Today, Eric shares the session he gave at IMEX Smart Monday, called “From Overwhelm to Clarity.”
Stay tuned as he walks through his three-phase clarity exercise, discusses the power of community and peer learning, and offers a sneak peek at Eric AI.
Today, Eric shares the session he gave at IMEX Smart Monday, called “From Overwhelm to Clarity.”
Stay tuned as he walks through his three-phase clarity exercise, discusses the power of community and peer learning, and offers a sneak peek at Eric AI.
Feeling Overwhelmed
You may be familiar with the overwhelm trap: everything feels urgent, nothing gets the attention it deserves, and your momentum stalls. You’re not alone. Almost every business owner in the meetings industry faces the same challenge. It’s not a lack of effort, but a lack of focus and clarity.
Clarity isn’t something you find; it’s something you build, one focused decision at a time.
Track Your Time
For two weeks, track everything you do so that you become aware of how you’re actually spending your time. After that, decide what to keep doing, what to delegate, and what you need to stop doing.
Your Ideal Week
Next, define your priorities and create a week that supports your goals. Map out Monday to Sunday, from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., and start blocking the time for your ideal week.
Use AI tools to help you list what you’re doing and design your ideal week.
Your Calendar
The third step is to put everything in your calendar. Block your time, protect your priorities, and make it happen. Also, remember to leave some free time for the unexpected.
Community and Peer Learning
You don’t have to figure it out all alone. Some powerful breakthroughs in business can happen in a room with peers who truly understand your world. By sharing your experiences and concerns, listening to others, and hearing others’ questions, you will likely find ideas to implement afterward.
Confidentiality
Confidentiality creates the trust you need to share your experiences, concerns, and challenges openly and receive honest feedback from those who understand your world. Honest feedback, however, is only part of the process. You also need a system to keep you accountable.
An Accountability Buddy
An accountability buddy helps you review what you said you would do and what you intend to do. You also need to demonstrate to them what you have done. For example, show them the marketing plan you said you would work on.
Turn Goals Into Results
Your goals provide direction, but consistent progress comes from having systems that create accountability and help you execute. A strong system turns your priorities into concrete action and keeps your business moving forward.
The Innovation Lab
The Event Business Formula Innovation Lab provides the structure, rhythm, and support to turn your ambitions into consistent, compounding results. It’s a year-long program that takes you from overwhelm to clarity and then from operator to builder. The program has three pillars: foundation, customer, and growth.
The foundation pillar focuses on your 10-year vision, values, mindset, business model, and ensuring your team understands where you’re going.
The customer pillar covers positioning, marketing, networking, sales objections, answers to those objections, numbers you should measure, and how often you should review them.
The growth pillar includes time management, delegation, mental health, building a dream team and a new culture. It should finish with the execution plan and accountability.
These pillars give you the framework and system to help you grow your business.
Eric AI
Eric AI is a digital coach for the meetings industry, drawing on Eric’s books, webinars, coaching sessions, conferences, and more than 340 episodes of the Business of Meetings podcast. It is totally confidential and available in 77 languages.
Use it to identify your next best business step, structure proposals and client pitches, work through pricing and positioning, prepare for difficult conversations, build better business systems, and stay accountable to your goals.
Your Next Step
Start with the clarity exercise. Examine how you spend your time, define your priorities, create your ideal week, and put those priorities in your calendar. You can then explore the Innovation Lab and try Eric AI as an ongoing resource for your business.
Bio:
Eric Rozenberg has dedicated his career to helping event entrepreneurs build real companies— not just successful event businesses. Over the past two decades, he has built, scaled, and successfully exited multiple companies, giving him a unique perspective on what it truly takes to create a profitable, scalable, and transferable business.
Having produced events in more than 50 countries for Fortune 500 organizations, Eric understands the realities of the Meetings & Events industry from the inside out. He knows the pressure of wearing every hat, the challenge of building predictable revenue, and the difficulty of leading a business that depends on its owner. More importantly, he knows how to solve those challenges.
As the founder and CEO of Event Business Formula, Eric helps business owners move beyond being overwhelmed operators and become true CEOs. Through practical frameworks, accountability, and decades of entrepreneurial experience, he has helped companies increase profitability, build stronger teams, create predictable revenue systems, improve their quality of life, and reduce their dependence on being involved in every decision. His mission is to help entrepreneurs build businesses that work without them—and that one day can be sold.
Continuing his commitment to innovation, Eric is also the founder of Eric AI, the Meetings & Events industry’s first AI-powered business mentor. Available 24/7 in 77 languages, Eric AI provides entrepreneurs with instant access to proven business guidance, practical frameworks, and decades of entrepreneurial expertise, making world-class business mentoring available anytime, anywhere.
Unlike many coaches and consultants, Eric doesn’t teach theory. Every strategy he shares has been tested through his own entrepreneurial journey and refined through multiple successful business exits. His clients benefit from lessons learned in the real world—not just in the classroom.
Eric is the author of Meeting at C-Level and Before It’s Too Late, and the host of The Business of Meetings podcast, where he has interviewed hundreds of entrepreneurs, executives, innovators, and thought leaders from around the globe.
His mission is simple: to help business owners in the Meetings & Events industry build companies that create greater profit, greater freedom, and lasting enterprise value.
Connect with Eric Rozenberg
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“If it’s not in your calendar, it is not going to happen.”
Eric Rozenberg
Full transcript of episode 344 of The Business of Meetings podcast, a solo episode with Eric Rozenberg. Lightly edited for readability.
Eric Rozenberg: Hello and welcome to a new episode of the Business of Meetings podcast. Today I thought that I would share with you the session I gave actually yesterday at IMEX Smart Monday, From Overwhelm to Clarity. I want to talk about an exercise in three phases which I can explain in a few minutes and will take you a few hours, but it give you a lot of clarity for many months, and also give you a sneak peek on Eric AI as well as talking about the community and peer learning.
So you might be familiar, I believe, with the overwhelm trap. Everything feels urgent, nothing’s get the attention it truly deserve, and the momentum stalls. Your to-do list never gets shorter, right? Your inbox resets every morning. You’re working hard, but the feeling of clarity feels just out of reach. Guess what? You’re not alone. Nearly every business owner in the meetings and event industry faces the same challenge. Not a lack of effort, but a lack of focus and a lack of clarity. The good news is that clarity is not something you find. It’s something you build, one focused decision at a time. And so I’m going to give you a practical tool to do exactly that.
If you look at the picture, for those who are watching on YouTube, you would see all the to-dos. You will see the client, the proposals, the events, the team, the sales, the team issues, the event delivery, etc., etc., etc. And it’s not even taking into account a sick child or an elderly parent that you have to take care of. So it’s really the perfect recipe to be overwhelmed.
So what we’ll cover now: it’s the clarity exercise, the power of community and peer learning, the Innovation Lab, and the Eric AI.
The clarity exercise is really defining your next best steps, and it’s in three phases. The first phase: track everything for two weeks and list everything you do every 15 minutes or so. I remember doing that exercise when I was a student in business, where we were given time management training by some of the sponsor of the student association, and the idea was to list all the things you’re spending your time on that you might not even be aware of. For instance, I found out doing that recently that I was spending a lot of time watching reels that my daughters were sending me. The idea of this exercise is really to make you aware of how you’re spending your time. And when you have done that for two weeks, you have a good idea of actually how you’re spending your time in general. So you can start deciding what you’re going to keep doing yourself, what you’re going to delegate, and what you’re going to stop doing.
From the moment you’ve done that, the second part of the exercise is to define your priorities in order to create a week that will support your goals. What do I mean by that? There’s so many things we should be doing, okay? And so many things we want to be doing. At the end of the day, we have seven days, 24 hours. We need to sleep, and we need to decide what are the priorities for our business. So from the moment that you have this ideal week, you know where to block the time. In other words, you take an Excel sheet if you want, or a Google Doc, whatever the tools you’re using, and you just go from Monday to Sunday, from 5:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., and you start blocking the time for your ideal week.
Now, how can you list all the things you’re doing for two weeks and create your ideal week? Actually, there are tools now that you could use, whether it’s muse or dot. You can basically use the AI to help you, to remind you, and to help you also list all the things you’re doing and design your ideal week.
So one, you’ve tracked everything. Two, you design your ideal week. The third step in the exercise is to put everything in your calendar. If it’s not in your calendar, it is not going to happen. So you need to block the time. You need to protect your priorities, and you need to make it happen. As you see in this beautiful picture, if you’re watching on YouTube, all the hours are blocked. Obviously, that is an example not to be followed. What do I mean by that? You need to block the time for the priorities, for sure. If you telling me that sales is important and you don’t even have one hour block in your calendar every day to follow up with prospect or your client, I will doubt that sales are very important. And as we also know, the unexpected is the rule. So you need to block time for the unexpected. In other words, don’t block everything from morning till evening. Okay?
And then another aspect that will give you a lot of clarity is the power of community and peer learning. You don’t have to figure it out all alone. Nobody does it alone. Everybody’s community made, as my friend Jayson Gaignard would say. And some of the most powerful breakthrough I had in business actually happened not in the solo planning session, but in a room with peers who truly understand my world.
First, this environment allowed me to share my experience, to share what are my concerns, to also listen from other experience, other people concern, and the question being asked also give me some ideas that I can implement afterwards. The second thing is you need to respect total confidentiality and honest feedback. If you have total confidentiality, that’s the perfect environment to create trust and to get really honest feedback from people. And last, but certainly not least, what is extremely important is to put a system in place where you’re going to be accountable. So every Monday at 5:30 Eastern, I have my accountability buddy, Greg, who’s on the West Coast, and we’re meeting. We’re meeting for 30 minutes. What have you done last week that you say we’re going to do? What are you going to do this week? And it’s not enough to say you’ve done it. For instance, if you say you’re going to work on a marketing plan, you have to show it. So sharing experience, getting honest feedback, being accountable, that’s the power of community and peer learning. And that also will help you to get from overwhelm to getting clarity.
And then you need a system. And as James Clear rightly stated in Atomic Habits, you do not rise to the level of your goals. You actually fall to the level of your systems. And so the goals are very important because it’s inspiring us. But the system is where the accountability is going to take place and where actually you’re going to do things. Are you going to execute things? You’re going to get things concretely done and move forward with your business. And that is what the Event Business Formula Innovation Lab is built on: giving you structures, rhythm, support to turn your ambitions into consistent and compounding results.
I just give you one slide on what it is. It’s actually a year program divided in two phases, where you go from overwhelm to clarity, and then you go from operator to builder. But we have three different pillars. It’s basically everything I wish I would have known when I started my first business 30 years ago, and what I’ve learned along the way.
The first pillar is foundation. What is my 10 years vision? What are my values? What is the mindset I need to have to be a business owner? What type of business model am I going to use to work in the business? And making sure that my team knows where we’re going, and really grow that part.
After the foundation are settled, we’re moving to the customer. We’re talking about positioning, marketing, networking. What are the important things to know in terms of objection in sales? What are the answer you’re giving to those objection? And what are the numbers that I should be measuring, and how often? That’s how you start building a true business.
And last but certainly not least, after the foundations, after the customers, the third pillar is growth. We start by looking at time management, delegation, mental health. We go into the dream team, building the dream team of your culture, and then we finish with the execution plan and accountability. That’s really the framework. That’s the system that will help you grow your business.
And then I want to introduce you briefly to Eric AI. It’s your digital coach. It’s actually fascinating to me because it’s everything I’ve done in my life in terms of books, webinars, coaching session, conference, everything I’ve written, the 340-plus episodes of my podcast, the Business of Meetings. Everything has been uploaded, and then thanks to serendipity of life and amazing people that I’ve met and their unique technology, all the algorithm, the agent behind, everyone who’s using it said, “It’s fascinating. I feel that I’m talking to you.”
And the best example I have: you open ChatGPT, you open Claude, you open Eric AI, you ask the same question, and you’re going to see it’s totally focused on our industry. It’s available 24/7. It’s totally confidential. We don’t learn from you, and nobody knows that the questions you’re asking, the answers you’re getting. And it’s basically somebody that is there for you 24/7 in 77 languages.
Eric AI can help you with defining your next best business step, structuring proposals and client pitches, thinking through pricing and positioning, preparing for difficult conversation, whether it’s with your colleagues, with vendors, with suppliers, making sure that you’re building the better business systems, and staying accountable to your goals. It’s really your clarity partner.
And as I always want to summarize and making sure that we having next steps: first, do the exercise of clarity. Define what you’re doing. Define your priorities. Create your ideal week. Put it in your calendar. Explore the Innovation Lab and try Eric AI. And I have, for those who are interested, here you can scan this code. If you’re watching, obviously, on YouTube, you have the code to have two weeks free. And if you’re interested, just reach out to me on LinkedIn and I’ll give you a code so you can try it for free. You’re going to see it’s absolutely amazing. At the end of the day, it’s helping everyone in the industry. For the first time ever, we can all have a business mentor, a business coach, available 24/7 that know our industry.
That’s what I wanted to briefly share with you, and this week I will continue to enjoy, and look forward to seeing you on the show floor or at the next industry conference. Thank you.
Thank you for tuning in to the Business of Meetings podcast. I hope you found today’s episode valuable. If you enjoy the show, the most important thing you can do is leave a review and share it with your colleagues. It really helps spread the word. I truly appreciate your support. And if you’re ready to take your business to the next level, don’t forget to visit eventbusinessformula.com to learn more about how we are helping event business owners like you. Thanks again for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
