I’m not by any means a Tm O’Reilly fan boy, half his posts I don’t agree with, but when I do, I seem to really agree. This is one of those.
My only gripe is that it’s easy for people with funds, to talk about doing things for reasons other than money, unfortunately, “changing the world” isn’t a check the mortgage company can cash, so it’s not so cut ant dry. So point 1 only does so much for me, although I do agree with Kathy, that if you focus too much on the competition, and not enough on your customers, you’ve already lost.
Point 2 however I really agree with and it really speaks to what Tom and I trying to do. One of our chief philosopthies is that we don’t pay speakers, we try to raise them up from the community. We certainly don’t take credit for their successes but we’re very proud that a great many of our attendees, have become our speakers. I see that as creating more value than we take away.
It doesn’t always work, some times a speaker from the community doesn’t receive the feedback we’d hope, but we still think it’s better for the community to have a larger pool of people willing to speak and share, than a smaller one that charges for their time, rather than give freely.
I think 360Conferences, has several goals, many of them larger than us, and that makes it something that drives me to be successful at it.
