I reached out to these leaders and every one of the CEOs invited to participate responded within hours, which says a lot about the character and desire from these leaders to communicate and lead from the front during such a difficult time. We all agreed to schedule our first CEO Roundtable webinar April 2nd. After the first event, all of the participants received such positive feedback and requests from the financial community for a follow up event that a CEO Roundtable 2.0 was scheduled for that very next week, and a final 3.0 version was developed that included an advisor panel.
Hortz: What were the main steps you took after your idea and putting together your CEO partners to launch your event?
Westphal: I have been utilizing virtual meeting solutions for years, so the technology for the CEO Roundtable was not a challenge. What proved to be the most time consuming and, also, one of the most important aspects of the pre-event activities was the marketing and digital promotion of the event to the financial community. I will be the first to admit that, without a Chief Marketing Officer to lean on, my creative and marketing skills were stretched to their limits. Just ask my friend Adam Holt, the CEO at Asset-Map, who spent many late nights on video calls with me, helping to bring to life ideas, Roundtable image concepts, and email and social media communication strategies. With only a week to prepare and promote, every day leading up to the event was filled with late night preparation.
The cooperation and active partnering shown by the participating CEO Roundtable companies to help communicate the messaging from Mobile Assistant to both their social media followers and customer communities was amazing and made me feel a sense of family within the FinTech space. I appreciated the efforts by Asset-Map, Redtail, Riskalyze, Orion, and Snappy Kraken who all contributed so much to the success and the incredible attendance of this series.
Hortz: What were the key dynamics of making this event successful?
Westphal: When you have six company leaders come together to share ideas and tactics relevant to the remote working environment, you would think a specific agenda and structure would be needed. Since we wanted to make this event happen very quickly, I instead relied on the professionalism of the Roundtable participants to have an open, candid discussion with a theme of remote working, change management and perseverance. No PowerPoint presentations, no marketing videos, just real people discussing topics at the forefront of the advisor community.
The result was an open, honest discussion, with great take-aways for the advisor audience that could help reduce the stress that comes with change, and tactics that could be implemented to make an immediate impact in their lives.
Hortz: What were the major obstacles and how did you solve for them?
Westphal: An obstacle did present itself upon the commencement of the first CEO Roundtable event. We had over 500 people registered, so we adjusted our account (or so we thought), with the virtual meeting provider, to increase the capacity of attendees from our 100 maximum plan. The adjustment unfortunately was not made, so once we reached 100 attendees, people who wanted to join real-time could not. The event was recorded, so no one missed out on the great discussions.
Post-meeting, we still were unable to contact the company to change our plan and were forced to choose another virtual meeting solution for our next CEO Round table events. The massive increase in customers for that former vendor company had obviously impacted their customer service. Luckily for us, there were a number of reliable virtual meeting solutions to choose from.