Managing Workshops At Self Serve | Facebook Walk With Reid And Hunter

Reid: Hello Facebook! It’s Reid Mihalko from http://reidaboutsex.com/ creator of http://www.sexgeeksummercamp.com/ and I'm with a sex geek summer camp alumni today, ladies and gentlemen Hunter Riley

Hunter: Hello.

Reid: Of Self Serve toys in Albuquerque and the reason we're not walking is…it's Albuquerque. It's freaking hot here and we would melt so we're sitting in the shade in the backyard and you manage Self Serve toys

Hunter: Yes, I am one of the managers at Self Serve toys. We now have two managers which is really exciting and I do a lot of the education and outreach at Self Serve so I plan all of our classes and I make sure that we have new people coming into the store all the time and I do a lot of outreach with medical professionals and health care providers to help them be better sex-positive doctors and providers and not shame their patients.

Reid: Oh, that’s nice.

Hunter: So I kind of get folks coming into the store and then also do a lot of the education at the store.

Reid: Got it and…and as you're signing on if you are sex educator or sex educator wannabe or some sort of sex-positive professional, leave a comment like where are you watching from? What kind of sex education do you do? And what kind of I mean you manage the store and we were talking about I'm teaching tonight

Hunter: Yes

Reid: and you're teaching tomorrow night

Hunter: Yes

Reid: which is your Blowjob workshop

Hunter: I am.

Reid: I'm teaching Rough Sex For Nice Folks and I'm actually staying the next day so I can finally see you teach.

Hunter: Oh no

Reid: Yeah

Hunter: Yeah

Reid: So what I want to talk about for folks ‘coz I just got back from Denver, I was at the Eldorado Trading Company's elevation event which was the training events for store owners, for…for retail store owners who own adult boutiques or franchises and things like that and the thing that a lot of people asked me about was how you know like we'd love to bring you to the store but how do we do that and what I realized was a lot of there's a ton of adult stores out there that have never brought in educators and had never even run workshops in house

Hunter: Right

Reid: So I remember when I was…was a wee laddie, laddie sex geek and I reached out to…to you all and I was like

Hunter: Yeah

Reid: “Can I come teach in your store please?” You guys were great and…and connecting with you and just kind of corresponding with you about how you run your workshops is really great so I thought

Hunter: Right

Reid: we would have Hunter share some of the ins and outs of how they run workshops at their store

Hunter: Yeah

Reid: because that might be useful one, for…for adults boutique owners or people who are looking to open up a brick-and-mortar store and it might be also interesting for educators to…to listen to how the store or this one particular store does their thing. So, ladies and gentlemen Hunter Riley go!

Hunter: Thank you.

Reid: Answer all the questions.

Hunter: Okay, so as far as on the side of setting it up, I think there's a couple things that people it would do you good to know these things before you get into it and one is do a little bit of market research, ask your customers what they want to know about. All the time, I get really excited for a class idea and then no one shows up you know so just because I'm excited about it and just because someone wants to teach it, doesn't mean people want to learn about it.

Reid: Got it and can you give us some example of a…of a class that

Hunter: Oh gosh.

Reid: filled [Inaudible 00:03:19]

Hunter: Yeah okay, there was one I mean so like I think a lot of it is…is how you title stuff you know so we have a teacher who is really into teaching erotic hypnosis and the first time we did the class, no one signed up and now we kind of tried it again and I think we tweaked the title a little bit and now we're getting more people to sign up.

Reid: Okay

Hunter: But it's…it’s an example of something people being like

Reid: Yeah

Hunter: “What the hell is erotic hypnosis? It sounds scary.”

Reid: Yeah

Hunter: You know so we actually had to do a bit more tweaking with the title

Reid: Okay and…and

Hunter: and the description

Reid: and the copy, yeah.

Hunter: and the copy, right.

Reid: Okay.

Hunter: So, so we changed that up a little bit and then also you know sometimes you think oh well you know like we're always really bummed that the blowjob class generally does pretty well but our cunnilingus class is hard to put on sometimes like sometimes people don't sign up for that class.

Reid: It takes longer to get people to come

Reid & Hunter: Ah!

Hunter: Well and it's…it's a trend in the adult industry too. There's lots of places where like we joke we’re the feminist sex shop that pays our bills at the blowjob class, right? And so that like doesn't feel good on the inside.

Reid: Got it.

Hunter: So what one thing that we did, Matie the store owner, she