Mother Earth News Fair 2019 – Recap

Sean E. Douglas and Brian J. Pombo
Mother Earth News Fair

Episode 020.

Have you used live events to promote your business, your book or your speaking career?

Podcast Host Brian J. Pombo and Producer Sean E. Douglas attended the Mother Earth News Fair in Albany, Oregon from Saturday, August 3rd to Sunday, August 4th 2019. Located at the Linn County Fairgrounds, Brian and Sean give their reactions, thoughts and tips for attending and profiting off of shows and expositions like the Mother Earth News Fair. Listen now!

Find out the business events secrets for growing and strengthening ANY company: http://brianjpombo.com/secrets/

Full Transcript

Brian: How many people do you think actually put their email address down off of that crowd from what you could tell Sean.

Sean: If we’re playing the game. So if you understand the 80/20 principle. 80 percent of the crowd was signing up for it, which pretty much blew me away, every single time I saw that. From my observation, I was definitely making note of that.

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Brian: Alright, welcome back to the Off The Grid Biz Podcast. Today’s episode is going to be quite a bit different because what we’re doing instead of interviewing somebody from the outside, I have producer Sean E. Douglas with me.

He also joined me in Albany, Oregon for the Mother Earth News Fair.

And we’re going to talk about our experiences there.

First, we’re going to go off of why we went. What made this one standout in our mind of something that we wanted to highlight on the show, and go to when it happened this year.

And really, that comes back to an episode with Brad James from BeePods.com.

He’s the one that mentioned Mother Earth News Fair off of the podcast, we had a small conversation with him about how he got involved with them and was giving a speech at one of the other events.

So that led us to look a little further into Mother Earth News Fair. We were very familiar with the magazine. And as we were looking into it, we noticed a number of speakers that had all the media capabilities.

They had been on podcasts before many of them had, many of them had written books. And it was something that was interesting to us that we wanted to explore via the podcast.

So in leading up to the actual fair itself, we decided to start emailing and calling some of these people and seeing if they’d be willing to be interviewed on the show.

Sure enough, they did.

As you may have heard up until now, and if you haven’t, go back and listen, we had 11 episodes with a different interview on each episode, all from different backgrounds, some of them writers, some not.

We produced them over a very short period of time in order to hit that deadline of the show itself.

The last one that you may have heard with from Jereme Zimmerman was taken at the show itself.

So you got to hear us on location and it was interesting, what were your expectations going into it Sean.

Sean: Well, thankfully as Janice Cox was so nice to print out the whole schedule there and the different speakers and times for you when she met up with you to do your recording.

We were able to hit the ground running on understanding the different speakers, especially people that we’d had on the show. We wanted to try to hit up as many as we could.

While we were there for the two days and trying to map out most of them would speak more than one time. I think there was only a couple that only had one speech if I’m not mistaken. Most of them are speaking 2,3,4 times maybe even putting on workshops.

Definitely expected to want to get in there and see as many people as I could and me personally, you got to understand I’m probably about as city slicker is you’re going to get.

Overtime as we’ve been doing the self reliance and learning more about the field.

Brian knows a lot more about these things than I do.

And it’s been a really educational and an eye opener for me and this series that we had before we got there was an no exception, it was very much eye opener for all the different range of topics that were being covered from the different speakers.

And so I was really curious to get to sit down and spend some time listening to them, see them in action and see people that were listening to different questions that would come up.

Really want to see that, wanted to see all the different exhibitors and how things were laid out there, how everything was set up. What the bookstore looked like, because I heard some things about, they have this really nice bookstore, you know, so I had an idea of how it might look.

But really being able to go in and see this atmosphere, and how it all worked together. Being there, it exceeded what I could picture in my mind. And it was, it was just very fun time. Before you knew it, the two days were up and it was time to go home.

Brian: Yeah, no, it really was it in terms of my expectations are very similar. I have been to expos and events like this previously, but none quite like this.

None put on by a world famous magazine like Mother Earth News. None that were that professional in terms of directing people. My expectations just weren’t there.

As far as that goes, I knew there was going to be vendors. I knew there were going to be speakers. I knew they’d probably be selling some books there because of all the writers that were going to be there.

Besides that I wasn’t quite certain how it was going to all play out.

I wasn’t sure how big it was going to be. They’ve got six different ones every year, depending on which event you went to. It may be larger or smaller.

I think this one in Albany tends to be over on the smaller end of things from the speakers that I know of that went to the other events. So I wasn’t sure about that.

But with first impressions, let’s talk about first impressions.

We showed up Saturday morning. We got there.

I was surprised how warm it was. It was very warm weather.

A good portion of the event was outdoors, also that was interesting.

This kind of see the mixture of the indoor and the outdoor parts of the event.

One thing I knew right away, there was going to be more to see than we could possibly get to the fact that there were 10 presentations and or workshops, going at any given time that you had to choose one out of those.

One, unless you want to only get partial viewings, you had to jump around to one of the 10 stages to catch whoever you’re interested in seeing.

One thing that we figured out pretty quick was that we were not going to see everyone that we wanted to see or at least get to see them speak.

And sure enough, there were people that I had met through the podcast that I did not even get a chance to go up and say hi to because we were so busy. That’s just part of the first impressions.

We’ll get into a deeper dive as we go along. What were your first impressions Sean that first morning when we got there?

Sean: Oh, yeah, it was a real eye opener.

In trying to get in. You know, there’s people there at the gates obviously they’re attentive making sure that you got your wristband or this, that and the other. But very very friendly, not super locked down like a you know, it’s not like…oh boy, if you go to a sporting event or something like that these days, or obviously going to the airport.

That’s a whole nother story as far as trying to get into a place like that, but no, no, it’s not super intensive or anything like that trying to get in.

So that’s really nice, again, friendly.

I think everybody there was seemingly in a pretty good mood. It wasn’t hard to figure out where the different stages were at.

It didn’t seem to take too long. Getting in there, figuring out the layout of the place, and taking it all in.

And as we were doing that I was surprised we kept running into different speakers as we were just walking around and then Michael Foley, Leah Webb, and a few others even before we even sat down.

And first one we watched was the Shockey’s and Kirsten was doing her speech. I think that one started about 45 minutes after we walked in the door or something like, that half hour after walked into the door.

So just taking in a lot of stuff. That’s all I can say.

Brian: And you mentioned the Shockey’s talk, so we got to see Kirsten and Christopher Shockey they were the first speech that we got to witness. And I had some notes I was looking over.

It was interesting because it was outside, it was it was slightly breezy. And you could kind of hear that it was kind of over underneath a large tarp and the tarp was kind of hitting up against the poles a little bit.

You could hear that they were kind of next to a petting zoo. So you could hear a few animal sounds here and there that they kind of integrated into their presentation but kind of joking about it.

Kirsten was the one that did most of the presentation. It was very professional, very interesting.

Kind of a good starter on just fermenting vegetables and the the concept behind that how to do pickling in a traditional fermented pickle in way is really good stuff.

We jumped from…..we’re going to go a little bit deeper. Just kind of giveing some highlights, just so you know, we kind of jumped from speaker to speaker after that.

We got to see you Jereme Zimmerman discuss beer making. Then we saw Leah Webb talking about belly biochemistry that was very interesting, lots of heavy duty knowledge on that one.

And then we saw Frank Hyman with Hentopia show some live examples of ways that you can create water feeder. I mean, he discussed it on the show.

So if you listen to what he was saying he was going to talk about, that’s what he talked about.

And it was it was a lot of fun. He’s very entertaining.

And then we got to see Janice Cox, talk about lavender for health and beauty.

So these were all people that we had had on the show. It was great meeting them in person.

Afterwards, many of them you were directed back to a signing table, which was over in this bookstore area, which is kind of an area in the expo that’s kind of cornered off where all the books being sold by the Mother Earth Mews Fair were there.

Most of the authors had their books in the bookstore and after they had had spoken many of them, you can go and get your book signed with them. That was a really interesting process.

So you watch a speech, you’re encouraged to go by the book and have it signed. Anything else you want to say about that first day shot?

Sean: Yeah, just a little bit further on having them go for the signing. The people that I made note, here we saw in total in the two days, and we’ll get into Sunday, we saw nine speakers, five on Saturday, four on Sunday.

And part of that is because on Saturday and ran an hour longer, I think it went till six and on Sunday and only till around 5. And most of those people that we watched, they had they were going to do a signing either right after or very, very soon after, and I didn’t look at the ones that did not do that when we were at their speech.

There were other times where it was quickly afterwards that they did that on other speeches. So this is something that definitely was….definitely is something that somewhere down the line that Mother Earth News is organized with their speakers to try to at least do that. It seems like at least one speech for most of them every weekend. So that that’s really good. I mean, when you think about it, I mean, a lot of the tie within this is going back, that’s your funnel, that’s where your call to action is, if you will, to go back there and do the signing and go to the bookstore and get them there.

But also I noticed, with various speakers not to say that they wouldn’t want to take questions or anything like that…everybody was friendly and all these things. But more to say that because you can see pretty much after a lot of these talks, you can see like a little bit of a crowd wanting to get around the speakers right after they were done.

Waiting to ask questions, and I’m sure, if I had to sit down with Andrew Perkins or whoever with Mother Earth News. If they weren’t doing this kind of thing before, they probably may have gotten bogged down with these questions. Right after the speeches, and so you can see a clear call to action to go back to the bookstore for a signing in to answer questions. And that’s part of the thing there.

But it also frees up that situation from getting kind of bottlenecked there so that they can also in turn, get ready for the next speaker to get ready. Because as you said, they could be having like up to 10 of these things going on at one time.

And there’s one after another that’s happened and again and again. So if you put it all together, it just makes sense for a lot of different reasons to have that kind of thing going on.

Brian: Mmmhmm.

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BrianJPombo.com/secrets and now back to the conversation.

Brian: Absolutely, it was great because there were different ways that they encouraged people to go purchase the books or to go and sign.

One of the ways that we saw on the first day, both Frank Hyman and the Shockey’s, had these flyers that were handed out during their speech. And you can tell they’re put together by Storey Publishing, because well, it says Storey Publishing on it, but also it has that they have a similar look to them.

So on one side, it’s got their picture, it’s got the picture of their book, that the item number, the price of it when their book signing is the fact that that you can get 20% off of the bookstore, which seemed to be a constant thing all weekend.

And then on the other side, they’d have details about that person.

So for example, the Shockey’s on the other side had a few recipes one for green peppercorn mustard, one for holy fermented bazell is really cool, nice little recipes on the other side and area for another.

And then on the other side of Frank Hyman’s four ways a hatch is better than a hinged roof.

And so it’s kind of a step by step talking about the advantages. That’s a neat little way to be able to get people to do the next step to be able to go through the process.

Another neat thing that we saw happening, and the first person we saw doing it was Leah Webb, and that was hand around a…..did she have a clipboard?

I believe she did. She had clipboards.

Sean: Two clipboards.

Brian: Had two clipboards. And she was asking for people’s names and email addresses and what and the reason for it, she said, if you put your name and email address down, I will basically have a raffle at the end of the speech and give away one of my books.

How many people do you think actually put their email address down now for that crowd from what you could tell Sean?

Sean: If we’re playing the game, so if you understand at the 80/20 principle….so if we’re playing that game, I would say we’re at least on the 80% side.

So that meaning at least I would say 80% of the crowd was signing up for it, which pretty much blew me away. That that would happen.

And that was not the only person that I would say…..every single time I saw, that from my observations, because I was definitely making note of that.

I would say from playing that 80/20 game, it’s going to be on the 80% side that we’re looking at for the conversion rate.

Brian: Yeah, that was pretty incredible. And you got to think about that as a speaker, if you’re a speaker, and you’re looking to get out there, how can you get the most out of this experience?

Well, one way is to encourage them to purchase something, purchase a book, if you’ve got a book for sale.

Another way is to get their information so that you can have an ongoing conversation with them after the show.

I mean, it only makes sense that they would do something like this. And there were a number of speakers that didn’t do anything of that sort.

But there were also a couple other speakers. I know Gary Collins did, I know, Janice Cox also passed around bags, they had little slips of paper that you can fill out.

I believe that was setup by Mother Earth News because that’s their publisher, you can see how the book publishers do everything they can to help out the process.

Also, just because a person’s a speaker, or has written a book doesn’t mean that they’re running a really full scale business on this.

What we’re talking about is the business aspects of all these things.

As we discussed throughout all the interviews leading up to this, why would someone want to write a book?

Why would someone want to give a speech at an event like this?

And so we’re kind of talking in and out of all these things as we go along, really entertaining speeches, and presentations, on on all levels. I mean, we enjoyed everyone that we saw. And it was very, very interesting if you’re just wanting to get some info, especially on a particular topic that you know, is in this realm, and you know, a certain speaker is going to be there.

It’s worth the price just to go in for that, let alone all the vendors have great presentations and everything going on.

There’s always more that can be done in terms of business.

And we’ll be talking more about that in future episodes. But just to see what was done.

I’d also like to mention, Chris White, who we had on the show from DripWorks.com.

We got to talk with him a little bit. We didn’t get to catch his speech, but he had mentioned how he told people about his booth, but he didn’t necessarily see people go over to his booth right away after being done with the speech.

But he found people filtering through all throughout the rest of the weekend. That had been to the speech that saw him there and came over because they saw a speech.

So even though he didn’t have a book for them to purchase, he did have an opportunity for them to come by the booth and take part in the activities that were there at the Drip Works booth. So that was pretty cool.

Sean: I forget if I asked him or not if he had something he was giving away during his speech, trying to mirror and match some ways. They do this with the books where there’s maybe there’s something given away or there’s a speech, you know, hey, they’ve got a draw to do signing or something like that. Was there a draw right after the speech to get them to that table so that they would go there right away?

But yeah, he was, he did say we’ve seen steady people coming in through the rest of that day.

And we talked to him fairly early on Sunday. And they seem fairly pleased that they’re just steady people coming back again and again, that they had saw the speech and one drop by and say hi and inquire about Drip Works, so that was terrific.

One other point I wanted to say on the speaking before I forget and also for that this is it’s a biz podcast. So we are talking about business stuff, but I do not want to undersell, I learned so much, again, I like I said I’m like a city slicker on a lot of this stuff.

I learned so much stuff from these people, in sitting down, and hearing what they had to say, taking notes with everybody all the way through, you know, even from a health standpoint, at least to start out, you know, I was so impressed by Leah’s conversation that I bought her book, and I’m implementing some of the things she’s got with her cookbook.

So I’m really pleased about that, just on a personal level, did not expect to get anything like that out of out of this, this whole ordeal, but just for my own benefit, I’ve gotten that.

But I learned so much stuff in getting to see again, like Kirsten Shockey, you know, they had the cameras up there and it was really nice to see her working on the fermenting and everything.

So I mean, I really enjoyed what the people had to say. I mean, it’s not just all business.

And it was very much an eye opener and I am very much encouraged to learn more about these types of things just over time.

Don’t expect to learn it overnight for sure.

But another thing that I thought was great and the first person we saw again, the Shockey’s, had their books right up there at the front, nice big books.

Most of them have you know, big lettering on the covers and you can see it, we were way in the back, I could see those things nice and clear from the back, you know, that you see that.

And again, you’d see a lot of these people have in their books right up there at the front and I thought that was terrific.

What a great way to remind people that you have these books.

And it’s, it’s right there. You can’t can’t dispute the it’s right there you can see it fresh in their minds as you’re talking. There it is.

So I thought that was another great idea that you’d see consistently through the different talks.

And it was just really nice. I know like Uncle Mud. We saw him on Sunday and he was kind of doing his own thing with his whole setup but they had the book layout right there for all his stuff, he pretty much had that spot is pretty much dominated his little area through the whole weekend.

But he had his books right there that you could get, you know, there were people available to help sell books or what have you, right there for his purposes, too. And so it just it was just it was great stuff.

Brian: Yeah, and that Uncle Mud we’re looking to have him on the show in a future episode here.

He was the specific talk that we watched of his was on rocket mass heaters. Really great personality, really interesting guy, got a lot of interesting background to go off of so I can’t wait to be able to talk deeper with him on that.

We got see Andy Brennan from Aaron Burr Cider. We got to see Gary Collins from the Simple Life.

We got to see Crystal Stevens from GrowCreateInspire.com, and she’s also someone that we were hoping to have on the podcast in the future, but you definitely want to check out her stuff.

Just a really good day on Sunday.

Got to meet a lot of great people.

Well, the whole weekend we did. Got to meet a lot of great people, didn’t get to see close up all of the vending opportunities there all the booths and everything that were set up. But we did get to meet a few people.

We’re going to have some of those people on the show get to talk with them about their final experiences with The Mother Earth News Fair and kind of give a wrap up to this entire series.

Now, it doesn’t mean it ends a lot of our relationships with these people, we’re going to go beyond that.

And we’ll have them back on the show, or have them on the show for the first time, even though we met them there. But we’re really going to, we’re going to go in a little bit deeper and find out some more people’s perspectives on the Mother Earth News Fair, this particular one for 2019 from Albany, Oregon, and, you know, overall impressions for me was that it’s very well organized, very clean, very straightforward.

Once you’re there for a few hours, you get an idea of the layout, and the overall process of the whole thing.

And there’s lots of opportunity for people with businesses. If you have a personality business, it really works out great because you may be able to get one of the slots to speak somewhere.

You could promote a book, you could promote anything that you possibly selling would fit that crowd. And it’s very much a self reliance based crowd, a homesteading crowd, you got a whole lot of anything that’s even closely related to that was represented there at the Mother Earth News Fair.

I know there’s a couple of the sub niches that I know people in that have been at those events in the past and I’m hoping to see them back again in the future and really see it.

Some even more variety at the shows, but lots of fun our overall impression was it was I can’t wait to go back next year. I hope to be able to hit up some of the other ones.

Also, who knows maybe even take part in some of the opportunities myself that any overall impressions from the whole event, Sean?

Sean: Yeah, I mean, you pretty much summed it up pretty good right there.

Definitely would like to go back again and it would be awesome to go check out some of the ones that are beyond just Oregon. I know talking with some of the speakers there were different, this was set up a little bit different than some of the other different one.

It’d be interesting to see how the layout is different, especially I think it was in Pennsylvania, Andrew Perkins was talking about how that’s a whole nother type of feel, with that one that’s very unique from the other different ones, the other ones that they have.

So like definitely like to check that out one day totally plan on going back again next year.

It was amazing. The first day there’s so much to take in because it was the first time that we had gone there and to see how it all was and you’re processing that by the second day, okay, you kind of got an idea how the feel is and how things are going to go.

And so it was a little bit different and I’ll be very interested to see how the second time we go out there how that’ll go had a great time.

Everybody seemed like out there they were doing it’s just a really fun time, just like you, while the stuff we’ve heard and the episodes that we put together. It held to it.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: So we’ve got a few more episodes to go in our Mother Earth News Fair series. So be sure and listen to those and we will continue on we’ve got some great interviews already lined up after the series also stay tuned.

Thank you for joining us on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast. If there’s anything that you’d like to hear more about, please let us know if there’s anyone you’d like to be on the show please let us know and you have a great day.

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