Ruth Poundwhite [00:00:00]:
I ran my first summit back in 2022, and I told everyone afterwards that I would probably never do it again. And yet this year I am back to run my 7th event, running more events than I ever have on the same amount of energy. And this is a behind-the-scenes look at how and why I’m doing it. Welcome to the Soulful Sales Show, where we talk about believing in the value of your offers, getting them in front of your right people, and selling more of what you do in your unique way. Hi, and welcome back to another episode of the Soulful Soulful Sales Show. This one is a bit different because I actually have my friend Destini Copp interviewing me about the behind the scenes of my current summit and my summits in general. And actually, she was the perfect person to have interviewing me about this because she runs so many events herself. She is the events queen.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:00:51]:
And actually, she has a— an AI event coming up after mine. So watch this space and be subscribed to my newsletter to find out more about that when it happens. But yeah, let me get into what I am talking about today. So I ran my first online summit back in 2022. I think I had 1,000 and something attendees, and I remember doing a debrief in my membership at the time, and I remember very clearly saying that I wasn’t sure if I would ever do it again because of the sheer amount of work involved. However, here I am. This year, I’m about to run my second summit of the year, and I have more planned. This is my 7th event that I’m about to put on, the Aligned AI Summit, and the link is in the show notes for that if you want to check it out.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:01:34]:
I’m running more events now than I have before, but I still have low capacity, low energy, and all of that fun stuff. So in this behind the scenes episode, I’m going to talk about what has changed. Some of it is practical, and of course AI comes into the mix. I will share my AI setup and what specifically I’m handing over, but what I personally keep control of as well. And another part of it is my own experience and mindset, and actually that is making a big difference when it comes to this particular summit that I am in the midst of promoting right now. And I also talk about whether events are worth it because we can never guarantee the results, right? But there are some really amazing unexpected benefits that I have had from running events, and there are very important reasons that I keep doing them, even though, yes, I am sometimes disappointed with the results. My Aligned AI Summit, by the way, is happening from the 8th to 11th of September. You can get your free ticket at alignedaisummit.com, and I am actually running 2 sessions of my own there, actually more than 2.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:02:36]:
I will share my Claude marketing roadmap, map, which is a lot about how I’m running the marketing side of things, which of course applies to my events as well. I will show you behind the scenes of some of the interactive tools I’ve been building, and I have a session about how Claude ran my launch, plus a Q&A if you want to ask me any questions. And that’s just my sessions. Of course, we have over 30 amazing speakers and sponsors at the event as well, talking about all things from what your boundaries and limits are, from— for what you will hand to AI and what you won’t, to setting up your entire funnels with AI and setting up agents that There is so much goodness in this summit, and as always, it’s about taking what is relevant to you and leaving the rest. Um, and yeah, enjoy this interview. And yeah, it was really fun doing it in an interview format, so I hope you like it too.

Destini Copp [00:03:24]:
Ruth, I am super excited for our discussion today. We’re going to be talking about live events and kind of going behind the scenes of what you’ve been doing with your Aligned AI Summit. So super excited to be here and I’m just gonna jump right in if that’s okay.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:03:42]:
Yes, that is absolutely fine. And I, can I just actually say, Destini is the best person to be talking about this with because you are the events queen. So I’m sure we’re gonna get some interesting tidbits from Destini as well.

Destini Copp [00:03:54]:
Well, it, it is my favorite topic and as everybody knows, if they know me, I do a lot of events, but I want to kind of really where I’m going to go first, because everybody out there has heard or they know that events do take a lot of time, energy, and effort. So I know that with you and kind of, you know, your brand, you have low energy. So I’m just curious as to, you know, how do you run So many events when we know that they do take time and a lot of energy to put together.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:04:37]:
The first time I did a summit, I’m pretty sure I did a debrief of it for my members, and this was probably in 2022. And I’m— and I think I said I’m not sure I would ever do this again. So it’s actually quite interesting that not only have I done it again, but I’ve— I’m— and when you say so many events, it’s nothing compared to you. But for me, I’ve ramped up and I’m doing more. Than I have before. And definitely this year, I’m planning on doing more than I ever have in other years. And there’s a few different reasons for that. I am not going to lie about the fact that they take a lot of energy, as you know as well, although we can also create systems behind the scenes and have support behind the scenes to manage a lot of that over time.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:05:22]:
But for me, it’s, it’s so important to be real about the fact that as much as we love the evergreen stuff, we love the things that run on autopilot, we all know that it’s not as simple as following this Facebook ads course and everything’s gonna work out really easily. I mean, you and I both, we have ups and downs with trying our own ads and whatever other strategy we’re talking about. There’s so many different— there’s, there’s so many details to figure out in terms of getting those evergreen funnels working. And for me, just nothing beats the energy in a good way as well of the live event, the influx of subscribers. Like, nothing I do leads to so many new, uh, leads on my list. Um, the connections that we make with people. Also running my own events, I think, has been really, really important for my own— I guess building my own authority and my space in this in this business that we’re in and meeting so many amazing people and getting invited to their events as well. Like, I, I don’t know about you, but I find that the more I run events and connect with people, it’s just so easy to take part in other people’s events.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:06:38]:
I don’t have to go looking for them because you’re just on their radar. Um, and I always say, like, yes, I have low energy and capacity, and I do have to be really careful about how I manage it, and it definitely fluctuates as well. But the way that I do it, I talk about is a kind of a seasonal cyclical thing. So there are periods where I plan for that are going to be high energy and more intense, and periods that I plan for that are going to be downtime and much more low-key. Um, so yeah, I don’t know if I’ve gone off-piste of the question, but it’s very, very important to be looking at both sides of things.

Destini Copp [00:07:17]:
And I love that. So even though you have the low energy, you do see the importance of doing the live events. How many are you doing a year? I don’t remember.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:07:27]:
So I have 2 that are like the, the bigger summits. I’m adding in some smaller collaborations, which hopefully will be happening in next couple of months. And then obviously there’s the other kind of events, although we’re not probably going into the details of this, but like the live launches and the webinars and stuff like that, which I will do more regularly. But even then, I don’t have a fixed schedule for those, but I’ll definitely do them several times a year because they, they, again, I could do some sort of prerecorded thing. It’s not the same as doing a live webinar. And even when I’m setting up those Facebook ad funnels behind the scenes, it doesn’t perform the same as when I have something live to point them to. So same, same goes with the summits, the webinars, all of this stuff. It’s really, really important to Schedule them in throughout the year with downtime in between.

Destini Copp [00:08:23]:
I love that. So, and I love the point that you’re making. I think all of us, you know, myself included, all the introverts out there for sure would prefer to kind of set our businesses up so everything’s just evergreen. And we certainly have those elements set up. There’s no doubt about it. But to your point, there’s nothing out there. that beats the energy and the conversions that you get from a live event, whether it’s a live summit, whether it’s a live webinar or whatever. So I love that we are being completely honest about that.

Destini Copp [00:08:59]:
So let’s talk about how you kind of judge whether a live event was successful or not. So I’m just curious as to, you know, what your answer is compared to kind of what I do.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:09:13]:
So I, and, and this is, I’ve spoken to a lot of people who have done live events and, and the sheer amount of work that sometimes something like a summit can take can make you think that it’s make or break for your business. Like, I’ve put so much work into this. I know, especially when you’re in the earlier stages where you don’t have the systems or you don’t have the support or you’re doing everything from scratch, it can really feel make or break. The way I know you and I both design our events is that they are profitable in and of themselves. We want them to be profitable. We want the money that we make from the event to not just cover the work we put in, but, you know, and some. And it’s unpredictable sometimes. I will definitely say that some events have done better than others.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:09:58]:
Like, my last event that I did, uh, earlier this year was definitely kind of disappointing in terms of what I brought in compared to previous years of that event, but it’s all part and parcel of running them. And one of the things that I have found is, I mean, one of the huge benefits I had of running events is meeting someone who then invited me to join this mastermind that we are in together. And it’s so, like, hard to measure that kind of stuff and hard to see immediately, but I would absolutely say that is one of the best results I’ve had from my event. But it’s totally not to do with the profit and everything. Having said that, obviously it’s really important that We are measuring whether it is worth the work for us. And I think that I’m definitely finding this a lot easier to do now that we have all these MCPs and we can get Claude. What I mean by that is like AI or Claude, whatever, can connect to our software like Kit or, you know, our accounting software or whatever, and it can pull in all the numbers for us and it can work it all out for us, or it can show us that, okay, these people who signed up to the summit then maybe didn’t buy straight away, but then over a period of months they’ve gone on to work with you in other ways and stuff like that. And that’s the long-term effect of the events that is very hard to judge at the time.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:11:19]:
So I guess the reason I have kept coming back to them, even though some are, some are better than others, is that I know over time they are growing my lists. I know over time that they’re leading to new people in my offers. Post-event, as well as the sales that I make in the event itself, and those relationships I’m building with speakers and sponsors and attendees is really powerful as well.

Destini Copp [00:11:42]:
And I want to keep going on that because you touched upon it, but I think we can go a little bit deeper here. So I think things even in the past 6 months have changed so much. So I know that you are in the process of simplifying your events now. Let’s talk about what you are actually handing off to AI, what you are keeping To yourself and what’s changing now? Because I know that you’re doing your events in school, so I’d like to go into details about that too. I gave you a lot of questions there.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:12:12]:
So, yeah. So what’s changing? So one thing I wanna say is like having been in this mastermind with you all and like several of us, not all of us, but a lot of us do run events regularly. And what I started, what, what I was noticing was like Destini and, you know, some of the other people in our mastermind, you’re just doing it so regularly. How are you taking that on? Because for me, It just felt impossible. Like, I would love to do more, but how can I fit this in with the time and capacity that I have? And actually, before I get to all the practical stuff, one of the key things that I took away from our conversations was the fact that I just have to decide that it is not as big of a deal in my head as I was making it. Now, some of that actually is practical in terms of perfectionism and wanting to keep control of stuff rather than either handing it to AI or handing it to team members. And part of that is just deciding that it’s, it’s not, I guess, because if you only do it like once a year or whatever it is, it can feel make or break, or it can feel like this is my one chance of getting these leads, or this is my one chance of making an impact. And it’s a lot of pressure, right? So one thing I have done in the last few months is just decide that it’s not that big of a deal.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:13:27]:
And Like I said, there will be some events that do better than others. Am I disappointed at the time? Yeah. But is it, is it still in the grand scheme of things worth it? Yes. So that’s the first thing. Now, AI. Oh my goodness. So, when I did my last summit, which was a few months ago, I didn’t have any of these systems set up that I now do in Claude, but it’s not just limited to Claude. You can do this stuff in other AI tools as well.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:13:55]:
Creating pages, creating the bigger project plans, you know, auditing existing stuff that you’ve had, you have, and checking links and all. There’s a lot of details when you’re doing a summit, right? Like broken links or things that can go wrong because there’s so many different intertwined pages and speakers. It goes into my Airtable, it checks what data we have about all of the speakers, all of this stuff. I hadn’t set it all up. I was using AI, but not to the extent that I now am. And, uh, you and I have had conversations about this separately, but the most important thing for me is that I’m the decision maker in, in my business, and I know the vision that I have for my events and like what’s the transformation I want people to walk away with. And I’m very involved in choosing the topics. I do have a speaker application, which means I get topic ideas that I never would have thought of, which I love, but I’m still very involved in choosing the topics and finding the balance.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:14:52]:
But AI is doing all of the grunt work, all of the grunt work, seriously, like creating all of the pages. Um, so whether that’s the free registration page, the tripwire pages, I mean, I’ve even got Cowork in there setting up products in ThriveCart. Not that it’s not great at that, just to be, uh, honest, but it does it, it just does it very slowly. And I’m sure by, you know, this, that will actually be out of date very soon. It’d probably be better at it very, very quickly, but It’s doing all of these things. And where in the past, because there’s so much information involved, that it would either be my error or my assistant’s error or whatever, like, you know, we’d get a date wrong, we’d say the wrong session title, that stuff is totally not an issue anymore because AI just notices it. Like, literally creating the pages and it was like, oh, this speaker has a typo in their free gift link. And it’s like, okay, well, I may or may not have caught that.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:15:49]:
But now I don’t even have to think about it, which— the stuff in your brain, I find, is that you could— the more you can get out of your head, the better. So yeah, I mean, I could go into detail about any of these things, but it is changing so much. And I do think that that is making it way more possible for those of us with less capacity, or those of you who are listening who are earlier on in your journey and don’t have all the system set up that, you know, I do, or Destini, um, it’s just making it so much more possible to do this live stuff. And I think the goal is that you’re not really worried about those details, that you can show up at the live event if you’ve got live calls, live sessions. Like, I’m going to do a masterclass at my event to sell my membership, for example. I want to show up at that. This is definitely the goal. With a clear head and just focus on being there and connecting with people in that moment rather than thinking about all the million other things.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:16:51]:
Which I guess could bring me to the point about school, which you mentioned as well. And that’s a change I’m making recently as well. Like, really, I’m not totally changing the summit and event model, but I am being more strategic about connecting it with growing the community that I then get to nurture and engage with post-event. And I know you’re doing this too, aren’t you, Destini? Like, you’re being really intentional about connecting your events, and you already had community, um, with your B2C events. But yeah, with your B2B events lately, the community is a big part of it, right?

Destini Copp [00:17:29]:
Yeah, it is. And I feel like that, to your point, with AI doing all this other stuff, you know, all the grunt work, we can actually show up live, right, in our events, in our memberships and whatever. And, you know, just to like let you know, like I have 2 live events that I’m doing today and one tomorrow. I would not have to— I would not have had time to do that had AI not be doing some of this grunt work and catching all those errors, quite frankly, that you, that you mentioned. It catches things that we would have never have caught. Not, not in a million years. Like a human, would not have caught a lot of the errors that AI catches for us. But going back to your point about school, I do think that in the era with AI, community is, you know, is where it’s at.

Destini Copp [00:18:20]:
And I love the fact that you’ve been building that community and you’re using that community to bring people together in your summits.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:18:29]:
Yeah, it’ll be really interesting to kind of debrief afterwards because I’ve not run an event fully in there yet, and this will be the first one. And the, and the group that I’ve built so far still feels kind of modest in terms of its size. It’ll be interesting to debrief in terms of how it grows, but it isn’t all about the numbers, as I was saying. Um, but yeah, I also, a few years ago when I was doing my summits, I also considered getting rid of the community altogether. And what I realized was, and I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I was running the event groups in Facebook I don’t know what it is about Facebook. Maybe it’s the fact that as soon as you go on there, there’s a feed, you’re getting shown all kinds of stuff. I’m not sure what it is. The notifications are also kind of all over the place, the posts aren’t in the right order, and all that kind of thing.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:19:15]:
I don’t know what it is, but I used to find it very, very overwhelming to go in there and try and engage more. I used to kind of force myself to do it, but it felt like a lot. And there’s just something that shifted massively running it in school. And I’m not saying to everyone listening, like, you must run your event in school, but I think the bigger point is well, where feels right for you. I do think the community is an important part of it, but you get to do it, you know, where and how feels right for you. And I’m definitely glad that I made that decision. I just find it so much easier to keep on top of. And just also AI tip with school: Cowork is very, very good at updating stuff in, in school classrooms.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:19:56]:
So if you want to Whether you’re doing courses, events, whatever, it’s already uploaded all of my summit presentations to a classroom. I didn’t have to do any work. It came up with the build plan itself, then it followed its own build plan. It’s just brilliant. And then I changed one of the titles. So I’m like, whereas in the past I would have been like, okay, I’ve got to update the registration page. I’ve got to update the email. I’ve got to update the page that the presentation goes live on.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:20:19]:
I don’t have to worry about that. I just say to Claude, oh, I’ve changed the presentation title, go and update it in all the places. It’s just so Amazing. So yeah, well, where, where Skool is quite limited in terms of its own, like, native integrations and stuff, actually Cowork can handle it very well. So I do like that about it.

Destini Copp [00:20:37]:
And I do want to talk about your Aligned AI Summit that you have coming up in a few weeks. So why don’t you tell, tell us a little bit more about that? What kind of workshops do you have coming up? What are we going to learn?

Ruth Poundwhite [00:20:50]:
So the Aligned AI Summit, first, I did the first round of it in, in 2025. And it really came out of this feeling that a lot— like, I am really personally very excited by AI, obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t be talking about it so much and doing this summit. And there’s a part of me that’s nervous about it. When I did the summit last year, a lot of my concerns were like, you know, how can I be using AI without sounding like everyone else. I started to notice, and I’m sure a lot of people listening have noticed, like, people sound the same or they sound different how they used to and all of this stuff. And it’s still a problem, but I think this year is more about going beyond that and getting excited about, okay, what can it take off our plates in terms of marketing and sales? And also, how can we make our offers more attractive in the AI era? So it’s kind of that positive look at how AI is helping us and helping our offers in the AI era so that we can, like we’ve already said, do what we do best. We’ve got the capacity to connect with people, we’ve got the capacity to be the, the, um, the strategist in our business rather than being stuck in all the grunt work and stuff. So we’ve got a lot of sessions, um, especially on— yeah, what— because I know a lot of us are wondering, like, how does this affect, for example, if we’re a course selling courses, you know, the whole landscape is changing because anyone can go into AI and get it to even create a bespoke course for them, basically.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:22:26]:
But it doesn’t mean that our offers are obsolete. It just means that we need to know how to make them attractive and potentially even use AI within them to help people actually use them, which is something I’ve been doing a lot. So, um, yeah, a lot of the presentations are talking about the opportunities that are coming up in the age of AI and how we can harness them without letting go of who we are and why we’re doing this in the first place. I’m doing a presentation specifically on how also how Claude ran my launch, which is a lot of that mental load that I talked about earlier. And yeah, I’m really, really excited because from one year to the next, the topics are completely different because AI is just moving so quickly. But I also know that this is a summit you can come to If you are scared about that, feeling behind, you aren’t behind. Or if you are just wanting to learn something new, you’re already deep in it and you want to learn something new. And it’s really about doing it in a way that works for you.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:23:25]:
So we’re never going to be saying you must do all the things or whatever. And it’s definitely not bro marketing vibe. So this is what the Aligned AI Summit is really about. But yeah, I’m so excited to be having these conversations, especially like the panel discussions as well. I love those. So we’re going to have daily panel every day. That’s probably where a lot of juicy stuff will come out about how people are really using it as well. So yeah, have I answered your question, Destini?

Destini Copp [00:23:50]:
Do you— Yeah, yeah. So I was just thinking, you know, if somebody is interested in doing one of these live events, they need to come and watch your workshop about how Claude did it. You know, it’s basically helping you do these events. So that’s gonna be a really good workshop.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:24:06]:
Thank you for reminding me because I was supposed to talk about that. Yes, Destini, thank you. So I am actually doing a workshop about how Claude can take over your So a lot of, although we’ve been talking a lot today about behind the scenes of events, you can come into the event itself. It’s a bit meta, like come in to see how it’s done, but also learn that kind of AI marketing side of things. I’m going to do a workshop specifically about that as well as part of the event. So yeah.

Destini Copp [00:24:30]:
And then speaking to kind of take it a step further, speaking of, you know, one of the reasons why we run these events is to get people into our own programs. I know you have an AI program. Can you tell everybody about that and what they would learn by joining that?

Ruth Poundwhite [00:24:45]:
Yeah, the Aligned AI Lab is my low-cost membership. You can read more about it at ruthpoundwhite.com/lab. And actually, that is the main point of the membership, using AI to do our marketing for us. And really what I came to realize as I was putting this membership together is that I don’t really want it to be a place where you learn all of the ins and outs of AI, because we don’t need to know all the ins and outs of AI. We don’t need to be tech experts. experts. We don’t know, we don’t need to be prompt architects, which I think is kind of becoming a bit obsolete anyway, because AI knows what to do. We just need to know how to get AI to do what we need it for, which is taking the work off our plate.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:25:26]:
We don’t need to learn all of the techie stuff, but we do need to get it to update that funnel that we’re running or take all the stuff out of my head about this launch that I’ve got and all the moving parts and actually structure it and get to work on it. for me. So that’s what we do inside the Lab, um, and I’m going to be specifically after the summit— you can join the Lab at any time, there’s a 7-day free trial. The price is going up just after the summit, um, and if you get in then, so you’ll get the lower price. But then we’re also going to do a, a kind of challenge after the summit where we’re going to upgrade some of our offers with AI. So really, that one of the core themes of the summit is about bringing our offers up to date in the AI era and making sure they’re really helping people still, um, So we’re going to do a challenge all about that inside the lab as well.

Destini Copp [00:26:14]:
Yeah, fun, fun. Ruth, any last-minute comments for the audience here?

Ruth Poundwhite [00:26:19]:
Well, I just want you to come to the summit if you have any curiosity around seeing how the events run, or actually, of course, learning from these amazing experts what, what they are doing currently when it comes to AI and what I’m doing currently to take that marketing off my plate. Like I said, mixed, like everyone has, AI is a whole thing. We all have concerns about it. We all have exciting ways that we’re using it. And we’re not going to shy away from that. And as part of this summit, I am personally very excited about how it can help us with the capacity side of things and allow us to do more of these impactful events and stuff like this in our business by taking the load off. So yeah, alignedaisummit.com. It’s free.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:27:04]:
So get your free ticket. There is an upgrade if you want to get all the replays and the bonuses, but you can join free as well if you want to join in live.

Destini Copp [00:27:13]:
Ruth, this was great. I had so much fun here today and thanks for sharing all of your knowledge with us.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:27:18]:
Thank you so much, Destini. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Soulful Sales. If you have a moment to rate and review, know that it really does make a difference. And if you would like to carry on the conversation, then you can connect with me in the free community at ruthpoundwhite.com/community, or my personal favorite, join me inside the Soulful Sales Society membership at ruthpoundwhite.com/membership. And keep doing what you’re doing because your work really does matter.