Are Conferences Worth Your Time as a Business Owner?
Updated on April 2, 2026
Transcript
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Opportunity Podcast. I’m your host, Greg Alfred, the Head of Marketing over here at Empire Flippers. Today we’ve got a solo podcast with good old Greg.
Right now, you might notice my background is a little bit different if you’re watching this on YouTube. And if you’re only a podcast enjoyer: yes, I do have a YouTube channel. You can go to youtube.com/empireflippers and see exclusive videos over there as well.
But right now, I am actually at Chiang Mai SEO. I just got done emceeing the workshops, and this is an event I come to quite often. I thought, what good timing: while Greg is in a hotel room, let’s talk about whether conferences are useful or not.
This is something we go back and forth on all the time at Empire Flippers, including me—the guy who goes to most conferences in the company. And I think this is a worthwhile topic because conferences can be absolutely amazing, or they can be the most amazing waste of time. I’ve been to both, unfortunately. So let’s talk about it.
I see people talk about conferences and they’re usually in two camps. Some are like, “Oh, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread,” and usually they’ve only gone to one conference. And other people will say it’s completely useless. I’m somewhere in the mix of it.
But before we get into some of my perceptions, let’s talk about what kind of business you should be in where conferences do make sense for you to go to. I think there are basically two ways to look at it: you’re either the vendor or the practitioner when you’re going to a conference.
So let’s look at Chiang Mai SEO and maybe some other events as I go through this diatribe of mine.
If you are a practitioner of SEO, then coming to an event like Chiang Mai SEO—where you’re networking with your peers and stuff like that—won’t directly lead to more revenue for you usually. But it may indirectly lead to a lot of revenue for you because you learn something at the event. You meet someone at the event that opens up your mind to a whole new possibility or way of doing something you never thought about.
Like, one of the workshops I was emceeing—I believe his name is Navi Kashal, who runs Pace Traffic. Really cool dude, great speaker. He gave a whole presentation on basically automating local SEO, and what used to take his team about 15 to 20 hours now takes like an hour to do. So he’s able to scale his agency much, much faster using all these automation things. That’s an example of a speech that would be really, really high value to the practitioner and can lead to some indirect revenue. You implement that stuff, it might revolutionize your business, right?
Then you have the other side, which is the vendor, and that’s probably more who I’m going to be speaking to throughout this podcast. But for us, Empire Flippers being at Chiang Mai SEO—though I do practice SEO, not as much as I used to—I’m a vendor. I’m here to get people to sell their business or buy a business with us. That’s the main reason I’m here, other than seeing friends and all that kind of good stuff, right?
Conferences can be fantastic for vendors, but the issue with vendors at conferences is: one, you don’t want to be the annoying vendor. Not just this event, but other events—like in the conference apps, I get hit up all the time with cold messaging from different vendors wanting to sell me something, and I have no clue who they are. Usually I’m not even in the market for the thing that they’re selling. But that’s very, very common and extremely annoying.
If you’re coming to a conference as a vendor to get direct revenue—get customers—typically I view that as a very bad thing to do. You’re just going to annoy people, right?
Versus what I do: I tend to go networking. I try to get on the stage. Sometimes we have a booth and all that kind of good stuff. But if you’re going to do the traditional route of sponsoring an event, this is a very expensive sport.
The biggest one I’ve ever spent on was probably Affiliate World Dubai. That was, all in, probably $120,000 we put into that event. When you factor in all the travel costs, probably closer to $140,000, to be fair. But we did make money on it. We made a lot of money off of that event, but it’s a big risk.
So when you are an entrepreneur and you want to look at possibly sponsoring a conference as a vendor, this is high risk and sometimes medium reward, sometimes high reward, sometimes no reward—but it’s always high risk because the amount of money you’re putting upfront into the event is a lot. And that money could be spent in many other places.
For example, we have a cold email campaign at EF that we’ve probably spent a little bit over 20 grand on at this point, over a period of like a year and a half or something like that. And it is doing some great returns for us—material returns that you can see in the CRM—more so than you would at a conference.
Likewise, we just did a conference not too long ago. It was probably like 25 grand all in when you factor in everything. The sponsorship was less than that, obviously, but all the other associated costs that go into it… and it’s a lot more shrug-your-shoulders, like, “Did it work? Did we feel good about it or did we not?” You know? Like, “How long is a piece of string?” kind of mentality, right?
I always tell people: if you’re going to sponsor an event, I don’t think it’s a good idea if you don’t have any other marketing channel already working. You should have something more low cost, more consistent, and ideally a little bit more direct-response-y that is working already before you even consider doing a conference.
Because one, that means you have a good offer. If you have a direct response channel working in some fashion, then you have something to sell that people are actively buying. So when you go to a conference, you already know your offer works.
Versus if you go to a conference and you don’t have an offer, you don’t have something that’s really set in stone, you’re just not going to have enough hits to know if your offer is good or not. Usually you might get a handful of customers, but you don’t really know. You don’t know if it was super good or super bad or whatever. It might be really, really bad.
A lot of times, conferences work where you connect with someone and they go off and do their thing, you go off and do your thing, and maybe in 12 months you end up doing something together, right? It can be a much longer sales cycle because it’s more relationship building.
So when you are looking at sponsoring a conference, I highly recommend you only do it when you already have something that’s working.
Now, a couple other things on sponsoring conferences to make it work as a vendor: if you’re going to do a booth—especially if you’re selling something complicated like what we do (we sell businesses, right?)—it takes a lot of trust. Because I’m like, “Hey, come list your business with Greg and I’ll give you a million dollars.” Right? Like, well, I don’t know if I can believe this guy, what he’s saying, right? So it takes a lot of trust.
So whenever I’ve sponsored events in the past, what I always try to do is: how can I get some kind of educational spot where I can speak at the event? From that stage, when I’m speaking, I don’t really hard-sell anyone anything. The only thing I sell them on on the stage is to come visit us at the booth.
Usually I’ll have our two booth guys in the back during my presentation, and I’ll point them out so everyone in the audience knows to talk to those guys, not just me. I’m only one person, right? Usually, if you have a booth, you have more than one person. So you want to make sure the rest of the conference can identify, “Who should I be talking to as well?”
Because so much of a conference really happens away from the booth.
But anyways, I direct people to the booth from the conference. Now I’ve done the education piece, so I’ve built some trust. They have a better understanding of what I’m doing.
And I always try to do the speech—if I have the choice—on the first day, right before lunch. Be the last talk before lunch. Because that is when people are most energized, least hungover from all the networking events. And that gives you ample time to introduce everyone to your crew, to your booth, so they start seeing them constantly and building that relationship over that three to seven days or however long the conference is going to be, right?
I always try to do first day, right before lunch. The worst one to me is any speech right after lunch because everyone’s in a food coma and they’re not really paying attention. Or there are just less attendees at that speech because they’re starting to build relationships with people in the hallways, people at the networking things. They might be, you know, “Maybe I’ll be late to that presentation,” right? So you get less bang for your buck, in my mind.
The other thing I try to do at conferences, like the booth itself: if we have coworkers there, I’ve had mixed success with this, but I always try to do it, or I try to convince the other employees: “Hey, you’re at this event. Don’t be answering emails, don’t be answering Zendesk tickets. You’re here for this event, right?” You need to be present—constantly on and talking to more people—because this is the marketing campaign of being in the event, right?
So you want your people to be as focused as possible on the event. If you have employees coming with you, try to figure out in advance how their normal duties can be picked up maybe by someone else, or maybe you lower their normal duties for that week for the event, so they can just be totally switched on.
Because a conference is much more than just attending the booth, at least if you’re really trying to make it work—which I’ll get into in a second. It’s full-time. Your whole mind needs to be focused on it to really get those connections and try to get that return.
The other thing I’m a big fan of is having QR codes everywhere. QR codes people can just scan and they go to your landing page or your advertorial—whatever your offer is.
And this is again why I say it’s good to have a direct response channel already working for your offer. Because then you know what to put on the QR code. You already know it works. So it should work even better because these people are at the conference, so they should be decently warm and open to talking to you because they already came to the conference. They’re open to learning more, right?
Those QR codes are fantastic tools. We basically use very similar banners almost every time with just the same QR code, and we change out the lander to whatever we want.
Some things I’ve seen mixed success with are giveaways. I’m not a huge fan of giveaways, personally. I think they can work, but they often backfire, or they’re lukewarm. Like giveaways: giving away an iPad, giving away $1,000. We’ve done this, by the way—so we’ve learned from experience a bit. And we still do this every now and then.
Every now and then we get one where it’s crazy. For example, we did a giveaway in Mexico where one of the guys who won happened to be this very rich guy, very charismatic, absolutely loved us, was shouting to the rooftops about Empire Flippers, buying people drinks with the money that he won from our raffle. That was pretty much the best experience you could ask for.
Versus this other giveaway we did: the person who won was very introverted, very quiet—still a really cool person, but they’re not raging through, screaming from the rooftops about Empire Flippers, right? So a little bit less brand exposure there with that person winning versus someone else. And you don’t really control that.
So if you are going to do a giveaway, my personal thought is: it should be something that is still related to what you do, that could be conceived as like a mini “yes” to start in the service.
So like an exit planning consult, or a buyer criteria call, or something like that for us might be a better giveaway. If someone wanted to do a one-on-one call and you position it as best as you could—like for us, we’ve made 90 millionaires at this moment—so you can have an hour call with the people that created 90 millionaires, “ask us anything,” that type of thing. You can see how that could lead into a deeper, more meaningful sales conversation versus giving away $1,000 or giving away an iPad.
Again, not saying that’s a terrible idea. I’ve seen it work well, including for us. It’s worthwhile. So it’s not a terrible idea—it’s just more of a crapshoot if it’s going to work, in my mind.
The other thing is I always try to get the attendees or the conference organizers to send out one solo email blast to our offer, whether it’s our valuation tool or some other lander—whatever KPI we’re trying to focus on. That’s something I always push for as well.
Now, the big thing to make conferences really, really sing in my mind has nothing to do with the booth or even sponsoring it.
So if you’re a person who wants to use a conference to get that direct revenue, but you don’t have the money to outlay the big cost of getting a booth or anything like that: good news, this is for you.
When I go to conferences nowadays, if I have an employee with me, I’ll tell them, “Okay, if we have a booth, you’re going to be the morning shift guy, and I’m the evening shift guy.”
Because I know from personal experience—having gone to conferences all around the world at this point, at all sorts of different types of events—a lot of times the real business happens in the evening.
So if I’m brand new to a conference, I don’t know anyone, I’m spending most of my time at the conference trying to meet as many people as I can. So when the conference is about to wrap up, I’m messaging them all like, “Hey guys, where are you going? What’s your plans? What are you doing?” Because usually they’ll be going to a bar or dinner or whatever, right?
So I try to latch on to a group, and that group often will start introducing me to all these other people. And often I’ll be out to like 10 p.m., midnight, sometimes like 2 a.m. with these guys just talking about business. I’ve done that many, many, many times.
And these kind of relationships really compound. You don’t have to go raging and drinking or anything like that. I’m not telling you to go be an alcoholic by any means, but you should still be willing to go into those kind of environments because you’re able to bond really, really fast and build these types of relationships.
People open up a lot more in these more casual settings than they will in the conference hall. You have more meaningful conversations that can really change the entire trajectory of your business.
I always say you’re one good business development partnership away from a million-dollar business. You’re only three business development partnerships away from absolutely changing your life—which is totally true, in my experience.
You meet a guy, you become really, really good friends, you find out that, “Oh, I have this massive company that is adjacent to what you’re doing. How about we get you in and we do something, because it helps our clients too?” And you might be the smaller guy just starting out, and they’re able to feed you so much business you can’t even handle it all, right? You don’t even need another marketing channel at this point. It’s just this one BD guy that’s scaling your business for you—this one BD partnership.
That is where conferences absolutely shine. You get to meet people that it would be really, really hard to meet if you’re doing like a cold email or a cold DM on LinkedIn or something like that. It’s much more difficult to build those kind of relationships. I’ve done it that way too.
But conferences are like speed-running networking.
So if you’re running a business where you rely on either a high value but low quantity of clients, like what we do at Empire Flippers, or a lot of business partnerships (which also is kind of like Empire Flippers), conferences can be amazing.
And you don’t need to spend 30, 40, 50, 60 thousand dollars on a booth. You can just spend the $1,000 to $5,000 for your flight and hotel to go and stay at the event so you’re always present, right?
This could be incredibly effective because, again, you only need one or two of these kind of contacts to really change the entire trajectory.
So when I was in Beverly Hills, I got invited by a buddy of mine—who I also met at an event. I was unqualified to be in the room. You had to have this insane amount of revenue to even join this event. But the guy let me in because we were buddies—because we met at an event.
So I was like the least qualified person in this room, but I ended up meeting another person who became a pretty good buddy of mine, who sold his business for 200 million, all cash. And this is a hilarious story of how I met him. If you see me at a conference, I’ll let you know.
But that guy has been incredible wisdom for me. Even though we’ve never done anything truly direct in terms of our businesses, that relationship has led to a lot of really interesting opportunities.
And you never know where something might lead—just from meeting one person, that leads to another person, that leads to another person. That is the beauty of networking to me. That is the true power of conferences.
Yeah, the speeches are great. If you’re giving a speech, even better, because it builds your authority. You can have a booth—also great. But it’s really the networking events that make it really, really sing.
And if you’re willing to spend a little bit more money, another thing I recommend—at least if you have the stamina to do it and you are a bit more of an event planner (which I’m definitely not; I’m a terrible event planner—I could sell an event, but I’m terrible at planning events)—is do your own version of a meetup.
Every now and then, we’ll have an Empire Flippers meetup at a conference that Al hosts. We’ll get between 10 to 40 people there, and it’s open bar for like an hour or something like that. Again, it’s not a crazy amount of money, but you spend a little bit more money. This is another thing you can do to really bring people to you.
So if you’re someone that struggles to talk to people, to just break into conversations—say, “Hey, what’s going on? What’s happening?”—you can host your own event that acts as a bit of a magnet for people to come to you.
And even if you’re not speaking at the event, the fact that you’re hosting an event at the event, like a little meetup, gives you a bit of authority. People see it in the app, people see your name, people are interested in what you’re doing. Everyone that comes there is interested in what you’re doing, right?
Though some will just come for the drinks, of course. We had a funny one in Vegas where we posted an Empire Flippers meetup and we actually had random people from the casino find out and they snuck in and started drinking. So you’ve got to be careful on that. Make sure you filter out the people that are not even part of the event.
But this is another great way, even if you’re a bit of an introvert, to make events really, really work. I’ve seen this work over and over again with a couple of friends who are much bigger than me at events, who are just honestly not that good at talking to random strangers like I am.
So, are conferences worth it? I think yes. I think conferences are worth it from the networking stuff alone.
Now, all the other stuff—like sponsoring the events and all that kind of stuff—can be really good. But again, I recommend only doing that when you have another marketing channel having some success and your business is in a healthy place. Because again, sponsoring conferences is big risk, potentially no reward. It can get high reward, but I’d say that’s super rare. Usually it’s going to be low to medium reward, or no reward at all.
Because attribution is really, really hard. One reason I like the QR codes: at our Dubai event, I rented a Lamborghini to be the fake internet marketing guru as a joke, and someone scanned the QR code that I put on the Lamborghini and ended up selling, I think it was a $2.3 or $2.4 million business from that, right? So it helped us with tracking, for sure.
Normally it’s really hard to track at events. It’s just the nature of the beast. But the real value—and again, another reason why they’re hard to attribute—is often happening not at the booth, but at the bar, or in the hallways of the conference, or at the restaurant that you got invited to. That’s usually where the real value is for the conference.
So yeah, I think conferences are fantastic. I think this is one of the number one ways to build your own personal brand and your own face.
I’ve gone to so many conferences, it’s funny. Sometimes I see the same people at conferences. It’s like I already have it in with that group. They might have known a few people at one conference, but they know a ton of people at this conference, and they’re like, “Oh, it’s Greg. Bring him in,” you know?
So the more you go to conferences, you actually get greater and greater results. Now, there are diminishing returns.
There are many events that we sponsored several times that we don’t really sponsor anymore, but we still go—we’ll go as just a normal attendee. That’s because that audience now knows us so well. The massive amount of money of putting into a booth or whatever doesn’t really make sense for us anymore, versus just going and showing up at the events and networking with our friends.
This network is constantly growing.
So I often like using the big splash of money as kind of a spear to wedge ourselves into this whole new community that might not know us very well. We can really aggressively network with some authority behind our back. And then, as the audience gets to know us better, maybe we lower our sponsorship from the diamond to the gold to the silver, etc. Eventually, probably not even sponsoring at all—just buying a couple tickets and going to network with our friends.
I think conferences can be incredibly powerful if you do it right and if you’re thinking about it in the right way.
You shouldn’t think about a conference like, “I need to see direct sales from this,” if that’s your goal. There are so many cheaper options with higher scalability that you just won’t get at a conference.
Conferences are really like—think of it as a middle-of-funnel kind of activity where you are trying to build as much trust with an audience as possible. And there should be other means as to why they really know about you, if at all possible.
That, or just networking and getting a business development relationship—which again doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. It just costs an attendee ticket, usually.
So yeah, I think conferences can be really worth it as long as you do it right.
So in the tradition, since I’m actually at Chiang Mai SEO: are conferences worth it? Let me give you the traditional SEO answer to any question, which has become a meme at this point. And that answer is: it depends.
With that said, I hope you enjoyed this solo podcast. If you did, leave a comment down below, come join my newsletter, and you could always make Greg’s life less stressful if you decide to help out my KPIs and buy a few seven-figure businesses from us.
All right, I’ll talk to you guys soon, and I’ll see you on the next one.
There you have it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope it got you inspired at all the different things that are happening in this industry.
And of course, if you just want to buy a highly profitable business, you can always go to empireflippers.com/marketplace. Or maybe you want to make an exit of your highly profitable business—you can go to empireflippers.com/sell-your-site.
I’ve been your host, Greg. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you leave a review, give us a like, a follow, share it across social media.
Talk to you all soon. See you on the next episode.
