's just good to have that 10%. So say, for example, all your costs are $1,000. Then make sure your budget is at least $1,100. You have a 10% buffer.
10:19 Speaker 00 Next, set your ticket price based on at least 50% profit margin. There's nothing wrong with even going higher, 100% profit margin. And I'm going to tell you in a moment why pricing higher is better for you and your attendees. But first, let me give you an example. Let's say your event will cost you $500 to run. Charge enough to make $1,000. That means 20 tickets at $75. Now, this is Just an example, but I don't recommend you sell tickets at a low ticket price. Okay, I think you should be running events at at least a $200, $300 mark to start with, even more if you can. Why? People pay for good experiences. Okay? People are willing to pay more money if it's a good experience,
11:01 Speaker 00 and you can't make it a good experience if you're not charging enough money. You hear what I'm saying? So say, for example, you want to set ticket price at $20 a ticket, right? And you're going to invite, let's say, 30 people. So that's $500 in revenue, right? So you can't spend much money out of that $500 to make a profit. Let's say, for example, you spend $250, so you're making $250, and you spend $250. What can you do with $250 for these people, for these 30 people? And remember, you know, a lot of the the costs, like the food and the drink, it's going to be per person. We got to make sure we factor that in and make sure that we have enough to make sure this experience is great for them. So if you want to have a great experience, charge a little bit more, and people are willing to pay if you're able to show the value.
11:46 Speaker 00 And you can't show the value if you don't charge more. So my advice is just go a little higher, charge $200, $300, $400 for a ticket. It's worth it if it's going to be like an amazing dig station dinner, for example, and you're going to have maybe some fun little party gifts that they're going to have. And it's a great curation of people, or it's in a beautiful location with a great view, and they're going to take pictures and it's going to be amazing, you know, Instagram post. The point here is that you need to be able to charge enough so that you can throw an amazing thing that's easy to sell. So once you've figured out the numbers, you're already halfway making money. Because if the numbers make sense, and you have enough money to make a profit, but also you're charging enough to make a great event, then you have a lucrative offer.
12:31 Speaker 00 And now it's time to collect that cash upfront. So how do you do this? How do you actually send an invoice or get money from somebody via email or via direct message? So what I recommend is using Stripe. Now, there's other platforms that are catered to events like Eventbrite, but Eventbrite charges like 10% fees. That means if you You sell a ticket for a hundred dollars. They're gonna take ten dollars out of every ticket. And that's a lot of money, okay? That adds up. And the reason why I say use something like Stripe, because Stripe has become very easy to use. Back in the day, it would just be like a developer tool. Now you can create products in Stripe easily and create payment links where they can just go to a page, put their credit card information, even play via Apple Pay and all that kind of stuff,
13:16 Speaker 00 and go ahead and buy a ticket. And you could charge tax and all that kind of stuff. It's very easy to create invoices in Stripe. Plus Stripe only charges 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction, which is very reasonable, much better than 10%. Now, keep in mind that if you're going to have some page describing the event, like a page on your website or a landing page of some sort, you're gonna have to do that on your own. Stripe won't do that for you. It's just payments. Eventbrite does have that ability for you to just create a simple page. It's not beautiful or anything like that, but it is a page that you can use. So if you are able to just create a simple page on your website or with a landing page software, that's super simple. And then you could just email people these invoices or these payment links via Stripe.
13:59 Speaker 00 Or you can just embed, create a button on the page and link that payment link to that button. Boom, they can pay for the ticket. Important thing here is that you want to keep it simple. You want to keep it mobile friendly. As soon as someone says, "I'm in", you want to send them that link. So I like to run my events via email. So basically, what I do is I send an email to the people I want to invite and say, "Hey, we're doing this event. You're invited. You're one of the cool kids and we want you to attend." The first thing we do is we send them an RSVP form, which is basically like a Google form. And they fill out the form just to say, "I'm attending, dietary restrictions, you know, maybe ask a couple of questions about who they are." And then that's it. We just fill in the form. Now we know that they want to attend.
14:42 Speaker 00 Once I have that RSVP form filled out in Google Form, we email them an email with the payment link. We just say, "Hey, thanks for RSVPing. Here's the payment link. Make a payment within seven days." And that way, we're collecting money before we even spend a dime with the venue or with the event itself. You don't need to chase money. You just Start collecting it. That's the beauty of events. Now, you gotta deliver on your promise. In order for this to be a viable thing that you do over and over, you need to deliver on this event. You need to make sure that this thing shines, that it feels elevated. One of the reasons why it's very easy for Nicole and I to sell tickets to any kind of event is because we have a track record of running great events.
15:25 Speaker 00 Every time we run an event, it's fantastic, they love it, and they just are so happy to get that email when they're invited to the next one. So when you run your first event, you gotta make sure you knock it out of the park, even if it means you're gonna take a little bit of a profitability hit. Be profitable, but maybe be 60% profitable instead of maybe 90% profitable for the first one, so that you can really over-deliver, so that you make your life and job easier the next time you run an event. Here are some tips. Send a prep email before the event with what to expect and who's attending. So I like to send an email out to all the attendees, maybe about two weeks before the event, just saying, "Hey, we're excited. This is what's gonna happen."
16:10 Speaker 00 Set expectations. Give a schedule. Tell them what they need to bring, or pack, or do beforehand, so they're not surprised. The other thing is that you gotta remember that people need reminders. Don't just send one email. Send several reminder emails. I would say at least three emails leading up to the event. Have a clear flow. One of the things that Nicole and I like to do at these events is have what's called a run sheet. And a run sheet is basically like a to-do schedule of what we need to do as the people that are running the event, step by step, from check-in, when they come in and, "Okay, check their name. Yep, you've paid and you got a ticket." Introducing people. How are we going to make sure that we facilitate this whole thing without a hitch? So like, if we need to give out prizes, who's gonna hold the prizes?
16:54 Speaker 00 Who's gonna give it out? Who's gonna give the speeches? Who's going to make the announcements? Who's going to take care of the food? Who's gonna make sure the caterer knows where we are? All that kinda stuff. You wanna, all the behind-the-scenes things need to be kinda listed out and written down. So when the day comes and you're running the event, you're not scrambling. You know exactly- What's happening in what order and who's doing what? I also recommend including little surprises, or at least one small surprise, like a small parting gift, an unexpected dessert, or maybe a handwritten card, a thank you note for attending. And always follow up. The next day after the event, send a thank you email and include a Google form for feedback. Include a link to Google form. Get some feedback
17:38 Speaker 00 so you can improve upon your event next time around, or any event in the future. And ask if they'd like to attend the next event or be invited to another one. Another thing we do is we ask them, hey, who do you think would be great as an attendee to another event that we do in the future? Who do you think would love something like this? And then we just add them to the next guest list. That last step, the thank you, the feedback and getting referrals, it's how you build reoccurring cash. It's how you can build this event's business, really, where you can continue to offer great experiences to your attendees. Now, we don't run events full time, but you can. You can do this as a full time business if you want. But we do it as a side thing
18:21 Speaker 00 to raise money for a charity that we support called Hands Across the Water. Hands Across the Water helps children have a life of choice and not chance by giving them food and education and shelter and safety so that they can have meaningful lives. And we try to raise a certain amount of money every single year. This year, we're trying to raise $10,000, and that's why we're running this event. We're so happy that we've sold enough tickets so that we can hit that milestone and be able to make that donation to Hands Across the Water. But I'm mentioning this. I do this on the side. I've learned a lot through the years by doing it. But you can make this a full time thing. Let's run some numbers, for example. Let's say you run a dinner for 12 people and the restaurant has a fixed menu. The cost will be $600. The room hire is zero
19:06 Speaker 00 because they'll give you the room and the table because you're at a restaurant. Let's say you get insurance for $50 because there's only 12 people. You have $200 for small gifts as a parting gift. So the total cost for this event is $850. You charge $300 a ticket for this. Exclusive dinner that's $3,600 in revenue. You make $2,750 in profit in one night. Now, if you do this monthly, that's $33,000 a year. You do this weekly, it's $143,000 a year. Right? And that's not factoring in any kind of upsells or bigger events you do later, or trips that you want to do as an event coordinator. This is something that you can really viable do. And it's a great way for you to get your feet wet in making money outside of your paycheck.
19:51 Speaker 00 Here are some bonus tips I recommend. I think that scarcity is one of the best things and easiest things to do in events because you can have limited seats. Like, for example, a trip, you're only going to take, you know, 16 people or 12 people. And we did this with our Oskan event where we took our good friends and entrepreneurs to New Zealand. We went to New Zealand and we had a great time skiing and snowboarding and having wonderful meals for a week. And the reason why we kept it to a certain number is because the dynamic of the group just kind of changes when it's too big. And in order for everybody to get to know each other and spend enough time with each other, you can't be 30, 40, 50 people. It's got to be a dozen people or less. So the scarcity makes sense to say, hey, we only have 12 spots.
20:34 Speaker 00 As soon as they fill, it's over. Use photos from past events. I highly recommend you take as many photos and videos as you can at the event so that you can post on social because FOMO is a real thing, fear of missing out. Also, leverage your network. Ask two to three friends to invite two to three people they know. And of course, like I said, charge enough. $30 events feel cheap. And you can't do much with the money that you're going to collect from this event. So, you know, charge at least a hundred bucks. Try to go to $200, $300 so that you can create a special event. Also, if you're going to do trips like we did and they're going to travel, require travel insurance for these events, okay? Make them get travel insurance and send you their policy
21:18 Speaker 00 so that you know for sure that they're covered. And a quick reminder, get public liability insurance for events if the venue doesn't provide it. So, the fastest way to make money? You know it now, right? Create a great experience, something you would pay for, something that makes you say, hell Yeah, I want to go to this thing. This sounds amazing. And you sell tickets, you make money before you even spend a dollar. This is the dream business model. So it's a good way to get your feet wet and just taste what it's like to build something and then sell it to somebody. Make sure you deliver an unforgettable time. This is how communities are built. This is how movements are born. And yeah, you can go from zero to profit within a week. So give it a try if this excites you, if there's something that's up your alley.
22:01 Speaker 00 I've given you the whole playbook. Go ahead and execute. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. What I love about events is you choose a venue, you choose a date, and now you have a deadline. It forces you to get going, to not procrastinate, to do all the things you need to do to pull off a great event. People are counting on you. It's enough pressure to get you going and to get you off your rear end and make something happen. So if you need that kind of push, then you'll love running an event.
22:33 Speaker 00 If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow, and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast. Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's Apple or Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically, and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free, and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.
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