Chris Hooley’s -ThinkBait-

The high price tag made a few waves in our industry, but all that talk will be put to rest once the blogs and reviews start flaring up. The fact is, buying consulting from top industry experts is expensive, and when you have one leader for every 3 or 4 attendees, you basically are buying consulting. Imagine that, a few grand a day for some kick ass consulting.

This was not general advice for the masses. At times it was a workshop about my site(s). When speakers spoke about broad topics, they either spoke about them DIRECTLY as it relates to one of our verticals, or about one of THEIR verticals. In explicit detail.

The people who attended the conference were far from typical. It actually worked like the Yahoo! Directory in a sense. They have high prices to prevent the spammy sites looking for free links from trying to get listed. In general, the attendees where extremely smart and serious about web marketing. In fact, I learned as much from the guys sitting around me as I did from the speakers.

The Location:

I have never been to San Antonio; I just assumed it was very “Texasy” and dry and boring. Wrong. San Antonio is probably the most beautiful downtown I have ever seen. The Hotel was perfect: not so opulent that I feel weird being there, but so classy and nice that it is impossible not to feel a good vibe. Kudos to Andrea Schoemaker for putting on a perfectly run, perfectly chill, and very fun conference.

Day 1

I got in late, the bar was dead. I traded beers with the first person to ever know who I was from my blog (score!). After the Charger vs. Chiefs game was over, we called it a night.

Day 2

I missed the breakfast and speaker intros (confusing time zones!), but I was impressed to see that there were very classy buffet style foods laid out on the side of the room and a guy who looked like a butler tending to Andrea’s every whim. Very classy without being fake. Easy atmosphere. I already liked it.

We started with the attendee introductions. We had an interesting cross section of attendees with one thing in common, they all know how to spot opportunity and they all knew what they want. I took my intro as the perfect opportunity to drop 17 F-bombs and at least a dozen other swears. It was fun. I also knew that I had 2 very long, and very important phone conferences that I needed to attend, so I apologized to the group (and to you) for missing some of this. In fact, I missed most of Jeremy’s slot.

Dave Taylor was my surprise of the day. He was the speaker I knew the least about coming into this conference, but I was thoroughly impressed with his presentation. Anybody who has the go-ahead from Google to show his Adwords account backend, and actually does, is pretty bad ass. He also showed us the back end of his blog and explained in an almost shocking amount of detail how each portion worked, why he did it, and how much money each piece makes for him (with exact, not broad numbers).

That’s the kind of stuff unique to this conference.

Nobody sat there and spoke in generalities (except when necessary)- the whole thing was “I did this, this is what happened” or “here is what I am about to launch and why” or “Maybe for YOUR industry you could try visiting THIS site and doing THIS”. Nothing like any conference I’ve been to before.

Night 1

Since the attendee list was small enough and there were no lame ducks (ok maybe ONE which I will explain later) Andrea decided that the Elite Elite Dinner thing didn’t make sense. We all went to get a kick ass steak on the RiverWalk in downtown. We had beers, great food, lots of laughs, and shared very specific details about our industries and how we run our web businesses. I spent most of the night speaking with a guy named Joe (lots of you know him as Cygnus) about leadership, some fun BS, and a few very specific link acquisition techniques. Amazing. This guy is very very smart, and a cool dude to boot.

We then went down to Howl at the Moon for some drinks and debauchery. When the pictures come out, please remember that at least HALF the things I was caught doing were on a dare, and not stunts trying to get linkbait. There was a lady walking around with a blinking Santa hat and I must admit, I was tempted to and was actually even begged to do something about it, but I resisted. I had to.

I tried my best to buy every drink for everybody, but everybody wanted to do the same. Reciprocal drinking all over. In fact, I had 4 full beers in front of me all night, and half the time I have no idea where they came from. Good crew of happy drinkers, until the incident… I call it CrapBait.

Looking for Signal? Skip Here… Queue the Noise

For those who know me, you know I just had a minor surgery a few weeks ago. This means I have to wear this embarrassing full body compression garment (ok it is a very odd, gross, crotchless girdle thing) which makes “doing my duty” a big process. Well, I snuck out of our group hoping that I could get down with PIOPP (pooping in other people’s places) without anybody noticing. After all, being the guy who has to take his shirt off and fully undress to use the restroom is very embarrassing

By this point, I had bought a most people at least 3 drinks and other drinks were flying around as well. We were having a blast. But now here I am in the gross public bar bathroom, literally undressing. Thinking the coast was clear, I began the process (no need to go further into that) when all of the sudden I hear a bunch of girls screaming “Where is Chris Hoooley! CHRIIIISSS I need a picture!!”. I’m like, oh shit. The camera happy girls are actually going to try and get a picture of me doing a #2 (which might have been funny if I were not in a completely embarrassing situation, literally completely naked in a bar bathroom) That’s when I hear the short guy screaming, “He’s right here taking a shit!” and the girls are bantering “Oh let’s get a pic!! This is so funny” while said short dude was pounding on the stall door.

I look out the crack of the door and see that little short loud drunk guy looking in and laughing, I literally made eye contact with him through the crack. That’s when he decided to start spraying lysol. Everybody was laughing at my expense, and I just wanted to flush myself down the toilet. Very embarrassing and dehumanizing. In fact, if it weren’t at a professional conference with my peers and it couldn’t get traced back to me, I would have kicked the shit out of this little napoleonic biz op bitch. He even had the nerve to pay the guy on the piano to write the following phrase on the board behind the stage “What’s that smell? It must be me. I’m the shit! Who is Jimmack.com?”. I saw him take a picture in front of that sign, so you will see who it is once those pictures surface.

Andrea knew I was feeling really badly because I wasn’t acting the same. I just wanted to go back to the hotel and sleep off the experience, but she was really cool and decided to take me to another bar and we talked about all kinds of deep stuff. It was really fun actually, and the downtown San Antonio area is one of the best places to walk around at night. We went to Coyote Ugly and continued the drinks, and eventually ended up hanging out at the hotel.

For those wondering what the deal is here and maybe getting ready to make some gossip happen, there is nothing notable to talk about. Andrea (as I know her extremely well now) has a boyfriend and plus she is ShoeMoney’s sister and the last thing I want to do is even try to move in and disrespect him or his family. Me and Andrea are very good friends now, and I think we shared a lot. If anything, that alone made the trip worth it (but I can say that about a lot of parts of this conference)

Day 2 Queue the Signal

I don’t know how everybody was already at the conference, but I was last one in again. Everybody started out rather quiet so they probably had some time to recap last night’s craziness. Biz Op Bitch (as I like to call him now) was silent most of the day and wouldn’t make eye contact with me.

Aaron Wall gave his SEO seminar (which started with the basics then was nice and detailed. I think he could have gone a bit further with specific new NEW linking strategies, but he was still pretty good and to his defense my expectations were probably extremely high). I loved when he spoke of trusted sites like wikipedia and how to leverage their power without being at all shady.
Aaron may be the most brilliant single mind in the SEO space. As he spoke, he brought up tons of his web properties (some that you may not even know of) and explained in depth how / why each of them worked. He also used our (attendees) spaces as examples and busted through numerous tools.

During the workshops, Shoemoney was probably the most vocal and was very personable. If he decides to jump in head first to the SES / PubCon / Search Engine Land / SMX circuit, he will likely be one of the top 5 biggest draws. He’s just good at it.

Lee Dodd spoke about buying businesses and websites and forum / community building. An obviously gracious dude, he seemed to truly want to help. His advice was so extremely specific (such as go to eBay, click this tab, do this search, sort by price, and start looking at page 2-7 for the results ) that you can’t help but have a competitive edge. He knows this stuff, and doesn’t sweep over topics then start pitching.

The best part was the final piece, where the big guys have groups of 4 people come to the front and you start asking specific questions and as a group they give you specific results, search with you, and create a business plan for you. While this was going on, the attendees do the same for each other. We spent hours helping each other’s sites and some even showing our tools / methods / results. It was the essence of the conference.

The bad part, I scheduled my flight a little early and did not get the chance to develop my business plan with the leaders. I lost out on a huge opportunity, and if it weren’t for the fact that I missed my daughter too much, I would have re scheduled my flight to stick around. The good part, we all have cards which are good for personal consulting from EACH of the big guys: Lee Dodd, Dave Taylor, Aaron Wall, and ShoeMoney.

Final Thoughts

I know that I sometimes sound like a fan boy when I talk about some of the SEOs I respect, but seriously, this was worth so more than the price tag. I made at least one good friend and a few awesome new business associates (moreso than when you go to a big conference). The reason I think they should raise their price is because the size of the group made it special, and the info the we got was so much more specific than any other conference I’ve ever attended. More people will want to be at the next conference for sure, but I don’t know that it will be as effective. The price, certainly was worth it. Great job to all invovled in the Elite Retreat!