I was flying home yesterday fielding what felt like hundreds of emails, texts, DMs, posts and comments about the just-concluded 2024 Future Proof Festival in Huntington Beach, California. I sat there thinking about the all the work that went into planning the event over the last year and all the aspects we had improved upon from the first two iterations. I couldn’t help but feeling as though we’ve really and truly nailed it this time. The feedback we’re hearing from our 4,500 attendees makes it clear that this feeling is just about unanimous.

I told the attendees from the stage Tuesday night that their presence and their enthusiasm was one of the main reasons why it worked so well. A key ingredient. I want to talk about the other ingredients that turned out to have been so instrumental in the success of the festival because I think what we’ve learned during the course of building the event is pretty universal.

Ingredient One: Filling a void

Within our industry, there are many events on the calendar throughout the course of the year, but it’s become increasingly obvious that many of them no longer have a reason to exist. In the pre-pandemic days, advisors would attend a certain amount of conferences each year in order to maintain their membership in this or that society and to earn CE (Continuing Education) credits, to remain in compliance with their professional designation. When the plague came, the events all moved their stage content online and the CE credits could be earned virtually.

This changed attitudes toward the very purpose of industry events and it revealed the lack of urgency for lots of things we used to flock to.

An ETF conference in a dilapidated 3-star hotel, bereft of advisors but festooned with vendors talking to vendors. An “Insider” conference at which literally zero actual insiders ever attend. A summit without anyone who actually sits atop the summit. A platform user conference repeating the same four “keynote” speakers (big air quotes around “keynote”) and six sponsor-laden panels followed by a bottom-shelf cocktail party. A generic “wealth” conference with daytime “tracks”, samovars of cold coffee and Kind Bars in baskets beneath humming fluorescent lights. Don’t get me wrong, people still go to these things, but in sparser numbers and usually because they think they are supposed to.

And as the attendance underwhelms, the sponsorships wither. The exhibition halls become somehow even sadder than before, with very little conversation and lots of keychains being shipped back to the home office on the final morning. The organizers become more desperate, calling in favors and slashing the ticket prices to preserve a minimum viable headcount. The social media posts and awkward selfies from half-empty ballrooms become increasingly cringe.

This was the problem that needed solving. It was the void that needed to be filled.

“What will get people excited to get back out on the road again?” Matt Middleton and I asked ourselves? Two things - the networking and the experience itself. Not the CE credits, not the boiler plate presentations on stage, not the Smirnoff and Tanqueray being handed over in exchange for drink tickets, not the strangers-and-powdered-egg forced breakfast weirdness. Nobody wants to smell your toothpaste while you tell your f***ing life story at 7 o’clock in the morning.

So we threw it all away and started fresh. Leaning in to the networking and the experience was the essential ingredient we started out with. That’s what will get people back out to an event. That’s the new baseline.

Ingredient Two: Know your customer

We’ve been throwing events, Barry and I, since 2010 when we used to do the Big Picture Conference around the blog and its audience. It was cool but it never scaled and fizzled out. I know why. It made no sense as a community. “Fans of Barry” isn’t a community. We had people there from every walk of life, every profession, every discipline, every flavor and stripe of reader he had. Which sounds cool but it’s not very cohesive in practice. How do you do content for an audience including day traders, mutual fund investors, doctors, lawyers, business owners, reporters and media people, technologists, hedge fund managers, financial advisors, social media randos and short-sellers? You can put great speakers on stage, and we did, but what’s it all about? What is the point? What are the shared goals of the audience? What do they want to get out of it? What does the conference want to succeed at? There was no answer that applied to the majority of the attendees. It was eclectic and we had lots of fun, but its growth was stunted by the lack of there being any overarching message or meaning. It was just interesting dudes saying random shit on a stage with Barry posing for pictures during breaks.

We got better about this over time. We threw three versions of the Evidence-Based Investing conferences that would serve as our elementary education within the professionally managed events business. They did well. Then we hooked up with Matt Middleton and did the Wealth/Stack one-off in Scottsdale, AZ in 2019. That one was a big success on a smaller scale, but even with just 700 or so attendees, we could see that there was something magical about assembling a community with a shared goal.

When we began to plan Future Proof, we knew exactly what we wanted to do and whom we wanted to do it for. The mission was to throw an event that would help advisors become better advisors to their clients and better employers to their employees. We were going full-tilt into wealth tech, entrepreneurship, marketing, practice management and investing strategies. We knew our audience because we are our audience.

Ingredient Three: The Steak and the Sizzle

You can get a great steak anywhere but the best steakhouses understand the importance of presentation. In Chicago they’ll walk you past the glass-enclosed room where they’re dry-aging the meat and explain the temperature and duration necessary to achieve the desired texture and flavor. At Peter Luger’s in Brooklyn they’ll tilt the screaming hot plate at a just-so angle and spoon the bubbling liquid back on top of the porterhouse as you whip out your phone to film it (Okay, I’m the only one, sure). At Morton’s they bring a cart of raw steaks out to show you the cuts. At Cote, America’s only Michelin-starred Korean steakhouse, they’ll describe each bite of A-5 wagyu as it hits the flames contained within the center of your table. You’re not just being sold the steak, you’re buying the sizzle.

In the events business, sound, color, vibes, feels, looks, smells, tastes, touches, all very important and all greatly ignored within finance. Most events put the highest emphasis on making the sponsors happy followed by the second highest emphasis on paying good speakers. They have it backwards.

Make an event so good, the sponsors will be happy just for being there. Make an event so essential, the speakers will be beating down the door just to grab a slot. Yes, this is harder than just slapping up some risers and throwing a black tablecloth behind them - “look, it’s a stage!” - but the effort is how you can deliver both the steak (the content itself) and the sizzle (the thing that draws a crowd to your content). You have to do both. If it’s just the content, send it to me as a PDF and save me the schlep to Denver.

Events that prioritize attendee experience will, by default, end up with happy sponsors and great speakers because everyone will want to be there. Events that prioritize putting sponsors on panels and hiring former athletes to deliver platitudes about “culture” and “leadership” will not.

This is simple to understand but not easy to do. Many won’t even attempt it. The 80/20 rule wins again.

Ingredient Four: Buy-in

“Well, we’re a media company so we should probably be in the events business” is the basic thought process behind many of the generic conferences you see being held. It’s almost obligatory. So they’re doing the event no matter what. Fine.

But what they’re often missing is buy-in. Because it’s so generic, there’s no core audience of people who are definitely in. So the emails and the banner ads start. And you can definitely turn out a couple hundred people if you spend enough on advertising. But who is the core of this attendee list? Who are the repeat visitors who are so all-in on what you’re doing that you know they’re coming back and will spend the year evangelizing it online? Who are the guaranteed speakers, who want nothing more than to be associated with the event and affiliated with the brand? If every year you’re not sure, it’s because you haven’t done enough to create buy-in.

Buy-in is essential. It’s a better reason to do an event than any other. You have this in-group of key people who want to be together once a year and share their knowledge with the fans. They’re not negotiating appearance fees. They’re not holding out for a better time of day or a choicer slot. They just want to be a part of it. That’s buy-in and it should be the starting point for creating a conference, not the thing you’re chasing six weeks after you’ve already given Marriott a deposit.

Ingredient Five: Organization

It does little good to invite a few thousand people out to something that completely falls apart the moment your dreams collide with the reality of the physical world. Organization is everything. No point in planning anything if you can’t execute. Especially when you’re high-profile and the whole world is watching.

Matt Middleton and his amazing team at Future Proof, including Cici, Jen, Lindsey, Kevin, Chris, Nate, Nyle, Morgan, Mariah, Katherine, Shereen, Paula and everyone else we’ve collaborated with displayed super-human levels of foresight, attention to detail and follow-through. I don’t know where he finds these people but they’re amazing. The group effort between the Future Proof folks and my own staff, overseen by Anna Chaiken, was key to pulling this off. The event runs its course in three days but it takes a full year of working together and communication to make it happen.

Every year on the final night we take a big group picture of the two firms at the Ocean Stage and the amount of mutual respect between our two organizations at this moment is just beautiful. “We did it!”

Ingredient Six: Personalization

“It’s their event, it’s not our event,” Matt always says. By which he means the event is about the individual experience of each person who comes to it, it’s not about us or the speakers or the sponsors. Everyone experiences their own version of Future Proof depending on how they want to spend their time while at the beach. They can attend dozens of Breakthru sessions (pre-scheduled, one-on-one fifteen minute meetings) or just wing it. They can join the morning activities like surfing lessons and yoga classes or just order room service. They can hit the private parties and organized dinners on Monday night or just hang at the bars in the hotel. There are three separate large format stages and multiple Level Up specialty stages. Content competing with content all day long, giving attendees unlimited choice to learn about what they’re most interested in. The food trucks and coffee bars never close, meaning lunch and snacks when you want, with whom you want. The ocean is to the right and the hotel swimming pools are to the left. Recharge the social battery whenever you feel like it.

There are no tracks. There’s no universal agenda. There is no wrong way to do Future Proof. When you come here, you make the experience for yourself.

Ingredient Seven: Magic

I don’t know how else to put it. There is magic happening everywhere, all day long. It’s the ingredient that the attendees bring with them when they come. It’s in the interactions they’re having among each other. We can set the conditions to bring this about, but we can’t specifically conjure it up at will. You guys do that all by yourselves. We just watch and smile as it happens.

Don’t take my word for it, there are thousands of pictures of this magic flooding social media timelines industry-wide as we speak. See for yourself and I’ll see you next year.

That’s all from me today, talk soon! - JB