Interview - Brandon Vaughn

Brandon Vaughn is the CEO of CONQUER®, a company that helps service-based business owners discover how to have a fulfilling work-life balance through an automated and systemized business. He is also the founder and host of Home Service Super Summit, a Guinness World Record-holding event where business owners learned industry experts’ best-kept secrets on providing the highest-quality service, effectively managing employees, and successfully growing their businesses. 

There are not many world records out there to break as far as the size of events so I’m bringing you the best today to help you with your event planning. In this interview, Brandon shares how he successfully planned and executed the event, from contacting Guinness World Records, booking great speakers and sponsors, promoting the event, and finally, hitting the world record.

Having a passion for helping business owners in the home services space, Brandon decided to host a virtual event for his community. COVID was precluding live events at the time and people were starting to hold virtual events, but Brandon wanted to do something bigger than anyone else had done before – to get as many people to come in as possible. He called up Guinness World Records and set up a campaign to promote and sell his 4-day event with over 40 speakers.

Promotion is critical to achieving a high number of attendees so Brandon leveraged a lot of media buying campaigns to get the word out. They bought ads on Facebook and Google and partnered up with a lot of industry sponsors that support home service businesses and have large email lists. They also utilized a platform called UP Viral and other different viral campaigns to share the event with others. A critical incentive was that each registrant/viewer could get a Guinness World Records certificate with their name on it as an official participant of a world record-setting event. “It really incentivizes a lot of people to not only participate but also to go get others to participate in it as well, because the more people that they shared, the greater the likelihood was that we’d actually break and set the record.”

Zoom meetings didn’t allow bringing on tens of thousands of attendees at the time. Brandon worked with a company based in the UK to build a platform that could support a high number of attendees and would allow them a lot of different controls and functionalities like chat, commercial breaks, call-to-action buttons, and more. They also had a thermometer-style success gauge on their platform that went up to 100% when they officially set the world record.

Brandon’s approach for this event was to pre-record all of the sessions so that they didn’t have to rely on the live stream technology and worry about connection problems or servers getting overloaded. Since it was a 4-day event, they had to plan their script as well as the corresponding outfits they wore on the recordings and during the live event to make it feel like a seamless experience for the audience. “It felt produced even though it was stitched together.” When it comes to commercial breaks, their sponsors provided pre-recorded 30-second to 1-minute commercial breaks to interject in between sessions. It provided value for their sponsors who were paying to help produce the events.

Brandon recognized 3 things that made the secret recipe for the success of their event:

1. The draw of it being a Guinness World Record-setting event.

2. Anyone could come and attend for free.

3. Every single speaker and interviewee got to sell from the stage.

People got the opportunity to watch the whole event without spending a dime. Brandon shares that the great part about the event was that the viewers got to hear and learn from some of the world’s biggest names in business, in the comfort of their homes. Brandon also paid for a professional note taker who created an 87-page long PDF file containing the summaries of the sessions that their attendees could purchase and dispense out to their teams.

Brandon also made sure that the speakers got a good ROI on the 15-20 minutes of time they invested in the event. While the speakers are presenting, Brandon’s team provided a call-to-action button on the screen underneath the speaker’s video that linked directly to a landing page the speaker wanted. “It’s a way for them to get in front of tens of thousands of people in a captured format, plus the lifetime value of those recordings being watched over and over and over again in perpetuity.”

The event was very profitable for Brandon’s company. They had sponsorship revenue and $27-$67 upsells for the summary notes. They also had a percentage of people that opted into some of their coaching programs specifically designed for home service businesses. The level of production quality of their event and getting the Guinness World Record have brought good value for their business in the long term and opened up so many doors since then.

When asked about the most challenging part of the event, Brandon said every part of it was tough! Only two from his team were tasked to work on the event but they also worked with a contracted company with several team members. They spent a lot of time getting things done in advance so they could run lean during the event itself. Brandon said the most stressful part of the whole process was getting a lot of people to register for the event. They spent close to six figures in advertising to get people to come and attend the event but most people did not register until the last minute. They broke the world record on the very last day.

Brandon and his team are in the works to bring another Home Service Super Summit this year and it’s going to be more exciting! We’re talking about an amazing lineup of speakers, virtual happy hours, breakout rooms for mingling and networking, lots of prizes, and more. If you want to be part of this event and watch the sessions live, you can get your free tickets at www.homeservicesupersummit.com