Session with Financial Bloggers : After Action Review

Today's session was a blast. For a maiden effort, it was a good attempt. After all, we did sell out within 24 hours. Our event's unique selling proposition was that it had ample substance, and we do not use this session as an attempt to get more sales from the audience.

With this event, what you see is what you get.

Content-wise, I was especially surprised at what Brian bought to the table in today's session - it really changed the way I looked at REITs. This idea alone makes the session worth the price tag we charge for. As we only saw each other's slides and did not rehearse our presentation together, some of the content was also very refreshing to me.

I am pretty sure each of us had a different take on what happened just now, but I want to be candid about our performance today because we are definitely trying to sustain our momentum with these blogger meet-up sessions in the near future.

Here are some areas of improvement we discussed on after the session ended. This should give fans an assurance that our event would be even better.

a) I thought the readers of financial blogs were a very punctual bunch, we should have catered for some snacks and allocated the first 30 minutes to fellowship so that we can break the ice with the audience before we start.

b) On hindsight, our panel was a little too long and too formal. We prepared too many questions and one thing we will change is that we will be more spontaneous in future events and not prepare too much and just answer the questions to the best of our ability. We do have the capabilities and knowledge to handle the Q&A but we should not have scared each other by designing hypothetical questions for each other. Perhaps the session should be half an hour shorter.

c)  In the future, if we can anticipate a common question in the audience, we should address this in our presentation slides with written notes and diagrams. Answering a complicated finance question without powerpoint to supplement our answers will cause the audience to lose their train of thought.

d) Finally, as you can tell from the picture, the lawyer look does not go well with a fun and engaging finance talk so expect me to ditch my 'armor' in future sessions as well. I was also told that I handled one Q&A with insufficient pathos, details which I may turn into a longer blog posting in the future as it concerns the lost of human capital in a recessionary economy.

So whether you are a paid customer, a reader of this blog or someone who missed our event, do share with us what kind of event that you'd like to attend in the future and actually be willing to pay money for.