SUBSCRIBE:

iTunes | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher

They need to actually put it out there, have people register, be getting paid for doing that work and then you know, they have a date on the books and now it starts to come through you, what needs to happen at the retreat.

– Darla LeDoux

Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Retreat and Grow Rich, The Podcast. I’m Darla LeDoux. I will be your host for this episode in our business model series. Our retreat business model series, where we’re specifically exploring all the different ways you can use live retreats in your business. As you know, if you’re here, we’ve been interviewing guests who use live transformational experiences in their business model in various ways, from big groups to small groups from front end to back end, and all the ends in between.  And in these episodes that I’m leading, I’m walking you through what we recommend and what I’ve learned about hosting and filling retreats and creating a profitable retreat-based business.

Today’s episode is about your Rich Retreat and really the purpose of your rich retreat in your overall business model. 

So in this conversation, I will be sharing with you what is a RICH Retreat, why I love them, why I recommend you have one. A little bit about the purpose of your RICH retreat in your overall business model. How to offer and fill your retreat, how that works in this system, and then what to do at your retreat to have it actually be successful and profitable. 

So if that sounds like something you’re looking for, you are in the right place. 

So what is a RICH Retreat?

So you’re RICH Retreat in my model and if you go to episode one of the podcast, you can hear a whole episode all about the business model that I suggest. The RICH Retreat is also known as a Connection Retreat because it is an opportunity for people to connect with you and also to connect with themselves and connect with the possibility of transformation in their life. So it’s something that “anyone” can register for. You might have a Buy Now button on your website, your registration page for this retreat where they can click and purchase or you might have an Apply Now button. 

If you’re someone who really wants to screen people, you want to have conversations with them before they register. If your retreat is more than, this depends on how established your businesses and your sales skills, but if the investment for your retreat is more than like $2000 or $3000 I recommend having an apply now button so that you’re getting the right people on the phone before you have them screen out the opportunity based on price. 

That said, if you’re more established in your business, you might go ahead and put the price right there. Even if it is a higher-end retreat. I call it a Rich Retreat for a reason. RICH is an acronym, Right-brained, Intuitive,Connected and Heart-centered

So in addition to this playing a specific role in your business model, which is a front end connection retreat, a place where people can experience and get a taste of you and a taste of the transformation you offer. It is also a retreat that is designed with a specific intention. It’s designed to maximize, optimize, leverage your rich skills, your right-brained intuitive, connected and heart-centered skills. These are the skills that, in my opinion, have been less valued in our society than some of the more left-brained technical hardcore skills. And they’re also the skills that are needed to really shift and transform and change what’s happening on the planet. 

So if you have these skills naturally being more on the creative free thinker, being able to put the pieces together, see the big picture connected to your intuition, connected to source coming through you. You just know what people need to do, what people need to hear. You just know because you’re connected to yourself, to others. You can connect the dots for other people. You’re amazingly talented at being able to see what’s going on energetically and in the conversation between people. And you’re heart-centered, right. 

So you’re coming from a place of trusting where your heart is leading you rather than letting your head lead the way. This is a big transformation that I’ve had in my own life because I dumbed down my heart and my RICH skills because they weren’t valued in the technology track that I was on as a chemical engineer in my first career. 

So why this is a RICH Retreat, of course, I want you to make money. I want it to be profitable. I want it to be worth it to you financially to do this amazing work in the world. And I also want you to set up your life and your business so that you can use your RICH skills and get paid richly for them. So that you can bring your full right brain, intuitive, connected and heart-centered self to the front of the room without having to have this left-brained agenda or this, you know, 182 PowerPoint slides like I had in my first retreat. And you can really work in your brilliance. 

So my goal and my job in my company is to set up all of the structures so that you can show up in that way, right? To teach you the structures to put in place so you can show up as your best self as a RICH retreat leader. 

People need those skills. We may not know. Not Everybody is conscious of their desire to connect more with their heart and to be able to trust their intuition. But if you look at the way so many of the left brain structures in our society are starting to fall away the way people are losing faith in authority all over the place. Really, we are looking for something else to have faith in and that is our intuition, our inner knowing, our connection to source. And if you’re someone with this gifting of helping get people out of their heads and into their body, connected to their truth, creating a safe space where they’re willing to share what’s really going on with them and actually see what’s really going on with them and see their truth in whatever area you work in. 

If you work in health and wellness, if you work in relationships, if you work in career, if you work in finance. Whatever area that you work in, if you’re here, I’m guessing one of the things that you’ve discovered in your own journey is that in order for people to get the results they want in that area, that they need to shift and transform into being able to hear their heart and able to hear their intuition and able to hear their truth. And to own and claim their truth, so that their whole energy field is operating in alignment with the result that they really want. 

And if there’s some old belief system, habit, practice, whatever that they’ve bought into from childhood, right, from, you know, the way our subconscious develops as humans, then they’re not going to be fully aligned to that outcome. And it doesn’t matter what brilliant ideas you have or what great information they get, they’re going to keep getting in their own way. 

So the RICH Retreat is all about helping people to see that, helping people to shift and transform their energy fields so that a whole different result is available to them. That’s the distinction of the Rich Retreat. 

What is so exciting about this is that when they get this with you as their partner, as their space creator, as their champion. They really get a taste of what it’s like to work with you. And they can start to imagine what it would be like to have you support them in a bigger way. And this is what transforms your business and your finances because now you’ve got a group of people who a good percentage of them are going to be ready to invest in you and your support at the level that their soul knows they need and that you know they need. 

So there’s no more, I have to think about it. I can’t afford it. I’m not sure if now is the right time, maybe later. All of those conversations start to fall away when you have these right people in the room with you. 

So I want to talk about, I’m alluding to it here, but I want to talk about the purpose of your RICH retreat.

So the purpose of your rich retreat in your Retreat and Grow Rich business system is for them to integrate what they learned in the gateway program. In my last solo episode, I talked about gateway programs and how they help you fill your retreat. When someone takes your gateway program, they, and you want to go back and listen to that. If you haven’t, I’m not going to explain all of that now. 

But when they take your gateway program, they’re going to learn a lot of things and 9 times out of 10 they’re going to get stuck somewhere. So either you won’t have enough time with them for them to fully complete their transformation. Or if it’s something that’s delivered via audio messages or workbooks or whatever videos. Somewhere there’s going to be some piece that their subconscious mind, their ego-mind doesn’t want them to hear because if they hear it, they have to actually change. And so they’re gonna get stuck. 

Okay. And if we were in a live room, I’d have you raise your hand if you’ve ever experienced that. Where a client gets stuck because there’s something they’re not seeing that you can see, but they can’t see. Right? 

But if you’re just delivering content, you don’t even know they’re not seeing it. You don’t know they’ve gotten stuck. Right. But they know maybe they stopped taking the lessons. Right. A lot of courses never get completed because they’re not bought into the transformation because something is going on, some mechanism is going on that’s keeping them from fully buying it. 

Now you will have people who make it all the way through your program and they get all the results and they still want more. But a lot of people will have a place where it’s like, okay, I’m getting this, but I would love your eye on my situation to help me really integrate what I’m learning. And that is the purpose of the rich retreat in your overall business system. To integrate what they learned in the gateway. And to integrate it, what that means is to transform or transmute or release, right? Or alchemize that old belief. And that can be as simple as stepping away from that old belief and into a new energy field so that they’re able to see it in a new way and then it gets integrated, right? 

Cause they might get it as head knowledge, but they aren’t integrating it as embodied wisdom until they come to your retreat. So that is the goal of the retreat and it’s totally okay to tell people that. And it’s totally okay. I think we talked about this in my interview with Angela Lauria that so many people like in her programs write a book and then they want to do a retreat and they think they need different content. But actually people read the book, they still need the retreat to help integrate the information they read in the book. 

So people take my course, which is called Retreat and Grow Rich and it has all these amazing exercises and video training and examples and all of that. And at some point they might get stuck because what their soul wants is for them to do retreats like this. But what their head thinks is that they have to do it this other way and they are not able to reconcile that on their own. 

But as soon as they come to our live retreat and they get in the energy field of clarity, which I cultivated, which we’ll talk about, they get in a safe space to hear their truth. All of a sudden it clicks and their ego is disarmed and they’re able to align themselves with what their soul really wants in that energy field. That’s integration. Okay. 

So your participants come. They can experience that transformation. They get a taste of it. They are now able to see what’s true for them and now they actually know with a clear conscious mind what kind of support they truly need to integrate this into the rest of their life. To go home and hold that transformation and make the changes that they know when they’re in their heart of hearts that they need to make to actually get the result. 

So they get a taste of transformation and then they actually know like know and they know that they know that they know the type of support they want, the type of environment they want to be in, the type of energy they want to be in and the type of coach or healer or leader or trainer that they want to have as they go forward and actually make this happen in their world.

Because the hardest moment in the world of someone who’s on a transformational journey is that moment where you leave that sacred environment of the retreat and you go back home to the environment that the old you created. And every single person in that environment has no idea what just happened for you. And now it’s your job to hold the transformation in the face of no agreement or no understanding. So that’s where the rubber meets the road. 

And that’s what you know, the people who are truly committed to making this change will recognize, hey, I don’t want to do that alone. I don’t want to do that alone. I want your support in my corner. I know I’ve gotten this little piece of transformation. But I know there’s more layers to peel back and I want the support of you, my coach, and you know this community to actually make that happen. 

So the additional purpose of the RICH Retreat in your business is to actually offer people who are ready. Not Everybody’s going to be ready, but offer the people who are ready, the right support at the next level, if it’s a right fit for them. So that is called a back end offer. Or I call it your high-level program offer. 

So at your RICH Retreat, you’re going to give everything you can during that time. And that doesn’t mean giving a lot of content. We’re going to talk about that. You don’t want to overdo it with content. But you’re going to show up and you’re going to play full out. You’re going to give 100% you’ll go to the math with them as needed. You’re going to present new ideas. You’re not going to be afraid to go there with them. It’s going to be a different conversation than they’ve probably ever had anywhere else in their life. 

And then you’re going to offer them the opportunity to continue that journey with you. For those who, it’s aligned, right? This isn’t weird. It’s not pressured. It’s not like if you don’t have this, you’re going to fail or anything like that. But for those who it’s right for, it’s gonna feel really right for, and it’ll be very very exciting for them to know that they can walk away with that support. 

So I want to move in to how do you offer this retreat?

How do you offer your RICH Retreat?

So as you’re getting by now, if you’re listening to this whole series, this is not about making a pretty page and going and splashing it on Facebook and filling a retreat. If you have a huge following, you may be able to do that. If you have a lot of people that have worked with you in the past, you may be able to do that. 

But even then, it’s not advisable. So you want to offer this retreat primarily, first and foremost, to people who have taken your gateway program. Ideally, people who are just now in it, they just bought it or they are just finishing it. Those are the very best people to invite to your retreat. Why? Because it’s designed to integrate what they learn in that program. 

So they’re already ready for it, right? They’ve started to learn. They’ve learned enough to know. They believe you, they trust your vision, they want what you have, and they also know they’ve gotten stuck somewhere. So those are the exact perfect people to invite to your retreat because they’re already on your bus and they know they need more. 

So ultimately when you have your Retreat and Grow Rich business system rolling, those are the only people you invite. So you’re not out there going, hey, come to my retreat, come to my retreat. You’re just inviting people in your gateway. That said, I always put it out there, right? So I always put it out there on Facebook so people know what I do and what I’m up to. I always put it out there to my list and say, hey, if you want to come to this retreat, here’s what’s happening, here’s when. Right? And give deadlines, give bonuses, all of those things. I do all those things. 

You know, I might do a teleclass or webinar specific to a retreat that’s coming up. Even if I have, it’s mostly full because people from my gateway have registered. I’m still going to do that because there could be that person out there who it’s the perfect thing for and they don’t know it exists. Right? 

So I’m still going to do those things, but I’m not stressing about it because I know that my retreat is being filled from my gateway program, from the marketing that I’ve done for my gateway program. And it’s a much easier decision for someone who’s in that place. Right? And so that’s ultimately what we want to create. If you don’t have a gateway program yet, because I don’t recommend making a gateway program out of the gate, so to speak, because you don’t know enough about your ideal client. 

So if you’re brand new in business, you don’t have a gateway, don’t go make a gateway, don’t go create a course or something like that. You might create a workshop or something, especially if you have a local audience that might be your first step is to create a gateway that’s a workshop. That’s totally cool. 

But again, don’t go invest in making a whole gateway. Just invite your past one on one clients. And if you don’t have past one-on-one clients, then I want you to develop what I call a short term gateway, which is a one on one offering. That’s a taster. So it kind of is testing your content for what might be a gateway. It’s making sure that people want the transformation that you offer. It’s also gonna make you more money because you can charge more for a one on one program than you typically would for like a leveraged gateway program. So do that first. 

Okay. So if you’ve never had one on one clients and you don’t have a gateway program already, what I recommend is start with bringing in someone on one clients and include in their package a bonus of, hey, you get a ticket to my next retreat. So that way, say you have six or eight private clients that you bring in, you have six or eight people who already have a ticket to that retreat. 

So then you go to them when you’re scheduling it and you say, hey mark, this date. You know this is going to be the date, can you make it. And you already have people registered as soon as you launch your retreat. That is optimal. Okay. That said, I do it differently. A fair amount. Right. Sometimes I get an idea and I think I’m going to do a retreat about this and I don’t do what I’m advising you to do and then it’s more work, right? 

I mean, I have lots of past clients now, so I always have people I can reach out to, who are past clients to fill a retreat. But I have to reach out personally and privately, right? If I’m doing something new. So just know that because your gateway warms them up, right and gets them ready and poised and they understand why they want to come to this retreat. Even if people love you, they’ve worked with you before, they’re on your list, they comment on your stuff. You introduce something new, they’re not automatically going to just jump on it. And that’s okay. That’s okay. Right? 

You’ve got to reach out to them personally. Hey, I was thinking of you. I think this will be perfect for you based on the last time we talked. Let’s hop on the phone and see if it is dah, dah, dah,dah. 

One other thing I wanted to share, is when you are creating your RICH Retreat, when you first create it, you’re going to have, like I recommended either you’ve got a lot of past clients, your already established, and you know a lot about who your clients are. Or if this is something new, you’re going to have a handful of private clients that you’ve worked within the past or in the recent past, right? 

So you have a sense of what they need. You’ve maybe gotten a download from spirit about this retreat and what it’s about. Maybe you’ve taken our course and you know your retreat leader archetype, you know the rooms in your castle and based on knowing the rooms in your castle, you know what your retreat is about. Okay. And this is a whole teaching we do in our program and you can find out more about it here

So, say you maybe you know all of that, still when you’re doing your first retreat, the temptation is going to be, I have to figure out everything I’m going to do at my retreat before I launch it, before I market it, before I make a sales page about it.  You don’t. So one of the things I teach is called The Learn Method. The learn while you earn, and it’s all about creating this new conversations. So you’re going to listen for what spirit is guiding you to…. Listen for what your audience is talking about. You’re going to start having different conversations. The E is to engage, engage in a new conversation and just see if people are interested, right? 

So you know what your retreat is about. You’ve got the rooms in your castle, you know you’re going to do a house party in the room of alignment or the room of clarity or whatever. Now you’re going to start to experiment. You’re going to start to have this conversation with people and just see if people are into the conversation. And if they are into the conversation, you’re going to go right into making an offer about this thing. Now, this could be offering your retreat or it could be offering a one-on-one condensed version of it to test that people really want it, right? And then you’re gonna rally to deliver. 

So rather than having it all figured out before you sell it, you’re going to ask people to buy. So you know, people want it, then you’re going to create it. Okay. And this is true for your retreat as well. Now you probably have some kind of vision. Like I usually get a vision of like, the experience I want to do or the transformation I want for people, or like a theme or something like that might come through. But never go develop all of the content before you sell it. 

And you know, we used to do that, we used to do that in our retreat where we would have people develop their content and their flow. And it was so fun. It’s so fun. I love helping people develop their content for their retreat. But the truth is, until you sell it, you’re just kind of moving deck chairs on the Titanic, right? 

Once you sell it, you know who’s in it. And by the way, we’re humans who have energy fields and we connect to other people’s energy and every one of you does it in a different way. But we connect to people’s energy. And so when people are registered, they energetically lock into the soul of that retreat. And when that happens, now you start to intuitively get a sense of what the actual people who are registered actually need. So you might have an agenda of this is what we do at our retreat. 

But you know, after you’ve done it a few times, but you might also tweak it every time. Once people are registered and you start to feel into the soul of your retreat. So a lot of the leaders we work with, they think their left brain thinks that they should have all the power points or the outline or the handouts or the every detail developed before they market it. And so then they set aside time to develop their retreat and every time that time comes and goes and they don’t develop their retreat. Well, because the truth is they’re not ready. They’re not ready. They need to actually put it out there. Have people register, be getting paid for doing that work. And then you know, they have a date on the books and now it starts to come through you.

What needs to happen at the retreat? This is super important and our archetype quiz helps you to know how much content you need and how that all works for you because it’s different for different people. But don’t feel like you have to have it all developed before you offer it. And then on the other side of your retreat, you’re going to look back and go that piece that was brilliant content that’s going to go in my gateway program, that thing every single person said they really need help with this. That’s going to be in my marketing. Right? And that’s where you really get the inspiration to develop your business in your brand is through learning while you earn or earning while you learn. Okay, beautiful. 

So that’s a little bit about offering this retreat. Now the next piece I want to move into is creating that taste of transformation at you Rich Retreat.

Creating the taste of transformation at your RICH Retreat. 

So I want you to write this down. It’s an acronym SAVOR. I want you to savor the success at your retreat and I’m just going to walk you through five things, they spell saver that really are important to creating a RICH retreat. One that’s profitable, one that allows you to show up as your best self and really have the conversations that people need to have to actually make an informed and conscious and aware decision about their next steps with you and about their next steps in their lives. First and foremost. 

So S is Safety or Safe Space. So the first thing you want to do at the start of your retreat is to be very intentional about creating a safe space. And we teach this in our program. How ways you can do this. But what I want for you now is just to know you’re holding the intention of creating a safe space. You’re creating agreement with the group about this being a safe space. You are bringing your own belief that this is a safe space to the room, by the way you show up and the way that you share, okay? 

So you want to establish that first and foremost. If there is no safety, there’s no truth. And if there’s no truth, there’s no transformation. And you can go back and listen to my episode on how to create transformation to know what I mean by that, okay? But no safety then there’s no truth and no truth there’s no transformation. So that’s the first thing that you really need is to create a safe space. And people are going to feel this almost immediately when you do what I teach, right? And a lot of you probably do this naturally. You have a safe energy, I’m guessing if you do this work. 

But when our ego gets involved. When we get nervous. When we think we have to prove. When we think we have to do it right, do a good job, you know, have all the powerpoints, whatever it is. We may not be intentional about creating safe space. And that is hugely important because for someone to see something they’ve never seen before, they have to feel safe to go there. So that’s the S safe space. 

A is an Awareness Experience. Awareness Experience. So I always want to create an awareness experience on day one. I want people to have a chance to see something about how they’re showing up or how they’re not showing up that they haven’t seen before. And when you work with people who are what I call closer in on the onion, they’re newer in their transformational journey. A lot of times this is going to drive up what I call, a bad news insight, right? 

They’re going to become aware of some way of being that they’ve had that they didn’t even know they had that’s causing them problems. Right? Bad news insight. I remember in my early training I did landmark education and I remember having a bad news insight when I realized how disempowering I was as a leader in my corporate job because whenever, well basically all the time I would just take over and do things instead of empowering people. And that was, a bad news insight. I had no idea. And it was hugely toxic pattern. Right? 

So that came to light through an experiential exercise where I had a new awareness. We want to create an awareness experience on day one. An opportunity for people to see what they haven’t seen about how they’re showing up. This doesn’t necessarily have to be bad news insight. It could be a good news insight, right? 

By the way, I don’t believe in good, bad, right or wrong anyway, but, so good news insight would because they’re really are just insights. But a good news insight would be, oh my gosh, I can give you an example. I remember going on retreat as a participant and my insight or my new awareness was, wow, I’m really good at leading retreats and I won’t go into any more detail about that. But that was an awareness that I had and it was a really particular talent or thing that’s important to me at my retreats that I noticed was missing at this particular retreat in that created an awareness for me, right? 

Without that experiential piece, I wouldn’t have had that awareness. And the experiential piece was really experiential. It was like in your face like, whoah, we’re having this experience now, and I got to really see a lot about myself. 

So an awareness experience could be, let’s say like we’ve done ziplining before at retreats, and your experience doesn’t always have to be some big dramatic thing. It can be an exercise in the journal, but we’ve done zip lining, you know, and there was someone who their whole awareness experience was, I’m free, I’m owning my freedom. Every time I step off of this ledge, I’m free. And there was no drama about it. It was just like, wow, I can own this. Right? 

So an awareness experience could be a bad news insight, could be a good news insight, could be a neutral insight. But you’re creating a new awareness that’s going to lead you to a new truth and truth is where transformation happens. Truth is where transformation happens. So that’s the second step is you want to create an awareness experience. Ideally on the afternoon of day one, because on the morning you want to really establish safe space and then you want this experience to take place so then they can work with their insights during the next two days. 

I always recommend people start with a two and a half day retreat. So afternoon a day one is a great time for the awareness experience. By the way, if you’d get our kit and take our quiz, you’ll get a whole sample agenda and all of that. 

The V is Vulnerability. Vulnerability, our friend and foe, right? Probably one of the things you’re known for is your ability to be vulnerable. That’s probably part of what draws you to retreats and how you’ve become a leader is your willingness to go there and your willingness to be vulnerable. And why this is really important at the retreat is, we want you to share your own vulnerability and allow others to share vulnerably as well. And this ties back to that safe space. The step before truth and an anatomy of a transformation is the step of surrender. And surrender doesn’t mean giving our power away. 

In fact, you want to really have the art of what I call healthy compassion, where you’re allowing people to stay fully in their power. You’re not trying to surrender their power. But you’re allowing them to surrender and be held while also being so fully empowered that it’s probably an experience that a lot of people haven’t had before. And there’s a vulnerability in that. 

And so as the leader, you can’t know it all. You have to have done your work, right? You want to have a solid, clear energy space for them, but you also want to not be afraid of their vulnerability. Okay? This means you’ve got to work with your own inner fixer. Your desire to do things for people. Your need for people to get it. Because if you need them to get it, then you won’t leave space for their vulnerability. If you need to look smart, sound smart, all of those things, you won’t leave space for vulnerability. 

So this is huge, right? Because people need to get present to their discomfort or present to their desire to surrender to the experience. And if you’re not comfortable in their presence to that vulnerability, then they won’t feel safe to go there. And they won’t go there energetically. It just won’t happen. So that’s really, really important, especially when you create an awareness experience. And people may be triggered in different ways or excited about certain things or whatever. And you want to really have done your inner work so that you can go there with people and in whatever ways they’re being vulnerable. So that’s the V. 

The O is Offer, offer, offer, offer. You cannot forget that you are a business. So you can design a beautiful retreat that’s whole and complete for someone if they don’t want your offer. If they don’t want to take the next step with you. And it can still be designed around your offer. 

So I know I’ve worked with hundreds and hundreds of business owners and there can be a lot of like squeamishness around this idea that your retreat is designed to make an offer because I know I feel this way. I certainly wouldn’t want anyone coming to my retreat and thinking I didn’t get value. All you want is me to buy your next thing. Right? That’s the last thing I would personally want. So I totally get when people have that concern about designing their whole retreat around their offer that it could feel that way. 

So what you want to know is the designing your retreat for that taste of transformation, for them to get that experience of what’s possible for them has tremendous value, tremendous value. Even if they don’t take the next step with you. Even if they go home and they get swept up in their environment. They have negative people in their life and the people tell them that their possibilities crazy and they believe them and they lose all hope and all of that. Right? That can happen. It’s not likely, but it can. 

But here’s the thing. If they got a taste of transformation, if they got that experience, even if it wasn’t their own, maybe it was vicariously through other people in the room. They can’t unknow that. So they might not go home and explode their life in that moment. But it’s in there. And the next time someone presents the opportunity for transformation, they’re gonna recognize it. And they might be more ready and they might lean in. 

So just know if someone comes, they don’t take your next step. They leave. It doesn’t look like anything’s happened. Something has happened, and at some point it’s going to come back around. I’ve had clients reach out to me years after coming to my retreat and tell me all the things that changed because they came to my retreat. Even if it took them awhile for that change to happen. 

So you want to trust that and then you also want to be very clear that the offer is amazing and you can let people know this morning of day one. Okay, so it’s not anything weird or hidden or surprise agenda or we’re trying to manipulate or anything like that. In fact, these days, anything that smells of that doesn’t go very well. At least it depends on where people are in the layer of their layers of the onion. 

But that said, don’t be afraid to design for it. And even the beginning of day one you can say, hey, I’m going to give you everything I can over the next two and a half days because that’s who I am and I’m so excited you’re here and I want this for you. And what I know is as human beings, we can only integrate so much into and a half days. And because of that, I do have an option for you to continue working with me after this.  And I’m going to tell you about that sometime during this retreat, probably tomorrow afternoon and invite you to continue this work. 

So I’m all in for your transformation this weekend. For some of you, this is all you need and you’ll take it and run with it and it’ll be amazing. And for others you’re going to know that you want to keep working with me and my team. And so I’ve designed something for that. Would that be okay with you? And then you’re getting their buy in right from the beginning, right? 

So you want to design around the offer. If you don’t know how to do that, we teach that in our program and we do a whole assessment and we help you get your retreat leader archetype and get really, really clear about the types of retreats that you want to offer. And also what they are about. 

And this is really important because a lot of times people say, I’m going to do a retreat and I don’t know what it’s about. And by the way, I don’t judge that. That’s okay. But then they do the retreat and it’s not designed at all for the offers. So they haven’t really, you know, strategize or even felt into, right? To use a more feminine phrase. They haven’t even felt into what people will need next. Right? What is the transformation of this retreat and what will people need next? 

So even though I don’t want you to go develop your whole retreat and all the content and all of that, I want you to have a sense, a feel. It can change, right? You might feel in to the group and decide, you know, I needed a little bit different angle on this then I’ll, and I’ll give an example of that here shortly. But you want to have a sense of this is what they’ll get here and this is what they’ll still need. Because that’s how you design your offer, right? And an offer that makes sense that they really truly will want. 

So that’s what I mean by your designing for your offer. And there’s a lot of ways to do that and ways to structure what you do on day one, day two, day three, and kind of how to talk about your offer depending on the rooms in your castle and your retreat leader archetype in these different things we teach in our program. 

So the main thing I want you to know is that you want to design for an offer and have that be part of the design. The other thing that does is financially, it frees you that you’re, you don’t have to make a ton of money on the front end of your retreat to have it be really profitable. 

So just as a math example, let’s say you have eight people come to your retreat and at your retreat you have a high level program that you offer that’s $20,000 okay. That’s a great, I mean, I don’t know what that includes or what, you know that it’s personal to your niche and your business, your star client, all of that. 

But let’s just say it’s $20,000 and of those eight people, five people take that offer, which is completely reasonable in an intimate group like that. By the way, the bigger the group, the smaller the conversion rate typically. So in a small group like that, that’s completely reasonable to think. And that would be a six figure retreat for you, not including whatever they paid on the front end to come to your retreat. 

So what that means is you don’t have to stress about there only being eight people and let’s say eight people each paid $1,000 and the retreat is costing you 6,000 to host. So you’ve really only made 2000 and that might feel stressful. But if you have a backend offer that makes you 100,000 do you really care? Right? So that’s also part of the design. So this is designed for how transformation works and it’s also designed for you to be profitable. 

So you’re delivering programs that really work and are effective for people based on how transformation works. And you’re also being really effective and profitable for your business. So designed for the offer. 

And then lastly the R is keep it Real. Keep it real. As I said, truth is transformation. We want to keep it real. And I put this last because after you make your offer, right? Or when you introduce your offer to people, they’re going to have a lot of things come up. Because people, they might not, it depends on who your audience is, but they might not be used to investing in themselves. They might be used to investing in themselves, but they’re thinking, I don’t want to invest in myself again. Right? If I not gotten the transformation yet, do I really need to do this again? Well, yeah, maybe if it speaking to you, you probably do. 

They might be thinking, what is my spouse going to say? They might be trying to figure out how they’re going to get the money or the time off work or whatever. And so they’re going to have a lot of stuff come up and this is where we just really want to keep it real. Okay, so you don’t want to make an offer and say, hey, you can do this thing and then from the time you make an offer, so you might think like nobody’s interested, dah, dah, dah. But there, that’s all they can think about from that point on is am I going to do this or am I not? I’m leaving tomorrow afternoon. Am I going to take this offer? How can I make it work? Is this for me? Is it not for me? All of the things come up around that for them. 

I want you to really get that, so once you make your offer, I recommend afternoon of day two, but it can be different depending on the flow of your content and who your client is and all of that. But I’d love for them to be able to sleep on it before they leave. From that point on, that’s what they’re thinking about. Now you’ll have your percentage of people who are like, no, I’m not interested in this. Then they’ll, you know, move on. 

But most of the people in the room, that’s what they’re going to be thinking about. Is this for me? Am I the person? Can I do this? Will I get results? What will people in my life think? Is this even possible? Who is she to make that kind of offer for that kind of money? This doesn’t have value. How dare anybody charge this?  Like whatever. There’s going to be all the different varieties of all of the things happening in the room and you want to be real about that. 

So you don’t want to just gloss over it. You don’t want to pretend you didn’t make the offer. You don’t want to stop talking about the offer. You don’t want to be afraid that you’re going to pressure people or any of those things because then what’s happening is you’re creating a disconnect in the room. The room is all thinking about this and the truth is you’re thinking about it, right? Cause you’re like, are people going to join and do I have a program? Am I gonna make money? All of these things.

And then if, because of social convention, which says we don’t talk about money and we don’t pressure people and all of these things. You don’t talk about it. Now it instantly creates weirdness in the room, right? All the clients are thinking about it. You’re secretly thinking about it. Your team might be thinking about it. But we’re just going to keep teaching new things and not talk about it. That gets weird. 

So you want to keep it real and teach about things that relate to helping them make a decision about the offer. Okay. And don’t be afraid to say, hey, I just made an offer. I know it’s a big deal. I know you’re probably thinking about it. You’re wondering, you know, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.. Raise your hand if you’re feeling a little distracted because you’re thinking about the offer. Or raise your hand if you’re actually like, annoyed about this offer. And you could even coach someone about that, right? So that you’re keeping it real in the room and not going on this weird disconnection trip that happens sometimes when people make offers. 

So that’s the R and SAVOR. We teach you how to do that. We teach you what I call the heart offer formula and how to make an offer. And there’s three different ways to do it. You can hand out an order form, you might set up an appointment, there’s various, like we cover all of this. But energetically, the key to having this rich retreat really be something magical, right? Right brain intuitive, connected and heart-centered. As you got to stay connected, which means you’ve got to keep it real. You’ve got to keep it real. Be transparent. Don’t be afraid. It might be vulnerable, but every single person in the room, including you as a human, and that’s how you want to be relating where humans with human experiences and you’re an expert at human experiences, right? That’s why you’re leading transformation. So keep it real. 

So that’s a little bit about your RICH Retreat. We covered what it is, why I love it, what the purpose of it is, how to fill it, who to offer it to. Don’t wait until it’s all figured out to offer it. And then we talked about the key components to actually make it powerful and profitable. And as you might be imagining, it takes something, it takes something to really be that leader of a Rich Retreat. It is not for the faint of heart and it is so magical. It’s so magical.

And in the next episode, the next episode that I lead, we’re going to be talking about, I’m actually inviting my lead coach Julie to be in the conversation with me and we’re going to be talking about the high-level programs, like the thing you’re actually inviting people to. And you’re going to learn how freaking awesome it is for you and your clients to have this kind of program and why it’s worth it. 

So stay tuned. We’ll see you on that next episode. 

Have you been called to integrate retreats into the way you do business?

I have an exciting gift for you, opt-in for our new free starter kit. This five-step kit will take you through everything you need to know about whether hosting retreats is right for you and your business, and where you are now, and how to be really great at it in a way that allows you to make the most money from your natural gift.

Get started today.

Share This
1