Recently, we ran our biggest and most successful Business Blueprint Conference ever after more than 13 years of running events. This was especially at the back of the toughest time ever, COVID. We’re really proud of this achievement and later in this article, we’re going to share seven things that we did to successfully get through COVID and come back bigger and stronger than ever.
But before we share those things with you, here’s a video that we recorded during our most recent conference, so you can see what it was like and experience the magic that happened during all 4 days.
1. Stay positive
Whenever there’s a crisis, it’s easy to let fear and negative thoughts creep in. But despite all the challenges, it’s really important to make sure that you stay positive. Constantly thinking about worst-case scenarios won’t help you to navigate challenging situations and move forward.
As the saying goes, “Negativity is the enemy of creativity.” If you want your business to thrive in times of crisis, it’s important to maintain a positive outlook. If you’re filled with self-doubt and negativity, these thoughts occupy your mind and leave little room to think of ways to move your business forward. Keeping a positive mindset can help you to develop the resilience you need to handle tough situations and bounce back more rapidly.
As a community, we’ve gone through a lot of changes in the last couple of months. These changes have affected our team members and most especially our clients. But we constantly remind them that how we respond to the situation is what matters. So during COVID, we encouraged our team and our clients to keep a positive mindset and stay motivated.
2. Look for opportunities
“When written in Chinese the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.” – John F. Kennedy
Business owners respond differently when presented with sudden, drastic changes. Some carry on and run the business as usual, as if nothing happened. Meanwhile, others try to look beyond the crisis and take advantage of the situation, and this is exactly what we did.
Inside every crisis is danger, but there’s also the opportunity to innovate, create and grow your business. Instead of waiting for things to blow over, we looked for new ways to elevate the Business Blueprint program and help our clients survive the COVID crisis. We started by gathering the brightest business experts in Australia for a 1-day business workshop called ‘Conquer the Crisis’. It was one of our most successful online events ever. We had business owners all over the world attend this free training and gain insights from experts on how to navigate the new normal.
3. Communicate early and communicate often
During times of crisis, you want to be communicating as often as you can. The worst thing that can happen is businesses don’t communicate or under-communicate out of fear of upsetting their customers.
When there is a crisis of any kind, then you always want to be on the front foot. And even if you don’t know exactly what’s happening, tell people that you’re working on it. It gives people confidence that you are proactive, that you care and that you’re finding solutions to their problems.
Here at Business Blueprint, what we did is we doubled down on our communication efforts during COVID times. We were sending out messages every day to our clients with updates and information and useful things that they could be doing in their business. But now we dropped that back down to once a week. But during COVID, we over-communicated rather than under-communicated.
4. Add massive value
During challenging times, we want to make sure our clients know that there is help at hand. So we launched brand new project initiatives that added massive value to our clients. Prior to COVID, we ran one event every fortnight. Then we levelled up to running an event five days a week.
We had a crisis hotline that we called “Panic2Plan” where clients would get access to our coaches for one on one conversations to help them. Our founder and CEO Dale Beaumont even made himself available to personally coach clients one on one, which he’d never done before.
Plus, we invited experts for our clients dealing with mindset issues. We also did extra events in terms of life planning and business planning, and also how to deal with the emotional stress of the situation.
In short, we’ve found ways to more than almost double the value of our program without having to raise our membership price.
Fast forward to today, since we’ve now come out of COVID, we eased back on many of those deliverables. However, there has been a number that we have kept like our weekly workshops and coaching session with Dale. So out of this crisis have come some amazing opportunities which are now an integral part of the Business Blueprint program.
5. We moved online
When COVID happened, we were forced to move everything online, which was a major blessing. Not only did it mean that we could attract clients that we’d never been able to reach before, such as in the country, rural areas or overseas. But it also enabled us to deliver more events to our clients than ever before.
One of the many online events we ran was “The Ultimate 1-Day Marketing Bootcamp”. This breakthrough event was designed to help business owners create their own marketing plans and bring in hundreds or even thousands of new leads every month. We even produced a brand-new document called “The 5-Page Marketing Plan Template” exclusively for this workshop.
Plus, we launched not just one but five free on-demand trainings. These training videos were created to answer our clients’ biggest business struggles like sales, marketing, hiring and managing staff, systems and leadership. If you want to watch or learn more about our on-demand online training, visit our Training page here.
These online events then opened up lots of doors and opportunities for us to help business owners transform their businesses. Although we have moved back now to lots of in-person events, we’ve kept many of our online events so now we truly have the best of both worlds.
In fact, just recently we organized our biggest, most successful hybrid conference ever! Knowing some of our clients will be unable to come, we decided to give them the best of both worlds. We live streamed the four-day event which meant we had to set up three breakout rooms going at the same time and our clients were able to enjoy the conference either live or in person without having to miss anything.
Our most recent conference brought together more than 320 in-person attendees and over 100 virtual participants. Plus, we put together a stellar lineup of world-class speakers and mentors including Maz Farrelly, Siimon Reynolds, Joe Pane, Dan Gregory and Katrina McCarter.
As if that wasn’t enough, we organized an epic party with the theme of Monaco Millionaires. Everyone dress up in style and danced the night away! Watch the video above to see for yourself what’s it like at a Business Blueprint Conference.
6. Build systems
After every winter, there is always spring, and we knew this spring would eventually come. And when it did we want to be ready so we thought what can we do during the winter?
With the new online events and initiatives we’ve implemented to enhance the program, we knew exactly what we need to do next — build more systems.
Some business owners tend to think of building systems as a “one and done” project. However, as your business continues to grow, you must refine your systems and work on them and take them to the next level.
So what we did is we assigned each team member to create five to 10 systems related to their work. So when we started to come out of COVID we had more than 150 new systems, which dramatically improved our efficiency.
7. We backed and supported each other
Amid the global pandemic, every single person on the team had struggles and times when they felt down. With all the lockdown and work-from-home set up, we knew that this new way of working was going to affect our team’s overall wellbeing and so we just rallied behind every team member that’s struggling and ask what can we do to help, what can we do to support and we did. We helped and supported each other. Then when that person bounced back, they were in a position to help other people as well.
As much as we want the pandemic to end, the effects of COVID will be with us for some time. There will be more disruption in the future and if you want your business to survive, you must adapt and find new ways to do business and add more value to your clients.
Here at Business Blueprint, we are so proud of our clients and team members for showing up with energy, passion, and commitment and constantly finding ways to transform their life and business despite going through the toughest time.
