In another episode of The Burn, host Ben Newman interviews Iconic Becker, the founder of Klevr Events. Becker's inspiring story includes overcoming near-death experiences, adversity and challenges to now creating high-level events with an unparalleled attention to detail. Becker shares the importance of persevering and failing forward, noting that out of failure can arise resilience, learning, and success. Throughout the discussion, the pair touch on the significance of pursuing one's passion and honoring their 'burn' or drive, to achieve their purpose, even when facing challenges or on days where motivation is low.
Save YOUR seat for BOOT CAMP 2024 in Puerto Rico! https://bennewman.net/boot-camp-2024/
00:00 Introduction and Welcome 00:30 Special Episode from Las Vegas 01:07 The Story of Iconic Becker 01:33 The Elevator Encounter 01:52 The Birth of a New Event 02:06 The Amazing Story of Icon 02:49 The Near-Death Experience 03:16 The Struggles of Starting a Marketing Agency 03:37 The Turning Point: Avatar's Lesson 05:17 The Rise and Fall of the Super Yacht Production Company 05:54 The Pivot to Live Events 07:44 The Million Dollar Day 08:49 The Car Accident 10:37 The Recovery and Reflection 15:48 The Importance of Details in Event Planning 18:22 The Power of Failure 19:40 The Future of Bootcamps 22:29 Conclusion and Gratitude
In another episode of The Burn, host Ben Newman interviews Iconic Becker, the founder of Klevr Events. Becker's inspiring story includes overcoming near-death experiences, adversity and challenges to now creating high-level events with an unparalleled attention to detail. Becker shares the importance of persevering and failing forward, noting that out of failure can arise resilience, learning, and success. Throughout the discussion, the pair touch on the significance of pursuing one's passion and honoring their 'burn' or drive, to achieve their purpose, even when facing challenges or on days where motivation is low.
Save YOUR seat for BOOT CAMP 2024 in Puerto Rico! https://bennewman.net/boot-camp-2024/
00:00 Introduction and Welcome 00:30 Special Episode from Las Vegas 01:07 The Story of Iconic Becker 01:33 The Elevator Encounter 01:52 The Birth of a New Event 02:06 The Amazing Story of Icon 02:49 The Near-Death Experience 03:16 The Struggles of Starting a Marketing Agency 03:37 The Turning Point: Avatar's Lesson 05:17 The Rise and Fall of the Super Yacht Production Company 05:54 The Pivot to Live Events 07:44 The Million Dollar Day 08:49 The Car Accident 10:37 The Recovery and Reflection 15:48 The Importance of Details in Event Planning 18:22 The Power of Failure 19:40 The Future of Bootcamps 22:29 Conclusion and Gratitude
You know Google rewards failure, apple rewards failure and I believe that if you can embrace failure and say like I want to chase failure as fast as I can I want people to laugh at me, destroy me, bring me down to my bottom so I can build myself back up you will have a stronger tower than the Google app.
Speaker 2:
Welcome back to another episode of the Burn. I am Ben Newman and you know how we do this. Every single week, we're going to bring you a story of an athlete, a celebrity, an entertainer, somebody who's performing at the highest possible level, who's recognized that the Burn is what ignites their why and their purpose and causes them to show up every single day, on the days that they don't want to, and especially after they win. From time to time, we like to do very special things for all of you, and today is one of those very special episodes. We are coming to you from Las Vegas Many of you online. You saw the amazing boot camp experience that took place with Ed Milet, tim Grover, dr Gabrielle Lyons, justin Gatlin some of the best speakers in the world who came together for an amazing experience. I've been doing these boot camps for over 14 years and I'm telling you we took it to a whole other level and, if you missed, we may have some details for you on our next boot camp, october 6th through the 8th in Puerto Rico next year, and I may have the man on the show today who might be able to share a little bit of information about that, but we're here to actually talk about his story, and his story is amazing.
Speaker 2:
Iconic Becker is a gentleman who I had the opportunity to meet after I spoke at an event eight months ago down in Atlanta, georgia, for our friend Alia Watt, and I get done with this event, like here's a guy who knows what he's doing, right, and I finished this event and all of a sudden I come off the stage, I'm hanging out with the crowd, as many people know that I like to do, and I'm getting ready to head to the elevator and all of a sudden Icon says to me hey, man, I like your talk. Do you mind if I walk with you to the elevator? Walks to the elevator, rides on the elevator with me, and we talked about something that I had been making excuses about. Our uncommon live community had been encouraging me. You need to get back to doing boot camps. We need live events. We want to meet each other.
Speaker 2:
Now we've all been able to get together, which has been amazing, because Icon had the courage to push me along with the Unchalment Live group to say man, I would love to be the one to help you at your next event. After we started the planning for the event, we'll talk about that, but I found out the amazing story of Icon his passion, his energy for life, influence from family we also had that father event, which we're going to talk about but some amazing things that have influenced him and also adversity and challenge coming close to that. Hang on to your seatbelts. Put them on, because I'm telling you this right now. You're going to love this episode with Iconic Becker, my friend Iconic Becker, founder of Clevver Events welcome to the burn.
Speaker 1:
It's a pleasure to be here, Ben. It has been a long time listening to, Ever since I met you last year. A couple episodes are in my podcast Playlist All Time Highs, especially role with Dr Lyons. So it's a true honor to be here.
Speaker 2:
Well, it's awesome to have you on. I'm going to get right down to it. Let's do it. Many people don't know the story of the challenge, adversity and the near-death experience that would have kept you from even being here on this couch, and I think so many people go through challenge adversity, but sometimes they allow things that really aren't that significant to hold them back from being their best, and I just love your story and what you fought through and still be able to do the work that you do today with so much passion and energy. So take us to the event and what you've been through.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, so let's run back a little bit. It was basically about three years ago. We were trying to start our own marketing agency and we tried to do it the way everyone else did, which is like let's go to doctors and gym owners and anyone we can that can afford a 1 to 2K a month marketing budget, and we sucked. We were awful at it. Nobody wanted to work with us, no one took us seriously and we really struggled to get clients, and so eventually we were watching the movie Avatar one day, and in Avatar there's a great lesson that most people skip over. You see, everyone thinks Avatar is about humanist destroying Earth and we need to protect life, and that's definitely important. But do you remember the end of Avatar? I'm sure you're a fan of the movie, right? Never seen it before.
Speaker 2:
No, I've got to be honest. I'm not one of those guys who says like, hey, I'm not a science fiction guy, it's got to be real.
Speaker 1:
We're fixing that after this. I'm going to be honest. You always get the real answer. But basically, the people in this fantasy world, they all live in fear of this giant bird-like dinosaur that flies in the sky. And so the people can ride smaller versions of these birds, but no one ever tries to mess with the big one, because it's so massive, it's so intimidating, it kills everything in its path. But one day, one day, this guy decides hey, this bird is the biggest thing in the sky, so it doesn't worry about getting hunted, so it never looks up. So he's the one guy who decides to fly above the bird and jump onto its back. And that was the first time that anyone ever conquered such a beast. And he was able to have the most powerful bird in the entire sky and command an army from it.
Speaker 1:
And so I said wait a second, guys, we need to go for the clients that are so big that they don't look up. We live in Fort Lauderdale at the time. So we said let's go and let's call the approach a SuperYacht company. So we bust in the doors, we say hello, mister, we're going to do your marketing. An old gentleman stands up and he says we've been running this company for 20 years and not a single person has ever talked to us about marketing. What do you got? We went him through ideas of video content creation, the whole nine yards. We ended up closing the deal. It was our highest paid client. It was six times the retainer we were asking from anyone else at 1 fifth the amount of work, which is just an example of what happens when you lean into individuals who don't look up. So we started building this SuperYacht production company out and we were filming these mega $30, $50 million boats. We had a $23 million private island, we did a whole TV show on and our little, small team was building. The videographers that are actually in this room right now were the ones who helped me all that time ago, starting to build that production out, and we had a little business that was starting to move along as a media company until the pandemic happened Instantly.
Speaker 1:
Within 61 days, all of the wealth, the clientele, the prestige we built up was instantly destroyed. We went from being the guys who were like we're doing something great here to what the hell are we going to do now? Now, in between those shoots, we randomly would shoot live events and I had an idea. One day we realized that most people only have the feedback from their own event, but we have the content from everyone's event. We've over 1,000 testimonials, over 100 different live events. We know more about live events than the people who ran the events themselves. So let's study the testimonials to see if we can run a couple of events. And so we spent four days watching every single testimonial, translating it, finding the links, and eventually we had a product that we were like this could be sold to help people run events in a time where no one was running an event.
Speaker 1:
So we called up the worst client we ever had and this guy had lost almost $200,000 on his event by the time it was all said and we called him up. We said we've got two promises for you. Number one we're going to make you back all that money on your events and we only need you to do two things. We need you to A follow everything we say and, b you need to pay a fraud because we wouldn't last another week in terms of payroll and it was a pretty bad situation. He agreed. We ran the first event three months later in Mexico. We had 200 people that we secretly found this hidden castle mansion for hosted it during a global pandemic and we're able to make an experience that everyone walked home with and saying this is the best.
Speaker 1:
Events are back. We're on. Me and my amazing team here were high five each other. We've got a new business model. We're the event guys now right and works quickly spread that we started running events.
Speaker 1:
So a couple of months go by, we run more events, more events, and about six months later a client comes to us and says I'm running an event and we're going to do an offer at it. What do you guys know about offers? We said well, once again, we have all this footage of everyone else pitching from stage. We know how much those events made. Why don't we just watch the pitches, see what they did right, see what they did wrong, and then we'll just teach this guy to do it? We asked him what his target was. He said we want to do $300,000 in a day and we said no, we're going to do a million. That was our big number. We want to do a million just because we want to shoot for the stars. This was it. So we spent two months preparing this pitch, preparing the event, the whole nine yards. We had 250 people in a parking garage in Miami all together for this event. We do the offer and we didn't make a million, we did 1.2 million. We did it in four hours.
Speaker 1:
This was the best day of my life. This was the moment that I was like we finally have a company where I can feel proud of myself, where I can go home to my parents, look them in the eye and say mom, dad, we're going to be okay To have my team, the people that are still here by my side and say, well, never going to have to worry about money again. This was supposed to be my day and I drove home that night singing Sweet Home Alabama and we Are the Champions. After I heard this million dollar day and I'm so excited, my mom calls me and she says how did it go? How did it go? And I said mom, mom, I'll tell you when I get home. I'll tell you when I get home.
Speaker 3:
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Speaker 1:
I'll tell you when I get home was the last words I said to her, because about 16 minutes later, a motorcyclist that was Kind of just speeding at a not just speed came and collided with the back of my car on the highway. Now, my entire life, I've never been in a car accident before and I didn't know what to do and I panicked and we pulled the car over to the side of the road. I see this guy. He's laying there. It's it's 3 am in the morning on I-95 and I'm freaking out. I don't know what's going on the bikes over there. He's over there and I'm thinking this guy's gonna die and I don't know if I'm supposed to do something, am I not? Is this my fault? I'm freaking out and all I knew was that there was someone there and we needed to figure out what to do and I tried taking a step forward to help and in that moment another car came and Hit me at about 50 miles an hour, full body, straight to. The front of the car Flew about 86 feet. I hit the sidewall. They peeled me off the paint.
Speaker 1:
About 13 minutes later, what was supposed to be the greatest day of my life, the time where I finally got the chance to say I Did it, like this is my moment, like I'm winning, mom, like I, everything's gonna be okay. Instead, that phone call was met with your son is we're not sure if he's gonna make it and you need to get here right now. And it felt so unfair to go from all of this effort, all of this work and finally keeping and telling my team like it's gonna be okay. It's gonna be okay. Going through a global pandemic, losing a company twice, having our grace experience. This is my win. And Life took it away an hour later.
Speaker 2:
I was your appreciation for life now change.
Speaker 1:
Something that's interesting about that experiences. A lot of times, people go through these experiences and they they change. They live every day with this new viscosity and this new high on life and, honestly, but I waited for that. I waited for it to come in and say, like I'm alive, I made it, but it didn't come. It didn't come immediately. Instead, I was mad. I was mad at everything. It was mad at life, it was mad at myself. I was mad at everyone, was mad at this guy who hit me with a car. I was mad at the motorcyclist. It was why am I even trying for all this? And I I didn't understand where I hoped appreciation would come. It never did. But these guys, the guys that are in this room right now, were at my bedside when I didn't have legs to walk on and when I couldn't stand for myself, they stood for me and so appreciation.
Speaker 1:
I've maybe I'm going about it the wrong way and I haven't mastered gratitude yet myself. It's something I need to work on better. But I've realized there's these pockets of moments in life that it hits me that I'm still here and we're doing good, and we made it through that dark patch and we're moving forward, and now we're going and now it's working, and it's those little moments that have made everything that much more worth it. One of those moments was sharing the stage with you this weekend, being able to be on top of this amazing penthouse and having all of your attendees come around Attendees. We're in the room with right now. Look so sharp, all dressed up, black tie there, your face on a poker table, like all of those bad things happen. And yet we're still here on this penthouse and it's those little moments that pay out for the, I guess, the bad ones.
Speaker 2:
Realistically, One of the cool things about that moment and the Clever Teeter entire team from doing a casino royale event when you talked about a first boot camp that I did where there were nine people, to now having so many amazing people from different countries and 30 plus states come together and have this great experience. But casino are out overlooking Vegas and at my let's speaking. And did you ever think that you would be able to bring your father? This is a really cool moment for me there. I always love the stories and things that happen to bring your father. It looks like that experience with your parents. Know that you almost died, know that maybe you'll never do events, so know that there's this pain, that to have your dad back there with you. What was that experience like?
Speaker 1:
You know, I came to Vegas for the first time five years ago. It was because my dad wanted me to fly in directly on my birthday. So he flew us into the moment we landed in Vegas like clock strikes and it does my birthday and we flew in on Spirit. But he wanted to make it nice, so we got first class on Spirit, which is god awful and to say the least. But we landed, he was like we're in Vegas, and as we drove he made sure to go through every single hotel on the strip and say, one day you're gonna speak at these. It's like, yeah, this is it, you're gonna speak at the very top of them.
Speaker 1:
And so when we had a conversation before the event and we were just talking about where the palms was gonna be at and the, the poker table on the roof, you know, being able to open to you and just be like this is, I would love to to show my dad that it's like hey, we made it through the hard times. Our challenges did not define us. These obstacles didn't stop us, as I like to say, that card didn't kill me, certainly this one either, and we made it through this. And here's the view, here's that small, brief moment that pays the dividends, and so, when you gave me the honor to not only share the stage with you, but to bring my father along to this event and have him participate, it was truly one of the greatest gifts and any of any of our our partners, you and friends has ever given me, and so for that I'm eternally grateful it was awesome to see it.
Speaker 2:
It was awesome to watch your dad's eyes as you were up there and your dad participated in workouts and all the great things. And which leads me to I've always been very detail oriented, very, very important for me. I mean, people saw how really anal I am, with how I yeah, it's pretty wild, pretty extreme. But the level of detail that your team put in from that casino rally that I mean literally clearing out the Ghost Bar, turning it into a casino, putting a stage in this beautiful place to the ballroom that was chosen, and the lights that were chosen and the smoke that was chosen and the food that was chosen, every single detail, events and the VIP that, the hardcore suite with Tim Grover, which obviously makes sense so bad with all the you know Michael Jordan, dwayne Wade, kobe Bryant, all those that he's worked with.
Speaker 2:
So right now, this is actually I'm just gonna throw it out there it's the first time we've ever done a live filming with an audience of the burn. We have members of our elite boot camp that are with us now. It's beautiful penthouse. Every detail was nailed, in my opinion what to go to the time I'm probably what do you guys think?
Speaker 2:
every detail was nailed. Why are the details so important to you? Because I've been to so many events. I've spoken to I mean hundreds upon hundreds of events, and sometimes you go to an event you're like, okay, they threw this thing together, but there was not attention to detail. Why are details so important?
Speaker 1:
yeah. So a great event. People always think a great event is defined by good speakers, and don't get wrong speakers are important, a good location or a crazy experience, an excursion on site. But I think we can all agree the greatest events are simply the events that deliver on the promise they said. So we took attendees from point A to point B. That's what we said we were gonna do and made it happen. Every other detail of the event is simply built around supporting that right.
Speaker 1:
So if we want to have it work, we want attendees to identify their burn and be able to be an understanding of how to chase and attack it. We don't want them thinking about things like is my room, you know? Where am I gonna stay tonight? Where's the food at you know is? Is the room gonna have water? Things like that.
Speaker 1:
That takes them out of flow, takes a lot of focus, and I'm gonna give a little shout out to my my lead coordinator, kaylee, because Kaylee and I share this fear of Imperfection in every element, you know, and so I think Kaylee probably read over the master tracker at least 20 times over, because our, our fear is that we step into these rooms, like I was saying earlier, with these giant birds that don't look up.
Speaker 1:
I mean, ben, you're a very powerful individual. My dream as a kid was to be Tony Robbins on stage, to be able to Share this podcast with one of the top five performance coaches the entire world is. Dream come true, and so it's like. For us to be able to even work or align ourselves with you in our mind puts us at such A high level of perfectionism that a degree under is just not acceptable for you. Standard it's not. Yeah, degree under the standards is not acceptable. And so, and so you know, you took a lot of trust and built it on our team, and I think our team equally wants to make sure that's respected, and so details shape the experience, but as long as we can build the event that delivers attendees from point A to point B and they don't think about anything else, then we've created a great event, and I think that's a formula anyone could take away one final question.
Speaker 2:
A Lot of people have great ideas and then they fail to execute. A lot of people you know a lot of people come when you do events. I've been doing events for a long time. This is nothing compared to what we just did. I'm just so forever grateful to you and to the entire team and all the Discipline, the time, the dedication and people saw what happened by the scene would be in the mind blowing. What do you say to that person who just doesn't have the courage, whether it be an online event, whether it be an in-person event? The people who they know they want to do something big but they just have that? What do you say, have all these events that you've done? What do you say to those?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I think it's something that Hermosie once said to me backstage, which was there are a million ways to win and there is only one way to lose, and that's simply giving up right, not trying at all. And so for a lot of our events that we've made, we royally screwed them up. We tried, our best, expectations were misaligned and it felt terrible, but we still moved forward. Connotation now we go carding kill us this one either, and so if that's not gonna stop us, I like to fail forward, fail fast and fail harder. Our company's mission is simply fail harder this year, and that's that's. That's what I would encourage anyone to do. You know, google rewards failure, apple rewards failure, and I believe that if you can embrace failure and say like I want to chase failure as fast as I can I want people to laugh me, destroy me, bring me down to my bottom so I can build myself back up you will have a stronger tower than ever before.
Speaker 2:
And I love that. One more, one more piece of you had mentioned yesterday, actually from the stage, the importance of Don't tell us the great feedback, tell us the feedback that's gonna make us better. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely my my lot ask you a question, absolutely. So my question for you is you, you? It's been a long time since you ran a bootcamp. What was the moment that really shined over everything else this weekend or this week for you?
Speaker 2:
Oh I would say that it when I, when we were up top and I stepped on to that stage, which, once again, was strategically placed in the perfect place, and you look out to Vegas, I mean it literally was like you could have taken a step. You're like on the strip and I look out and I see all the lights, and then I turn around and hear all these amazing Individuals that, whether it was the first time having an opportunity to meet, that remembers our uncommon live community, or there were friends and See my wife's eyes who had never been to a bootcamp all these years I've been doing just to see everybody. You know I'm a crier, yeah, and so for me, the emotion of that it just, it just made me want to just pour into everybody and I was so grateful and so humbling and it was just almost like this Seen a perfection, the pen, I go into attack. It was this perfection excitement, but it was like, alright, now it's time to attack you.
Speaker 1:
It was and now that you, you were at the end of it for closing on our amazing elite, danis, awesome penthouse, here at the end of the event, we mentioned the 2024 bootcamp in Puerto Rico. I what excites you most about that one? What ideas do you have going forward? That's like I want to drill into this. I want to lean into this more.
Speaker 2:
This is why my screws are loose, because when I say never finished or own a mentality like it's never finished, like you love it, that's like you want to do it again and you want to continue to get back and you want to continue to serve, and it's. What more can you do? And a little side story that I'll wrap it up here. But Coach Belu, who is the strength coach at Alabama, I'll never forget. We won the national championship in 2020. We were down in Miami Everybody's up late the night before and then all of a sudden wake up the next morning and we're texting each other about how we can't wait for, like next season, to start.
Speaker 2:
And so there's this love, there's this passion, and then you say, ok, we've got to stay connected, continue to deliver on what we just did, which means that you have to continue to provide environments that allow people to continue to do that. So, yes, it gets me excited that there's lots of things that we have upcoming, including that Puerto Rico bootcamp, but we're going to continue to do something which was very important, which we all deliver on together, which was create an experience that hits people in all different areas of their life, not like other events where it's just a bunch of great speakers. Yeah, literally, we're continuing to attack every single area of people's lives. So there's nowhere to hide. We're creating an environment that makes you uncomfortable and challenges you to be your best. So it's always fun for me. We challenge everybody Get to December, the 25th, allow that to be the foundation for new thinking, heading into the next year, to be a new you.
Speaker 2:
And then next year you come back and it's like, ok, how did I do over that last year? Then we keep attacking it, doing it again.
Speaker 2:
So I couldn't be any more fired up for what lies ahead in the community that we have to continue to do it together and I'm grateful to you and the uncommon live community for encouraging me to do it again, because this exceeded my expectations in terms of how I feel, my excitement, my energy to continue to give back to Puerto Rico. Absolutely, I'm supposed to be finishing the show. I feel like I'm finishing your show. Sorry, matthew, but hey, I'll do this. I'll say thank you and this is not like a sales pitch for you, but I've been to so many different events and people need to be talking to Clevver events at ICON because there's something special about the way you do things and I appreciate you and look forward to growing together. Thanks for coming on the bar To the moon and back ship.
Speaker 1:
Thank you so much and thank you guys for all coming and playing full hour. I want to give a round of applause for me. Bring me a bed.
Speaker 2:
Thank you. The first live episode of the Burn. I can't thank you enough for every single week choosing to join us to hear amazing stories. Oftentimes, adversity and challenges makes you shift your perspective A near death experience to now having the opportunity to perform at the highest possible level. You have that in you as well. But you have to choose to connect to your burn so it ignites your why and your purpose and allows you to show up on the days that you don't feel like it and especially after you win. See you next week for the Burn.