Warrior Gathering - London REVIEW... What I learned!

So last weekend, I attended the very first UK Warrior Gathering, and what an event it was!

With easily over 100 attendees and a dozen or so speakers, it was a pretty big event... Good to see the UK IM scene getting a bit of recognition and starting to show the rest of the world that we can represent too :-)

Our first speaker on the Saturday morning was the legendary Brad Gosse, who was very kindly giving away free copies of his new book "Chronic Marketing" and shared some interesting stories on his take on IM. Basically, Brad is all about being yourself, doing things your own way, and not paying any attention to "the rules" or how things "should" be done. He has bags of charisma, a great sense of humour and a slightly limited attention span / short term memory (brought on by years of herbal medication?) Anyway, what I took away from this talk was the importance of being known for a definite quality or achievement... standing out from the crowd by focusing on what makes YOU different to Jonny Generic Marketer.

Next up, who should leap to the stage but one of the organisers, Paul Clifford. Paul has clearly put loads of work into this event to ensure its success so I was surprised that he would find time to speak himself. Paul taught us about software development, and actually managed to make it sound fun and something that I might like to get into.

(Pretty impressive, huh? I mean, I am NO coder or programmer, but Paul explained how easy it is to act as the project manager and have other people create software for you, which you then brand and sell. The thing I really took away from this is how much higher in value software is perceived to be by the market... thus allowing us as marketers to charge a premium price :-) )

Andy Fletcher had sent in a sick note so we had an impromptu panel instead of Andy's speech (shame as I was looking forward to hearing him talk. Hope you get well soon Andy!) Featuring on the panel were Justin Wheeler, Peter Garety and a couple of other chaps whose names I didn't catch.. sorry guys, nothing personal! An interesting Q&A session followed, covering all sorts of different topics.

After lunch, Mark Lyford took to the stage... Crikey, does he have a story to tell... From making 250k a month by creating 32,000 porn sites way back in the early days of the interwebs, to being forced out of business by one of the big dogs who didn't like Mark's new network... to losing 4 million and going bankrupt owing friends and family all sorts of money... to deciding to pay his debts by becoming a cannabis dealer... getting busted when the warehouse in which the plants were growing caught fire... spending 2 years in prison... getting out and deciding to start online AGAIN... and making over $300k in his first year online!

Bit of a rollercoaster, I'm sure you'll agree! Mark's a lively, entertaining speaker... opinionated, certainly but obviously knows what he's talking about. The biggest single thing I saw in Mark was a strong determined focus... the guy is so single-mindedly focused on success, it's easy to see why he's doing so well... talk about driven! So I've definitely taken away the importance of sticking to my guns and being a bit, well, bloody-minded, for want of a better word!

Another panel followed Mark - focused on WSO creation, this was very helpful and encouraging, and I wouldn't be surprised if 20 or 30 of the attendees weren't formulating plans for their own WSOs as the talk progressed. Personally, it reinforced the belief that the topic I have chosen for my next WSO is a good one, so keep your eyes peeled for that little beauty coming soon :-)

The final speaker on the first day was Michael Christon, an expert in selling without being all "salesy". His mantra was "people love to buy, they just hate to be sold too" and with some video clips and personal demonstrations, we learnt some of Michael's Jedi-like, sales mind-tricks.

I found this talk really interesting, as someone who has studied a little NLP and also is a hypnotist and mentalist (that's a "mind reading magician" not a "nutter" for fellow Brits!) it was awesome to see those skills adapted into the sales arena... Just need to work out how to apply those strategies online, instead of face-to-face... Well, Michael gave us all a handy little set of his lecture notes so next step is to work through that :-)

Afterwards, a bit of a party was laid on... Andy Fletcher had opened a bar tab for all of us (although as he wasn't actually there, I wonder if he knew he had done this... ;-) ) and we all got stuck into networking, having fun, and helping to spend Andy's money on grape juice and lemonade ;-)

Later in the evening, the impressive Simon the Hypnoman put on a stage hypnosis show for us, where much fun was had by laughing at certain marketers making utter fools of themselves :-) Names witheld to protect the innocent :-) Good work Simon, you put on a great show! Only wish I could remember more of it, but I had put away a FAIR amount of wine, in my defence.

Great evening though, met loads of interesting people and had a blast....

Right, that concludes the first day, on the Sunday we heard from Oz, Peter Garety, Mark Thompson, Steve Benn and the legend that is Alex Jeffreys! Anybody want me to do a review of the Sunday?

Phil Ainsworth