Have you ever been to a business retreat at one of the most beautiful places in Sweden, Yes, that’s the DYFConf, Yasuragi resort at Stockholm. I have been to many conferences, but nothing comes close to the incredible experiences of DYFConf. Let’s address some questions here
1. Do you take a 12h flight to meet strangers?
I had a little bit of hesitation at the start to travel on a 12h flight to meet strangers, especially leaving my 1 and half-year-old princess, Yeah, of course, they are great people on their own. Put that hesitation aside and took a plunge, well it was one great amazing experience & worth it was an understatement. I just had a 12h flight, but we have got someone from Australia, which is 21h flight, you have to trust and leap forward. I have never met anyone in person or did even had any email communication before the conference, but Brennan & Kai have created an opportunity for me to connect with these people by setting up a slack for all the attendees of the conference including speakers, it helped me a lot.
2. You don’t get to hang out with speakers
Most of the conferences I went into speakers usually have a separate lounge, or they usually hang out with other speakers, but it’s completely different here, everyone shares the same conference room, same dining tables, same hot tubs :), so they hang out with you in all those places. Since there is no name badge at all for anyone in the conference it was a blessing in disguise. Started a conversation by introducing myself, if you are introvert like me, this is a perfect fit. Did I mention we did have attendees speak at our conference and present, in fact, one of those participant speakers shared a golden nugget of proactively help your existing clients to solve their business problem.
I have been to a conference where organisers distant themselves from attendees, of course, they have a lot more things to care about but still they could have hung out with people. Trust me Brennan asked everyone ‘what’s their biggest takeaway from the conference‘ personally to most of the attendees. Speaking to him, Nick, Jane & Laura, Jeremy, Reuven & Eric (among the speakers) been most fruitful to me.
Why you should be here next year
1. People
Without saying the quality of any conference depends on the quality of attendees. I have been once to such a private gathering, and this is my second time witnessing the abundant energy, smart and amazing people who care about you & your businesses. I had lot many conversations to know more about their goals & struggles, sharing my struggles and goals made a starting point for a lifelong friendship. Definitely, the star of the conference is the People.
2. If you care about your customers
If you care about your customers and their problems, they deserve an incredible five-star experience from you, right starting from onboarding to invoicing to ROI report and finally how you solved their problem. I certainly know that I don’t provide incredible experiences to my clients, but I am in pursuit now and should start implementing those.
Takeaways are personal to me 🙂
1. Set boundaries before and after engagement by Nick Disabato
I was too focused on our client’s businesses that I forgot to take care of myself and my business. Many of my past clients have used my vulnerability to their profit, but my other clients do take care of me when I needed them the most. So the first obvious thing from Nick’s talk that strike me was Setting boundaries before and after engagement with clients.
a. Set business hours – I don’t have business hours (I have worked till 3 am just to make sure everything was right in production server when the client don’t want to hire a server administrator) –
b. I have never restricted the number and time of the meeting, whenever client needed a meeting I obliged (another mistake).
c. Don’t be afraid to show them the door – I have never fired a client earlier (Not sure why! but did that first thing after I came from the conference).
d. Schedule Skype Video Call with clients (I was too shy to do a video call! Not sure it’s just me?!)
2. Give incredible five-star experiences to your clients by Laura Elizabeth
I work remotely with all my clients. Even though we have systems in place, I didn’t have any onboarding process in place or kick off process, all I had was just a delivery process which worked well with our clients but if I can incorporate onboarding and kick off process I am very sure they would greatly appreciate it. Laura is very generous enough to give away her client area templates and onboarding process cues for us. Oh, she iterated again the power of Video Skype call with clients. I should set that as a standard for calls.
3. 50% content creation, 50% promotion by Nathan Barry
I was just starting to build an audience and I felt his talk was tailor made for me. If you are like me just starting to build an audience you should follow Nathan. Nathan iterated that spending 50% of the time in creating content and 50% of the time in promoting it resonated with me a lot. Nathan insights on how to choose a topic, what to write and what to promote are useful for starters like me. I have zero subscribers and set a goal to reach 50 subscribers in 30 days!
4. Proactively help existing clients to solve their business problem by Matt Inglot
Rather than spending a huge amount of time in acquiring a client if we can spend a fraction of that time in getting to know our existing clients business problem and proactively reaching out to them to solve their problems would be a huge business change over. I have in fact used the same tactic and closed some 5 digit worth of work, Thanks Matt. It helps to build a long relationship with our clients.
5. What your sales website should do by Jane Portman
No one ever explains it better than Jane, your sales page should follow the framework of “Pain, Dream & Fix, Objections, CTA” I don’t think so it needs any more explanation that that 🙂
Oh did I mention that we have got super Mojca with her Dinosaur onesies sharing her actionable insights on how to acquire leads and increase conversion via Facebook adverts.
That’s quite a lot for me, but actioning each one of those. I have enjoyed the conversations with all of them, made new friends and yeah such a highly impactful experience for me, well I would attend next year conference as well 🙂 I think you should attend as well!
If you have attended the conference and would love to hear your thoughts on how your experience was?