Beaufort, South Carolina’s Jamie Peart has only been a licensed real estate agent since 2020. However, she’s been able to grow both a team and a sizeable business in her area in that short amount of time – selling almost 120 homes in 2024.
What’s her secret? Incorporating events that speak to her Big Why into her business repertoire.
Jamie is passionate about having a presence in and giving back to her community. And its through the events she puts on that she’s able to do both at a high level.
And while her town music festival is a large-scale event that over 5,600 people attend, she didn’t start there. Rather, the events she hosted evolved over time. She started smaller with movie nights and an Easter event before taking stock of what she felt was a town need. She then built up to the massive scale of the day-long music event.
Whether or not you envision yourself putting on a music event for your hometown, you can use Jamie’s key learnings and approach to plan your own larger scale event.
1. Be a good partner to your community. Jamie and her events were already known to the community because she started on a smaller scale and did a good job on the events she put on. The city enjoyed what she did. She was then able to translate her role as a good citizen naturally onto a larger stage.
2. Pitch your idea to the town leadership or city council. Jamie went to her city council, asked for their permission, and found out what they would need her to do in order for her to pull off the event. She positioned the music festival as a free local event where they could showcase local talent and then after receiving approval for the overall event, planned via trial and error, where she expressed what she wanted to do and the council would approve or deny her ideas. Remember, every city, their rules, and regulations are different.
3. Don’t bite off more than you can chew for your first event. Although many music events are multi-day occurrences, Jamie planned the music festival as one 8-hour day. She knew what she could handle and ensured she could deliver at a high level.
4. Utilized local talents. She brought in three local headliners to attract people and keep the park full of attendees.
5. Invite craft and food vendors to attend. Jamie’s vendors paid to have a presence at the event – and it benefited them to be there.
6. Don’t underestimate the marketing benefits that events offer. Jamie’s team was a presenting sponsor of the music festival. This meant that the entire park was outfitted in her colors and she had signage everywhere. She also had a tent where people could stop by, provide their contact information, and be entered into a giveaway. This allowed her team to collect more names to add to the database – to add to the names she collected when people signed up to attend the free event.
7. Prepare for your events to be a long-term play. The music festival was not a profit center for her. As Jamie says, when pouring into the community, she expects it to be a long-term investment.
8. Follow-up consistently with attendees. Jamie was able to add more than 2,000 people to her database around the one-day music festival event and each was tagged with the music festival information. This enabled her to continue to reach out to them with information about future events and music festival details. While all her communications to this group of people were about events, they still have an undertone of real estate so people are aware of who she is.
At the core, Jamie’s events enable her to satisfy her Big Why and give back to her community. As she says, she doesn’t put on an event just to do it. It aligns with who she is. And by staying true to who she is, people take notice. Her business has grown organically as a result.
Inspire members, if you’re looking for a guide for putting on a good event, download Jamie’s large scale event playbook. Not a member and want to learn more? Visit the link here.