Opportunity Cost at Events.

This is a story about Jim. Jim wants to meet marketers looking for work and his friend tells him to go ICON17, a large small business conference put on by Infusionsoft. He vouches that theres going to be hundreds of marketers there. I mean, of course there are. It’s a gigantic small business conference. Long story short, Jim goes and makes a few connections that doesn’t lead to anything.

Little did Jim know, there was a small meetup at a coffeeshop just a few miles up the road that had 4 marketers looking for work. There was no way Jim would have known about it and if he would have, he still would have gone to ICON. More people = better chance to meet who you’re trying to meet, right? Nah.

This is our problem.

There is no system for Jim to know about that meetup and that his ROI would have been higher by going to that versus going to ICON. It costed Jim 3 days and $700.

Our problem is that we go to events for all the reasons that are visible to us, (Speakers, name, people that we know who are going, company throwing it, etc.). Obviously, we can only see what is visible so we use our best judgement when deciding what events to go off of by using these indicators of potential ROI for us.

That meetup wasn’t visible to Jim. There was no way he would have found it without some digging. Even at that meetup, those marketers sure aren’t visible. Sucks for Jim. Hey, sucks for you too. You know that happy hour you went to the other night because you were looking to make some friends in the ecosystem ? (roll with me for a second)

There was actually a “New to AZ” event that same where there were 16 people that were looking to meet another friend, 7 of them had two hobbies in common with you, and 3 of those 7 were passionate about improving AZ Education, just like you. Does that guarantee that you’d make a friend at the “New to AZ” event…nope. Does it raise the chances? Yep. But you went to the happy hour, where you got a little too tipsy and took some regrettable selfies with people you’ll never see again…and you will never know the night could have ended with a few more friendships. See why you needed that hug?

You never know what you’re missing out on….you never know your opportunity cost is when you go to this event versus that event. If only there was a way to quantify it….