The night nothing went according to plan

I bought out a restaurant in Ottawa last week.

The whole thing. Every table. Sixty seats. A place called Gezellig, run by one of the best operators in the city. Three course meal, cocktail hour, a real speaker, the works.

And by the time the night arrived, almost nothing had gone the way I planned it.

Let me walk you through it.

What I was trying to build

This was my first real event as President of the Ottawa chapter of Advocis.

Here’s my thinking on the role. Advocis delivers great content. Always has. But great content in the wrong wrapper doesn’t do what it could do.

We can deliver content virtually. We do, all the time, and it works.

So if I’m going to ask people to show up in person, and in person is expensive, it can’t just be about the content. It has to hit the thing that only in person can hit. Networking. Connection. People in a room together.

That was the whole premise. Buy out a beautiful restaurant. Bring in a great speaker. Let people relax and actually connect.

The speaker was Dennis Moseley-Williams. If you ever want someone to talk about client experience, about how to build a business people never want to leave, he’s the guy. He lives in Ottawa and rarely works here, so getting him felt like a win before we even started.

So that was the plan. Buy out Gezellig, three course meal, cocktail hour, Dennis speaks, beautiful night.

Then reality showed up.

The compressed timeline

It wasn’t just me running this. It was the organization. And there are a lot of moving pieces inside an organization to get something like this done.

By the time we negotiated Dennis, negotiated the restaurant, got the contracts signed, got the financing in place, there was almost no runway left to market it.

I like to give people about four weeks for an event. Bigger event, maybe more.

We were down to about two.

I was excited. I was also honestly a little scared.

We had room for sixty.

We filled about forty-five.

Now a lot of people would look at that and say we wasted money. They’re not entirely wrong. We could have had fifteen or twenty more people in that room. We didn’t get them.

But here’s the thing. It wasn’t because we did something wrong. We signed the contract, we did what we could, and the timeline just wasn’t there.

So the lesson got filed away. Next time, an event across multiple organizations, with paid speakers and multiple invite lists, needs more planning runway. Noted.

But sit with that for a second. Because this is exactly where most people freeze.

They look at an event and think, I’m not going to get it all right. So they don’t do it at all.

We needed more time that night. And I run a ton of events. This was just bigger. A whole restaurant, multiple partners, multiple invite lists, a paid speaker. New scale, new mistakes.

It got worse before the doors even opened

Turns out there were a million events in Ottawa that same night.

Government conferences. Engineering conferences. Sales conferences. A two-star hotel downtown was going for five hundred and fifty dollars a night because the whole city was booked.

So the traffic was insane. I kicked off the cocktail hour at five o’clock, rush hour, in one of the busiest areas in the city, with people circling for parking.

Cost of doing business. You just absorb it.

Then the audio fell through.

We were supposed to have a proper speaker system for Dennis. Every AV company in the city was booked because of all the other events. We scrambled and rented a mobile PA. Got there, set it up, and it screamed feedback the second we turned it on.

And here’s the cool part.

The restaurant wasn’t that big. Dennis could just talk. No system needed.

Should we have had audio sorted properly and earlier? Yes. Absolutely. But it didn’t end up mattering at all.

Then the final bill came.

When you buy out a restaurant, there’s a minimum spend. If you don’t hit it, they charge you the difference anyway.

We didn’t even hit the minimum.

Because here’s something you’ll learn fast running these. People don’t drink the way they used to. Too bad, technically a little wasted money.

So let me total it up for you.

We didn’t plan it with enough time. The invite list wasn’t deep enough. We didn’t fill the room. The audio didn’t work. We didn’t hit the minimum spend.

By the numbers, you could call it a mess.

Here’s the thing. None of it mattered.

Not one bit of it.

People showed up. Maybe not as many as I wanted. But the ones who came had one of the best Advocis nights this chapter has run in years.

We ran it at one of the best restaurants in the city. The staff nailed it. The cocktails were incredible, the best old fashioned in Ottawa as far as I’m concerned. The wine was excellent. The atmosphere was something you can’t fake.

And the one thing I did get right in the planning was this. I said we need a photographer.

One of the people on the council mentioned a woman in her office who shoots all their events. Asked if we needed to pay her. We didn’t. She came, she shot the night, and afterward she sent over these photos that were just beautiful.

I’ve put one in here.

Then after the event, Dennis messaged me.

He reshared the post. Told me he loved it. Said he doesn’t get to work in Ottawa often and this was special.

Then he pitched me on doing another one.

He came up with this idea for a biking tour. Fifteen, twenty advisors, riding the parkway from one park to the next, stopping at each one to dig into a piece of the business, then rolling on to the next. Almost a multi-day thing. Ride, stop, talk business, ride again.

I’ll be honest, it sounded great.

And he offered to do it at a discount.

Why? He told me straight. He loved the event. But what really got him was the photographer. The photos of him speaking that he can now use in his own marketing.

That’s what the room did. He didn’t just show up and go home. He left wanting to build something with us.

And he wasn’t alone.

I talked to a bunch of advisors that night who said they wanted to hire Dennis individually, for their own teams, to go deeper on exactly what he was teaching. Building a client experience so good that clients never leave and people want to join your firm.

I had drinks with a few advisors after. They said it was an incredible night. Great content, sure. But what they kept coming back to was the room.

One of them said, isn’t it so cool that we just bought out Gezellig for ourselves.

And I said, that’s exactly why I did it here.

Why the room is the whole point

Listen to what that advisor said. Not the food. Not the speaker. The fact that the room was ours.

That’s the part people miss.

When you own the environment, people relax. They’re not guests at a restaurant. They own the place for the night. It’s theirs. So they let their guard down, they reconnect with old friends, they actually talk.

Compare that to a stuffy conference center. Mediocre coffee. The same tired catered meal. Nobody connects in that room because the room is telling them not to.

This was the opposite. High-level food, a place everyone raved about, drinks people will remember.

And we could do it. The chapter raises money for exactly this purpose. Connecting and educating. So we put it where it does the most good.

There were people in that room who aren’t even Advocis members. Invited by me, invited by others. And by the end of the night a few of them came up and said, maybe I should be part of this.

That’s what events do.

Everyone who came wants to come to the next one. And everyone who couldn’t make it, advisors and partners both, they’re going to want in next time too.

That’s the other reason we took the photos. I knew a lot of people wouldn’t make it. I wanted them to see exactly what they missed and exactly why we ran it.

Because we have a much bigger event coming in September. Same idea. Same feeling. High-level content, high-level connection, the whole thing scaled up.

This is the part I really want you to hear

This is the exact stuff I’ve been writing to you about for the last couple of months.

And I know how it can read. Theory. Nice in concept. Easy for me to say from behind an email.

So this is me showing you it’s not theory. I’m actually doing it.

This is what I think a chapter should be. I’m not totally sure it’s the official Advocis line, and I don’t really care, because this is my read on what these events should be.

And here’s how I operate, on everything.

I don’t wait for people to change. I don’t complain about how it should be done. I just go do it the way I think it should be done. Then people either follow or they don’t.

Mostly, they follow.

So I’m showing you what’s possible. You don’t have to run something this big. But if you want to, look at what it actually took.

Find a good speaker. Find a good venue. Bring in partners if it makes sense, so they help fill the room. Get people together. Connect. And if it fits, take the photos and post them.

Because then people see it.

They see you ran your own event. They see the room was full. And something shifts. They start reaching out. They want to meet. They want to do things with you.

If I had to put it in one sentence, here it is.

They stop making you fight to get into their world.

And they start wanting into yours.

You set the frame. You build the room. And people want to be in it.

So here’s my ask

If you want to run events like this, buy my book.

It’s five hundred dollars and it lays out exactly how to run every one of these events. The venue, the speaker, the partners, the photos, the framing, all of it. Step by step.

Everything I just walked you through, the whole system behind it, is in there.

I’m not selling you a theory. I just ran the thing. Now go run yours.

Buy the book, read it, and implement.

Talk soon,

Andrew