Who do you speak to and what do you speak about?
My name is Dan Brulé. I teach breathwork. I’m fortunate, I’ve been doing it for over 50 years before it was even a thing. I’ve watched the industry and the movement grow up around me and I’m excited that breathwork has finally made its way into the mainstream, and there are a lot of unarguable scientific results and medical benefits. It’s kind of cool. I mean, 50 years ago I felt like a voice crying out in the desert. People would say, “Breathing smeething.” But now, it’s a proven thing and these days everyone is jumping on the breathwork bandwagon.
What was happening or not happening in your speaking business that led you to join The Speaker Lab?
I never really looked at speaking as a business. I mean, I’m training, I’m teaching, I’ve traveled to 70 countries – I train breathworkers. I work with groups, I do group seminars and so on, but I got the desire, the intention, to earn in a day of speaking what I was earning in a week teaching.
So that was my original idea, my dream.
I’m getting old, I’m getting lazy, maybe. So I just thought it’d be kind of cool to do a keynote talk and offer a short workshop, and earn what I would earn when I do a week long training. That was my motivation.
I started looking around and it was hard to avoid Grant. I must have clicked on something at one point, and I kept getting messages from him and he finally wore me down.
I’ll tell our marketing team you said that. We’re glad you said yes. Did you have any fears or apprehensions at the start?
You know, I can’t count how many programs or courses that I signed up for and never even did or completed, so that was my major thing. I’m going, “Well, it sounds good. Yeah, I’m really ready. Why not!” Another part of me was going, “I don’t know, I’m already so busy.” I got my patterns, my habits, and it was a real time commitment. You offer a really big program that’s got lots of work to do. That was my only hesitation–that I wouldn’t take full advantage of it.
What helped you overcome that?
I had a really nice windfall. I had launched an online course and was crushing it. I was extremely and pleasantly surprised by the success of the course. It brought in much more income than I had expected. So I thought, “Well, now I’ve got the money, so I’m in.”
Congrats on the course doing so well! What were some of your aha moments and key takeaways from doing the SPEAK framework?
Breaking down the speaking business into industries and categories. Normally, I would just talk to anybody – if you have a belly button, you’re in my market, you know? So this idea of selecting a certain audience, a certain industry – that was foreign to me because I thought, “Everybody needs breathing!” But I loved how you divide things into specific markets or niches.
It made it easy for me to focus in and think about serving a particular audience. It helped with my focus overall, and that was really good; when I’m speaking to a specific group, it’s easy for me to focus on the exact benefits for that particular group rather than just speaking to everyone.
At first I didn’t think I could focus because I couldn’t pick one audience. So fortunately as I got the coaching and went on, they said, “Well, you don’t have to pick one. Try picking three audiences, and develop a talk for each audience. “Ohh, okay, so I don’t have to just pick one?
That’s great!” So the coaches just kept making it easy for me.
What have been your results so far or highlights for you?
I spoke at an event in San Francisco called Bliss Fest, and I got to share the stage with John Gray, the “Men are from Mars” guy, and that was a really delightful experience. We were the two main speakers. It felt really good to meet him, hang out with him and share a stage with him.
I got a couple of invitations that seemed to come out of nowhere, and that was pleasantly surprising, and the audiences were very interesting. One of the niches I like is schools – I love getting breathwork into schools and to kids, but even better I like to train teachers and principals and administrators, sell them on breathing, and let them do the work of getting it to the kids. That was one of the niches that I decided to focus on: school administrators.
One of my coaches, that was his specialty, and he had spoken to 30 or more school districts and I guess there’s a thousand of them in the country. He was making a really good living just in that one niche, just speaking to school administrators. So I could see the potential in it, and that got me more interested in focusing on particular niches.
What’s your new normal as a speaker?
I’m actually not doing that much speaking, but I have doubled and tripled my rates. It was kind of forced on me – that was nice. My organizers, my sponsors, my hosts sort of forced me to charge more. So while I’m not booking a lot of pure speaking engagements, I’m making 2 or 3 times more than I was at my seminars and trainings.
That sounds very aligned with what your goal was at the beginning – how can I do less but make more?
Yeah. I’ve gotten the people that I’ve trained to step in and do some of the work, so I’m moving into this heart surgeon model where before I was a scrub nurse, I was the anesthesiologist, I was everything. Now I have other people I’ve trained, who begin the seminar, to do the work, and you know, in the surgeon model, they prepare the patient, open up the chest, I just walk in and snip, snip, and then walk out. Then they close up the chest and finish up. And so I’m liking that model.
So even though I’m doing the same number of trainings, I’m not working as much or as hard, because the practitioners I have trained are stepping in and doing some of the work.
It sounds like you’re doing the scaling part! When you say people forced you to up your rates, what did that look like?
Well, for example I got invited into the Hasidic Jewish community, a couple of rebels or radicals within the community–kind of edgy, they came to one of my events in New York, and they decided to organize for me and it spread like wildfire.
I think there are probably about 60,000 people in this particular Hasidic group, and I have already worked with almost a thousand of them. So when they started organizing for me, a couple of them became good friends, and they said, “We want to be your representative within this Jewish community. If anybody wants to hire you, please tell them to talk to us.” On a verbal agreement, I said okay, and then sure enough, whenever I would finish a seminar, three or four people would come and say, “Hey, I’d like you to come and talk to my group.” So I’d say, “Well, you gotta talk to Nachman and Adam.” And they were the ones who raised my prices!
I also had a really wonderful client, and when I was doing a group session in New York, in Monroe and around those towns, he invited me to come and do some private sessions while I was in the area. He said, “I have four or five people who’d like to do a session, will you come?”
I said, “Yeah.” He says, “How much do you charge? “I charge $450 for a session.”
He said, “Damn, you know, I charge $1200…and if I charge $1200, I don’t want to tell them that you only charge $450…Is it okay if I say that you charge 1200? I said, “Yeah, okay, go ahead.” That was that!
I told my new organizers what the minimum was that I needed to make for a week, and they turned it into a five day event, plus it went from 9am to 6pm each day with an hour for lunch, to 10am to 5pm with 2 hours for lunch!. So they increased what I made for my time by over 30%. They said, “we don’t think you’re charging enough. You should be charging more. And so I said, “Okay, charge more. I’m happy.”
You got a lot of people doing good business for you out there.
Yeah. I’ve been a missionary for the breath my whole life, honestly. And truth be known, I would do it for nothing. I’ve been to 70 countries, and if I get an invitation to a country I haven’t been to, I don’t want to tell them I’ll come for nothing but I love being in a country I’ve never been before and working with a community I’ve never entered. Now I have a bigger team. That’s one of the things I feel grateful for in connection to The Speaker Lab. They sort of forced me to bring more people onto my team. I now have a marketing person. I have a social media person and it’s just lifted everything else up, you know?
You say you’re not speaking that much…What does that mean for you?
Well we just got my website and demo reel down, and I’m still not really satisfied with it at this point, so we’re editing and tweaking. I haven’t even posted my speaker website yet! DanBrule.com is going to be my designated speaker website. My regular website, breathmastery.com is the only one I have running at the moment. So I haven’t even started promoting myself specifically as a speaker!
I did hire a VA on Fiverr, and he has been developing some really good lists. So when I am ready – 2025, is going to be my transition year, to really have my practitioners step in and take my teaching gigs so that I can focus more and more on speaking.
WOW. So everything you shared before this was before you’ve even fully even finished the SPEAK framework?! You have another level up that’s probably gonna happen in the next couple months.
Yeah. When I really put focused attention and my team on it, I can expect that I’m gonna see some really good results.
Well, we’re excited for you! My closing question is just who would you recommend to the Speaker Lab and what would you say to someone on the fence? Anything else you want to mention?
I wanted to mention a couple of things that I really appreciated and got a lot of benefit from, and that is, the coaches are really crushing it in the speaking business. And that was real inspiration to know, “These guys are really doing it. They’re not just teaching it, but they’re out there speaking. And so I’m getting their ideas and the lessons they’ve learned and the shortcuts and the steps involved. It’s not theoretical. They’re sharing what’s really working for them. I found that to be extremely valuable and really inspiring. They’re walking their talk and what they’re teaching really works. It’s working for them. And so I feel it’ll work for anybody.
I just love how responsive my coaches have been. I got stuck a few times and they just stepped in and gave me ideas and helped me work through a couple of the areas where I got stuck. I appreciate how sensitive and responsive they were, when I needed to bounce something off of them. The feedback was really useful.
The majority of them started as Speaker Lab students, which I also love! Thanks for taking the time to share that. Lastly, who would you recommend to the Speaker Lab, and what would you say to people on the fence?
Take your time. If you really love what you do and you’re passionate about it and you’re good at it, it’s a no brainer to become a speaker, you know? If you have a message that you really feel is part of your mission and your purpose in life, then you’re going to attract people who are ready to hear it. Get over whatever the hesitation is, and just put yourself out there. The coaches at The Speaker Lab really help you to pick a topic and hone your talk and practice it and drill and rehearse it.
That was actually really difficult for me because I never plan a talk. I’ve been teaching breathing for 50 years. I just come in, I take a few breaths and then I just flow. And so the discipline of creating a talk that you then repeat, it’s still a bit out of my comfort zone but I see the value of it.
You get a talk that really works, that really helps people and you keep getting new audiences, so you can tell the same joke over and over again, but the people you’re telling it to haven’t heard it yet. And so, even though you’ve told the joke 50 times, this time you’re in front of a fresh audience.
For me, developing that discipline of preparing a talk and rehearsing the talk and having a script that you follow, I never did that in my life, and that was the biggest thing I had to get over, to overcome. But if you’ve got a topic you love it and you’re good at it, it’s so satisfying to get out there and get your message out. So yeah, just do it!
Well, I can tell you have just such a genuine passion for what you do, and it sounds like your business is thriving. We’re happy to hear about that. Thanks for taking the time to share all the good news with us.
My pleasure. Thank you.