Why A Pink Cadillac Will Transform Your Work with Ryan Campbell [Transcript]

Click here to listen to episode 460: Why A Pink Cadillac Will Transform Your Work with Ryan Campbell.

Grant Baldwin

Welcome back to The Speaker Lab Podcast. Good to have you here with us today. I’m excited for this conversation because we’re going to be chatting with my buddy Ryan Campbell and he and I geek out on speaking. We also geek out on flying, a new hobby of mine. He’s been a great friend in this and also a big source of peer pressure. This guy really has some serious aviation experience, which we’ll touch on a little bit today, but his speaking journey has also been really fascinating. So, Ryan, thanks for joining us today.

Now, you’ve also mentioned to me that you’ve listened to the show for a minute. Is that fair?

Ryan Campbell 

Yeah. This is weird. I’m like any kind of speaker out there in the game, always looking for new insights, and it’s a lonely game. So I think we turn to podcasts. It’s such a wealth of knowledge and fruit out there. So I have listened to you for years.

Grant Baldwin

Yeah, well, it’s good to have you here on this side of the microphone now. So, first of all, for some context, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you speak to and what you speak about, and then we’ll kind of jump in and dig in from there.

Who do you talk to, and what do you talk about?

Ryan Campbell 

So we speak on prioritizing joy. Specifically, we talk about mental health, we talk about resilience, but we really dial down into the importance of our hobbies, our interests, and our simple pleasures in life. We call them pink Cadillacs for good reasons. So it’s a mental health conversation. It talks about this idea of stepping back in order to show up better in life and getting that rest and recharge that we all need. We do a lot of health care with a bit of a backstory in that industry. But honestly, as much as I know we are told not to say this, we have a pretty broad, wide range of clients, and I think that comes down to how important this concept of understanding adversity, accepting the role of resilience, and then just having joy in our lives. It’s something every single one of us needs.

Grant Baldwin 

Now, I’m going to take a quick detour right out of the gate here. You do not have an American Southern accent here. You live here in the national area. Do you feel like the Australian accent helps you to book gigs?

Ryan Campbell 

Australian? I’m not Australian. I’m from West Texas. Grant, that’s what we tell everyone. But yeah, I don’t know. I think maybe the laid-back likability factor. I think the more I get into this game, the more I realize that a massive part of being a successful speaker is being easy to work with and likable and stress-free, and that’s kind of everything that most Australians are. So I think that helps. And I think the West Texas joke always lands well.

Grant Baldwin 

All right. And it’s kind of like our friends with a British accent. They always sound 10% smarter than the rest of us, so play into your accent. That’s part of what makes you unique and distinct. 

All right, let’s go back a little bit because, again, like I touched on there, you have a crazy story that I’ve been able to hear about, but give us a little bit of background of this key story that has really had a big impact on your life and part of what led to you getting into speaking.

What lead you to speaking?

Ryan Campbell

Yeah, for sure. So, there’s definitely two main chapters to my life, and they both happened before the age of 22. And they both involved aviation, and one was ultimately amazing and one was obviously terrible. But when I was a young kid, I discovered aviation, fell in love with it. It was my passion. It was everything that I wanted to do and be an experience. And as I grew up, that never went away. I was a 14 year old kid and I wanted to learn to fly an aeroplane, but realized that it cost a lot of money.

So I went and found an after-school job and a weekend job and funded my flying lessons. I flew solo on the day that I turned 15, and then my whole life just revolved around anything that flew. And what that led to was this ridiculous want as a normal Aussie kid. Dad was a truck driver, a farmer. Mum was a stay-at-home mom. This kind of idea to want to be the youngest person who’s ever flown a single engineer plane solo around the world seemed like a good idea.

Ryan did what?!

Grant Baldwin 

Hang on. Let’s just stop right there, because that’s a sentence that’s easy to casually, flippantly throw out there. But again, let’s let this soak in here. A single-engine plane to solo around the world and a globe doesn’t look that big, but in the scope of things, it’s a long way around the world. And you did this at the age of 19?

Ryan Campbell 

Yeah. So we started planning at 17. It took two years, fundraised a quarter of a million dollars on a laptop computer. I really think the planning phase was actually more impressive than the flight itself. But, yeah, I mean, we took a single engineer plane, modified it, put 160 gallons of fuel in the cockpit with me. It was a flying fuel tank and then flew 24,000 nautical miles solo around the world as a teenage kid. And I don’t know why I did. It was a terrible idea. But it changed my life. It’s amazing. But I think as you get older, you look back and you’re like, wow, that was a big deal.

Grant Baldwin

Well, that was one thing we were talking about recently when we hung out, we went flying together. And it’s an incredibly impressive thing, but also it’s incredibly risky and dangerous. We were kind of looking at the legs that you flew there, and so we don’t have to get into the nuts and bolts of it but, for example, flying from Hawaii to the mainland, that leg, if I remember correctly, was like a 10-12 hour leg.

Ryan Campbel

Fifteen.

Grant Baldwin 

I remember you said at one point, you’re over the Pacific Ocean there, and you are 1,000 miles from land in any direction. And just like, as a 19 year old, just getting lost in your thoughts of, what the heck am I doing out here? It’s super sketchy risky type stuff.

Ryan Campbell

Yeah. And I think that’s kind of the spirit of adventure, which is what got me into the whole thing, like falling in love with those pioneering aviators that we read about when we’re in school and read about in the textbooks and just their sense of adventure. They want to kind of know what was over that next horizon. They want to push their limits. When we did this, I didn’t really realize it at the time, but more people had been to space and flown solo around the world, and this was ten years ago this month, I departed, which is kind of insane. So, yeah, it was rare, it was big and it was adventurous, but thankfully, it was a success. And then it obviously changed my life.

Grant Baldwin 

Yeah, so you mentioned that was kind of the high, in aviation. Talk to us about the other story.

What happened next?

Ryan Campbell

Yeah, so straight out the back of the round-the-world flight, a 19-year-old kid offered to speak. People would call up and say, “Do you want to come and share your story?” And I didn’t have a website. I didn’t have a reel because I just didn’t care. I just walked up, told my story, and left. And that was kind of the spin off off the back of the media and the coverage of the flight. Somehow I was named one of Australia’s 50 greatest explorers, which we laughed about at the hangar and I had the opportunity to meet the royals and kind of just live this real, unique life. And despite all of the good stuff, despite the opportunity in speaking, I actually turned down a lot of speaking and just focused on flying.

I didn’t care about money. I just wanted to pursue a passion. And that led to a job flying vintage aeroplanes, specifically an open cockpit biplane built in the 1930s and I went to work to fly that aeroplane two years after the end of the round-the-world flight and I climbed into the aeroplane, I had a passenger in the cockpit in front of me. My job was to fly up the beach, and if the passenger wanted to go upside down, we would fly upside down briefly at the end of that kind of adventure flight and land. It was a great job. Beautiful airplane, beautiful part of the world. 

But on this day, we took off from a grass airstrip, the end of the airstrip disappeared beneath the nose of the aeroplane, and we had an engine failure, and we lost power. And despite doing everything that I could, and you are a licensed pilot, you do understand the training that we all go through. And despite doing everything I possibly could in the scenario we found ourselves in, it wasn’t enough. Ultimately, what resulted was not just a horrific plane crash, but I was actually cut from that wreckage and taken to hospital as the only survivor.

It’s tough. We don’t deliver a keynote without a box of tissues. And it’s tough. It really is. And I was taken to hospital, five breaks in my back, shattered, facial bones removed, right ankle. I was the lucky one. I was placed in the IC and I woke up in a recovery ward. Five breaks in my back that included a spinal cord injury resulted in a complete paraplegic diagnosis. It resulted in almost six months in hospital full time in a spinal rehabilitation ward. And then it resulted in a year and a half total of rehabilitation and journey, not just, as you know, back to flying, but back to walking. So tough. Aviation gave me the very best, but it also gave me the very worst experiences of my life.

Grant Baldwin 

That’s powerful, significant. I know you’ve mentioned before that it’s hard to stand on stage and share that story without getting emotional and just the impact that has had on you for the rest of life. How do you go from that to that recovery for those next several months and start to think not even about flying, but what do I do with my life now and where do I go from here? How does speaking start to enter into the picture? Because I know this has become a big part of your keynote, but why would I want to go around telling large groups of strangers about the worst possible day of my life and reliving that time and time and time again? So walk us through what that transition has been like.

What was the transition like after that?

Ryan Campbell

Yeah, I think it took a long while, and I was on a journey back to flying. I completely retrained as a commercial helicopter pilot, as an incomplete paraplegic. And I was flying the helicopter one day, and I landed and I packed the machine up and my life was great. There are lots of things wrong and lots of internal systems that don’t work. I can’t feel my feet or the backs of my legs where I sit. There is no push in my feet. I obviously walk like I’ve had a few too many Tennessee whiskeys, but I ultimately am very lucky. But I do have lifelong disabilities and physical ailments, as we should say. So the fact that that was the case and I was a helicopter pilot was amazing. 

So I was finally kind of paving this new road and writing a new chapter, and I flew the helicopter one day, landed, went home, realized that my foot hurt, which was very odd. I normally couldn’t feel my foot. So, I took off my shoe, and it was full of blood. I had a rock in my shoe. I’d flown the helicopter all day not knowing the rock was in my shoe because I couldn’t feel my feet. And then ultimately back into hospital, back in the wheelchair for another two months. And two months of recovery was a massive opportunity to reflect and kind of ask that question that you just asked, what on earth am I doing here? Like, what am I going to do with my life?

And I realized at that point that a lot of speakers are out there. Like the prior version of Ryan, who spoke on climbing a mountain, this incredible success that had its adversities along the way, but there was also a whole different group that spoke on the day that changed their life forever, and that was unrequested adversity, but very few had both.

And I thought to myself, hang on, that’s actually an opportunity to compare the two, to see where do we truly learn? And it was that realization that said, hey, what you have to share actually kind of far outweighs your unwillingness to want to be a keynote speaker. You should do it. And that’s when I packed up my entire life. I sold everything except a little airplane that got me back into the air after the accident. And I moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and I thought, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it in America. Gosh, that was just the beginning of the journey, really.

Grant Baldwin 

So moving to the U.S. was in part to pursue the speaking dream?

Did you move to the US to become a speaker?

Ryan Campbell 

A hundred percent. That was the complete reason, in fact, I moved here and launched a business just prior to COVID, and the president gave me a visa that says you can speak and only speak. And then Australia said, “You’re not welcome back in during the pandemic.” So I’m locked in America in the state of the industry that kind of existed around the pandemic, and then realizing that my one source of income and keeping bread on the table actually came from speaking. So it was a trial by fire, in a way. And I think that actually kind of benefited us and helped with the growth because it was just I mean, we had to do it. We had no choice.

Grant Baldwin

Like you mentioned there, you’ve had an incredible, incredible high that most people have never experienced. And you’ve also had an incredible, incredible low that most people have not experienced. Yet, for a certain percentage of speakers, there is some type of crazy overcoming obstacles story. And it may not have anything to do with aviation, but they’ve overcome cancer, they’ve climbed Mount Everest, they won an Olympic gold medal, they’ve been to space, whatever.

So something has happened. How did you kind of navigate in determining, like, okay, I’ve got a cool story – so what? How do I turn that into something that ultimately is in service of the audience and is something that they don’t walk away from going like, “Wow, crazy story, cool story. Wow, that guy’s had quite the life,” and then walk away and don’t do anything different? How did you kind of navigate and determine, okay, I’ve had these life experiences, so what do I do with these as a result?

Ryan Campbell 

Yeah, I mean, some of that came natural because you actually had to go through it. So I was pretty passionate from day one about mental health. I mean, I was in a spinal rehabilitation ward seeing incomplete paraplegics who basically won the spinal cord injury lottery walk out of that rehabilitation ward with worse mindsets than a quadriplegic who’ll never move their body, arms, legs, anything from below their chest for the rest of their life. And that was a window into the world of mental health and the importance of winning and losing life above your shoulders. 

And then to be able to pair that with my own experiences of getting back to walking and kind of going through the accident and all of that, realizing that learning to walk was a mental challenge, not a physical challenge. All of that combined made me very passionate about mental health. And so I think I naturally fell into the resilience mental health box because I really wanted to be able to help people with that. I saw people struggling everywhere I looked, but it was actually being on that journey while still struggling myself, still trying to find my feet at 24, 25 on the other side of the world. And a number of events that happened that actually led to what we now do. 

Specifically, that was the purchase of a 1960, 19-foot long, Elvis-inspired, pink Cadillac when I moved to America because I thought that was a good idea and I just wanted to do it because I wanted to do it. It was that pink Cadillac merged with my aviation stories that really kind of led us down the road of prioritizing joy, and now I really believe that you have to get out there and deliver the content to see what resonates and I’ve been blown away. If you had told me that the pink Cadillac message that we share would have taken off in the way that it has, I would have laughed at you. But it’s getting out there and having this conversation and watching the reactions that make you understand what is not important. That’s been a wild journey.

Grant Baldwin 

We haven’t talked much on the pink Cadillac, so I want to come back to that. But a couple of other questions, just as it relates to the story, because it sounds like on the aviation stories, you’re getting some traction. But it wasn’t until the pink Cadillac entered the picture that things really took off, which you wouldn’t necessarily think. You would think like, okay, wow, we have two amazing, powerful aviation stories, which on their own should be enough. Were you finding that they weren’t resonating, that you weren’t figuring out where they fit? What was that journey like?

When did you start incorporating the Pink Cadillac into your message?

Ryan Campbell 

It was really good, and they were great platforms to share lessons and thoughts on resilience and some kind of framework to say, hey, this is how you need to go out and become what we call turbulence tough. But what I realized with a pink Cadillac message is that my aviation stories created the buy-in. And that was getting the audience sitting there in the palm of your hand not saying, “Why do we have to be here and listen to this,” but, “How do we be what you are? How do we do what you did? Because we have challenges and plane crashes in our own lives.” And it was getting to that pink Cadillac message and actually turning the narrative from Ryan to the audience member and saying, okay, well, this is my pink Cadillac story. These are my aviation stories. What’s your pink Cadillac?

And it was that moment that we used the word “your.” It was the moment that we posed a question in the keynote to truly turn that around, to put the lights on the audience, to get people standing up saying, “My pink Cadillac is the moment we did that,” we saw this mass adoption of this weird concept. 

Ultimately, we’re having a work-life balance conversation without even saying the words “work-life balance,” which is actually part of the success of this. But we put it onto the audience, and the moment that we did that, we had to create the buy-in with the story. We can’t throw the stories away. So that was imperative in the beginning, but that’s what made everyone listen. And then posing a question was actually what created change. And I had to learn that out there on the stage. That wasn’t something that was taught to me beforehand.

What if you don’t have a plane crash story?

Grant Baldwin 

Now, I’ve got one other question before we get to the pink Cadillac stuff, because again, you just have two crazy, crazy stories. And so there’s going to be people who are watching, listening. I would fall into this bucket – I’ve always said I’m a white male from the Midwest who’s had a normal, average life. There’s nothing on paper that would be like, oh, well, yeah, of course that guy should be a speaker. Look at that resume, or, look at that story, or, Holy crap, that’s amazing. I’ve got none of that stuff.

I remember early on in my own speaking career, that felt like a limiting belief, that it felt like you had to have something. So what would you say to speakers who may be in my spot who are going like, “I don’t have anything like that. I’ve never had cancer. I’ve never even broken a bone. And so I don’t feel like, on the surface, that I have anything that could compete with something like that that could get me in the door.” What would you say to that speaker?

Ryan Campbell 

I don’t think it matters, to be honest. Now, I’m lucky that we have a story. And it’s a good crutch to lean on. But if you haven’t seen Ryan Estis’ “Pouring Happiness” video on YouTube, jump on there and watch this one story of Ryan being at an airport and going to Starbucks. And it’s purely this interaction between the girl pouring the coffee and Ryan going home for Christmas. And I think it is just like a masterclass in storytelling, and it’s not some crazy, “I climbed a mountain” story or “I had a bad day” story. So we do have those, and they do help, for sure. But talking is not about that. 

Watch that story with Ryan. There’s lots of different examples out there in the industry of people who’ve taken something so small and created something so amazing. And I think that the pink Cadillac idea has this virality to it, which, again, we’ll talk about it, but it’s being able to present an old truth. There’s very few new ways to do old things, right? It’s finding a way to take a cliche or something that’s worn out and present it back to an audience in a fun, unique, potentially viral, unforgettable way. And that’s what we’ve managed to do, which is really, really cool. So if you’re out there and you don’t have that wild story, don’t worry about it. There’s so many examples of incredible speakers who are just making waves and they don’t have the story.

Grant Baldwin 

So we’ve been dancing around the pink Cadillac. First of all, why don’t you give us some context of, again, what it is, how it ties into the message, and then again, how has adding that layer really enhanced the overall presentation beyond just the aviation stories?

How did the Pink Cadillac come to be?

Ryan Campbell 

So, for context, in 2018 I moved to America. I’m this kid who started a speaking business. We’re pushing closer to the pandemic, and I’m just excited to be in America, right? There’s fun food here and fun things to do, and this place is just like a theme park of the country. So I’m kind of living the American dream and at the same time, still trying to find my feet after the accident recovery and kind of just get into a groove. I moved to Tennessee and bought an American truck because that’s what you’re meant to do. And I drove west to Memphis, Tennessee, and visited as much as I could in one day in Memphis – went to Elvis’s house. That was the highlight. Graceland, did the tour. The whole thing was super cool.

I left the house, they placed us in a bus, took us down to the main building, and then I realized the only way to get back to my truck out there in the car lot was to actually go through the gift shop. Because in America, I now know they force you through the gift shop. That’s how all of the attractions work. So I went through the gift shop, and I bought this. So what I’m holding is a model pink Cadillac. It was $30. It’s this ridiculous pink toy car.

Elvis was obviously well-known for his pink Cadillacs. I took this Cadillac home. My housemate at the time was like, “What is that? Why did you buy it?” I was like, “Man, I have always wanted a pink Cadillac.” So I tried to justify why a grown man had bought a pink toy car. Ultimately, nine months later, I bought the real thing, to cut a long story short.

And I spent a whole bunch of money that I did not have to spend. I bought it off a guy called Hot Rod Walt. He was a rockabilly singer in Jackson, Georgia. This thing overheated and broke down seven times on the way back to Nashville, but it brought us so much joy. 

So what happened was I was trying to build a speaking business. I was still struggling with certain aspects of my life. But when I went out and jumped in this pink Cadillac, all of that went away. I was full of joy. I was smiling ear to ear like a kid. It was just an incredible moment of relief. I was a keynote speaker on resilience and mental health. One interaction at a gas station with an old man who was smiling at that car, one thought, one connection made me realize, wait a second, this is extremely powerful. I’d been doing these things that brought me joy.

But then, I was not really thinking about why I did them or the benefits of doing them. I had lots of things that made me happy. Flying and old cars and cooking barbecue and adventuring around America, but I hadn’t thought about the benefits. And this one interaction with this one guy, wondering what he was going through in his life, what turbulence, what adversity made me think, wait a second, what if I merge these two worlds? What if every time I was struggling, I actually intentionally prioritized joy? What if I took this one thing that a lot of us consider selfish and I made it essential, and it was an understanding of the benefit to deep dive into that that led to the permission to do something we often see as selfish. The permission led to prioritization, which led to positive change. 

So this one idea led me down a path that not only became one of the greatest benefits in my life to my mental health, especially since the accident, it actually became a question – what’s your pink Cadillac?

What’s the one thing you do that makes you smile like a kid?

It was a question that I decided, for some reason, to ask at the end of a keynote in the last five minutes, and the reaction to that five minutes, the fact that people were talking about that more than the other 55 minutes, is what led me to continue to ask the question. And then slowly it expanded and kind of took over the keynote. Now I wear a pink shirt to work in America. I talk about a pink Cadillac and we pose this question. We have pink Cadillac post-it note boards. We have even had a whole bunch of keynotes where we have a real pink Cadillac on site at the venue. So it’s been this wild journey, not just of buying the car and having it affect me and my life, but seeing it go out there and affect others.

Grant Baldwin 

But one of the things I think that’s so powerful about it is that you’re making an educated guess as far as how the audience is going to respond. I think this is interesting. This is fascinating. I think this is funny. and I think this is powerful. But you just don’t know until you get up in front of the audience. 

Now, over time, you start to get a better feel of like, oh, I’m pretty confident this is going to work. But like you mentioned, the first time you share the pink Cadillac story, it sounds like it’s a story, but I didn’t foresee that a few years down the road, this would be the entire keynote. And actually, in fact, all the aviation stories may become kind of a secondary side dish to this main entree of this pink Cadillac. So the importance of just testing, trying, iterating, leaning into the things that you try on stage and seeing what evolves and what comes out of those. 

How do you come across a message like that?

Ryan Campbell

And I think at the end of the day, you are a communicator. And I think you’ve got to get out there and be in the trenches and do this stuff. You’ve got to iterate on it. You have got to learn. You’ve got to see it in the flesh. You can listen to it on a podcast. Or, you can read it in a book. You can go and do a course. And it is all great, for sure, but there’s no substitute for being out there and watching it happen in real-time. So you’ve got to take all of those tools and put it together, and it takes time to get to that message that’s really going to stick and last. And it’s a surprise to me, for sure. And the aviation stories will always be there as a credibility driver. 

I’ve realized that this is really a marketing game, right? We have to have clarity in all of our messaging and marketing. We’ve started to kind of finalize and perfect some phrases to talk about the fact that regardless of the around the world adventure, being one of Australia’s 50 greatest explorers, regardless of being in a plane crash, a paraplegic diagnosis, and learning to walk again, my greatest resilience-building tool that I have ever discovered was parked in my driveway. And it’s that type of thing there. It’s that stuff that matters. And when I look out at all the speakers that I really look up to, we talk about Clint Pulver a lot, and we watch the experience, and we look into their marketing and just what they’ve created. Like, this is more than a keynote.

Gone are the days where you get to stand up and just give a 60-minute story and walk off the stage. It’s not enough. We have to create an experience. We have to create something so sticky that once you leave like that, what’s your pink Cadillac message? They can forget about Ryan, they can forget about the aviation stories, but they’ll be asking each other, “What’s your pink Cadillac,” for years to come. They’ll be talking about it at future conferences. They have that pink Cadillac model sitting on their desk. I think that’s the secret at this stage.

Grant Baldwin 

I want to shift gears for a second. You mentioned that you came to the U.S. in 2018, really started to kind of ramp up the speaking thing in 2019, and in 2020, the pandemic hits. And so if we fast forward to today, your speaking career of really going all in on this is three, four, five years old, which is still relatively new.

I know you’ve talked about the highs and lows of this business, right? There are days you’re like, man, I can’t believe I just booked this. Or, I’ve done some real big clients and some I can say you’re getting really solid fees and you’re booking some really solid gigs, but also there are days you’re just like, dang, I can’t believe I lost out on this gig to that person. I’m better than they are. Or, I can’t believe that they got paid this and I got paid that, and just the mental, emotional highs and lows. 

So walk us through the past couple of years of just building the speaking business and the highs and lows of that, and how especially as a talk, one of the things that you’ve talked about is resiliency. How have you found resiliency in building your own speaking business?

What was it like building your speaking business?

Ryan Campbell 

Yeah, I’ve been through some stuff, and building a speaking business, especially around the pandemic, is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. And I think people laugh about that a little bit. But when you’re in a spinal rehabilitation ward or when you’re flying around the world or on an adventure, you’re kind of in control of the results – they’re directly proportional to your effort. You get up, you get going, you give it all you have.

The speaking industry, I don’t think, is quite the same. It doesn’t feel the same anyway. You’ve got to put the hard work in, for sure, but sometimes you put all this hard work in and you just don’t see anything in return. And then all of a sudden you get this flow. It’s all ebbs and flows, right? So we have these moments of like, what is going on? I’m going to have to go and get a job at Walmart. But you have those moments where you’re like, oh, my gosh, this is never going to be successful. And then you have these other moments where in one week you travel and do more keynotes. At the end of last year, I had this one week where I earned more money in that week than I’ve earned in Australia in a whole year. 

So I often think of it as designing and selling a scooter. I always say this to my wife Rachel, a Tennessee girl. I always say it’s like if we designed a scooter and then we took this scooter out and we prototyped it in the market, right? Coming up with the keynote, coming up with the messaging, you have to take it out and prototype it. You have to let other people ride that scooter and tell you what they like and don’t like, and you tweak the design and all that kind of stuff. 

Last year, we got to the point where we finalized the design on the scooter. Like, this is it, the pink Cadillac message.

We watched it evolve. Now let’s take it to the mass market. But unfortunately, the mass market is not a switch, and bureaus don’t line up at your door, and leads don’t fall in your inbox. So there is a period of time that’s probably not talked about enough. And there’s an incredible Canadian speaker who kind of sits down and talks about a growth curve and makes me realize that we can’t have it all tomorrow. This takes time. So once you have that scooter locked in, you go out to the mass market. You’ve then got to be patient. And we are seeing incredible growth, but it has taken a lot of resilience. 

I lean on probably two speakers in particular, so when the ebbs are ebbing, I get on the phone and we chat and we talk about it. And more often than not when I’m in an ebb, one of these other two guys are in a flow, so we can kind of bounce off each other and I can tell you what happens vice versa as well.

It’s a lonely game, but also jumping on the podcast, motivating yourself to realize that this is a really incredible opportunity that we all have as a keynote speaker. It can change our life and we can change the lives of other people. Just understanding that it’s a long game, that is just the biggest part of this is it’s not going to happen tomorrow, so don’t expect it to. And that’s been the biggest part for me. It’s been the foundation of resilience, getting up every day and just chipping away a little bit and knowing that it’s a long game, not a short game.

Grant Baldwin 

So you had mentioned keeping that long term perspective and for every speaker on the planet, we all wish it would happen faster than it actually does. And it is such a long game. And part of it, you look up the speakers that you admire, you respect, that are getting more gigs or higher profile gigs or higher fees than anybody else. They’ve probably just been doing it for a long while and it’s kind of that compounding effect.

So when you know you’re doing the right things but things are just not progressing as fast as you would like, you mentioned you’ve got some other speaker friends that you chat with and compare notes with, anything else that you do just to keep yourself moving forward and just remind yourself, like, dude, I’m doing the right stuff. Even if I don’t see it today, it doesn’t mean things aren’t happening or that momentum isn’t building. How do you continue to push forward?

Ryan Campbell 

I go and drive my pink Cadillac, and I know that sounds so cheesy because it sounds like a sales pitch, but it is not, mate. It’s not. You and I sit in the hangar. We go for a flight and that renews me. Going to the lake renews me. Driving the actual pink Cadillac renews me. Like, I have to understand that this is a long game. I look at my business as a chain. Your chain is only as strong as the weakest link.

So we’re always looking every day at what that weakest link is. Right now it’s our reel. We want to see the reel be improved. We just released a new website, so that link was strengthened. So always looking at the weakest link, making sure we polish that every day, understanding the basics when we rock up to every event. Make sure we get every event on film. Ensure we get testimonials. Make sure you’re making the most of every opportunity you are given.

The sales side of it drives me up the wall. That’s not something that I love. I struggle with that. But we’ve had a lot of success with bureaus. We have incredible bureau partners. So putting in the effort to try and expand the number of bureaus that we work with and doing things like this, networking with like-minded individuals and asking for advice and being humble. But at the end of the day, you just can’t go 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s not how this game works. So give yourself a break. Go and do something fun and drive your pink Cadillac, and you will show up better on Monday morning. And as long as we’re making the most of every opportunity, this business will grow at the speed that it is meant to grow at.

Grant Baldwin

You mentioned that one of the biggest benefits for you or one of the things that’s been most helpful for you in building and growing the business has been connecting with a couple of other speakers. Anything that you have done over the past couple of years just to network with other speakers because especially when you’re early on, you’re looking up to speakers that are what feels like light years ahead of you and going like, I don’t have anything to offer. And they get hit up all the time with, “Can I pick your brain?” -type crap. But what have you done to network and connect with other speakers that has helped you in your journey?

How have you networked to grow your business?

Ryan Campbell 

I think you’ve just got to be careful not to network too far ahead. Ben Nemtin speaks on “the bucket list.” I found his Instagram stories to be harder for me, it’s more of a drag and a setback than it was a benefit there for a while because I just couldn’t believe the amount of work he was doing. I couldn’t believe it. He’s the number two motivational speaker in the world according to one of the lists. So this guy’s incredibly successful, been in this far longer than I have, and you’ve just got to be grounded. So make sure that the people that you reach out to are just above you. Make sure we’re setting goals. Set something that’s attainable. Don’t go and set something that’s so far out that you’re going to set yourself up for disappointment. 

So the couple of guys that I work with are in my position, and we seem to be following each other pretty well. But then I have a couple of guys who are a little bit further ahead, and then I have the big guys like Josh Linkner and other people that we can go to and say, “Hey, here are some real high-level questions.” It’s very motivating and inspiring to watch what they’re doing and know that we could one day be there. But when we talk about business development and the next step, the next reel, the next website, the next outreach to a bureau, the next connection, I make all those decisions based off some guys who are just ahead of me. And I think that is how we’re going to grow sustainably and not get too down when the ebbs ebb. 

Grant Baldwin 

Let’s wrap up with this: Again, you’ve really been at it all-in for the past three, four years. And so you mentioned this has been the hardest thing that you’ve ever done, and that’s saying a lot, given some of what you shared earlier. So if you go back to 2018, 2019 Ryan, and you’re just going to have a conversation with him, what do you tell him? And then ultimately, you’re speaking to speakers everywhere who are in the early stages of the journey, just like, “Dang, this is hard, man. Is this worth it? What am I doing this for?” Like you said, maybe it’s simpler to go get a job at Walmart. And so what would you say to Ryan of three, four, five years ago? Or a speaker who’s in the same spot now?

What kind of advice would you give to someone in your shoes?

Ryan Campbell

First off, I would say that this job obviously offers the most incredible lifestyle in the whole wide world – money and time. So that money and time continuum that is so hard to nail for every person on the planet. We either have one or we have the other. We rarely have both. And this industry is an opportunity to have both. And Rachel and I, post-pandemic, have spent three months each year in Australia. We do virtuals. We can come back for mainstage, full-fee keynotes, but we dedicate three months of our year to be where we want to be in Australia with her family or with my family. So the work-life balance is incredible in this game. So you’ve got to keep that in mind. That’s part of the reason why we’re doing what we’re doing. 

But the one thing I wish I understood in 2018, 2019, even 2020, was no one can create your brand. No one can come up with what you should speak about. You have to do it yourself, stop trying to shop it out completely. Now you’ve got to jump into the school, you’ve got to have the help. But you can’t push it all away and say, “You guys build something for me, come back to me. And then I’m going to go and demand $35,000 per keynote.”

In the beginning, I thought that that could happen. I was like, oh, this will be easy, right? But that was based on a false idea of how easy speaking was in Australia post my round-the-world flight. And that was just the hum of the media. I thought that was normal. It’s not. You’ve got to fall in love with your own brand. You’ve got to really sit in the trenches, get a whiteboard, think about that basic problem that I solve, transformation that I create and nail that. That is the ultimate foundation to your business. And it took me many years to fall into where I was truly comfortable with that. And, I mean, that’s the basis for everything. So I would say to anyone, don’t brush over that. Don’t underestimate how powerful that is because it’s kind of everything.

Grant Baldwin 

Yeah. Really good stuff. Ryan, thanks for the time, man. We appreciate it. Always good to chat with you. I can say from having spent time online and offline with you that you are a top notch quality human being. And so we appreciate your time today. 

If people want to find out more about you and what you’re up to, where can we go? 

Ryan Campbell 

Thanks for having me. They can jump on ryancampbell.com or Instagram or LinkedIn at Ryan Campbell Speaking. If I can help, please reach out. If I can be that guy who’s just above you, please reach out. I’d love to help.

Ready to hear more? Check out Episode 460 of The Speaker Lab podcast here or wherever you get your podcasts.