I remember once seeing an ad with a Polar Bear in the Arctic with a very edible looking fish a few inches from his feet, the only problem was that the fish was in a block of ice. On the ad it read “ Opportunity doesn’t always arrive gift wrapped”.

I found this very humorous as it hits very close to home. We’ve had some enormous success hosting events in the last 2 years and as such on October 14^th I received a email asking if we wanted to be involved in bringing Brad Lamb to Calgary for an event; I said we did.  On October 17^th it became clear that Blueprint was the only group that could put this together. The event was to be November 9^th giving us 15 business days to book the venue, create content, market the event to the public, prepare the logistics etc etc.

Now anyone who’s ever hosted any function will tell you that even coordinating a night out with a few friends is a lot of work. Most people would have looked at this and said “ NO WAY, there’s not enough time/resources/whatever”. We said....”sure, looks like fun”.  

The result: in 15 days we were able to register over 350 people for this event with very little if any money going towards advertising. How did we elicit such a strong response? Did we rent several large buses and strap them with massive speakers and drive all over the city promoting our event? No. Did we hit every mall in the city limits and bury people’s cars with flyers? No. ( although those ideas would have been fun to witness)

The only thing we did was get buy in from our team and partners. Initially our plan was to have 200 people registered for the event. It was a goal the team bought into and through calling existing contacts and people in industries we thought would be interested the registrations started to come in until we had to call the hotel to get a bigger room.

Morale here is simple, get “buy in” from your team and you can build incredible momentum.

A few points to get successful “buy in”

1.      Make the goal a stretch but you need to personally believe it’s attainable otherwise you will talk yourself out of it before you start.

2.      DON’T give yourself too much time. Urgency has a way of making us focus on the action points that really matter and creating extraordinary momentum.

3.      Leverage your past successes as stories that you share to get “buy in” today.

      Opportunity may not always come gift wrapped ( rarely does ) but in my experience having the right attitude and mindset will allow you to see and make the most of  opportunities that many have missed.