Stop Waiting for the Perfect Event. The Best Ones Are Already on the Calendar! Here's something most people get wrong before they ever send an invite. They think the hard part is the party. It's not!!1 ....the hard part is that people have forgotten how to be in a room together. Look around. Everybody's home. And when they finally do go out, they're standing in the corner staring at a screen, scrolling through photos of other people having the life they're too checked out to go live themselves. That's not a problem for you. That's your opening. You are not in the party business. You are in the "get people off the couch and make them feel like they belong somewhere" business. The party is just the vehicle. And forget big for a second. Big is not the goal. Your event doesn't have to be huge. Some of the best things I ever did were for a core group. Twenty people. Forty. Fifty, eighty, a hundred. Your core people. The ones who already trust you. Take care of them. Make something happen that makes them feel special, like they're on the inside of something good. Do that, and watch what you've actually built. You've built an army. People who will go to work for you to pay you back for every favor you've ever done them. They'll fill rooms for you and they'll do it gladly, for free, because you took care of them first. And here's the part that matters most. When one of your people tells a friend about your next party, that friend doesn't feel like they're being sold anything. They're just hearing about something amazing from someone they trust. No pitch. No pressure. Just "you have to come to this." That's the kind of person you want around, and that's the kind of word of mouth no ad budget can buy. Keep that in your head for everything that follows. So let me give you a pile of ways to build that room. Steal any of them. You don't need your own event. The city is already throwing one. This is the easiest first win there is, and almost nobody does it. There's a concert coming to town.

Let me be straight with you about something! You have probably been watching people walk around with their heads buried in their phones and thinking the world is getting harder for people like us, ....Event organizers. ....The ones who live to bring people together. And I get why it looks that way. But here is what is actually happening out there. People are lonely. Like, really lonely. Not just "I wish I had more friends" lonely. We are talking about a full-on social recession, and the world is starting to talk about it openly. You hear it in podcasts. You read it in articles. You see it in the comments sections of Reddit threads where people are literally asking how to make real friends as adults. The desire to be in a real room with real people is not going away. It is getting louder. And here is what that means for you. You do not have to convince anyone that they need what you have. That work is already done. The hunger is already there. You just have to show up as the person who knows how to feed it. Think about what you actually do. You take a group of strangers and turn them into a room full of people who are glad they came. You create the kind of night people talk about on Monday morning. You are the reason someone met their best friend, their business partner, or someone who changed their life. That is not small. That is exactly what the world is starving for right now. And here is the kicker. Most people with a gift like that are just doing it for fun. They are not getting paid. They are not building anything. They are throwing great parties and walking away with nothing to show for it except a good story. That is the gap I am trying to close. Because the world does not just need more great parties. It needs more people who know how to build a real business around bringing people together. If you have the personality for it, if people naturally gravitate toward you, if you have been the one pulling everyone together your whole life, then what you have is not just a social skill.

.... I would simply start doing special events. I would avoid doing weekly events or biweekly,.... even worse. I totally see the advantage in doing larger, more unique events where you collaborate and plan and make a special Night Out. , because people are looking for not just a regular get-together! They look for something fun they can plan for a few weeks out, and that's exactly what I did for years and years when when I did my parties in San Francisco. The bigger parties were always the best ones. They were the ones where the energy was on FIRE!!!, ....like a good friend of mine used to refer to them as. And I always had multiple rooms with different type of music and entertainment. Very often, it was a theme, and that's actually a big point, getting people to join in on a theme, something that they all can feel like they belong to in a group or what have you. A simple example could be White Nights, where we celebrated the summer solstice, the lightest day of the year, the 21st of June. You can flip that around and do it on the 21st of December, where you have the darkest night. My FAVE events were Events like Halloween, Fourth of July, Beach Parties,....Thanksgiving, holiday parties, taking people to Concerts where we would set up a Pre Party with food and drinks... rent Theme Busess, like The Mexican bus... the list goes one etc. etc. If you have any questions and wonder how I pulled it all off and how I had the best crowd in San Francisco, let me know. Let's set a time up to talk. I am All ears.

It is all about Venues and how you can Maximize the most out of it ... and not the least do it right. GIVEAWAY: My Checklist for Venue Selection! PS. let me know your thoughts about this video and please place any comments there: ...it should be LIVE BY THE TIME YOU CLICK THIS LINK

It is a standard that most people in this industry will never hold themselves to, which is exactly why it will give you an edge the moment you commit to it. When you show up early to a venue walk-through, you are not just there before the meeting starts. You are walking the room with fresh eyes before anyone else arrives. You are spotting the thing nobody else noticed. The entrance that creates a bottleneck. The back corner that needs better lighting. The bar setup that slows service during peak hours. None of that is visible when you walk in at the exact moment everyone else does. When you show up early to meet a sponsor, you are settled. You have your materials organized. You have had thirty seconds to breathe and get your head right. You are not flustered, not apologizing, not playing catch-up from the second you sit down. You walk in already in control of the room. And when your own event night arrives, being early is not optional. It is your job. The venue staff, the production team, the bartenders, the door crew, they all take their cue from you. If you arrive calm, organized, and ahead of schedule, the whole night runs at that frequency. If you arrive rushed and reactive, that energy moves through every person on your team before the first guest walks in. In 22 years of running events in San Francisco, I never once wished I had arrived later. Not one time. But I can tell you exactly what it costs you when you do not arrive early enough. You spend the first two hours of your own event putting out fires instead of working the room. And working the room is the whole job. Build in thirty minutes minimum before anything begins. Treat that time as sacred. The people who master this habit look like they have everything under control even when something goes sideways, because they bought themselves the one thing money cannot buy back. Time to respond instead of react. Organizer Alf Marcussen