Who do you speak to and what do you speak about?
I speak to businesses and associations, so I tend to speak at a lot of large business conferences. I have two topics – the first is how to create an extraordinary workplace culture that employees can’t imagine leaving, and my new keynote speech is about how to light a fire beneath employees to inspire them to execute.
Those sound like great talks! Going back to the beginning, what was happening or not happening in your business that made you sign up for The Speaker Lab?
I’ve been speaking professionally for about eight years, and in all honesty, I got completely burned out. I found that I was doing lead generation for honestly 8 to 10 hours a day. I was working most weekends, and I knew that there had to be a better way.
So for the past two years, I actually took time off because I was speaking between 50 and 60 times a year doing 110 flights a year, and I just couldn’t keep up with it. I found that even though I knew I was adding value with these events, I wasn’t enjoying the journey.
Two years ago I decided to move from Denver to Arizona, and then when I got settled in my new house, I thought, “Okay, I’m gonna have to relaunch my business again.” But it didn’t excite me and I knew there had to be a better way. And so one day I was literally on Facebook and I saw an ad for The Speaker Lab, and I don’t believe in coincidences, so I booked a discovery call and had an amazing session, talked about some of my successes and also some of my roadblocks and really felt like The Speaker Lab might be a great restart and refresh for me to come out of the gate again with a new keynote speech, and just a new energy and passion, if you will, for the business.
Sounds like we came at the right time. Did you have any fears or apprehensions when it came to enrolling?
I didn’t have any fears and apprehensions, but I didn’t really know if I would be taught a different way. I thought maybe the speaker business was just a bunch of really, really hard work and a grind. And I’m willing to work hard – I worked in corporate America for 23 years and that was difficult. This was difficult times 10, and so I just thought I must be doing something wrong. I must not be understanding the tricks of the trades.
What am I missing? So I didn’t have any fears, but I did think to myself, “I wonder if they can really teach me anything new that I didn’t know…Maybe this is just what it is.”
Totally. Well once you did the SPEKA Framework, do you recall any aha moments or key takeaways?
Yes. Thank goodness I had a lot of aha moments and key takeaways from the SPEAK Framework. For the past eight years, I was basically only going after cold leads. I was creating lists of hundreds and hundreds of conferences and reaching out to those event planners. I was not tapping into what you taught me to do, which is the warm leads. I wasn’t reaching out to my hundreds of family and friends and acquaintances. I wasn’t circling back with the thousands of people who I’ve worked with in the business environment in the past two decades, who know me, know my work ethic, have seen me speak right in the corporate setting, who have a ton of leads because they work in corporations still. Going after those warm leads is something that has really helped.
Also, The Speaker Lab gave me extraordinary scripts that work, that are going to make a huge difference and be a game changer. Then another thing that I didn’t do in the past eight years is thorough follow-up after an event. When I would do a keynote speech, I’d write a two sentence thank you note email to the event planner and that was it. Just walk away. It was like a drive by, right? I wasn’t really thinking about the event planner as a relationship. I was never circling back a few weeks later and asking, how did I do? What could I have done differently? Do you have any referrals for me? Could I get a recommendation? I wasn’t doing any of that. I wasn’t closing the loop. I was thinking of all of my events as a one-and-done, because most organizations don’t hire the same keynote speaker the next year because they’re the people in the audience don’t turn over that quickly. And so, again, I wasn’t thinking of it as a relationship business. So you’ve reset in my head warm leads, what those successful scripts actually say and look like, and to start thinking of it as a relationship and managing it that way, so that I can use each of my bookings to get spinoff business.
That’s amazing. You’ve really summarized so many great things that seem like they really reshaped your business. We’re so happy to hear that. As you’ve been implementing that, what have been some of your results?
Initially when I had discovery calls with the event planners, I would just jump right into talking about myself, talking about my keynote, not really breaking the ice and getting to know them at all, not really asking: what do your audience members need, right? I was doing this sales job without making it about them. And so I’m finding that the discovery calls are much more enjoyable now – light, customer focused, and I’m finding that they’re appreciating that a lot more because I’m guessing they have a lot of keynote speakers who just go in and it’s just sell, sell, sell. “Here’s who I am, here’s what I can do for you.” And that’s the way I used to approach it. So I can only imagine how many people I potentially turned off by doing that, whereas this is just more of: we’re just getting to know each other. I’m bringing to the table what my solutions are based on what you told me your audience’s problems are. And I can just already tell that it doesn’t feel like a sale, if you will. It feels like a “let’s see if we can put our heads together and come up with something that’s going to be a win for the audience.” It just feels different, right? It doesn’t have that same level of pressure. It doesn’t have that same business to business feel. I feel like I’m asking questions and getting to know these people a little better, and you can tell that that warms them up.
I’ve booked a few keynotes for 2025 already. I haven’t yet executed the follow up right that I learned from my coach and Erik, so I haven’t yet tried to spin a keynote into multiple keynotes but I’ve got that process in my back pocket and I will absolutely be executing it next year because I do know from past experience, when you speak 50 to 60 times a year, you do definitely get some spinoff business.
When I was speaking 50 to 60 times a year, I was getting about 20 keynotes each year that I’d never went after. These were people in the audience who came to me and that was with no effort on my own doing. So I can only imagine the type of traction that I would get if I actually attempted to spin keynotes off of my 2025 keynotes, so I’m really looking forward to leveraging the process that you’ve taught me for that.
It sounds like it’s time for a total renewal and I can hear a lot of hope in your voice, which is really nice.
Yes. Well, it’s nice to be doing something differently, right? Because I always feel like if you do the same thing, you’re going to get the same results. So now I’m trying something different and I trust that I’m going to be getting different results and that I’m not going to get as burned out in the process.
Yes! Well, that leads to my next question – we would love to know what your new normal looks like?
My old normal was get up, jump out of bed, feed my cat, eat, sit at my computer and literally be there, for eight or nine hours a day just, just doing lead gen and nothing but lead gen if I wasn’t on the road, flying and speaking somewhere, and now it looks a little bit different.
Now I get up, I feed my cat, I actually don’t go on my computer, I shower, I take some time out in the morning to meditate and to make sure that I’m balanced right. And I focus on myself first. Whereas in the past, I woke up and immediately started thinking about the list, right? The Excel spreadsheet of 600 conferences and the 50 to 80 that I had to go after that day. And again, it was just very exhausting and I feel like it really took me out of balance.
So now I have the CEO hour, but for me, because I don’t have a full-time job – the speaking business is my full-time job – It’s more like the CEO two to three hours. I go in, I respond to the people who responded to my ear emails from yesterday, I go into Pipedrive, I look at all of my open activities, I go through those activities and see if there are any new leads that I want to add to my pipeline. Then I will actually leave my desk and have lunch like a normal person versus eating something at my desk and not even remembering to have lunch.
Then I do a mix of things in the afternoon. Sometimes I’ll work on my social media posts for the week. Sometimes I’ll write a blog. I’ll always go into LinkedIn and respond to anyone who has responded to my LinkedIn posts. Sometimes I will be on someone’s podcast. I’ve also made some friends in my cohort, so yesterday afternoon I spent a couple of hours at a sushi restaurant meeting with other speakers from The Speaker Lab and we just shared ideas and talked about what was working and what wasn’t, and bounced ideas off of one another.
So my days are looking very different. I actually turn off my computer around five o’clock versus working into the night. And I basically now have a no work on weekends rule. So it’s much more manageable. I feel much more balanced. And so I believe that that’s going to help me not get burned out like I did in the past.
I have the chills. You’ve really painted a picture of there being breathing room and life that you’re living in the midst of also building your business. It sounds like there used to be more of a scarcity mode – like I gotta keep hustling. There wasn’t a system to trust or maybe the system you had built required a lot from you, whereas now there’s this careful stewarding of things, with an attitude of, “I’m cultivating this and it’s gonna work, and now I can also release it and take time off and grab sushi with a new friend.”
Absolutely. And my old system worked, but it was exhausting, right? Nobody should have to work like 60 hours a week, seven days a week to book 50 to 60 keynotes. I knew there had to be a better way. I knew that I was out of balance, which is what led to my burning out and me needing to step away from the business and take some time off to just really focus on myself, move from Colorado to Arizona, reflect on what it was about my business that was working, but also that wasn’t working for me.
Because on paper you would say, “Oh she’s a successful keynote speaker,” but if you’re not enjoying the journey, it doesn’t matter. And so, again, TSL just gave me a new processes, a new approach, a new outlook, and morning routine, and all of those things have really helped me regain that balance, which I believe is going to help me be just as successful, but I’ll also be enjoying some happiness and the journey which Is precious, and crucial.
I’m so glad you’ve gotten that. That brings us to our last question. Who would you recommend to The Speaker Lab and why?
I would recommend either new speakers or seasoned speakers. As a new speaker, there are so many shortcuts that you’re going to learn. When I came out of the gate eight years ago, you know, I did it. I just gathered a bunch of information on my own and pieced together what a speaking business looks like. But if I had had the resources that The Speaker Lab has given me now and didn’t have to go out there and find it all on my own, and test it all on my own, I would’ve saved an enormous amount of time and angst.
It’s really about them doing the legwork for you upfront. Even if you think you’ve got the good scripts, you think you’ve got a great process – again, I’ve been a professional speaker for the past eight years, and The Speaker Lab has taught me so many new things or how to do things that I was currently doing differently in a better way, in a proven way, that has helped me tremendously.
Even if you’ve just put your toe into the speaking space, maybe to speak a couple of times a year, or if you are a full-time speaker, trust me when I say there are different ways of succeeding in this space. The Speaker Lab brings all of those options to the table so that you can sort through them and pick and choose what’s right for you. They really do bring an enormous amount of best practices and things that I wasn’t employing in my business at all that really help you to be a high performer in this space and achieve personal balance as well.
I love that. I feel like the theme of our conversation is work smarter not harder.
Absolutely. Yeah. And again, don’t get me wrong, I’m still working hard, because I still have a time-is-money element in my head from working in the New York area. But I think my execution is going to result in a lot more because of the way I’m doing it. I’m doing it differently. I’m doing it the way you taught me to do it.
Anything else you wanna share as we wrap up our conversation?
Just don’t ever get defeated or feel like you’re doing something wrong. You’re not; this is tough work to be in, but once you find your passion in life, and for many people, this is it. Once you figure out what you are going to talk about and you find your audience, there is nothing more joyful than speaking, than being in front of people, than helping people, helping them solve their problems, giving them hope.
There are so many people in this world today who need hope, and they need answers and they need solutions, and they need strong beacons of light, and I think that’s what speakers are. So again, at times it might feel daunting, it might feel heavy, but maybe that’s just a sign that I need to rethink this and do something a little bit differently.
Just never give up on your dreams. If you know that this is your purpose and this is what you’re meant to do, don’t quit. Don’t stop because there’s a pot at the end of the rainbow.
I will let that be the finale because you said that so beautifully.