Make Room For A Summit (In Your Already Full Business) with Ashley Gartland

Wondering how you can possibly make time for a summit when your schedule is already full?

I've brought in Ashley Gartland to cover:

• 3 simple steps for making room for a summit without overwhelm
• common mistakes when trying to make time for your summit

I'll let Ashley take it from here!

Make Room for a Summit in Your Full Schedule

Adding a summit into your already full schedule is totally possible, but it's only possible if you make some shifts behind the scenes first, both in how you're working and how you're delegating, and how you're setting things up.

The only way you're going to get to that next level thing, like the summit or the big picture project that you're working on, is to make some changes behind-the-scenes first.

3 Simple Steps to Take

It's common to say that in order to fit in a summit, you're just going to really hustle the next few months and pull off this summit. But what happens is you end up burnt out and overwhelmed. By the time the summit comes around, you're almost sick of it and don't want to deal with it. It's hard to engage attendees and speakers the way you should at that point 

Create a Simplified Schedule

If you compared eight different simplified schedules that I designed with my clients, they all look different because we all have different styles of the way we like to work.

Some examples of schedules are:

• batch weeks- go deep and immerse yourelf on one type of activity for a week
• a little each day - work up to 1 hour each day to avoid overwhelm
• set aside 1 day - knock a bunch of tasks off your list with 1 day set aside per week

What that does is create a dedicated time so when you want to launch something like a summit or challenge, you've already got the space set aside in your calendar. 

How long does it take to plan a virtual summit? We recommend at least 90 days!

Outsource Tasks

The first thing I recommend is to enlist support. You don't need a huge team to pull this off, but there are a lot of tasks that go into hosting a virtual summit and one of the best ways to lighten the load is to outsource where you can. 

You can outsource as much or as little as you are comfortable with. 

The two biggest places I recommend outsourcing are:

1. Virtual Assistant (VA): Someone who is good with your main tech platforms, good with your audience, and who can follow a process and instructions quickly and accurately.
2. Designer: Someone who can make a sub-brand for your summit, if you want one, and make a whole lot of graphics and probably some PDFs as well. 

Get Clear on Your Priorities

It's important when you're doing a summit to get clear on your most important deliverables and what are the nice-to-haves.

One of the things I do when I do a big event is I do a brain dump of all the things that I would like to include in that event. 

To help, I like to create a:

• pre-event checklist
• during-event checklist
• post-event checklist

Some things on eachlist are must-do's and are essential to the summit, while others are saved if I have extra time and energy. 

It's important to separate the two so you don't spread yourself too thin trying to fit everything in. 

Streamlining Your Business After Your Summit is Over

After a summit, it's important to know what your baseline is and go back to it. That simplified schedule's a great place to go back to.

The first week or two maybe that time is used for debriefing and saying here's what I learned from the summit, here's what I want to do next time, and spending that time on it. And then afterward it might be moving to the next thing and getting yourself to whatever that next level goal is. And since you have your simplified schedule with time built in for that next goal, you will have time to get planning again! 

Ashley's Big Takeaway

This is totally possible for you! If a summit is something that you really want, set the time aside to do it. 

About Ashley

Ashley Gartland helps service-based business owners and online entrepreneurs simplify and streamline their business so they can grow to the next level without the overwhelm. She works with them on intentional business design, smart systems, team support, and focused growth strategies that allow them to work less and live more. 

Connect with Ashley on Instagram

Resources

• Episode 29: How Long Does it Take to Plan a Virtual Summit?
• Episode 85: What To Outsource In Your Virtual Summit
• Summit Host Process Map
• Summit Host Hangout Facebook group

View related episodes >>