Gig Inception (Results From Sponsoring A Major Conference)

Hey, what's up gigging pros! It's Jared Welcome to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. I'm so sorry for the delay between our last two episodes. And this one, it's been about a month since I've recorded an episode. And I feel bad about that, except I have had a very busy month. So long story short, if you rent a house, there is a risk that it will get sold out from underneath you. And then you'll have to find a new house within six months of moving into your first house. That's what I've been dealing with. However, that's not what today's podcast is about. This podcast is about what happened musically in this last month, which actually has been one of the most exciting times in my musical life, and has actually led to many gigs, one of which they're actually flying me from Denver, to Minneapolis, to play. And these gigs all came from one opportunity that I created for myself, that you can create for yourself, too, using the nonprofit strategy that I talked about several episodes ago. And so let's rewind just a little bit. As many of you know, I am a board member of Denver's National Association for Catering and Events - NACE. And I highly recommend you look to see if there's a NACE chapter in your area too. Because as a part of this, you know, being a part of NACE, I'd found out about this conference called MIC Meeting Industry Council of Colorado, which is a special organization that is the parent organization of NACE in a way, they conglomerated. NACE and MPI, which is Meeting Planners International, and all of these different groups of event planners and industry related folks. And so the MIC was having a conference in March, found out about that, because of NACE, I actually had to write some of the emails and a Facebook Instagram post about our sponsorship for MIT. And so I looked into it more discovered how powerful this conference would be, because it would be attended by all of these different events, industry, people decided to use my nonprofit strategy, where I offered had to sponsor this conference, I had reached out to them via email, at first heard nothing. So they call them followed up, because Persistence is key in this business, and said, Hey, I'm an electric violinist new to Denver. We'd love to sponsor the Meeting Industry Council of Colorado conference coming up here. Would it be possible to do that? The said they took a look at my website, saw my videos, they're like, yes, it'd be great for walk in music, walk in music, meaning as people are entering into the conference, they would walk into my performance on stage, which to me was perfect. So I said, Yes, we negotiated our sponsorship, which included my logos on their signage and shout out from the stage logo on their website, and mentions in their emails and social media and signed the contract. Which Yes, you can use a contract, even if you're playing for free. And they also gave me a free booth in their exhibit hall. So all in all, it was a great, you know, fair trade of services, I would say, because these booths alone, they were charging other people $2,000 To get, and I got it for free, which was awesome. I remember when I played, played on stage, I also played in my booth. And I had a couple other performance opportunities as being like reception type situations. And during all of these opportunities, I got people coming up to me saying their wedding planner or their destination management company, all saying, Yeah, you're awesome. We want to add you to our preferred vendor list to do this. By the way, we've got this corporate event coming up at the Sheraton in Denver. Do you want to play it is like, Oh, that's cool. Oh, yeah. And then the cool part, the Minneapolis thing, it came about because I received an email. By the way, I've probably booked like five or six gigs from this. It's been two or three weeks since this opportunity of the Minneapolis one came about because I got an email from somebody who said, Hey, I saw you play at the MIC conference, we're having a similar conference in Minneapolis and gotten the entire nation space. And I loved your performance so much, that we would love to have you come and play for our students. Let me know what your pricing is. We'll pay for airfare hotel, and I can't wait to have you. I thought that was so cool. This will actually be the first performance of mine where somebody's flown me out to do this. So I'm excited. I've never done this kind of thing. I have to figure out the logistics of equipment, which if any of you have experienced with that, shoot me an email JARED@BookLive.com. We'd love to know your experience about that. Or shout it out in the Business Tips For Gigging Musicians Facebook group, I want to know your experience about flying with equipment. And probably. So what's most likely going to happen is they have on site, AVE. So they hired a company to run the sound for the entire conference. And so I'll be able to hook in my system to their sound system, I don't need to bring speakers or rent them if I were to rent them. But I do have like my wireless setup, and effects processors and the backing tracks that I play with as an electric violinist who plays with backing tracks. So I got to figure that stuff out with I'm sure I'll I'll just pack up that stuff in my suitcase, put some clothes around it, and then bring it on the day of me make it easy on myself. So we'll see. But all of this came because I played at the MIC conference. And another thing that came out of this was there is another group, in addition to NACE called MPI, I think I mentioned this before Meeting Planners International, which is more corporate. And the president of our local Denver chapter, reached out to me saying, "Hey, we're having an MPI Gala, in June. And we would love to pay you to play that too". And I met with her chatted about the opportunity. And I was thinking, you know, it'd be awesome to go for the low hanging fruit, the cash grab of, you know, 1000 bucks for the gig or something like that. However, what's more impactful for me, even just based on my experience at MIC, it's what if I sponsored the gala? So here's the strategy again. It's kind of like Inception, you know, sponsoring your gig from a sponsored gig. And I said, Let's do this. I will sponsor it. And we'll get my logo, signage, email, shout out, social media shout out and all that. And I'll play the gala. And she accepted. And that is, we're still working on the contract details for that. But that is going to be another amazing gig opportunity that will lead to more do you got opportunities from this sponsorship strategy. So I can't wait for the snowball to happen. It's already happening. Very excited. And yeah, I'm also really excited to get back to recording these podcasts regularly. Cool. So that being said, I'm going to wrap up today's podcast. And I did want to encourage you, if you're not sure how to get started in the high paying gig scene, the first thing you have to do is identify where these gigs happen. Because they do not happen at your local bar. They have not happened at your local restaurants or club. They happen at private event venues, like hotel ballrooms, convention centers, that's where this MIC happened. They also happen in big ballrooms like wedding venues, which don't just host weddings. But the first step is identifying where those are, and then reaching out to them. Similarly in the way that I reached out to MIT to sponsor but slightly different strategy. So if you want to get a list of all these venues in your area, I have a list available to us over 11,000 venues across the United States. And that is available at FulltimeMusicAcademy.com/venues F U L L T I M E Music academy.com/venues. So check that out, grab yourself copy, and then let me know if you were able to use it which I'm sure you will get yourself some high paying gigs here. Alright, thanks for tuning in to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Remember, "You are just one gig away!".