How Lara Makes 6-Figures Producing Events and Hosting Farm Dinners

Super cool story about Lara who runs a corporate events company and hosts dinners on her farm.

Check this out. Lara held a dinner on her farm in July 2021 and did over $10,000 in sales for that one dinner alone. Her costs include chef, ingredients, drinks, equipment hire, and some other bits and bobs. I’m guessing there’s a 50% margin here, minimum. Lara only holds 1-2 dinners a year so saying there’s a big opportunity to make a lot more money here is an understatement.

When I tell you about Lara Farm Dinner's marketing strategy, you’re going to wish your marketing was as simple. I do.

Lara’s got a real entrepreneurial spirit. She noticed a gap in the US when COVID first hit and launched a pop-up product that did over $300,000 in 6 months. I’ll tell you all about this and loads more.

Let’s look at how Lara makes 6-figures across her businesses.

What Lara Offers?
Event Company

Starting with the Events company, Lara has been very intentional about who her customers are and the type of work she wants to do. Lara focuses on corporate customers and organises them from small events of 50 people going up to 500 and even more.

Her responsibility is to essentially make the event happen. Lara hires contractors as and when required but at this stage has no need for full-time employees. I love lean businesses like this.

Lara works with clients on a retainer basis depending on the number of events they are seeking to hold over the year. Her fees could be anything between a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands of dollars depending on the event requirements.

The $300k pop up business

Unfortunately, events have been one of the hardest-hit industries and Lara’s felt the pain. Fortunately, this spurred Lara on to create a new business that earned $300k in 6 months.

With sports events closing doors to fans, Lara noticed a new business model that was working well in Asia. Fans would essentially pay the sports team to put a cutout of themselves sitting in the stadium.

This meant much-needed revenue for the team and fans who could get excited about having some sort of presence. Win-win.

So, Lara set out to replicate the business in the US by partnering with a printer, getting a quick website up and ready and My Fan Seats was born. The majority of the revenue goes to the club itself as once they are onboard they promote it to their fans, which makes sense as they own the stadium and are taking care of a large portion of the marketing.

This situation reminds me of some of the businesses I’ve launched on a whim after noticing a gap. They don’t always work out but going through the process, you learn tons more than reading books. Clearly, this worked out pretty well for Lara. Who knows where she takes this business or if it slows down completely.
Farm Dinners
Lara had a bright idea a few years ago to host Jeffersonian dinners on her farm with locally sourced food and chefs. There’s a particular topic of conversation and it makes for a great evening.

She charges $150 per person and this includes the food, drinks, and experience. She sold out in July and has 70 people booked on. That’s over $10,000 for one dinner!

This business fits really well with Lara’s experience in that her background is all about organising experiences and as she put it, people are nearly in tears (in a happy way) when the evening comes to a close. I think she could increase her prices.

What’s super amazing about this business is that the marketing is almost too easy, I’ll explain below.

How Lara Gets Customers?
Event Company
Lara is a serial networker. She is out meeting people at every opportunity, whether that’s online or offline.

What’s also worked to help her grow the events company is working with partners who not only help with the event but also cross-refer clients.

Now, when a client is interested in working with Lara, she will arrange a 30-minute discovery call, and if it’s a good fit, it’s followed by a number of meetings.

Pop Up Business
Lara’s fan cutout business had a very clear target audience - schools, universities, and sports teams.

So, how did she get them onboard? Cold emails.

She downloaded a list of schools from the NCAA website and sent 1,000 cold emails. Her response rate was an impressive 15-20% and more impressively, she closed between 50-75% of the people that responded.

The cold email strategy alone brought in initial customers for the first 2 months and then after that the business snowballed and customers started coming inbound. I’m sure the attractive “we’ll help you to set this up and also keep most of the revenue” had a big part to play.

Farm Dinners
When I asked Lara how she gets customers, I was expecting a marketing mix of activities but here’s what her marketing actually looks like.

Lara’s put up a $3 banner on the farm’s fence to advertise to passers-by. The farm happens to be set next to one of the most popular walks in Colorado, which has brought in 80% of her customers. Facebook Ads have also been useful for filling up capacity.

Over the years, Lara’s developed an email list of 500 local people interested in her farm dinners. They literally see the sign on the fence, go to the website and buy a ticket or sign up for future events if there’s no event on.

Lara shared some great ideas behind growing this business in the interview, there’s just so much potential here to grow it. If you’d like to see the full interview go watch it on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/6sHzn_0I4Vw