18 days, 3 live events—here’s what I learned

A Better Way To Do A “Free With Your Purchase” Live Event

I’m writing to you from an AirBnB in Cleveland that is so AirBnB it looks like it dressed up for Halloween as an AirBnB. Every design flourish in the room is lemon yellow, down to the salt and pepper shakers. Whoever designed this place definitely has a cursive Live Laugh Love sign on their mantle.

I can’t wait to be back in my tastefully decorated living room where there is nary a yellow knickknack in sight. 

Last night was the close of a 3-day Transformation By Design event with XCHANGE (affiliate link), the organization I’ve been training with all summer. It’s been years since I attended one of these events – by which I mean, the kind of event that comes with an online training program. 

I had my skeptic’s goggles firmly attached to my face

Every “free with your purchase” event I've been to in the past followed the same formula. The attendees in the room usually have the same goal—start a membership, course, etc. The program’s top affiliates get speaking spots. There’s pitching throughout, panels of success stories, and often a special VIP lunch for people who buy whatever is being sold, usually for upwards of $7K, with incentives for people to buy while they’re inside the container of the event (and drunk on possibility), before they have a chance to check their P&L or consult with others who will be affected by their financial decisions. You know, your classic “run to the back of the room” type stuff, even when those words are not explicitly spoken. 

Six years ago I hosted an event exactly like that. It was the beginning of the end of my girlboss empire.*

…so you can understand if I entered the room three days ago in a thick suit of armour. Even though XCHANGE has consistently proven that, as an organization, they are not like other girls, my walls were up. While I ached for a different experience, I didn’t know what it would look like or feel like. 

XCHANGE’s 3-day event broke the paradigm, while also building in familiar sales strategies that we know work, but in a consent-based way. (← This is exactly what I teach about persuasion: You still need it to sell. The trick is to use persuasive sales strategies in conscious ways that gently encourage a decision without shutting down critical thinking.)

For starters, there were zero keynotes. 

We spent more time talking to each other than we did listening to the person at the front of the room. This is a fundamental of the XCHANGE approach, which is to make connection time the main event rather than relegating it to something that happens between the breaks. 

There were also long periods of silence, where we got to work heads down on whatever was needed—lots of people designed their events and retreats, while others might be working on a mission and values, or sketching out the bird’s eye view of their whole business. 

The post-its and coloured markers provided for this purpose were next level. Yumm.

We had two hours off for lunch every day. 

I was not the only one who brought a packed lunch to eat in the grass outside Case Western where the event was hosted, watching people through frisbees in the football field. During those long breaks I met many people building completely different businesses—from improving the worklives of careworkers at hospice centers, to communication among Montessori teachers to running corporate leadership events. It was broad and beautiful. It reminded me how much diversity strengthens a room, and how much is lost when every person in the room is trying to do the same thing. 

The day three sales lunch was available to anyone interested in hearing about XCHANGE’s suite of programs. I signed up because I want to keep working with this organization, and also because I wanted to see their sales strategy, which I rightly suspected would be consent-based. Even before I could sign up for lunch, I was reminded about the prices of the offers they would present. Upvote for pricing transparency, which is a huge part of consent-based selling! 

Not only was the lunch delicious, there were papers on all the tables with the programs and pricing right there in front of me. I kept waiting for the “sign up while you’re in the room and save three thousand dollars” part but it never came. A forthcoming price hike was mentioned as a likely possibility sometime soon but no specific date was given. 

One thing I didn’t foresee was how much I would feel different in this new paradigm. Who am I when I’m not showing up as the girlboss everyone wants to be? (Or boyboss or theyboss or whatever—this isn’t about gender.) Who am I in a room full of PhDs and corporate consultants, people who have never heard of The Amazing and Famous Tarzan Kay? What is my value if it’s not measured in dollars and followers?

I found there was space for all of that, including the not knowing. 

I used my silent design time to try and put some of the pieces of myself and my business back together, pieces that were blown apart by grief. I found that the foundation underneath me is much more solid than I thought. The event host Jon Berghoff asked me to present my design to the room, which led to me closing out the event by singing an original song to two hundred people.

It was an unforgettable moment for everyone in the room.

I’ll have to save that story for another day tho. 

In October I’ll be talking a lot more about XCHANGE and the work I’m doing with them (affiliate link), but I’ll leave it here for now. It’s incredible to have found an organization who stumbled on a consent-based approach to marketing simply by making decisions that naturally align with what they teach. 

I’m taking notes! ✍️

And – unrelated note – I promised a breakdown of my mastermind promotion but this month has been so, so busy: three events in three weeks!! I’m tired and sick as fuck, basically bathed in green mucus and living exclusively on calories from cough syrup. 

That’s coming. We’re closing enrollment in Wisdom Circle today, and the group is just WOW. What an honour to be leading such smart humans. 

Thank you thank you thank you. 

‘Till next week,

Tarzan

Tarzan Kalryzian [she/they]
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*Please don’t hold me to every single word I said in this blog post, which was written five years ago. A lot has changed, including me. But this post does have an excellent bullet list of what to watch out for in live events.