Episode 157: Running a Successful Event with TJ Belger

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We talked this week with TJ Beljer about running one of the biggest events in the world, at least for masters athletes. This is the crossfit masters athlete event held in Nor Cal or northern California.

We get into where he started with crossfit, also running the crossfit regionals for the first three years it was put on and we get into how to run a successful event, identifying a problem, finding the right people and executing on the plan, really trusting within your staff and letting them take ownership and getting into the some of the do's and don'ts necessary for putting on a successful event. Enjoy the episode. All right, I'm on with Tj Belger.

He is not only a business owner but he has running an amazing program and event, uh, and done it very successfully. So I want to bring him on here to share that with everybody so they know the do's and don'ts of running events and make sure that they can not really maximize the experience that they give to people. So welcome Tj.

Now I can't remember if it was two or three years ago at that phenomenal success with being mentored myself personally with a Jay Williams. But I'm lucky enough to have. And uh, on that, on the side of what we're talking about today, specifically, we been in the events business or I guess going on about eight years now, 2009. We held our first in gym event for just our members. We were tapped when the, when we games move to regionals became a regional event.

Our Gym was tapped to run regionals for the first three years in northern California. So when I say our gym, it was members of our gym, literally members of our gym as well as a couple few folks who worked with me in the gym. And we ran the show. So for crossfit shortly after that. So that started, I believe in, I think it was 2010.

It might've been 2011, 2011 we started an event, sorry, 2010 we started an event called nor cal masters, which for the last nine years has been one of, if not the largest masters only event in the world. And along with that we ran separate events, something called nor cal teens. Um, a bunch of other things that we did.

We've helped many programs as far as weekends dedicated to different types of events, like a masters, uh, event for just bringing in coaches of leaders in the community, having lectures and all kinds of stuff like that. So yeah, we've, we've done a good number of quote unquote events.

It's not a small event. It's, it's a very orchestrated and needs to be that way and have the systems in place. So I can only imagine the, the very beginning of building that. But

jumping into into this, this event which I know is not only the biggest masters event I think in the world, but one of the biggest crossfit events in the world. What kind of leads to that path? Was it? I mean was it building, building these, these smaller events within the gym and kind of getting reached out by HQ and and kind of going from there or like what actually made you say, okay, well this is what, this is the kind of event we want to have. We want to have north cal masters event.

The problem we identified was my, my wife was on our competition team when we went to the games for a few in the early years. For a few years in a row. She was at that time, 40 years old, the mother, two small kids. We had a number of people like that on our team. We'd like to joke, our first year we went to the two, what quote unquote the Games, which was actually in a Rhombus. Our tee shirts said Masters Division on them for our team because we were just all moms and dads. Right.

That's basically, we were just old people trying to do this thing. From there we identified, Hey, we think that there's this segment of people who want to do this, uh, who you know are a little long in the tooth, who, who can then this might be their thing every year. The dream of going to the games. Now obviously there were no masters events at the Games at that point. So we said, let's put on an event for 40. Literally the first year it was a one day event, 40 to 49 year olds. Right.

And it worked out really well. We just, it was word of mouth. We've told the local gyms around are within me. I don't know, maybe a 50 mile radius and we sold it out. Okay, cool. So the next we had to find a larger venue and the next year it got bigger and then the following year we moved it to two days and we got him in a larger venue and it just started to roll in it. And by solving this problem that we have, we thought was a problem, it kind of exploded.

What, what are the first steps or what are the steps basically somebody needs to do to build the checklist of, hey, these are the things I need to get done. And also let's, let's kind of look at maybe the struggles too. What are the things that have come up that you make sure that people are aware of so that if they do decide to do this,

It's going to cost you in time or effort or man hours or whatever it is. And what I always tell people is, if you're going to take something on getting in touch with people who are doing it, we were, we were lucky that I could sit down with people who ran a, and I reached out to them, massive iron man triathlon events or people who put on the San Francisco marathon or people who put us up. So I could sit down with people and say, what am I? What am I getting myself into here? Right?

And I never assumed that I knew what to do. So I just saturated my network with being able to have coffee with people to say, well, you know, how does this, how does this work? So when you, because what they're going to do is they're going to hopefully beat up your business plan. You need to bring them your lame one page, you know, written down with a pencil, a piece of paper, business plan, let them beat the crap out of it.

And because the people typically want to help, you know, that's two brains going to motto there. So, and so what I did was start figuring out, okay, what do we got to do? How do we, we have to do this. The first thing was I got to get the right people. I got to get, I got, I got to get people who, who once again want to be here. I say to somebody who works for me, hey look, you're going to be in charge of securing trucks and volunteers for moving equipment.

And they look at me and they say, well, okay, I work for you and you're telling me what to do. So okay, if this is my job, I have to do it. That's a bad hire, right? Don't hire that guy to do that job. Say go to your community and say, Hey, here's what I need. I'm planning on doing this. I need help. And you know, you'd be shocked at the people who step in to to want to help, you know, especially if you created a good network.

So this is plan first, network second, get the right people doing the right jobs. Once again, this is no different than running a business. And then you start to roll. When you start to roll and you make the context, that's the first punch in the face. Okay? Meaning you get punched in the face because you start finding costs. You start finding how long things are going to take. You Start Finding out, oh wow, should have gotten started on this thing a year ago.

You start finding that the dreams of things that you want it to have done have to all of a sudden start being cut it slashed. And there's nothing wrong with that. If you have a grand vision and you have to cut and slash it look, you have to, you have to hit the learning curve. Or I should say the learning curve has to fall on you at some point.

And the only way that's going to happen is by you going out there throwing it out there and men, maybe you screw up the scoring or maybe it runs massively late. People are waiting to do the finals we're having. It's eight o'clock at night or maybe. And that way you can say, okay, I can't believe how much I learned. I'm either going to do it again or I'm not. And you move on from those mistakes and typically you'll be able to really start to finding it very quickly for the for the next time.

now that we've basically figured out that you cross figure out the timeline of when we're going to be doing this and always feeling like, hey, there's not enough and I wish we would have started a lot earlier. What are the key points that people need to have in place in the sense of, I mean like uh, like you said equipment judging somebody that orchestrates everything or overseas, kind of like the ring ring master.

What are the positions that you feel like people need to have or at least the hats and roles so that

You really have to start digging into the homework as far as the different costs to you, your community, your team that you're going to be running this thing with. The last thing I would wish upon people is that when you make a decision to run an event like this and you start putting people into place, that it actually ends a relationship.

We've all been there, we've all been in situations where we're like, okay, we're doing this thing, and then it just, something happens and you, you hadn't thought about it, hadn't figured it through. You didn't know how you are going to thank that person. Some people are great with a handshake, some people need your time, other people need to be compensated. You also have to figure out what legally you can do and can't do.

Okay. You can't, you can't say to somebody, hey, you're going to drive trucks and you, you didn't put them on your insurance. Right? You can't say to somebody, Oh, you're going to, you're going to, I don't know, uh, be in charge of the medical tent and they don't have their CPR. Right. So you really have to do your due diligence and a lot of different ways to make sure that things aren't going to, you're not, you don't want to have to yell at anybody. Let's put it that way. Right?

You don't want to have a bad emotional moment because running in event will peak your emotional, I don't know what your, it will push your emotional limits. It'll push you all the way to the very edges because things are happening. We're talking about know if you're talking about what we're talking about, you're talking about an event, which means people are keeping score, which means that people want to win and they don't want to lose.

So you've got fans, competitors, coaches, judge's head judges, and at the same time somebody, you know, the, the catering guy is like, hey, I gotta leave. You gotta pay me. Right? The last thing you want to deal with, or eight people screaming at you at the same time. Now we've resolved that because we have very defined roles.

When we put an event on, if you have a question, you know I will be, I know my role is and if typically my role is to be on the mic, on the floor, one of the roles I have in that moment don't come up to me and ask me a judging question. That's not my department. To be honest. I don't even know the answer. When I was, when I was new at this, I would give an answer and the head judge is like, that's totally wrong and I'm a okay. I got to learn to just shut up. Right.

You people might be like, wow, this guy's running the event and he doesn't even know what the movement's standard is on kipping pull ups. No, I don't. I don't want people to come up and ask me those questions. No different than if they were to ask me, you know, are you guys serving bud or bud light? That's not my, that's not my department. Right. So getting all those little minutia things divvied out and then setting people up for success and or failure and letting them go and run it is key.

You know, once again, no different than if it were a business.

you run an event like this after, after everything is over with, do you guys do any kind of like after action report or, or anything to kind of innovate on to the next years?

My registration person, my person, and when I say my wife has, you know, should be on this call if she had the time because she has, my job is almost 96 straight hours of work around the event because I'm typically in charge of equipment. I'm in charge of the equipment team, meaning, you know, we're making sure all everything is there and ready to roll. She has to deal with the other 12, 11 months and 26 days of the event.

Meaning answering questions, working the social media, setting up, you know, testing the workouts, getting the feedback, finding out, uh, from Pete, from the venue cause securing venues, signing, putting down deposits, getting the information out to people and getting the feedback and having to answer every single question. Where should we stay when we come in? Well, on the website, here's the host hotel. It's been up for six months, but I'm just customer service.

So I knew once again, here's the hotel. Um, the, all that stuff that she has to go through for the whole rest of the year. The second it's over, people are like, what is the date for next year? What's the host Hotel Wa, you know, so she, she handles so much of that, that side of things that is just, you know, it is, uh, uh, a phenomenal amount of work.

I, and when we now start getting into talking about how our event differs maybe from something like WodaPalooza, Granite games, some of these other events and our mission is to support this masters community. That is what we're trying to do. We're trying to say, look, we're putting this event out because, and we have people who, we have a lot of people who were games athletes, right? Which is great. We want to support that.

We also in the corral of what we're doing, when the athletes are lined up in the crowd before they come out for their heat and athlete will say, Oh, you know what? By the way, I don't have pull ups or I can't do double unders. And it's like, okay, so we're doing, you're about to do a workout that is 12 chest to bar pull ups, a hundred double unders and power snatches at 95 pounds and you're saying you don't have double unders and pull ups. What are you doing here? Right.

Their response is I'm just going to have fun and that is something that we have stood behind from day one. We are supporting any master who wants to put themselves out there and they're like, maybe today I'll get my first double lender or maybe today I'll give my first chest to bar. We want us, we always are wanting to support that community from top to bottom. Whatever way you look at it.

One of the big separators for our event is we don't do an online qualifier and when you don't do, when you do do an online quote bar soap, when I sat down with people who run the bigger events and obviously regionals is easy, right? You qualify, you can either do this or you can't. With ours we're, we're, we're celebrating these athletes. We, we, we have judges who say, oh, okay, I can, obviously I can put my clipboard down here because we're just trying to get this person to double under.

We're not worried about counting a hundred double unders in a row and we want, we tell our judges like, okay, let's come on. Let's get this person their double under. That is incredibly fulfilling. No different than if somebody, which we've had said multiple times to us. When someone comes to us who's been to the games as a master and they say to us, this was better than the games. Wow. Well how great is that? You treated us better. We felt, we felt special judging the quality of it.

Just wow, how great and that's it right there and you know what? You win an hour event, a swag bag. You wouldn't stuff that we managed to get people to donate essentially. Right? No cash. No, because you know the online qualifier for events is typically where events make the money. I have that event. Directors of the biggest events in the world tell me we lose money on the event, but we make such a big profit on the online qualifier. It's worth doing well.

Okay. We have to scrape and claw and make phone calls and try to develop relationships right now for our event next year because that's the type of event we run. We are not looking to crown the fittest master in the world. We're looking to put on the best event we can for the people who register for the event. That's it, period. Whether they're double unders or not. So, and that is fulfilling to us.

And when you're trying to have a community that's based around supporting each other, it's sometimes hard unless you're entire gym is filled with these competitive athletes that hold each other up and keep each other accountable and do the workouts with each other and create their own culture subculture within the gym. He usually never turns out that way.

It usually gets, the clicky is usually the term a lot of people use or they feel like they're, the competitive athletes are entitled and it just doesn't really make for a great experience. Whether that's members watching these athletes do their own programming or they're in class and they're just 10 times above everybody else in class. It's sometimes doesn't always give them that, uh, that warm fuzzy feeling of this is the place for me,

uh, because the experience. But it sounds like you guys kind of take those competitive athletes that want to be competitive and show them how amazing of an experience they can have through a, an event compared to just being competitive, just trying to beat the person next to you. And I think that's huge.

That's a really amazing, uh, outlook that it sounds like you guys have TJ on the event that I think a lot of people need to start doing, whether that's within the gym or outside of the gym or whatever.

We want to support every member in our community. Now. It could just be that the culture and the community that we've created here. But you know, for example, I believe this last year from our gym, from our gyms are multiple gyms. I think we had maybe four athletes compete from our gyms. And we have our, our communities mostly masters. I mean just the, the area that we live in, we have very few folks in their twenties. We, we have a large team program and everybody else has kind of 35 plus.

All right? Because it's just a, it's a suburb, right? And we probably had four or five people compete, but we had probably, I don't know from our gyms, 50, 60, 70 people volunteer. So the satisfaction when you look at that of safe people saying, Hey, I want to help, well, oh my gosh, how great is that? Right?

They're just, they're just show up and then I'm going to dedicate my Saturday or my Sunday or both days to helping you run this event because, um, I, I like being part of this community and I want to get back. Well, if you're looking at profit first, and that's part of it. All right. Plan accomplished, mission accomplished.

So the future, the next thing I feel like I have to kind of put in here the future of what events are, but I think if we're anybody is, you know, no, at the same time that we put on a yearly event called the tjs Rodeo.

Okay. It's called the TJ's Rodeo because many years ago, and it's funny because just recently there's been a real, an announcement by crossfit that they're now having this licensing ability and gray, I don't know how much you've read about it, but they're saying, okay, look, if you license your event crossfit, we'll stand behind it and all that good stuff. Right. Well, we had this thing called the tjs games that we've done since 2009. It is our inter gym competition is for our gym members.

I think in 2011 ish around there, I got a cease and desist email from crossfit saying you cannot use the word games as a crossfit affiliate. And as we were putting on our event that weekend where I was like, well, it's a little late now because it's happening tomorrow. We, a woman walked by, we had it at this, our local civic center here in our county.

We were holding an, a person walked by and said, what's going on here at one of our volunteers said, oh, it's a, it's a vent we do for our, uh, the members of these gyms. And she said, it looks like a Rodeo for city folk and boat. The name Tjs Rodeo became name from that off. Now we put on this event, which is great, which is, it's all about the community. We don't, we don't look for sponsors, we don't look for vendors.

We w we try my business manager, Jessica, who works tirelessly at all of our events, who sees if we can get some local businesses that might be interested, but we don't kill ourselves trying to do that. When you look at a bigger event outside of that and you start looking down the line of trying to find vendors, sponsors and you know, you want to put on a village of people who are interested in in uh, or a vendor village.

The tides are changing and now with the, you know, the future of how people qualify for the games or what their goals are or what they're shooting for.

I think you have to take that into account now because if you're fit aid, if you are some jump rope company or beef jerky company or whatever, you are looking at 16 sanction rules now, which are going to have a lot of eyeballs and we for our event have to look to the future and say okay, they're probably not, why would they as they've already told us, why would we come to Europe? It, right? You're not putting anybody on the games, you're just putting on an event that's regional and local.

But the reality is in the past we've Kinda, we counted on those companies and now for the future we have to try to figure out how we're going to do this. If we want an event of this magnitude to continue because, it's a specialty event. It's something that if you are putting on an event and you say, well here's what we're going to do.

We're going to call rogue and we're going to call crave beef jerky and we're going to, and they're going to, and we're going to see, oof, I would, I would call them first to get that rejection out of the way. So you're not counting on things like that. I think you're better off if you're starting one of these things. Go to the local paint store, you know, go to your, go to your neighbor who makes pottery and see if they want to have something to do with it. Starting there.

we want to start sponsoring to hey we saw this last year and we want to, we want to definitely be there for this. So it could lead to to bigger companies coming in and doing sponsored sponsored events into it. But really starting off small it sounds like,

Now you have the opportunity at those events to say to your local coffee shop, or, I don't know, somebody who's trying to, a massage therapist or anybody to say, hey, would you want to come in and be present at this event? I'm going to charge you x to be there. All right. See how it goes. The worst thing that could happen is they say no. Right? Now. That gives you a little bit of experience of saying, you know, because you know in the back of your head you're saying it's six months.

I want to put on a little local throw down where I'm going to do an event where every gym in the area can bring a team of three people and we're going to have a little throwdown here, Jim versus him.

Or we're going to do a masters event or we're going to do a team event or we're going to do an individual event, but I'm going to throw something on and you know, I'm going to go to the local plumbing company or I'm going to go to wherever and see if they're going to get more eyeballs and maybe I'll expand out a little bit because you know this plumbing company, they take care of a 50 mile radius, so maybe I'll check in with them or maybe so it, it, it gives you practice of trying to get the

right sponsorship, the right eyeballs, and we've had sponsors, two brains been one MobilityWOD year after year who support us by saying this is, this is, we just want to be involved with this. We just want to support this because we love the mission and it might not have anything to do with them. Actually getting direct response from your event other than it's one of the things that they do. They do.

We have a billboard, we do Facebook ads and we hang a banner at the TJ's Rodeo every year cause we like to support it. So like I said, you can't, you can't be afraid to ask. You have to ask because if somebody is going to write you a check, oh man, that's only gonna make the event better. You're going to be able to say, I can now rent this or I can buy this for the event or I can, I can make it that much better. So you got to start, you got to start by asking.

do that, you're not going to learn. Like I love that you said, hey, call up rogue. And, and all the other ones and just get rejected right away, uh, because it's gonna make it a lot easier for you to now to go to those smaller people or asking people to sign up for this event and

And so that might've been saying, hey, if you want to buy last shirt. So I, I don't know if he remembers me, but we have some relationship. I, I don't even get rejected by rope. They just don't respond. Now at the same time, I don't stop asking. Right. I send an email to this magical, you know, contact info thing.

And I, and I don't hear anything in a few months later, I throw another one out there and I throw, you know, another one out there and that did, they're too busy shipping containers to Saudi Arabia doing whatever they're doing. But who knows, maybe they'll loop back around and say, yeah, you know what? Sorry, we've been distracted with stuff we'd love to help out. I'm not going to stop. Right? So that's the main thing. You gotta be tenacious.

The good comes with the bad meaning you're setting yourself up for criticism, right? You're, you're putting on an event, so you're setting yourself up for, for people to, uh, to not like it for whatever reason. They didn't get the end result they were looking for and they might take to social media. They might, and that's just part of the deal. It's just a bad Yelp review. Bed bed, Google Review. Yeah. Okay, move on. You've got to go.

So don't, don't be discouraged and Wa, and I'm happy to talk to anybody through this stuff. I typically get almost minutia questions like what scoring system do you use or what insurance company do use? And I say, well, we use this, hey, I've got a quick question back. How, what's the budget for this event? And they're like, ah, I dunno. Like, okay, well you know there's some things you might want to think about. So we, it's been great. It's been completely exhausting and absolutely crushing.

I came off, I just came off, I couldn't talk last week because I got so sick after our last event. And that's something that comes with the territory and you know the work, like I said, that my wife does for this thing and the, the, the work that my entire family has to do to put this thing on and at the end of the day you sit back and go, okay, people were really happy and that absolutely fulfills me. I think the Guido Trinidad who runs WodaPalooza, I think he sold it.

I think that was the latest that I saw. And maybe that's your goal to build something to sell. I don't know it, it probably would help to know a little bit about what the end game is and know where you're, what direction you're heading into. That message is pretty consistently there. I don't know if we don't know what he was doing when he started WodaPalooza or not, but it just, it just, it helps to drive you forward a little bit. Yeah.

have to let them have ownership because I mean, if something goes wrong at that front door check ins or the athlete area or whatever it is, you have to let them kind of have that ownership to correct it and make the right decision and an interesting, what does that look like for you?

And at this point, because you have, I always preach to my staff, two things make you good at anything. Time and volume. Okay, have you been doing it for a long time and you've been doing a lot of it, you're probably going to end up being pretty good at it. And some of those things I realize, I tell the people, some of you guys don't have those. Maybe you have one of two or you don't have any and I'm just going to trust that you're going to do the best you can.

So with the front door, the front of the house person is new, which I'm lucky she's not. But the first year she took it over I said, just do the best you can. People are going to try to sneak in. You're not, everybody's going to have a wristband, people are gonna have Amex and we don't accept Amex and you're just gonna do the best you can. Here is the game plan, here's the written out policy that we have your script. And then that's it.

And it's like, okay, you know, standard operating procedures, just this is what you do and I'm going to walk away and you're going to be fine. And when I have a brand new coach and I hand them the keys to the gym and I hired them and they there, they moved to my area and they don't really know anybody and they shadow me and they shadow a few of the coaches that we decided. It's time for them to run the show and a hand on the keys. And I'm like, okay, I'm an tomorrow morning. You're on.

And you got to let them go. Right. So I don't know if that's maybe easy for me to do because I have to. It's my life. We had to, I'm, I'm happy. I'm happy that I have the ability to do that.

I mean, like you said, if you're not there at 5:00 AM and they need to make a quick decision on whatever's going on, you've already laid that out through your so ops and through your handbook and playbook, but really making sure that they, uh, they, they make the best decision possible and they'll probably make a mistake. And I, I love that you're able to create that culture within your staff of, of kind of explaining, hey, like you're going to make the best decision you can at the right time.

If you mess up, understand like, we're gonna work through it and, and we're going to do the right thing. If, if somebody wants to reach out to you, Tj, they listen to this episode and they say, Hey, you know what? I'm really, I'm having trouble running this, this event or this program that we're doing right now and say, hey, I want to reach out to teachers and ask him a few questions. What's the best way

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