After-Action Review : Financial Bloggers Meet-Up

The tradition of having blogger gatherings was started by the folks of BigFatPurse who took the first step in getting the financial bloggers together to have gatherings to discuss key issues affecting them. A much stronger alliance came into being when we found that many marketing firms are trying to pay financial bloggers in "exposure" in exchange for influencing the investing public towards their corporate goals.

The work of organising such gatherings has now been passed onto BIGScribe, which is really a company incorporated by financial bloggers with the mission to monetise their knowledge and effort.  Yesterday, we had a meet-up amongst financial bloggers and for months, I have been hatching a scheme to go beyond just catered food and gossiping about lifestyle bloggers.

Financial bloggers are one of the most motivated and learned folks on the Internet. Their ideas are valuable to corporate companies and their talks consistently sell out because of their willingness to give straight talk that is untainted by corporate interests. As I had over a decade of public speaking experience, I always believed that we can create a model that can surpass that of the Toastmasters because we have more substance and more willing to critically evaluate someone's content. I was also betting on the idea that financial bloggers would be happy to share 10 mins of their time to talk about any topic in an informal setting.

I will leave each individual blogger to expand on their talk but for this blog's readers, here are the topics we discussed yesterday:

There was no investment talk last night. We even had a special treat when SMOL sang a song for us.

Broadly speaking, six speeches was quite a good result for a first trial run.

But the weakest link was me as the MC. I should have controlled time slightly better, so we may have to use a bell if we were to coordinate another event and I surprised that chair placement in the room can really help us with crowd control. These are rookie mistakes if you do not have event management experience.

It's now back to the drawing board where I try to convince the directors to carry this idea forward for a paid event involving around 10 speakers, some preliminary ideas include the following :

• We have to curate each speech proposal.
• We have to aggressively limit each talk to 10-12 minutes.
• There should not be no more than 6 slides including the introductory page.
• Each speaker will limit himself to discuss ONE investment idea / philosophy.
• Of course, speakers will be given a small gift of vouchers for participation but the real reward is to attend the talk for free. ( 10 investment ideas is a lot for one event ! )

There are some crazier ideas I may borrow from the Barcamp Unconference but I really got to have some coffee with the company directors to push them through.

Eventually, this may even be a new way for us to discover some new public speaking talent that investors would be willing to pay for in future conferences.

In the next 2-3 installments, I will talk about Mid-Life Crisis and how it affects a person's approach towards his Personal Finances.