There’s a drawer in your desk with business cards from the last three events you went to.
It’s not that you don’t care. It’s that every time you got back, there were 200 emails, a client thing, and a report due. By the time you looked up, three weeks had passed, and you’re at another event, meeting new people who you won’t have the capacity to follow up with.
Real talk…what nobody says out loud about events: The ticket, the flights, the hotel, the two days you were “OOO at an event will respond when I return” … all of that is the cheap part.
It’s a clear number on an invoice that you approved.
The most expensive part is the 72 hours after, where follow-up goes to die; that’s where you fall short.
Run this on your last event
- How many connections did you make?
- How many got a second touch within ten days? Not a LinkedIn connect. An actual message that referenced the conversation.
- Divide the second number by the first.
That percentage is your real event ROI. For most people, it’s the first time they’ve ever seen it, and it usually lands under 20%.
Now take everything that the event cost (table, travel, staff hours, two days of nobody billing) and divide it by number two.
Say the event ran $6,000. Forty cards. Six real follow-ups. Your cost per usable lead isn’t $150. It’s $1,000.
Same event. Same spend. The only variable is what happened in the 72 hours after.
And if the number comes back near zero — forty connections, not one conversation that warranted a second touch?! That’s not a follow-up problem. That’s a room problem. Worth knowing now, before you rebook it next year.
The solution I built for this
I got tired of the drawer, so I had an idea to build an AI agent that could handle Business Card Scans + follow-up. The concept was that you text it a photo of the card, or just a name and a LinkedIn URL, and it loads the contact into a spreadsheet. Then it texts you a draft follow-up and asks when to send. You say Tuesday. It sends from your own Gmail on Tuesday.
I planned to build this during the long weekend, only to procrastinate because life…And then on Tuesday, Meta launched their new app called Muse. When experimenting with Muse, I put in the idea of what I wanted to do. Then, connected Gmail and Google Sheets, and in less than 10 minutes, Muse was able to create what I wanted.
Watch the full video breakdown here:
Before you close this — Run the three numbers on your last event and reply with just the percentage. I’m collecting these, and the range is wider than anybody expects.
P.S. If the number came back low, that’s a system problem, not a discipline problem. The most recent Lunch N Learn is 3 Ways to Maximize Networking and Events in the Age of AI, and I’ll show the scanner live.
— Georgie-Ann, your Ops Bestie
GSD Solutions works with Owners and Operators to audit, automate, and update the systems they outgrew. If you want a second set of eyes on yours, that’s what the 90-minute evaluation is for. Book yours today at gsdsolutionsinc.com/letstalk
