Re: what my mentor told me… - Posted by Ronald * Starr(in No CA)
Posted by Ronald * Starr(in No CA) on December 18, 2002 at 22:02:36:
Chris----------------
Not having attended any secondary education convention I cannot do a comparison for you. Sorry. All I can do is tell what I have seen and concluded.
From my observation, most of the “conventions” about real estate investing are misnamed. I’m not sure that there is a suitable word for them. Maybe something like a sales attempt. They are a collection of sales presentations to the participants. I have gone to conventions as early as the early '80s, although not for a while now.
The so-called “conventions” have the format of a person doing a speach or “presentation” which is seen by the uninitiated as an educational experience. The presenter or speaker, discusses some approach to investing or some techniques of investors, or some source of purchases and gives some information about how the whole thing works. Then s/he mentions his/her educational materials about this topic which can be bought from the people who are sponsoring the convention. End of presentation.
Then there is another presenter talking about a different subject and the format repeats. Typically there are two or three speakers in a day. Sometimes there is some other meeting at which no particular product is being sold, just a presentation about the topic, typically, when dealing with real estate investing, urging people who are not already real estate investors to get into it. There may be some other variations such as some awards to people who have been outstanding investors or to speakers who are “outstanding educators or speakers.”
But the whole thrust of the event, from the presenters and the sponsor’s viewpoint, is to sell those materials. After the convention is over, the speakers/presenters get an accounting of how many people were counted at the event or at their presentation and then their gross sales volume is presented, then the calculation is made of number of dollars of sales per head of attendees. Typically, it was about $40-$120 a head when I was in touch with these events.
Sometimes there may actually be something to be learned at the presentations. Always there is something to be bought.
My observation is that the speakers who lie the most sell the most. Those who can get the particpants pumped up emotionally tend to sell the best. The quality of the materials is typically unrelated to the amount of the materials sold. The usual “convention” that I attended sold materials which ranged from dismal in quality to pretty good, depending upon the particular author of the materials. And some of those who were genuinely successful investors had poor materials because they were not good teachers or good writers. It is my belief that some of the speakers did not write their own “educational materials,” as I know of a couple of people who worked as ghost writers for speakers.
And the “package” prices were always much higher than those for books which can be bought in bookstores. When tradional real estate investing books were selling for $15 to $30 in bookstores, the “packages” of the books and tapes of the speakers typically sold for about $275 to $600 each. Many of them had less educational value, in my opinion, than the average bookstore book on real estate investing.
But this is a very inefficient marketing method. The sponsor’s had huge overhead for advertising and costs of the hotel rooms where the conventions were held. And they had to split the profit with the speakers, “authors.”
Please understand that I am speaking about conventions I attended in the past. I have not attemded a CREONLINE.COM convention. I can not comment on what those are like. From the comments posted here on CREONLINE.COM by attendees at the CREONLINE.COM conventions, there seems to be a great enthusiasm for them. Many people seem to find them so much to their liking that they attend them repeatedly. That I take to be a good sign. That the attendees have not gone home, cooled down and then though: “Whoa, I was sold a bill of goods. I’m not going to that thing again.”
What are secondary education conventions like? Anything like what I have described?
Good InvestingRon Starr*****