Behind the Scenes: OntraPalooza 2015

One of the beautiful things—I’ve been here for a little bit now—is that they’re taking a thirty thousand foot view, an overview, on strategy. Generally you only see tactics at events like this. I like the combination of tactics and strategy. So I’m going to introduce the speakers, I’m going to find out what they’re talking about. I’ll share a little bit about what I discussed. I’ll show you a little behind the scenes. Let’s check it out.


Interview with Christo Hall
Ezra: Hey, Eza here. Behind the scenes at OntraPalooza with California Christo Hall, who’s not from California. Fun fact about Christo, he was recently rated the 279th best surfer of all time. Christo, you just gave an amazing speech about how to build businesses to last, which is something that I’m really passionate about. I don’t like quick money. I like slow, sustainable growth.

Christo: Yes.

Ezra: So for people who weren’t here, what are a couple of things you would tell them about how—because you have an amazing business, an amazing team, a successful relationship, ya know. I love watching you…

Christo: Yeah, we give them a good time.

Ezra: What are you doing?

Christo: A couple key takeaways from the session, definitely… Building systems within your business. What we always do is basically, if you’re going to do something twice, build a system around it.

Ezra: Right. Document it.

Christo: Do something once, script it. I like to say it’s almost like being a play writer. You practice it, you rehearse it yourself. Maybe it’s at home in your underpants, but rehearsing is going to happen, like writing a play.

Ezra: Sure.

Christo: Then write the script, tell the story. Put it in a framework if you can so that it’s easy to teach somebody else. And then you cast it. So, then it’s like the playwright puts the performers on stage and then you sit back and watch it and see what we can do better.

Ezra: So, repeatable, replicatable systems and processes, so you only have to stuff once or twice and then you can get other people to do it.

Christo: Another thing is learn from people who have already done it. Like, your presentation was amazing.

Ezra: Thank you.

Christo: I’m in the game, you know, and I’m taking notes vigorously. Thinking okay, great I’ve got to do this, I’ve got to do that.

Ezra: So take the time to find people who have been there and done that, because you get what you want from people who have it.

Christo: Exactly.

Ezra: If someone has already done something, be willing to learn from them.

Christo: It’s like going cross town, and you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re just like which way am I going to go?

Ezra: And if you ask someone for directions, they will give them to you. They might not always be right, but they will give them to you!

Christo: Someone’s already mapped it, get your GPS out.

Ezra: So research who you’re getting your information from.


Interview with Landon Ray and Lena Requist (CEO, President of Ontraport)
Ezra: Hey, Ezra here behind the scenes at OntraPalooza with lucky Landon and lovely Lena, lucky because he’s with Lena. This event is so good you guys. Feeding people, everyone is happy here, your staff are enthusiastic.

We were actually having a conversation before this that wasn’t going to make it into this video, but I think it’s so important, about deadlines. About how this event creates a true deadline for your business, and that’s something that every business owner out there, every entrepreneur, should know about,

So, what do you find with having a deadline like this? How does it affect you?

Lena: Yeah, in most real business, you don’t have real deadlines. There’s not a thing where all these people are showing up. You’re making up deadlines, and you can push them or move them up at your will and at your whim. For us, this is only real drop dead deadline. We have all year, and man, we get so much done leading up to this event, it’s amazing. I love it.

Ezra: Create real deadlines for yourself. Now Landon, you announced some really cool features coming out for Ontraport.

Landon: We did.

Ezra: Tell us about them.

Landon: Yeah, so we released our OntraPages feature, which is a landing page builder that we gave to your existing Ontraport customers a couple months. And, today we announced that we’ve broken that thing off and made it a standalone product that we’re actually giving it away for free.

Ezra: Free landing page builder! And it’s cool.

Landon: It’s really cool. So in OntraForms, we created this really interesting editor. What we realized is that for publishing just about anything on the internet—pages, forms, emails—if you think about it as chunks of blocks, you can make sure everything looks good, keep things mobilely responsive. So we’ve used the same editor for our email builder, for our landing page builder and now for this form builder that allows you to build light boxes that are always going to be beautiful and responsive and you can put them on any website.

Ezra: And one of the cool things about this is, so it’s light boxes right… you click a link on a page, or a button, and it pops up an opt in box or form, or anything you can imbed in there, an order form. You can decide where you want it to go on the page, and you can set it to have exit intent. I am personally paying hundreds of dollars a month for an exit intent tool, and this guy is giving it away for free. So check it out. Ontrapages.com.

Lucky Landon, lovely Lena here. Ezra Firestone at OntraPalooza. We’ll catch you later.


Outro
Ezra: OntraPalooza. Awesome event as you can probably tell by now. One of the things that was consist across all the speakers who I was able to sit in on, was systems. Processes. Procedures. So, essentially, what we heard Christo talk about. Making sure that you have repeatable processes that happen in your business, and that you’re delegating and giving yourself some help.

One of the interesting things about buying help is that it improves over time. So let’s say you hire someone to help you for 40 hours a week. The first month is going to be good, but the third month is going to be great, because they’re going to be better at their job.

Another thing about coming to these events, is that it gets you out of your life, out of your routine, it gets you out of your normal thing and forces you to put some attention on your business full time. As you know, the things you put your attention on in your life, grow. If you put attention on your relationship, it’s going to get better. If you put your attention on your business, it’s going to grow.

So by coming to events, you have what I call an assigned author, a reason, to really focus on your business for a couple days. I highly recommend it. I very much enjoyed my time here at OntraPalooza, and I hope to see you next year.