Public Speaking Secrets

The world has changed radically in the last few months. Conferences cancelled, events postponed and domestic and international travel is at a standstill. This has meant many speakers and trainers have had to shift how they present. That’s why I got Eric Z. Yang on the show to breakdown everything you need to know about speaking at or hosting your own virtual summits. Eric is the founder of LeadNextGen & reknown virtual summit expert. Born and raised in Paris, Eric built his first 6-figure business at age 20 by hosting conferences for leaders and entrepreneurs under 30. He has created a proven lead generation system that establishes entrepreneurs as industry leaders in less than 90 days with virtual summits. Eric’s online events have gathered over 45,000 attendees across 40 countries. Some of his notable online conferences include industries such as short-term rentals, digital agencies, cryptocurrency, dropshipping & real estate. Eric partners with 6 & 7 figure companies and influencers to build virtual summits that systematically generate peak authority and leads for their businesses & teaches young entrepreneurs who get paid to learn from industry experts. He is also the author of “Virtual Summit Launch Formula” & host of the F*ck College Podcast. Connect with Eric Z Yang Facebook Amazon Book Website

Christine Clapp is the founder of Spoken with Authority, a Washington, D.C.-based presentation skills consultancy that elevates the presence and expands the influence of professionals through coaching engagements and training programs. Connect with Christine Clapp Twitter LinkedIn Presenting at Work Spoken with Authority Victor Ahipene:Speaking nation, what’s happening? Uh, welcome to another episode of public speaking secrets here from covert studios. I’m your host Victor. I am looking forward to introducing you to something that I think will be very beneficial to develop now and then with the world and how it’s going to change in the new world that we’re going into I think is going to be really beneficial. So Christine, clap onto the shows today and she’s based out of Washington. She’s written a book called presenting at work and she is the founder of a company called speak spoken with authority. So little that being said, welcome to the show Christine. Christine Clapp: Thanks for having me. Victor Ahipene: One of those things that I think, you know, we’re obviously on a public speaking podcast, so um, a lot of people have that fear when it comes to public speaking. And then I think a lot of people just put out the BM minimum when it comes to obligatory public speaking, which I think the most often that that happens in day to day life is in the, in the workplace. And so it’s something that I always find really, really interesting because you can teach someone potentially how to, how to give a good keynote presentation. But when it comes to, you know, when you’ve got to insert graphs or information or those repeated presentations that you’ve got, it can be a whole whole different ball game. So how did you kind of get into, uh, I guess that that space, the business space and the presenting at work and, and, and all of that, and your journey? Christine Clapp: Yeah, thanks for asking. So my journey started back when I was a college student. I went to a small school in the State of Oregon. It is called Willamette University and it was one of just a couple of schools that had an undergraduate major in rhetoric. And that’s the study of persuasion. I was really interested in it, but it had a requirement for oral communication proficiency, which meant doing the debate team for a semester. And that terrified me. I was not a comfortable public speaker or a polished presenter. I really didn’t want to do it. But I decided I really love this idea of studying persuasion. I think it could be useful in a lot of different professional paths, so I’m just going to sign up for debate and see how it goes and if it’s a complete disaster and I don’t get oral communication proficiency, I’ll just switch to chemistry or another subject that I liked. So I did debate and have my first two debate tournaments. I won zero debates. I lost every single one. There wasn’t even someone who forfeited because they were running late. I just, I was terrible. I was the worst person on my debate team and even though I never actually read the fine print that you could get your proficiency by participating, you didn’t actually have to win any debates. I came back my sophomore year to debate because it was really, it was a frustrating experience. I knew that my opponents weren’t better, smarter, they were. We’re poised and polished and articulate and I knew that as an 18 year old kid, if I didn’t figure out how to do that, it would put you at a disadvantage no matter what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. My sophomore year, I came back, I ended up getting a really great debate partner who was a freshman who had debated in high school. He actually is the coauthor of presenting at work. The book that I wrote with Bjorn Stiliyan Southern and we debated and we had great coaches. I had a great partner. We did lots of rehearsals and by the end of my sophomore year, I made it to the national tournament. I qualified to go, I participated and I made it to the elimination rounds of the tournament. I was also named the most improved debater of my sophomore year and that’s all to say that I had this huge transformation of going from being a really terrible speaker to finding a moderate, a measure of success and find any comfort and confidence as a speaker. I continue debating throughout college and by the time I graduated, I knew that for the rest of my life, I wanted to help people with these skills to give them that public speaking presentation skills piece that you need to unlock your leadership potential. No matter whether you’re in politics or whether you’re in science or you’re a journalist or a researcher, no matter what it is that you do, you really have to be able to articulate yourself. And I founded spoken with authority in 2008 and the rest is history. Victor Ahipene: It’s awesome. And I mean what I love is you see like yeah, I yeah. Went from being pretty average to some level of success now delivers success side of things I think is really irrelevant because everyone’s bars so much different. You know, winning one a debate could have been a degree of success, but I think the, the success there is, and what I love is that extreme transformation that, I mean you would have seen, I’ve seen a lot in regards to the confidence that people can have. Like you I’m sure, and workshops and trainings that you do, it’s like you can see it in ours. You can see someone go from like stuttering with cue cards to confidently delivering and holding a room in like the space of hours. And it’s something that holds a lot of people back. And this is why I really wanted to get you on the show in the career progression. Those people who are looking to become better speakers within the organization, they may, they may be a business owner, they may not be, but they may just be, you know, a person looking to get to the next level on an executive team or to get to a manager and yeah, they keep turning down the opportunities to, to speak. Um, so do you, do you see that a lot? Is it or is it just something I’ve made up in my head on the people who are, who are turning down those opportunities and in work or, Christine Clapp: No, I, I see it too. And the place where I see it is there, we work with lots of different types of people. We do training programs. We also do one on one coaching and a lot of the one on one coaching clients that come to us, they come to us when they’re at a pivot point in their career where they have an opportunity to present at a conference where they have an opportunity to give a celebratory speech such as a graduation address or a Ted style talk, a thought leader talk. They might have a job interview or a job talk. If they’re an academic and they get to this point in their career where they have that big opportunity, they know it’s a big opportunity and they are not ready for it. And so that’s the moment where they come in, search of our support, no our help because they know that this is a make or break moment. Our goal is to help people in that moment, teach them the tools and strategies so they can do well for that presentation. But the bigger picture is that we want to give people the tools and strategies starting when they’re a young professional or starting when they’re a college student or starting before then so that they don’t have to have that crisis moment so that they are taking, right. When you’re a brand new professional, you may not have a ton of opportunities to speak at conferences, but we want young professionals to think about, Oh yeah, when I give an update at our team meeting that that’s a public speaking opportunity. It’s not a conference. There’s no stage, there’s no microphone but me doing my virtual meeting or standing up in front of my team for our Monday morning meeting. That is an opportunity for speaking. So we want to help people in the crisis moment but bigger pictures. You want to help people build the skills in the day to day, week to week speaking opportunities that so many people don’t think of them as quote unquote public speaking, but they are public speaking opportunities. If you look at them like that, if you approach them like that, if you deliver like that, because if you do those practice the skills and strategies and techniques in those day to day, week to week, month to month opportunities, when those big make or break wants to career opportunities come along, you already are ready. You don’t have to freak out. Victor Ahipene: And that’s what I think a lot of people, they either freak freak out or they go into it and they go, Oh look, this is an obligatory presentation that I have to give at work. Uh, rather than an opportunity. And so they just make it like everybody else, boring, read off the slides, put you to sleep, uh, you know, no enthusiasm into it. Nothing, nothing like that. So that’s the, that’s what I would love to jump into. I guess the second half of this, this episode is what are some of the actionable ways that people can present more effectively within their work, within their own workplace? So, yeah, whether it be, how to mean, I’m happy to let you guide and have a discussion around it. But whether it be like, yeah, how to present data, which can often be a bit dry or boring or information or uh, yeah. How to incorporate storytelling into the different things. Like what is, I guess the overall, do you have a system or an approach that you work towards when you’re, when you’re helping people? Christine Clapp: Yeah, we do. And again, we have our own approach. I think there are lots of awesome approaches out there. So this is just ours. And I think that the message for your viewers is that it’s not important that you use our approach. The important thing is that you adopt an approach and a strategy. Our particular approach is that we start with an outline because we think that when people start writing text on slides or writing text on paper, that leads to that scripted and emotional delivery that does not build rapport because there’s no eye contact. So we want people to start with one sheet of paper, right? Words and phrases on it. And we do it all on one sheet and we start with that central idea. And for most workplace presentations, that central idea, you’re either going to inform someone about something or you’re going to persuade them to do something and you have to be really clear about what you want people to know or to do at the end of your presentation. And the biggest mistake we see people make is that if they’re trying to inform, they want to inform them of way too much. They want to, if they’re an expert in something, they want to teach the people in the room what they know. The people in the room don’t need to know what you know. They need to know enough about what you know so they can reach out to you for help is usually the answer. And in terms of persuasion, when you want someone to do something, people have a very limited capacity to do things. So the amount of time that we’re willing to take after we listen to a speech and how far we’re going to stick out our neck to do something. I do have a pretty low bar in terms of what we’re asking people to do, whether it’s to make a donation or to invest time or to to vote. We have to be really, really careful about how much we ask. Because if we ask too much, people get overwhelmed, they just, they won’t do anything. So you have to be strategic about what your goal is and to be realistic about what you can accomplish. So that’s the first thing. The next thing that we do, getting to your question about how do we avoid just reading data off slides, is once we put together that central idea, we encourage our speakers to think of a structure that they could arrange their main ideas to support that thesis. And think about an organizational pattern that’s logical both to the speaker and to the listener and some of those organizational patterns. For example, for informative speech, you might tell three examples or three stories of how what happened are three case studies. Uh, you might talk about, um, three different topics or you might talk about, uh, what happened in the past, what’s happening in the present when you expect to happen in the future. So chronological pattern of, of organisation you for persuasive speech you might identify a problem and the solution and the benefits of the solution. You might talk about why we should do it, how we should go about doing something and what the benefits of doing it are. So similar to problem solution, uh, you might, um, for any of those structures then until you want to think about the structure of your ideas, you want to think about how do I add in humus humanistic elements to that structure. And some of those structures already have humanistic elements worked in. So if you tell three stories or examples, those stories or examples are the humanistic element. Um, if you talk about why, how, and why, you might have examples or stories that you tell within each part of that structure. But the important thing is I think about where the story’s fallen and it might be for the main points themselves might be a sub point to support the main point. It might be the introduction and conclusion as a way to break in narrative and narrative element. And then another way to do it is to think about how you could use metaphors and analogies and for people who use data and science, those metaphors and analogies can be really helpful to explain what exactly is going on. So use one concept to make it clear what another concept is about. And you might even be able to use it for the entire structure of your speech. So your organizational structure could be hinges on a metaphor. For example, I’m putting together a webinar and how to be a great, have presence in virtual meetings, right? So everyone’s taking over and right now. So what we did is we talked about it in terms of a cooking analogy. So the recipe and ingredients is what goes into it. That’s your agenda and the participants and whether it’s an in person meeting or virtual meeting, you see you need to have a recipe and you need to have great ingredients. They might be a little bit different based on whether you’re using an Instapot or a grill, but you still have to have those fundamentals going into it that we talked about. The equipment you’re you’re using are using a green egg, are you using an Instapot? Are you using your barbecue grill or smoker? That’s the equipment that’s like, do you use zoom or WebEx or an in person meeting or whatever the case is. And then at the end it’s how do you conduct yourself? So how do you actually cook the meal? So the conduct in terms of that situation, the metaphor is what’s your presence? How do you work on your verbal and nonverbal language in your setting, in your clothing? How does that all play in? So that was one cooking metaphor to help people make sense of how you approach virtual communication. So that’s an example of how you can approach the humanistic side. And then so we have the crafting of the content. We think about the humanistic elements. Those humanistic elements oftentimes might have a visual element that goes with it. It might be a prop, it might be a slide, it might be a handout, or maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s a flip chart and markers. It depends on the situation and the speaker and the audience. Then after you do that, then you want to shift to that. How do you say it? And what we find is that most speakers don’t practice enough. So we recommend that speakers practice a presentation six times out loud to get confident with it and to become more fluid so they can have a really conversational and confident delivery. And it’s the reason why we think most speakers are really nervous and why most speeches are not conversational as people just don’t know the material well enough. So those are the three big pieces that we encourage folks to think about in terms of the putting together of a great presentation. Victor Ahipene: It’s what I, I love when you said the practicing, you know, at least six times. It’s, uh, I think, I think the other thing is people without a system or a formula or a recipe, they don’t bother practicing because they’re like, why shine a turd? I can get enough. That’s a, yeah. It’s kind of like, it’s going to be crap. Why practice it to make it, yeah, a little bit less crap or yeah, fluently crap. Um, and I think as soon as you realize, you know, you put any of any of the multitude of things that you’ve put into place, like one of those things, it doesn’t even matter if it fits your organization, if you suck already. Like if you pick a, you know, in the past and the prison in the future and you apply that and you go out and you practice it six times and you add some humanistic elements into it and whatever else, yeah, you’re going to be a lot better. Because I use this like a similar analogy to the cooking in the sense of it’s like riding a bike. Like you don’t begin riding in the tour de France or the Olympics. You start off on like a, yeah. A tricycle or a bike with training wheels, and then you’re riding around in your backyard without the training wheels and you go into the ride and like you’re you. But if you don’t know how to ride at the start, yeah, it’s kind of like, Oh, I’m just going to, Oh, I can see this person writing. I’m just going to try and, and have, have that kind of a skill without really putting the time into it. So I’ll just walk down to the local shop instead of jumping on my bike. And it’s what I think a lot of faithful tends to do. So it really is a lot. I think people, if you’re listening to this, you’re listening to it for a reasonable cause. You want to improve your, your presentations at work. So I’d highly suggest going back to a lot of those points that we’ve just been gifted by Christine, because they are valuable. You, you have to implement them. That’s what you have to do. You have to get out there and practice it and implement it because it’s all well and good knowing it. But the rubber’s gonna meet the road at some stage. My other question, and I, I know you’ve, you’ve kind of touched on it already with your answers, some presentations to just unavoidably information deans or data deans. What are some strategies that people can kind of either soften the blow or disguise some of that information into the presentation and let’s say a situation that there’s still a degree of a time restraint. It’s not like I’m going to make this, this meeting ran over time because I’m going to give an awesome story for every piece of data point or something like that. Is there any technical, why is that you look to integrate information and data? Well, data it should be, yeah. Christine Clapp: Yes, and it’s a great question is how do you deal with data heavy presentations? The first recommendation I have is to look at the data that you want to present and to ask yourself why you want to present it. What is the purpose of sharing this information? What is the ultimate goal? And then take a step back and ask which pieces are necessary for me to share in order to reach my goal. Because a lot of times we, when we have a lot of data, it’s because we worked our butts off to collect that data, to analyze the data, to write reports about the data. And we, we want to show everyone what we did and I get the impulse to do that. But when we’re so close to a topic, we have to remember that your audience is never as close to a topic is you. They never care about as much as you do. So you have to figure out of everything I have. I know that I have a very limited capacity for people to listen and for them to either learn or take action. So what am I going to focus it down on that is most important to get across and what are the most compelling pieces of data? So first of all, narrow, narrow, narrow, narrow, narrow. And now in this world of coven 19, when we’re doing virtual meetings and presentations, you have to narrow even further because we have even a shorter attention span on a virtual meeting than we do in person. So that’s first narrow. Second is that when you are sharing data, I encourage you to try to link it to a story. So here is an example of, of a phenomenon with the happen to one person or one city or one case study. And this is what it looks like when we look at the data from a much larger sample so that people can connect to it through that story. People don’t connect to the aggregated data, but they can connect to the one story which makes it important. Like, Oh yeah, this, this, this one story. I get it. I can feel that it’s an important issue. I, it resonates with me, but then use the data to say, and it’s not just one person that’s happening in all of these places, in all these contexts, and then it makes it, uh, uh, something that needs action. So I care about it and now I need to act on it. And then the other thing I would say, one of the biggest problems I see with presentations with graphs is when you put something on a slide, when you put dad on a slide, make sure again that you call out all of the unnecessary stuff. So oftentimes when we present our data in the report or the binder, the article, there’s a lot going on in the charts. You really want to strip down anything that’s unnecessary from what you put on the screen. Otherwise it’s just going to be overwhelming and people are going to be trying to read it and make sense of it and they just, the minute they do that, they’ve lost you and your commentary. So really simplify it. And then the heading of your slide or of the handout, whatever you’re doing as your visual aid should have an argument. Because if you just say graph about trend, you are not analyzing what the data says or making an argument to your audience about what the data says or what they should believe about it or do about it. Or know about it, you need to make that connection. It should be an argument at the top of that slide. That argument needs to be reinforced in the verbal communication as well. So make arguments in the titles of your a headings that go with the visuals, the slides, the graphics, and whenever possible link them to a story or a humanistic element to really make it resonant, resonate with people on a human level. Victor Ahipene: Yeah, I love that point in regards to, you know, the argument because you see it and it’s like I’ve, I’ve been told a lot of in previous years, kind of like health professional based conferences and stuff like that. And like you say, they just get so excited about all their data that they just drown you in it. They’re not really taking, they’re just explaining what the article says rather than, yeah, does, does this work better than this? It’s like, Oh, well we researched this and uh, around, here’s what graph number one sees and it’s exactly that. And you see your friend, you know, pulling out their phones or just, you know, walking out if it’s a dark place. And in a board room, you might not be able to do that, but you’re going to lose the tension. And, and like, it’s just amazing what I find really, really amazing and, um, is little things, just such little things like all you’re doing is tweaking what you’re already planning on delivering. Yeah. You might be cutting a few things out and uh, you know, changing how you present that, that information, but it makes a huge difference. And then all of a sudden it’s like, wow, but it does a really good presenter. Uh, we might get him to see if he wants to do such and such, or we’ll get him to do another one of these. And it’s just like the snowballing effect of, of opportunities, um, that you, you kind of see from there. Christine Clapp: Well, and I w I would say in regard to that. So a lot of times people who we work with are subject matter experts and they’re there, they’re serious and they’re hardworking and they’re, and when we come to them and we say, how can we do this presentation differently and to have this humanistic element and to, and to think about differently and they’re really concerned about, they’re like, Oh gosh, no one else on my conference does it like this or no one else in the board does their presentation like this. That’s the point. If you do it differently, that’s why they will pick you to do more speaking roles is because you’re not falling into the same mistakes that everyone else at the conference and everyone else in the organization does. So we always say, you gotta go big, go big or go home. You have to take risks as a speaker and there is a risk that it’s not going to go well. But what we found is that even if some of the risks may fall a little flat, I mean, yeah, you want to make you sure you’re not telling an off color political joke or you know like yeah, you definitely want beta testings, but even if people like it’s a little bit too much or whatever, I think that audiences are really made me animus toward people who are trying to make their material more interesting and more understandable. So if you look at people like Hans Rosling with his global population box by box, and he has his props from Ikea and it is a little hokey, but people remember it and they get it and they say, you know what? At least he didn’t give the same old boring thing where people are trying to edge out of the room in the dark. So when your listeners say, gosh, these are kind of different ideas, I don’t know if I can do it that would you ha when you question it like should I do that? That’s when you should lean into it AB solutely because you will stand out from everyone else on your team. And you will get more opportunities and that will take you up the ladder. So when you’re, when you’re questioning, when you’re uncomfortable, that’s exactly where you need to go. Public speaking should not be a comfortable experience. Every time you let the R line is, the harder it is to give the speech, the better the speeches. And that oftentimes has to come at that where it comes in as if you’re sharing a difficult personal experience or story or a failure of loss. Those are the speeches that people will never forget, but the really hard to give. So when you have that sense of discomfort, that’s exactly where you need to go. Victor Ahipene: I love that. Yeah. I mean another example is that my uh, fiance was doing her masters for physiotherapy, like physical therapy. And the last, the last kind of assignment was to present it this small to medium sized conference. So the six of them all had to present and I was like, no, you can’t do it. Like everybody else’s has done it. And I mean the first image she had was like and erase the tiger woods. Yeah. Like dragged up and drunk and everyone’s like, yeah, no one was really shocked. Like yeah, back. It was like, Oh my God, they’re not starting with the title of the presentation. Read off a PowerPoint presentation like that. Yeah, but the presentation got the information, it challenged the and blah, blah, blah. You’d kind of hope so when you, when your other half is, you know, not bad at helping people with public speaking, but it ended case what got the best Mark out of their class for the presentation. Why? Because it wasn’t the same boring dry stuff and people, people were a member to a degree. Yeah. They’re going to remember a lot more than what they remember. Others, Christine Clapp: Right in that moment of when they see the image on the screen and there’s that, there’s that disconnect. Like where is the speaker going? There’s that suspense and that’s exactly what you want to do as a public speaker is you want to create suspense. So the best public speakers are ones who can draw that suspense out to the end. And I would say for someone who’s just starting, that’s a lot to ask you, able to do it with your introduction until you get into the main point of your presentation. But next time that your listeners listen to a keynote speaker, someone who gets paid thousands of dollars as a professional speaker, those are the people who can create suspense throughout the whole presentation. At the very end, they’re able to resolve it and it keeps you listening and on the edge of your seat the whole time. And you have to do that when you are at that high, high, high level of speaking because that’s the only way that you’ll be able to win over the internet. Because now that everyone has a phone in their pocket, like what I started doing this I, you know, I’ve just teaching and doing this work starting in 2001 and people didn’t have access to the wifi. They didn’t have laptops, they didn’t have smartphones. So you only had to be better than falling asleep. That was has how entertaining you had to be. But now as a speaker, we all have to be better than the worldwide web, everything on the internet because people have it at their fingertips. So I think that the standard, the requirement of us in terms of being interesting and polling people and really has gone up. So I think more than ever like go big or go home, it’s really important. And now that people are working from home, it’s 10 times because in a face to face meeting, when I get out my phone, you can see that and there’s still a little bit of social shame that goes along with it. Whereas now on zoom, I know that zoom has an attention feature, so there’s some ways to tell if people are paying attention, but there’s very little social shame when you just leave the box open and you start working on your email or surfing the web. So I think that she went the right direction and that’s exactly the way that your listeners need to go when they’re thinking about is this really a risk worth taking taking. And I think those risks are necessary or else you’re irrelevant. Victor Ahipene: That’s brilliant. Well talking about suspense and holding it for all the way to the end. This is been a absolutely brilliant episode and I know a lot of people are going to get a lot of benefit out of it. For those people out there who they’ve heard that you’ve got a book or though they’re wanting to find out how they can work further with you, where can they go and what can they do? Christine Clapp: Well, thanks for asking. We are on Twitter at spoken authority. We’re also on LinkedIn spoken with authority and of course our website spoken with authority.com are all great ways to get connected with us and we look forward to having that community of folks to learn more about how to be great speakers and how to fulfill leadership potential. Victor Ahipene: That’s brilliant. Well we’ll link all of that@publicspeakingblueprint.com look Christine, it’s been absolutely amazing and really appreciate your time. Welcome you into our speaking nation family and I look forward to hopefully when the world allows people to talk in person again that we hopefully cross paths sometime in the near future. Christine Clapp: I would love that. Stay well, stay healthy.

Getting into corporate training and running workshops is for many of us a big goal. The problem is not many people are out there showing you how. In this episode Anthony Kirby breaks down how to get a foot in the door, how to price your self and create a no brainer decision for the company, the unknown risk-reversal technique that Anthony has used to add an extra 0 to his contracts. We also go deep into what actually makes an effective and engaging workshop particularly for those who have been forced to attend. I have never heard anyone share this insight into the behind the scenes of a successful corporate trainer. Connect with Anthony Kirby Website Email Victor Ahipene: Speaking Nation what’s happening? Welcome to another episode of the public speaking secrets podcast I’m Victor your host today. As always, and super excited to introduce you to one of my friends who is doing cool things in a multitude of different areas that I think will benefit a lot of you out there. He’s helping a lot of coaches out there in the online space, but he also helps a lot of businesses increase, the sales and their productivity, with workshops. And I know a lot of the listeners out there are looking to get into the corporate space or the workshop space, uh, or even to up the coaching abilities. Anthony Kirby: And I know that my friend Anthony Kirby has, uh, been there and done that and has got the runs on the board. So welcome to the show mate. Please should have. Yeah, thanks. It’s nice to have this opportunity to, um, interact with a human. Yeah. COBIT 19 environment we find ourselves in at the time of recording. Yeah. So if you’re listening to this at the moment, we’re both currently in covert studios, uh, which is a very socially distance device, zoom. And, uh, I know a lot of people have just figured out and found out about zoom, which is a pretty funny, all the people just go, Oh my God, there’s this thing called zoom. You should jump on it. It’s like, come on. And you know what, there’s a lesson straightaway. There’s a lesson than that for every person who wants to speak around the world is that like the market is not a city sophisticated as you potentially think it is. Victor Ahipene: So what we, what we think is like very basic is actually in fact not very basic to the people who need our message. And that’s the reason why she keeps turning up. Because, you know, we, we, we take it for granted what we learn and what we, what we teach. And, uh, yeah, this is the classic example of it right now with people moving into a digital format of life. Yes. Well that’s, yeah, 100%. Like, because I had three people messaged me last week asking if I could help them sisett up telehealth for their prey, the health healthcare practitioner based things because they didn’t know how to take payments. I said, just sit up Stripe. How do you sit up Stripe? Yeah, yeah. And use zoom, what soon? And it’s a, yeah. So definitely don’t under it, don’t underestimate your expertise because they were all super stoked that I could help them. And um, yeah, it was literally pretty easy for me. Uh, but on you, on what you do, you obviously do a little bit more than teach people how to use zoom and Stripe. Yes. Can we run out there like a little bit of a, you know, from your work site, workshop side of things, how did you kind of get into it and what do you do when you go into businesses? Anthony Kirby: All right. So I’m in the background of all of this is that, um, when I moved to Australia, which is what, 16, 17 years ago, something like that, I got into sales and I quickly discovered I could do really good job of teaching people how to sell. So I ended up doing a lot of sales training through my career, if you want to call it that. And then I decided about five and a half years ago now, um, that I could probably help a lot more people if I went out on my own. I left my kind of corporate job jumping out into the crazy world of entrepreneurship, um, with bright eyes and, uh, all the dreams and all, you know, all the, all the things that people promise you out there, all the guru’s promise and started to, to teach sales teams essentially and go into businesses and run workshops and speak at conferences and events around the world on the topic, basically upsells and all sort of self branding or marketing. Um, and what was really good about that was the exact thing that we opened the show with is the fact that I remember the first time I spoke, I was thinking shit, like these people are gonna know more than me. I was super nervous. I had a slide for everything I wanted to say. You know, it was super like rehearsed, very, very kind of sterile. And I realized that at the end of that that the very basic stuff that I taught at the very start of the day was the stuff I could have talked about for eight hours and if I would have still worked. So, um, the, the transition to workshops was almost, well actually to tell you the truth, it was bye. Bye. Absolutely need. So I started the business with this grand hope of working on a beach somewhere in Vanuatu, sipping on a pina colada all day. You know, I live in the dream but it didn’t work like that and I needed to make some money quick cause I had a six month old baby and I um, I called up 300 people and there’s a good lesson in this I want to share. Um, I call up 300 people in this specific industry and said, hi, I’m thinking of running this workshop to teach you, you know, IB and see about sales in this specific niche. Would you be interested in the ticket? And I, every time I, every time I would call someone, I would get the feedback from that call and I’d say, all right, I need to pivot my next call, a slot, you know, I need to make the offer slightly different. I learn all about risk reversal, all these like fundamentals of making a great offer. And that’s how I feel the first event. And we’ve got, I think 43 tickets we sold at $300 for that event. I remember that. So that was pretty pretty. Yeah. I mean you’d remember that. We’ve known each other since those days. Victor Ahipene: Now our, I literally remember we were jumping on a four way call, like an accountability call. Yay. And you’re like, Oh my God, I’ve got to by 300 calls today cause it’s do or die. Like I, my relationship’s on the rocks, my businesses on the rocks, my finances are on the rocks because I’ve not, because the business fundamentals weren’t there, but because of jumped out at without a pedal and my boat’s thinking I’ve got to quickly learn how to swim. And I literally remember that because I, I’ve referenced it to other people before, like, you know, jump out there and do that. So yeah, no, sorry, carry on. Anthony Kirby: It was massive. And I think, you know, the biggest lesson from that for everyone is, you know, it’s easy to fall in love with the concept of just a landing page, build a click funnels funnel. Like, you know, Russell Brunson will save the day. You’re one funnel away from magic life. You’ve got to do the work as well, right? Like, if you want to be out there and you want to be precedent in the market and you want people to respect you on a stage or in a room for a workshop, if that’s five people or 20 people or a thousand people, you know, you’ve to, you’ve got to make the calls, you’ve got to tell people the benefit. You’ve got to learn how to sell first. Mmm. You know, once you learn that, then you can fill any room. The, it’s easy after that and then you’ll get invited to other rooms and it just snowballs from there. Victor Ahipene: And so, yeah, I mean I talk about that the kind of one should equal one at least, you know, you speak one place and then it should open a door to another place and another place in that, in that space. Um, so you went from like the paid, you know, market to people to try and get into workshops. Um, I can’t remember back then. Did you have, was it an up sell from there or was it just get people in a room and just vomit some knowledge on them? Well, let me share the strategy because I think this is going to be really helpful for a lot of listeners. Um, the strategy was I knew that if I could get these individuals into the room that they had, so these were business, um, sales teams essentially, and I knew that if I could get them to go back to their respective businesses and do something different, it would open up the eyes of their management and the management would say, hang on a second. That’s probably because of Kirby’s event. Yeah. And so the plan was if I could get them in the room, teach them for the day, buy them some drinks at the end. So I built a heap of rapport and trust, which I did. Then what followed was I followed up their businesses, their bosses, and I said, Hey, you know, such and such kind of lump to my event two weeks ago. I just wanted to check, are you seeing any differences? And what happened was they were saying, absolutely yes. We actually have seen people go from the bottom of the sales leader board to the top of the sales leader board already. What is it that you do? What is it that you teach? And it was basically my way of getting to the door for corporate business, corporate training and coaching without having a knock on the door and be the guy saying, Hey, I’m the best corporate trainer in Australia. Yeah. And it worked. So then I got a whole raft of corporate clients and start to then work individually for those businesses. So rather than having an event where I was kind of pushing the ticket sales, they were just paying me a fee or a retainer, monthly retainer in most cases to come along and do quarterly workshops. Um, you know, fortnightly zoom calls twice monthly zoom calls and try and people in workshop style settings, either digitally or, or in a live environment. Victor Ahipene: And my big question from that is I think a lot of people can potentially, before we get into, I want to get into the fundamentals of running a workshop for people as well. But before we get into there, I think people can understand all right, like your household, there’s multiple ways to I guess, sell tickets. Like yeah, you can do your online marketing and you can pick up the phone and hustle, whatever. Um, when it comes to that area where you can’t pick up a Russell Brunson book or a podcast or listen to a Facebook person to sell tickets and you’re actually going to these corporate organizations. Is it the, how do you, I mean, I think you gave a bit of it away by following up with your bosses, which was a cool strategy. But moving forward, like for these other companies that you’ve gone on to work for, how did you find the decision maker and then how did you decide on a price? Because that’s the big like, Oh my God. Like am I undercharging myself? Am I overcharging myself and I’m going to lose it? Like, yeah, we’re, did you be able to, you know, figure out, um, their price, their price 0.2 Anthony Kirby: to two great questions right there. So in terms of, let’s start with the first bit, which is how do you get in the door with the, and I passed the gatekeeper to the desk of the person or to the phone of the person that you want to deal with. Honestly, the answer is not one that most people like, but it’s write a book. Yeah. Um, it doesn’t have to be. Now let’s just be clear here. It doesn’t have to be the 300 page bestselling, you know, thing. It could be like a 20 page guide that solves their big problems. So if you know that, let’s just use an example here, Victor. Let’s say it’s physiotherapists. Yup. Right. I know nothing about physios, but let’s just roll with that. Cause I know that you know that that world if I think about like a physio therapy business owner, their big problem is probably one getting skilled people, but from a sales and marketing perspective is getting people to show up for their appointments and making sure the lifetime value of the clients improved hundred percent so they don’t have to go out and get more, more clients. Right. So then I would just write like a small, a 10 page, 20 page document about, Hey, here’s the three things I would recommend you do in your business to to encourage client retention or to improve LTV, lifetime value, whatever it is that the problem is the main problem for your business owner. Then literally get it professionally printed. Don’t just send them a word document cause that looks rubbish like it costs nothing to go on and get it edited on Fiverr or Upwork. Get it made into a nice document. Send it to even if it’s office works or your similar office store that would print your office materials or even Ingram spark in Australia or Amazon direct Kindle direct publishing. If you’re in the U S or you can pay three bucks or four bucks a copy, get it printed professionally. Pop it in and this is the key. This is the real part of the strategy. Most people would just post it to the business. The problem with that is it’s going to land on a PA’s desk or receptionist and it’s going to go to the mail room. It’s going to get sorted. It’s going to end up just in this giant pile of junk. When you FedEx someone and you put it so that the signatory is the person that you want to speak to, so they have to sign for it. So they, they get this thing delivered to them and the FedEx guys at the front reception saying, no, John Smith has to sign this. This is a, this is for John Smith. It’s not for the receptionist. So then John Smith has to come and sign the thing. So now what does John Smith think? Wow, this must be important. I’ve had to sign for it. So now he goes back to his desk. He or she goes back to their respective desk. They sit down with their cup of coffee. They, they pull up in the FedEx envelope and they pull out your thing and then they start going, wow, that looks interesting. That’s exactly, that’s the exact problem I’ve got. Now you’ve got their interest. Now what happens is, this is the part that most people fail, is that people expect John Smith or Jane Smith to pick up the phone and say, Hey KB, hi Victor, I’d really like your guide. Thanks for sending it. I’d love to book you. That’s not how it works. The fortune is in the followup. So then you follow up a week later and you say you get through the, you know, Jane on the front desk or Bob on the front desk. He was going to be the gatekeeper and you say, Hey Jane, I know that I can’t speak to John Smith right now cause he’s very busy.But can I just ask one question? Can you just go and double check with him just for a second, uh, and just check whether he’s had a chance to read my guide or read my book. And then you get the followup from there. So generally what happens then is then they would go to John Smith and say, yep, John’s received it. He said, it’ll give you a call back. Then you want to email John. Then you want to follow up John on LinkedIn. You want to get like Hungary for the followup if they don’t follow up. This is, this is a method that I learned from Frank Kern and it’s the craziest thing ever. But for some bizarre reason it just works because it’s really memorable for me. So I was teaching sales training, so I would send like a bottle of champagne, like really nice French champagne. And so, Hey put this in your, in your fridge, you’re going to need it when your souls of records are broken. Like something like that. Right? Or you could send them a baseball bat with their name engraved on it and say, Hey, you’re going to need this cause we’re going to hit some home runs when you work with me. You know, like just something really out there where people are like, what the hell is this guy all about? Right. And that’s how you get past the gatekeeper. So that’s like kind of part one of that. Yep. So let’s say you’re now at the table, you’re in the boardroom, you’re talking to the board, you’re presenting to their people and sort of giving them a pitch. So the next part of that is how do you price the service? Most people go in there and they, they massively undervalue what it means for this business. So the why that I do it, the one that I recommend you do it is to break your sales and break your sales process in a two part first, popping in like more of a discovery phase and then not the intention be on clothes in the boardroom.The intent should be to sit there and say, Hey, as a professional, my job here today is to get to know what you need. Then I’m going to go and put something together and come back and present it to you again. they love that because it means that you’re listening to their needs, sells one-on-one. So the question I always like to ask is you know, well, I’ll give you the exact question. I work in 90 day blocks with businesses, so I work in a 90 day period and we do a 90 day growth plan. You might work differently, it might be six months, 12 months, one month, whatever. So I would ask the question, look for you to be absolutely just blown away by the results we get. What needs to happen in the next 90 days? What are the tangible outcomes you’re looking for as a business in the next 90 days? And they will tell you. So they’ll say, you know, we want more sales, more this, more that, better retention at a turnover, et cetera. You want to then get specific about how much, so if a business owner says to me, a Kirby get me $1 million in sales, million dollars extra sales in the next 90 days, then I would say, if I get you $1 million in extra sales, what is that worth to you? What do you think it’s worth for you as a business? Like net profits or, or end outcome? My experience tells me from doing this a few hundred times, now that is generally 10 times what you’re gonna create and turn over. So if you divided by 10 that should be your fee. Yeah. Okay. So if you’re gone in there and you’re saying $2 million of extra sales, you, you can easily charge $100,000 now, there’s a caveat to this though, because most people will be like, Holy shit KV. I couldn’t go in there and charge $100,000 no one, no one would take it. You’ve got to have a, well, this is my take anyway. You need to make, get a results guarantee. It can’t be all about you going and taking the money out of their pocket. This is what gets you the business. If you go in there and say, look, there’s no guarantee that we can get this. So here’s what I’m going to do. This is a, this is a 100% 100% relationship. I’ve got to put in as much as you do. I’ve got to come and deliver to your guys. I’ve got to come and speak. Well, I’ve got to come and make sure they implement. So here’s what we’re going to do. I want you to pay me $10,000 for the next 90 days. If I get you that result, I want you to pay me the balance. And that really works. Now, it might not be that you go in there at 100,000 it might be that you say, do you know what 30 grand a good number. Yeah, but so when I was doing this, I was generally ending up charging a client $86,000 per quarter. It was what I was charging and I’ve never had anyone push back and say, Kirby, that’s ridiculous. Like every client that I had that conversation with, and there’s more to that whole sales process. Of course I’m giving you the real, yeah, yeah. Kind of very basic aspect of this. But there was never a situation where I was sitting there and the client’s signed to me. Now it’s not worth $86,000 because I demonstrated the path that we were going to go on. I had a proven system, I had great results already, and I was able to go in there and say, Hey, if I don’t hit this result, I’ll work with your team until we do. Yeah. And yeah. Then there was, there was massive buy in from me too. And I mean, I understand as well as you do that if you get them $1 million increase in it next 90 days, it doesn’t stop for the business after that. It’s not like they’re just sitting there guy. Yeah. Even Victor Ahipene: if they made nothing from you, increasing them $1 million in sales over the 90 days, they’re going, awesome. Well that should mean we should get an extra 4 million or 8 million over the year or whatever it may be. Um, and I mean, you know, businesses that can afford that, you know, the corporate industry, they understand it. They’re like, okay, cool. We’ll run the setter cost neutral and then we’ll, um, we’ll come out. So that’s, that’s, that’s such awesome insight because I think that’s the biggest thing. And you know, you’ve, you’ve obviously fine tuned it and learned it from experience. And if you haven’t been necessarily at the decision making level within a corporation, it’s just this like guessing game that you go, Oh, how about $3,300 plus $150 a month? Um, and then that just, yeah, I know I spoken to a guy who, you know, he was just lucky when he put his first Tinder and to accompany that his friend was on the decision thing and said you need to make this 10 times the amount or they won’t even look at it. Anthony Kirby: Same word. Just 10 times the amount. Yeah. Cause it was a fortune 500 company. There’s this, there’s a level of, there’s a level of seriousness that comes at that level. Um, incidentally, another good point to make here as well. When you’re selling to these people, you’ve got to think how they think no one wants to like there’s a great sign that I got from one of my early mentors in the corporate world when I was working in corporate and he said to me, Kevin, you have to put more people between you and the gun. You can’t be always the person that takes the bullet. Now that’s a bit self serving. Of course it’s a bit cruel. But in a corporation that’s how they think. So I knew that’s how they thought. So I said, look, don’t take this out of your sales budget for my fee. Take it out of your marketing budget cause you’re going to spend it on advertising and what we’re going to do is improve your conversion so you’re not going to need to spend that money on ads. And then they were like, Oh that makes total sense. So you’ve got to know how they think as well. You’ve got to think about how they think get inside their head. Victor Ahipene: Yeah, that’s interesting. It’s really good. So because we’re obviously we’ve got, you know, time constraints and we’ll probably end up having another episode on this end, you know, the more your your life into the online space as well. But in regards to running an effective workshop, cause we’ve all been to a lot of them and you know what, I try and teach a lot of people, which I see is one of the most common mistakes with speakers. But obviously I think with, uh, with worked people running workshops as well is just trying to spew knowledge onto people and give them too much too soon. Um, is that as, yeah. How, how do you find that you overcome that? Like how when you’re going into these corporations, how do you find, Hey, this is the point that I need to be at to be able to go in and this is how much I need to be able to give them so they don’t leave and have 28 different things on the to do list and, and to make that effective? Anthony Kirby: Yeah, great question. So I’m going to give you the exact way to do this and and also the way that you pre-frame next steps as well. So it’s kind of like book ending a workshop, we’ll call this. So when you start, obviously you’re going to have a brief from whoever’s hired you to do the workshop. So there’s an overarching theme that they’re going to want it to run with, whether that’s, you know, service sales, whatever. Now when I start a workshop, and you can do this, whether there’s three people or 3000 people, if there was, if there’s less than 10, 15 people, I would go around the room at the start and this is a really good pre-frame and it’s, I’d say, Hey, look, what is the outcome that I could give you by the end of today that would make it worthwhile for you to be here? Because engagement is the biggest thing in a workshop, especially if they’re being paid to be there and they’re not paying to be there. Hmm. If they’d been forced to go essentially by their employer, um, then you know, most, you’re going to have half the room who are just like, this is just another workshop. I’m just going to type my notes and forget them and put them in the drawer. So use all of that language and pre-frame it and say, look, I know that most workshops you go to, you know, you’d get there and you’d be thinking, Oh, this is just going to be another workshop. I don’t want it to be like that for you today. So what I want to know is I’m going to write it on a, on a piece of pipe and put it up on the wall so we can look at it all day. What’s the outcome you want to lie? And then go around the room if it’s a small room and ask the question. So they’ll tell you what they need to to have you deliver that day if it’s the larger room. So obviously it’s not possible to go around one by one, get give him a piece of paper and write it on a piece of paper and say, Hey, there’s a piece of paper in front of you. I want you to write on that piece of paper. The one thing that I could give you today that would make this day worthwhile. Now, what you do during the day is you looking at these, that these sort of outcomes on the wall or on the whiteboard or if it’s a big bigger room, you’re looking at the outcomes on pieces of paper and you keep the money and or on your pie, on your presentation table and during the day you start to go to the people who’ve given to the answer they need and you say, Hey Victor, you mentioned you needed to know how to run a great workshop. Have I delivered on that yet today? And then Victor would go, yeah, actually you have Kirby. And I’d say, is there anything else I can cover for you on that before I cross it off the list? And what you’re doing is you’re closing the psychological loop in their brain. So they go, wow, that was good. I actually got the thing I came for. Now the backend of that is you get to the end of the workshop, you make sure you’ve covered off everything on the list. Anything that you haven’t covered off for time constraints or for whatever reason you say, Hey, can I set up a call with you one on one to go through this? Or can I set up a group call with the whole business to go through this? And then that gets you the foot in the door for the next step. But also what you then do is you want to say, um, I wanted to give me a piece of paper and I want you to write on that piece of paper on a scale of one to ten one being the worst conference, worst workshop you’ve ever been to, 10 being absolutely unbelievable metal of your needs. And you’d love to know more about how we could do things together so I can help you go further. Where would you score me? And if it’s less than a 10 I want to know what I could have to make it a 10 and that’s how I finished every workshop. And the answers you get from that are great because you get feedback and here’s the power of it. Someone who wards you eight or above, you call them and you say, Hey, thank you so much. I really appreciate that feedback. If it’s below that, you call them. You say, Hey, I noticed that I didn’t deliver for you. What did I miss? And, and you touched, what do you want to do is you want to make sure you leave everyone better than you find them, right? You want everyone in that place the leave sign. That was the best speaker I’ve seen and I’ve never heard of that person before, but they just nailed that workshop. And you’ll do that if you know what they want to achieve, not what you want to achieve. And I think I like just hearing that. I’m thinking, yeah, even if you’re running your own workshops, not for corporations, you start a free workshop or at a cheap workshop that’s a lead magnet and to know half day or a full day into something bigger and you get everyone to write that off right on the board. And you go, Hey, I have, we ticked us off. Have we ticked this up? Or this is actually what, you know, these other things. I know we haven’t ticked everything off, but here’s what we’re actually going to be doing in this next workshop because some of these, you know, these things are going to be in it, but we’re also going to be doing this as well. Um, and then yeah, people leave, they leave satisfied. Yeah. Yeah. They leave thinking, wow, that was worth my time. Not, not like, ah, you know, it didn’t really get anything from that cause the guy just spewed out all this crap that I didn’t need to know about. And I also realized that we got it like exactly that there’s the big salad because if you finish with a point that’s not for them, but they got everything they needed before lunch. It’s not until you say, Hey, did you get everything you needed or you say, I did. Yeah. Thank you very much. Yeah, exactly. And, and it’s, and it just works so well. I mean, I, I that’s something that I just, I came to that conclusion that that’s what I needed to do after I did a few workshops where it literally was me delivering on the message or the theme purely that that had been told to deliver on um, that way by switching it up, I knew that I was appealing to 100% of the room instead of 50% or 40% or 30% and that was a game changer in terms of the feedback. It was the game changer in terms of the testimonials and it meant that they were then going out into their respective markets, talking about the guy that no one’s ever heard of, which is, which is what you want because then you become her the name of the game with the other thing as well mate. Like you go through that whole day and you tick off 20 items on their list, they’re going to say like, this guy was able to answer everything we asked. I’ll be mean. He or she is the expert. It’s instant credibility. Like there’s no way they can, they can’t. One thing you can’t argue with, there’s three ways to, to teach the people. You can tell people how good you are, you’re gonna have other people tell you how good you are or you can go and show them how good you are. And the showing bit is that you can’t dispute the facts. Victor Ahipene: Yeah. And that’s, that’s what I yeah, I think is, is really, really interesting. And I, you know, I haven’t heard that before in the sense of, you know, be adding it to my toolkit as well. But the,being able for people to just know that they’re going to leave, you know, ideally with a 10 out of 10 and if they’re not, yeah. What is it to bring somebody up and get them from an eight to a teen and spend half an hour on the phone to them because what’s that going to do? Like you’re unsatisfied or you know, not 100% satisfied customers that you turn into a satisfied one are going to be your raving fans because yeah, they go back and again, that person was actually like, yeah, it wasn’t that they couldn’t answer my question. They just didn’t have time or fit into the fit, fit into all of that. Um, yeah, no, those are, those are amazing tips. And like I say, a lot of people don’t, you know, there’s, there’s no one really out there showing people how to get into this corporate space or being able to position themselves. And I know that’s a lot of what you do and what you’re helping coaches and people do with the, you know, cause part of it, which we haven’t even delved into is positioning yourself. I’ve got an episode further back where we talk about the other different ways that you can, uh, you can position yourself, but all of that kind of ties up. It’s not like you just ring up somebody and you’re like, Hey, let me come and pitch you. Yeah. You’ve still got to have that level that, what I always say to people is the event organizer or the decision maker within a business is taking a risk and it’s on them. If you come in and under deliver, it’s a reflection on them. If you come in and overdeliver, it’s a reflection on them. So they want the letter. And so the more things that you can do to diffuse that, uh, and so that, yeah, you’re like, Oh, okay, Oh, you’ve got a book or cool, you’ve spoken know all around the world or you’ve worked at companies bigger than us or whatever it may be. You’ve been in the media, I’ve seen you on TV, you’ve got a podcast. What are all of these, these kind of positioning markers. Yeah, they help you get in that door. But then all of this other stuff, you know, I haven’t met anybody who’s even shared what you’ve shared about this kind of behind closed doors on what happens in the corporate realm because yeah, I think, I think a lot of people were out there doing it as well. And um, yeah. Then there’s other people wanting to do it and they’re doing so many things wrong. Anthony Kirby: And let me leave you with one last tip because this is super important too. And I know, I’m like, I know I’m probably going over time, but it’s worth knowing this. If I want you to split your market into three, like whoever it is that you serve, whether it’s corporates, individuals, whatever, split into three the top of the market, let’s use technology companies. That’s a good example because everyone knows them. The top of the market, the top third of the market would be Google, Facebook, and all those kinds of companies. Then that’d be like there’d be an app, a low third, bottom third would be my spice for example. Right? Like no one uses anymore, but it’s still around kind of. It’s in the shadows and then you’ve got that middle third. Now the middle thirds, the powerful third because they want to be in the top third and they’ve been in the bottom third and they know it feels like to be there. So they’ve got the most hunger to change. You go after your market like that, you split it into three and you’re so right. Who are the third of the market who want change? Not the people who are already at the top because they’re the hardest to sell to and everyone’s chasing them. Go after the people who no one really knows or no one really cares about and go in and promise, promise and deliver on the expectations that you set for them and they will love you for life. They will pay anything you want to be paid. They will send you to places that you could never imagine. And that’s, that’s how you approach your market. It’s brilliant. Victor Ahipene: Yeah. Cause I mean it’s kind of even a few take it from the smaller side of things. It’s like, you know, do you go chasing after the solo preneur insurance broker or do you cha chase the guy with a company of 20 or do you chase ING? Well yeah, the company with a hundred or do you chase the company with 100,000 and you get the one with a hundred and you take them to a thousand staff and you’re still going to be there for a long for the ride if they, if you get down to a thousand so brilliant. Brilliant. Yeah. Brilliant points. Dab. Oh, there was one, one other question that I wanted to, to delve into your Trojan horse. A lot of other speakers, a lot of trainers that I speak to kind of have a Trojan horse in the sense that yes, you can go in there and run a workshop. What do you like? A lot of people might use their workshop as the Trojan horse to then be able to offer other services afterwards or package on with them. What are some of yours that you would suggest that are easy? Things that you can add on to or pitch after the fact? Anthony Kirby: The easiest thing to pitch is followup training. Yep. If you’re doing it like assuming that we’re taught in workshops, workshops are very much outcome-based generally, so let’s say the outcome is more revenue. You want to say to the owners of the business or the individuals, hi, look the workshops one day. The habits build over time, so let me come and give you the habits. Let me instill the habits, but more important than the habits. Just the accountability. You’re too busy running the business. Let me run your people that we could come in and be that voice. Let me be the white coat on the, on the Colgate toothpaste advert to use the uh, the example. Um, you know, cause in most cases the bosses told them everything that you’re going to teach them at the workshop, but they’re just not listening anymore cause they’ve heard it every week at the sales meeting. You going in there with the white coat on as the expert, you blow their mind and then you follow them up every week or every month, every two weeks for three months. And suddenly you’ve instilled the habit and you’ve instilled the accountability and you can’t file the result then. Victor Ahipene: Is that how you say the easiest thing to answer? That’s exactly how I do it. Is that how you package it into a 90 day rather than a two day yeah. Offering. Anthony Kirby: Yeah. And that’s where you get the value and also gives you continuity of work. It’s much easier to, and at the end of the 90 days they would see results too. So it’s easy conversation to say, Hey, do you want to keep going for another 90? With accountability coaching or accountability training?Hmm. And it’s super easy for them to say yes because you’re already doing it. Yeah. Victor Ahipene: And now you people getting results. That’s, that’s absolutely awesome. So I know I’ve known Kirby for for a while now and I know that, you know, all the knowledge is just shared is just kind of the tip of the iceberg and what he knows in the online realm and the online spaces probably even deeper than what you’ve just, you’ve just heard here and I know that you’ve just recently launched a mastermind, a, an online mastermind for people who, you know, may have found this valuable, they’re gonna and you know, if they’re wanting to either do more of the workshop space or you know, add another leg to their business or develop their online branding and things like that, they can, they can do that. Do you want to tell people completely about that and where they can go to find out a little bit more? Anthony Kirby: Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, let me say that the starting point for that in a circle I call it, which is like coaching and training with me. The starting point for that is an online program called the expert blueprint. Um, and that is actually free of charge. So you can go to the expert blueprint.com and get the whole online course for free. This, uh, 50 something lessons in there now, this Facebook ads training, webinar training, event training, positioning, training, um, social media content training. Like everything you need to take yourself from where you are now as an unknown quantity to someone who’s fully booked and has a calendar full of awesome clients is in that online course and that’s completely free. So you can grab that right now. Um, no need to talk to me about that. You don’t need to spend a cent. So people who go through that though, generally some of them would say, you know what, I want more support. And if you do, then the inner circle is probably the right, the right call. Um, and that’s just a, an annual membership to, uh, uh, online. Most of the wines, I suppose we’d call it, where we meet twice a week and talk about what’s going to be business and we keep you accountable and keep you on the right track and moving in the right direction with your sales funnels and your automation and everything that’s attached to sales. And Mark gets thrown in the mix there for a discussion every week. Well that’s awesome. Victor Ahipene: So I will link that plus some other links to find Kirby or over the interwebs at a public speaking blueprint. We’re all about blueprints here, um, dot com and where you can find that you can find the show notes, everything we’ve talked about. Cause I’m sure there’ll be some things that you want to go back if you’re on the move and John, a lot of those things down. So there’ll be in the show notes. Kirby always awesome catching up with you and chatting and it’s awesome that we can even record it and share it out to the world to offer a better value. Thanks mate. Really appreciate it. Yeah, no worries. Thanks for having me.

Isaac John aka Ice is an ex professional NRL rugby league player turned entrepreneur, podcaster, vlogger and card collector. He is the founder of clothing brand YKTR (you know the rules). Since following him I have seen him leverage the power of social media, authenticity and storytelling to grow his business. Today we dive into his thought process, what is working right now for him, how it can work for you and the biggest challenges he faces with growing his business and personal brand. Connect with Isaac John Instagram Youtube Itunes Victor Ahipene: Speaking nation, what’s happening? Welcome to another episode of public speaking secrets. Super stoked to have you listening and tuning in today. I’ve got Isaac John aka Ice, who is a founder of a clothing company, and I want to talk to you as his clothing company called YKTR. Check it out. It’s a, you know, the rules, and he’s also done a lot for getting his company off the ground, which I want to delve into and some, uh, some insights that he’s gained in a bit of the behind the scenes in that aspect. Because I know a lot of you, I know I’ve watched what he’s been doing and I know this works just not for clothing companies and it can work for you out there. So we’ll get another aspect of that public speaking, which is the digital side. So with all that being said, welcome to this show, my man. Isaac John: Thanks Bro. Thanks for having me on. Victor Ahipene : So give us a quick background of, you, how did you get to kind of be doing the clothing side of things and then we’ll delve into kind of the aspects that you’ve used to I guess, leverage social media to grow. Isaac John : Short or long version? Victor Ahipene: Just go, the medium. Isaac John: Nah, so just, I grew up in a small town, um, had ambitious to play sort of rugby league play for the play in the NRL and sort of was able to do that, uh, through my NRL career, very average player through, um, had a lot of injuries and stuff like that. So through injuries I was actually, um, through injuries actually started reading up on books and had outside interests and from there sort of dived into business once I finished football. Kind of just wanted to really pursue business and YKTR, was one of those things and been lucky enough so far for it to eight. Victor Ahipene: Cool. And I mean, I guess, guess part of that, and I know, I see with the questions that people ask on your Instagram who will like oh, how do you do it if you’re not an ex NRL player. And I’m like, I mean, I’ve, I’ve, um, myself, I’ve physio for the magpies I know quite a lot of like sports, like all blacks and whatnot ends. I mean, you know, outside of them getting sponsorships from external companies, they wouldn’t know how to leverage any of that anyway. So it’s like, yeah, I feel like it may be a little bit of a fire onto the flame, but it’s like if you don’t have the, um, the kindling or the water or whatever, it’s just going to die out anyway. So, yeah. How did you initially leverage that? Like, did it help for your initial growth or was it the kind of the stuff that you threw out and tried that you felt kind of grew the brand? Um, yeah, like, um, obviously I understand like it’s just, it’s just where I’ve come from. I can’t really change my career or my previous past. It’s kind of a weird scenario cause a lot of people would think that they’re like, Oh cause you’re friends with chicko and Cory. That’s what made your brand grow. But obviously anyone that’s sort of been in business understands, that’s probably not the case or anyone that actually knows those two boys. That’s not the case as well. So to say, it didn’t help would be fucking ignorant of me, which I’d never say that, but to say that’s the only reason we’ve succeeded. I wouldn’t say that as well. So I understand why people say it and it does make sense from I find that know anything about business or didn’t, understand my journey. And I just saw me personally just fringe off in all these innerL players and I think a business society from that, I understand that narrative a hundred percent as well. Isaac John: But um, I used to frustrate me a little bit, but no, not too much anymore. I just is what it is that people that don’t know me people I know the work that’s gone behind the scenes, people don’t know that almost ended up broke trying to pursue this dream as well. So people just see what they want to see. And we’re guilty of headline reading here in Australia and New Zealand and it’s just the same thing. They only see the result that I sort of see everything has that’s gone behind it. So I do understand that it is what it is. Victor Ahipene: So speak on, speak on that. Like they don’t see the behind the scenes side of things. When you were, I know you’ve, you’ve tried other businesses prior to this and then there’s obviously the trials and tribulations that come with, you know, particularly the clothing industry. What has, like what were the things that when you were first starting out that the mud that you’re throwing on the wall, was there any like, and seeing what sticks? Was there any systematic like I’m going to look at how I can leverage Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or podcasting to help grow my brand. Or like how did, did you have any plan or process to that? Cause I’ve obviously seen it’s a fairly decent aspect of, of what your business is, is the content that you put out to get exposure. Isaac John: Um, to be honest, I just sort of went into a blind, took a few online courses about Facebook advertising in that and like those that kind of helped me out. But um, I seen Nevara Vercon sorta talk about the best thing I learned from, um, the best thing I learned. Ah, someone asks her what’s the best business books or what was this book should I read? And he goes, I’ll just, if you, if you rely on business books given to your competitors cause it’s going to help you succeed. And I love the education that I’ve learned from businesses actually from being in it. But the sort of turning point for us was probably about four or five months in obviously ran into a guy called Gary V if you follow my content, I preach him and everything. He sort of done everything he was preaching at that time. Isaac John: I just started to implement them. And see the little bit of success. Probably the first one was vlogging and we started to vlog. I’ve seen our sales sort of drive up and then um, obviously learned how to edit and stuff like that and just build brand based off his philosophies of humanizing it. When people see YKTR they usually know our story, usually know who I am as well. And off the back of that then that sort of moved into blogging, which is writing articles and documenting the journey moved into podcasting in that sort of unintentionally personally branded myself. So that was just the method that he taught and that’s the one I followed. So, and it’s just worked for us Victor Ahipene: and from like, not necessarily the dollar figures or anything, but from a percentage of breakdown of sales, how much would you attribute to say vlogging blogging, uh, podcasting, like not each one, but as in compared to say your paid marketing or SEO or anything like that? Isaac John: I dunno, cause if you look at the way we use vlogs purely top of funnel, so if you understand the funneling system, like we don’t try and really try and monetize off it. Um, sometimes when we put paid ads behind it, I’ll test it. Like 80% of our Facebook ad spend goes toward top of funnel at the moment where all the rest is bottom of the funnel, which is automated through dynamic product ads and retargeting and stuff like that, which is almost automated. Your bottom of the funnel shouldn’t change. So we use vlogging, not so much for sales but purely for branding. So I don’t think people understand the difference between branding and sales. A branding sort of long term, branding sort of the difference between people buying, um, a handbag for fucking $2,000 versus $100. You know what I mean? So vlogging is about building brand. It’s not so much for sales, but that just ends up working, turning into sales eventually. So it’s kind of playing the long game and long tail of it. Victor Ahipene : And I mean I think there’s what you’ve done really well is like, yeah, I choose whose stories I watch not to, not to be necessarily a consumer of like, Oh, what’s ice got to say today? Cause a lot of the stuff is great but it’s, yeah, you’ve got a certain clientele that are asking you these questions that are maybe at the entry level wanting to get started or find out about certain things. It’s more the, it’s just understanding different markets and how people are communicating to them. If we were to say start with your, with your vlogging, what have you found has, like if people going out there and looking to leverage their brand with vlogging, what are some of your tips on yeah, anything for them to get started in there, in that realm. Um, make sure you make sure you just being real, make sure you’re not trying to fabricate anything. I think a lot of my, um, what I’ve been able to garnish such a loyal following with the brand and myself is I’ve been transparent the whole way and we’re going into pretty testing times coming forward from this corona virus i’ve got friends going out of business, got people within our building, going out of business already and it’s only been like a couple of weeks, you know what I mean? So, um, I think even when I was struggling I was sort of saying like, Oh fuck, but we’re not going that well here or whenever I make mistake, I was the first to put my hand up and document the journey. So I think the trap about social media is, um, everyone tries to put the best version of themselves out there, which is understandable. Isaac John: So if you were to take 20 photos of yourself, which one would you put up? You’d obviously put up the best one when you are. So I feel like people’s, um, vlog style becomes like that. They just want to put out this real super polished version. Like, like everything’s good all the time. Where if you look at my Instagram now, like I use to, only want to put good photos up. If you look at it now, it’s just screenshots of Twitter and stuff like that. So I feel like real, real is, super important. And it’s just quicker. I could put out a vlog in a day because I’m just being myself. I’m not trying to fabricate anything that I wouldn’t do. I’m not trying to live this life that I’m, I don’t live, um, like at the moment I’m just collecting like sports cards and shit and I’m just documenting and stuff like that as well. So I feel like it’s hard for a lot of people, cause a lot of people insecure about who they are, especially our public opinions. So I’ve been able to build these walls up through just being myself. Like I get paid out well through DMS and stuff all the time saying all that you’re faking or the sort of stuff like that, which, which just comes with the territory as well. So if you want to start vlogging, just make sure, make sure you’ve been yourself because you can’t get caught. Victor Ahipene: Yeah. Yeah. I think, um, it’s interesting. I just finished Russell Brunson’s latest book cause traffic secrets one, and he was talking about, um, it’s funny, like a lot of the people that I deliberately follow, uh, he talks about this like I think it’s five F’s or something can, uh, when putting out content and it’s like having five different kind of topic streams. So like for example, basketball cards, uh, league podcasts, clothing, uh, whatever. So that, you know, yes, you’re not just continually pitching the same thing or putting out the same content, but then later on down the track you can, um, yeah, potentially branch off into other aspects. Like, I know, you know, having watched your stuff up and I’d love to hear your side of the, was it deliberate? Like, ah, yeah, I see your recording some courses and stuff now and you’ve highlighted to a lot of people who may be in jobs are, Hey, look, yeah, there’s different opportunities that you can have with business. Um, and then that’s kind of just his there organically lead to, Hey, I might put something together that can help people. Or was that kind of, yeah. Was that part of a plan? Isaac John: Um, not really a plan and just sort of come off the back of sort of answering all the same questions all the time and sort of just trying to speed it out. The reason I started writing blogs of skip around, it’s like what equipment do you use or how do you start a cleaning company or how do you podcast? So the reason I read those blogs in the initial phase was just to speed, speed the process up of replying to people and not just giving them short answers, actually try and give them some value. So that ended up saving me time. And the online course such as talk about trying to build multiple streams of income and building a personal brand is probably the best thing you can do right now. You look at it a lot. The biggest people in the world, like Kanye West for example, love more Hayden, but his brand like is these were fucking billion dollars right now. You know what I mean? Like Kim Kardashian, that’s a personal brand. Even Donald Trump being able to be the president is because he is a personal brand. So I feel like that’s the way to moving forward and like say please come in months and YKTR flowers? I think I’ve built up enough of a personal brand that I could potentially pivot in a different direction, whether that be with myself or potentially someone hire me. It’s been super important. So fuck, what was the original question? Victor Ahipene : No, no, that was, that was it. Pretty much. Pretty much it. It was like how did you, how did you go towards the online coaching or like, yeah, those different types of content that you’ve like, you’ve just Victor Ahipene : I’ll tell you why I did it because I’m, everyone was going, Oh, can I come pick your brain for two hours and I’ll buy your coffee. I seen someone else do it and that on their website they’ve priced their coffee at 500 bucks. If you want to pick my brain, it’s going to cost 500 bucks and we can do it on Skype. I’ll get my own coffee. So, um, I heard someone say price your time. At a point where they can’t say no to. So I started doing consulting and priced myself at 500 bucks-nd I’d just done it cause I didn’t want to do it. But then people were starting to pay it and a lot of the conversations were only going for like 2040 minutes. So I was like, yeah, fuck it. Let’s go. Yeah. And it’s, it’s funny man, cause I think I heard Tim Ferriss or something, he got in that kind of conundrum with friends when he was first kicking off and I think he said like, all right, cool, it’s free. You just got to give me $1,000 and if you don’t take action on the advice I give you, I keep your 1000 bucks. If you haven’t done everything I sit in two weeks, if you’ve done everything in two weeks, I give you a thousand bucks back. And it was like, yeah, cause there’s always the mate that you’re like, Aw man. Like, I’d love to give you a time, but I know, I know that all of you aren’t going to read that book that I told you to read or post that blog or start their podcast or whatever. And um, yeah, so I found that an interesting one cause then it says, Oh, you really want to pick my brain. Cool. Put a thousand dollars deposit down and then let’s see what’s up.  Isaac John: So yeah, I think a lot of people would just get obsessed with knowledge as well. And I was guilty of that. Like there was a time in my life where I’ve read about a hundred books and um, I was just like, ah, I say this all the time. You know, when you have a bear in his, those bunch of useless facts underneath the cap, just like that guy. Like I could tell your fucking bunch of letters, shit, that didn’t mean nothing. You know what I mean? And I was just a bit of a nodal and likes to go to coffees with the boys and the boys are just going to shut the fuck up. So it got to that point where I just go, fuck, I’m just full of shit. I’m just like a bunch of useless knowledge and I just wanted to apply some way. But it’s been a great foundation, obviously reading because these, I’ve got a photographic memory life. He asked me something right now. Oh, couldn’t remember my off the cuff. But when I’m in a conversation I can relate examples back to books like top of my brain like that. So it’s kind of a weird, like I say, I’ve got a photographic memory, but if you say something, I remember that part of chapter three of this book. I can’t remember. Yeah. But then if you’re like, if I’m in a scenario, Oh there’s like this timeline, but ABC. So it’s sort of being great in that sort of sense. Victor Ahipene: Um, run us through, and this is, this is the thing that I’m interested in and I’ve been watching of your journey as your YKTR media. So how did that kind of come about and where do you see it in the, in the future? Cause I think this is a huge part of like stepping away from you being the personal brand for part of your company. I don’t know, like that’s just the way kind of, I see it’s something bigger than you. Isaac John: Yeah. Um, just from a pain point to be honest, I just kinda got over modern day journalism just so listeners. So we’ve actually changed just it to YKTR sports. It’s actually a pretty dodgy place right now cause there’s no fucking sports going on. So, what, YKTR sports is, is just trying to go to an alternative that connects players to fans and fans, to players. And I just sort of saw rugby league media besides the Matty Johns show, which is kind of fun. It was just actually really funny. Everything else besides that, I was just old school players just with the younger generation like our back in my day. And then you open up newspapers, they’re just negative, negative, negative all the time. And none of the sources actually ever come from the player. So that was sort of the pain point from it. Um, we have got massive ideas from it, but it’s just an execution point. Obviously media costs money and if we were to film shows and stuff like that, but the basis of it was we essentially flipped Corey Norman’s narrative around where he was nominated for Kim Steven Medal last year, which is then like spending your time with the community and stuff like that where two, three years ago his perceived to be like this bad boy and he’s just a regular bike and I’ve seen his name get dragged through the mud through YKTR and vlogging really flipped the narrative and people that meant him be like, Oh he wasn’t like the person I thought he was probably the best example I’ve had that and probably Quade Cooper. Yeah. So like, I’ve known Quade since I was three or four and um, I just, the way he’s portrayed in media was never the way. Like I knew him as a friend and um, talking to him behind the scenes and stuff, it was very, very different. So, um, that was probably probably this the moment we’re like, fuck we got some here But in saying that like everything’s sort of pulled back as well. Like, you know what I mean? Like Fox sports are in trouble. Um, it’s the whole rugby leagues in trouble. So really wanted it to build a like American style. A media format where not just talking to 40 plays about footy, but talking to them about say sports cards for example, or bro where does Jason Taumololo eat on a Wednesday, what’s his cheat meal like? I feel that stuff’s done get a lot more important than the actual 80 minutes of the game. You’re always going to get people that stat nerds and love all the stats and that type of platform is good for like someone like Denan Kemp were very big on stats and like, Oh he made an 80 meters post contact meters today. Like for me, I don’t really care about that stuff. I what’s, what’s, what’s Cameron Munster doing on Tuesday night? Like what’s he watching that stuff. That stuff seems more interesting to me. So that was the, that’s what we wanted to put the narrative around. But also I’ve done a podcast with Mark Boris in his office and after the, after the podcast, he sort of goes we want to do is run a clothing company and he just, he sort of just at the time I thought I was killing it. Fuck how good am I going, like running this business like ABC. And um, and I sort of just got my mind thinking, I was like, Oh far even I’m running a clothing company, it’s cool and all this sort of shit. Like, am I actually making an impact? And a sort of a question of wrestle with myself a lot of the time and just started like just obviously through media and that just kind of got over it. But there’s also been the backlash of it as well because when you see the word media, people think also so they’re like, Oh, why aren’t you reporting on this or that? We’re not reporters, we don’t report on stuff. We just want to tell stories in a different way. And it’s still been a backlash from it. And I’ve had people turn off like YKTR, not stop buying from like YKTR because of it. Um, few guys are getting really personal with me because they’ve got a difference of opinion. So there’s been real interesting transition where it goes forward. I don’t know because obviously there’s no, sports on at the moment it hasn’t made any money. We’re kind of just be doing it for fun as well just as a side hobby. So it’s been a different narratives to be the guy that people laughed and you’re the guy that’s selling clothes and then you try to tell all these different stories. But it’s different what they heard in the media. So we must be lying. He to respect you as an entrepreneur and support your brand. Now you’re doing this and yes, it’s been interesting but I’ve kind of really enjoyed it at the same time as well. Victor Ahipene: Yeah, I mean from me personally, I see it like I love Denan’s podcast when he’s given a bit more of a, an insight into the players and then you know, yours as well. And in that space because I think, yeah, I follow a lot of the NBA. I follow a lot of the the NBA players or ex players, podcasts and stuff like this where they’re actually like talking to the players. Yeah. How good is that? You lie, you lie. I freaking love this slide. The next thing I want man is I want you or someone else to start doing 30 for 30 type docos of the Australian and New Zealand sports like Isaac John: yeah, that was, that was sort of like those other sort of big dream and big picture and we’re obviously going to start with blogs first. Like we got a few blog ideas. Even just boys going out and having like eating. Like Hey Adam Reynolds, where do we go on a cheat day? Victor Ahipene: Yeah. It’s like a carpool karaoke and comedians and cars and that sort of stuff. Like they, they go off for a reason is because you actually get to see the not the Boofhead league player given that year now a game of two halves rural, 110% all credit to everyone. We’ll go back to the drawing board stuff yet you go, Oh that guy seems like an idiot. And then they actually get on to a platform and it’s like, Oh man, all right. They are actually a human being, which a lot of people forget. Isaac John: Oh that’s the, that’s the biggest thing. Cause I see, cause we put sports players on the pedestal as well. So when we see them on a TV, we think these fucking mystical type beings and they are ungrateful and they’re overpaid and all this sort of stuff. But we going to realize this is just normal people just like everyone else. And a lot of the times, like my friends that I’ve grown up with and they knock about my footy players now I’m like, Oh fuck. It’s just normal. And that’s what a lot of people don’t realize that everyone is just normal. But I say this a lot, like if you want to hang around football players don’t talk football. That’s like number one rule. So and and being a football player in the past and hanging around them and having some of the biggest names in the game is like my close friends. Like the amount of football that we actually talk compared to other things. It’s probably about 90 to 10 by percent football. I haven’t seen another route. Isaac John: Other people talk about horse racing, like having to beat or what to watch it on Netflix or like sports cards is a big one right now. We’ve got a crew I’ve only in NRL players and all black players. We call it card gang. I would go one out of the guy in there and it’s about 10 of us in there. Like Kalyn Ponga, Connor Watson, Andrew Fafita, Ardia Savea, Aaron Smith. Like some of the biggest names in sports right now what we do is talk sports cards or what are you trying to collect and like you feel like a little kid again, you do realize that people were just normal people. Yeah. And I just want to show that side of players cause I’m sick of him getting bagged for like, I don’t know, just for doing shit that anyone else would be doing it. 21 and 22 having to bury or pissing on the street. Victor Ahipene: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s what I, that’s what I love. And that’s what I think everyone listening to this should, should take away from this. As you can tell from it. It’s just an authentic conversation they were having and I’m sure a lot of you enjoyed it, but when you’re going out there and putting your content on YouTube, on Instagram, on whatever, to start building your personal brand, uh, you know, try and be the person. If you’re speaking on stage, you’re the same person when you’re off stage, you’re the same person when you go home and like, you know Gary V yeah. He’s a example. I’d say most people listening to this podcast know and yeah, he’s, if you meet him in the street, he’s not the dude go. And you know, I’ve heard stories about other guys like Kiyosaki and stuff like you know, back in the room, they won’t, they won’t talk to you. And this, you know, it’s not like a, it’s not, you haven’t paid him 10 grand, he’s not going to say hello to you and tell you to piss off stuff like that. Isaac John: And do you know what, like I’m, a lot of people have sort of come up to me like when I’ve been out and that, like you’re exactly the same as on Instagram, which is true. But then you’ll see a lot of people that like have spent time with me over a, um, maybe a couple of days that are come stay and you’re like, Oh bro, you’re completely different. Like it looks like you’re always on the go all the time. But when I get home I’m fucked. I just, I really enjoy my space as well and people gotta realize like a lot of my content comes from me just being on my own. Like it looks like I’m out there and outgoing and I can be when I want to be. But then also like just being on my own as well. So, um, just got to realize that there’s a balance there somewhere. Victor Ahipene: Yeah. Cool. And uh, finally just give us a bit of a breakdown. What’s your, what’s your number one tip obviously apart from the authenticity to getting lots of content out of your day, like solo preneur or you’re that speaker out there, what would you say like the best way to start building that personal brand? Um, find. What your medium is. So are you a writer? Are you comfortable in front of a camera? Are you better speaking to someone as well? So find out what your medium is and just try and make ’em. So Gary, based on their content pillar strategy, I find podcasts the best cause when you can video them too, you can record them and then three you can turn them into written and stuff as well. So I feel like podcasts are the way forward. That’s why I’ve been super aggressive and trying to be, I open this hour and a bit the best podcast there in Australia when people come to share that with them to jump on my podcast because the amount of content that you just stripe from that is huge. So this podcast right here, I might have said 10 things that can be turned into quote cards on Instagram. This could be turned into six one minute clips as well. If we recording opportunities into videos. Then of course you’ve got the long form content you can put on a Spotify, they can put on podcasts if you put it on YouTube. So I gravitate towards content that’s moving forward. I feel like vlogging, like our views, they get nowhere near as much. But I still enjoy making vlogs because always I looking back when like a year from like a year ago, like where it was a year ago. So document and journey is always important from that sort of standpoint. But understanding where you speak your, where your brand or your personal brands voice is best documented. So I enjoy riding as well. So I try and I can cover across all three bases, which are pretty lucky to do and I’m confident in doing and don’t care if I can fuck up as well. So I think that’s a big part of it as well. I see, I see a lot of people trying to vlog and like they’re not, they will look awkward in front of the camera or they start a podcast and they can’t really speak or their tone of voice has kind of weird. So finally find what suits you and just roll with that. Well, we’ll do a hundred podcasts and get better at it. Do a hundred podcasts, real quick ratio. You jump in. Oh man, it was rural last minute. And I’m sure there’s a ton of, a ton of knowledge that. We can strip into one minute videos and repurpose into wave audios and have them all over the net. But if people want to follow you, find out, more about either you, your clothes or you know, what you’re doing on social. We can they go, what can they do? Isaac John: Uh, hit me up on, um, Instagram at iice_ for their Instagram name for ages. Probably not the best one, but as we can find me YKRR_ can find us on Instagram as well. You can find me on YouTube, the ice project like YKTR and YouTube, but probably podcasts. I think the last project find me on Spotify and Itunes. Yeah. So they’re going on there. Victor Ahipene: Well, we’ll link all of that in the show notes at public speaking, blueprint.com. Man, it’s been a pleasure. I am. I enjoy jumping on and I hope everything with this Corona virus doesn’t affect you too much, but we’ll see you on the other side anyway. Isaac John: It definitely will affect us. To what extent? Who knows? So it’d be all the on camera anyway. Victor Ahipene: Cheers man. Isaac John: Alright. Brother see you later.

Sally Prosser is a voice coach who’s all about helping you find your vocal confidence and courage. She says unless you’ve sworn a lifetime vow of silence, your voice matters and is key to connecting with others – whether it’s one person at a coffee catch-up or a thousand people at a conference. Sally’s background is quite diverse but speaking is a common theme. She ran a Speech & Drama studio, read the news on radio, reported it on TV and was the spokesperson for Queensland’s largest water company (not all at the same time, might I add!) Sally holds a licentiate teaching diploma in speech and drama with the Australian Music Examinations Board, as well as degrees in Journalism and Law from the University of Wollongong. She also has a podcast called That Voice Podcast. Connect With Sally Prosser Website Podcast Facebook Instagram Twitter TikTok Victor Ahipene: Speaking nation. Welcome to another episode of public speaking secrets. Super excited to have you here where I’m probably going to get judged for my lack of vocal tonality cause we’ve got Sally Prosser who is a voice and presentation coach and she’s had a raft of experience across multiple different industries and different ways that we present, which I’m super excited to be able to dive into. So welcome to the show, Sally. Sally Prosser: Thanks for having me, Victor. Good to be here. Give Victor Ahipene: everyone a bit of a background, I guess, how did you get to where and what you’re doing now? Sally Prosser: Well, I’m sure as most people say, how much time do you have? So it could go on from it. But I guess the, in a nutshell, I started out as a speech and drama teacher. So for anyone out there who’s done a Stedford growing up, poetry, prose, that kind of thing. And then I got to a point where I thought, Oh my goodness, if I have one more child come in the door wanting to do a tongue twister, I, you know, don’t think I can continue. So at UNI I studied law actually and also journalism. And I worked as the broadcast news journalist. So I did radio, uh, then moved into the area where you had to blow dry your hair TV unfortunately. Uh, and then I went from news reporting to PR, which is a very, it’s called crossing to the dark side. So the journalists who cross crossover to PR, that’s what they’re called. And I was the spokesperson for Brisbane’s a water and sewerage company. So there you go. The glamour girl for Siri. Victor Ahipene: Yeah. Does that, does that need lots of spokesperson? Sally Prosser: Well, you know what they say, if you can sell it, then you can sell anything. Right. Um, and then it was while I was there in the corporate setting that I started to understand how much of a skill public speaking, well, how much it was lacking. Really. A lot of people were struggling to speak up in meetings, struggling to speak in front of people, being asked to be on a panel or speak at a conference and be freaking out, wanting someone else to do it. And so about a couple of years ago I left and I’ve started my own business. Victor Ahipene: Nice. Do you kind of diving into that aspect on the corporate side, do you find it to particular level that uh, you know, to put it bluntly, like sucks at the presentational fears, the presentation side? Like is it their middle manager person, is that, you know, still happening at the CEO or the C level side of things? Or is it those, you know, people aspiring, cause I’d be interested from someone who’s going to been in there on the ground level seeing it, Sally Prosser: you know, I saw it at all levels, right? From people who don’t even apply for jobs. If they have to do any sort of speaking, they actually bring up insight. Do I have to do any speaking in this role? And if they say yes, they say, Oh thank you, I’m not applying. Victor Ahipene: It’s extraordinary. It’s crazy. I mean I worked with someone who was in the air and the like, you know, one of the big four or five or whatever it is, accounting firms. And it was kind of in the middle management space. And then once he improved his presentations, it was like three months later I got a promotion. Sally Prosser: Absolutely. And that’s one of the main reasons people come to see me because everybody’s starting to realize that no matter what job you do, if you’re not able to speak well and communicate, you’re going to really struggle to shine in that field. And then, yeah, I’ve seen right through to CEOs and board chair people who freak out. I have one client, he’s just such an amazing woman and I’m sure that any meeting that she chairs, everybody is sitting around just hoping to impress her. And she tells me that she feels sick with nerves every time she walks in. Victor Ahipene: It’s, um, it’s, it’s, it’s really crazy that, not necessarily that they can get to that level, but how yeah. That they’ll surround themselves with amazing people, like who are amazing at different areas. Uh, they’ll work really hard in particular skill sets. And then like that one is the one that they often let down. And I think, you know, obviously there’s all the, we’ll know that there’s the, the fear and everything that I don’t have the gift of the gab, et cetera, et cetera. Um, but yeah, it’s just the, I find it really, really interesting when those top level people and then when they are able to share their message and find their voice and, and go through their, how it kind of amplifies everything. And, you know, I talk about it, I thoroughly believe it’s the way to future proof yourself in a workforce where more and more things are getting automated. There’s still that area where, you know, you want to get out in front of an audience or you want to be able to lead and, and you know, uh, lead your team and lead your company. And as those who have got their ability to communicate that are going to be, yeah, probably the last out the door because yeah. Apart from those with really elite skill sets. But yeah, that’s it. Sally Prosser: Yeah. I totally agree. I think the, the more and more we’re relying on technology, it’s more important than ever to be able to make that human voice to voice connection. Victor Ahipene: and so you’ve gone out from on your own since then and uh, you, you obviously help people with both. Yeah. It was kind of all the aspects of what you’ve, you’ve developed from the presentation side of things, from the, uh, the vocal side of things. Obviously it helps understanding that PR and being the spokesperson and that sort of thing from our, I’d love to dive in today into some of the voice side of things because I know, uh, yeah, you can have the, the, the voice for radio and the, and the, the face variety as well. Um, but yeah, you don’t necessarily want to end up like the, you know, the Australian reference, the Wally Lewis on, on the TV who speaks like this. Like he is reading off a teleprompter and he absolutely sucks at it. And I see that even when I can. Yeah. You can sometimes tell on social media or on LinkedIn, on YouTube, people who are still using teleprompters and then not overly natural.Um, you see people who are memorizing things and then they’re having to use two parts of their brain to try and again look natural. And I see it coming in affecting their voice in different ways. And then obviously there’s people who are speaking off the cuff and, and then maybe monotonous in the way that they present. So I don’t think there’s really a question and what I just rambled on about, but when it comes to voice, what are the things that, as, as business owners, as professional speakers as, uh, people looking to present more, what should they be looking at from a vocal side of things to get started? Sally Prosser: Yeah. It’s interesting that you talk about news rating cause being a news reporter, I work with a lot of broadcast journalists with what I do. And it’s always the same thing. We want to be telling the story, not reading the script. And this is something that happens with people who aren’t too experienced with videos. You see it on social media and you do say it in public as well. I call it a high school awards night syndrome. You know when every single line it sounds like it’s being read and the winner is, and he usually find with the phrasing what’s happening is it’s too many pauses. So when you raid, we take more pauses than we do if we’re just speaking naturally. So that’s one of the things that I work on. If you want to sound natural, Sally Prosser: the pauses. The second thing we do when we read, and this is how you can tell if people have got a teleprompter or if they’ve really tried to memorize it off a page, is people overdo the little words, which I call grunt words. So the two that have the, from the, Ugh, all of these words should usually come out as to have from Victor Ahipene: yeah, Sally Prosser: because they’re all sandwiched in other words. And so, yeah, a lot of the work I do is on getting the phrasing right, making the stars of the show that put important words stand out and the connecting words sit in the background Victor Ahipene: comes with practice. Of course. Yeah. And I, I mean I think those are the, the big things. Like everything I talk about public speaking, being kind of like riding a bike in the sense that you don’t become a tour de France cyclist from day dot. You become, yeah, you start riding a tricycle or a bike with training wheels or what, you know, whatever it may be. Um, and I have no doubt that it’s the same from a vocal standpoint is Hey, here’s some things I can learn and I can implement. Look, I’m probably not going to get them all right the first time. Like I’m 100% not going to get them all right the first time. Um, do you, you know, I’ve followed different vocal coaches and, and listen to what they’ve had to say over the times. Do you do like a vocal warmups? I’m sure if you’ve been in the speech and drama space, you probably do. Uh, are there certain drills that people can work on, uh, say on a daily basis, even if they’re not presenting, you know, just in front of the mirror or just in the car on the way to work or, uh, when they’re in the shower that can work on your, I guess, your vocal tonality or, uh, trying to have a bit more inflection or a bit more excitement or whatever it may be in their voice. Sally Prosser: Yeah, absolutely. So I actually have a free one minute warm up people can do. So if you head to my website, which is www dot dot com.edu, you can click on the warm up there and it’s all there for you. Sally Prosser: The one that I use is called body breath and buzz. It’s the first thing anyone needs to think about before speaking is getting your posture right. Because we are a walking, talking instrument. And in the same way that the first thing you do when you pick up a guitar, when you sit at a piano or anyone who plays musical instrument, you have to hold it correctly. And so all of us can sit our posture up correctly and I say, pretend you’re wearing Victoria’s secret angel wings, right? It’s as soon as you put your wings on your shoulders, we’ll come back and unlock your knees. He rolls through the shoulders. You know, it’s almost like you’re warming up for some kind of sporting activity, stretching the neck. Then you can get the breath in. So the breath is so important for voice because it’s the fuel. Sally Prosser: Oxygen fuels our voice and it’s one of the main things I see with people. Their voice is affected by their breathing. We think it’s just something that’s really obvious. Oh, how can I be breathing wrong? But breathing is habitual. It’s not actually natural. It’s habits that we formed and a lot of us have formed quite bad habits and we’re breathing far too shallow up inside our lungs. And the white. Now if you’re doing it right, is take a deep breath Dean. And if your shoulders rise, then you’re breathing too shallow. So what you want is wanting to have your hands down your tummy and as you breathe in the tummy spans, it’s not very flattering, but this is how you get the air that you need in order to control the voice that’s down where the diaphragm is. So people might have heard, you know, speaking with the diaphragm, that’s the the power must. Sally Prosser: So for your voice. So a few deep breaths, just breathing in for one and out for two. So you want to have more on your exhale. That’s a good little want to do. And also good to come nerves before you speak. So you’ve got your body set up, you’ve got the breath coming in. And then the third one and I called buzz and buzz is getting vocal chords to wake up is that vocal chords. It’s so 17 or so muscles in there that had to come together to make a sound. And we know that they aren’t ready to go first thing in the morning because we all have that morning voice. It sounds a bit like this, you know me on a Sunday morning after too much, you know, but too big a Saturday night. So, Oh sorry Victor, we are you right? Is the connection okay? Victor Ahipene: Yeah, just cut out there. That’s all right. We can, we can eat it. That part. Sally Prosser: Okay. Uh, let me know if you’d like me to go back a little bit. Sally Prosser: So then we have, yes, we have bars and we want to wake up our vocal chords and if anyone wants to say something quite disgusting but fascinating, then Google vocal chords while singing it looks like something else. It’s really interesting. Say a vocal chords are like two little chicken wings and we need them to come together nice and strong to get a sound. And the one that I use is count Dracula, which is like, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. And that brings up my records together and gets the air flowing through as well. And now the quick warmup is braying like a donkey with the lips. Sorry, I know this sounds very silly. I’ve got, I’ve actually got a podcast episode all about this, which is kind of embarrassing, but this is what you do to all and warm up your voice. Anybody out there who’s doing public speaking and not warming up, it’s the equivalent of, you know, diving in for a swimming race or running out onto a footie failed without doing any stretching or warming up, you’re not going to perform your best. And when people say, Oh, I take a bit of time to get into presentations, it’s often because they’re not doing in warmed up. Victor Ahipene: Hmm. And I think, I think there’s some big ramifications. My voice is sounding horrible at the moment cause I’ve got a cough but not that I saying it, which is a pretty good side note actually is once, and you really realize this is the more speaking you do in particularly podcasting is you will hate the sound of your own voice regardless of how good you get it to sound. Particularly when you’re starting out, you’re like, Oh my God, is that how I sound? Oh my God, that is, that is horrible. And I’ve helped a lot of people with podcasting as well, and they’re all the same. Like, Oh my God, I feel this and that. It doesn’t mean that that’s how other people will try you. It’s just you often cringe at hearing yourself. But, um, that, that being said, yeah, I think there’s a lot of ramifications as well with that. Victor Ahipene: Not warming up before you go out to speak. As you get that shallow breathing, guess what? It’s going to dry out your mouth. And then you’ve got those lips that are going into the microphone and you can’t not necessarily announce the eight your words or get them out there. It’s, you know, your mouth is dry, your lips are dry, which obviously stress EDS to further, and then you’re stopping halfway through your presentation because you need that drink of water because there’s no way that you could’ve made it 15 minutes in the real world, not onstage without having that drink of water. And, um, and then you end up straining. Yeah. You, you ended up getting hoarse by the end of your presentation that you see a lot of people because it’s a big room and they’re trying to get the voice out there to the, to the masses and all of a sudden, you know, they haven’t had everything warmed up or the, like you said, the breathing too shallow so they haven’t got the air and they’re not using their diaphragm to push their voice out and all of these sorts of things. So I mean, I think it’s, it’s, it’s really, really important because it’s one of those invisible ROI wise with your presentation that you never say, wow, I saw Sally on stage and she had such a great voice. It’s like she, she had a, occasionally you’re going to say, Oh, that person had a really cool voice. But the majority I will, I think of of great presenters. It’s, yeah, they’ve got this great presentation, they’ve got great body language they’ve got right, and everyone just walks off and go, that person was a great presenter. Sally Prosser: Yeah. And you’re talking about presenters here, but a lot of the work that I do with people is they just in normal professions where they’ve got a lot of stress on their voice. You know, so a teacher is a good example. If you’re not using good technique in front of the classroom, by the time you get to Friday or the end of term, you could do some serious damage. Or even people who are facilitating workshops. If you’re talking nonstop every day, then that’s when you can put strain. If you’re not, if you don’t do things right. In my experience, people who are professionally public speaking, they tend to have some good techniques that they use. And it’s often one of the better term, regular people who don’t think that they need to use their voice so much. They’re the ones who could benefit most from a bit of TLC. Victor Ahipene: Yeah. And I think that’s, um, yeah, it’s, it’s very, very important from a, uh, say someone who’s, you know, speaking in the board room or delivering a presentation to their company or know whatever they kind of everyday person. What are some of the things you, are there certain things you see people once they start learning these things, maybe try and overcompensate. I you were saying earlier when the certain people over pronounciate words that wouldn’t necessarily come off your tongue is, um, are there, are there other things along that like, you know, inflection at the wrong times or, uh, too long, a pause to shorter falls. Anything else throughout that, that kind of, I think a voice is, it’s the verbal but also the nonverbal use of the voice. Yeah. The pause is using your voice to add to it, but um, yeah. From, from your side of things, what are some of the things I throw out that praise? Victor Ahipene: You’ve warmed up your voice. You’re out on the stage now. Um, yeah. How do you, you know, you’re nervous. There are a lot of, I’m sure a lot of your students are still, yeah. They still got that gap. Reaching nerves. Some of them, when they’re stepping out there, how do they, I guess remember, Oh God, I’ve got to breathe through my stomach. Um, I’ve got to do this. I’ve got to do this. Uh, what are some of the things that you kind of work on throughout that presentation? The actual giving of the presentation for them to nail it. Sally Prosser: Yeah, we arrived the keys in the preparation and if you practice all the techniques beforehand, I say you practice training in pace time so you can draw on it in wartime because there’s times when you’re really, really nervous that’s you need to have things just there ready to go. And that’s when the training comes into play. And while you’re on stage, I always just go back to the body and the breath, you know, take that deep breath. If you feel your legs shaking or your arms shaking, just tense it. Tensing and releasing will help there. And smiling, breathing and smiling can often get things centered again so you can continue. And you were talking earlier about in the board room, different things that I’ve seen people do. You know, trying too hard. I see some people, especially women, push their voice to the back of their throat because we’re told we have to sound lower, right? Sally Prosser: Lower lower pitched is better, a lower pitched voice is good and that’s true. But to make the voice sound low, we want it to be in the walls of our chest. So if you’ve seen the Wolf of wall street, that’s scene with Matthew McConaughey is laid out as a Capri, right? That’s what we want. We want it down there in the walls of the chest. The mistake a lot of people make is they push it to the back of their throat. So you end up getting this very pompous, self-important kind of voice. And I’m so important because I’m at the board table. And the problem with that is, yeah, you love because that voice sounds very fake and very put on. And when people are trying to stake with credibility, it can backfire Victor Ahipene: and so good for people cause they’re obviously going to be hearing this. If you were to give an example of say that that Becca throat, what she just did versus say something deeper down throughout the chase, what would they kind of sound like for people out there? Sally Prosser: Yeah, so it’s all, it’s, it’s different by the brain. So it’s a bit, you’ve got to visualize where the sound’s going. So rather than swallowing it back down, he the back of the throat, think like you’re doing a very posh kind of queen accent. Instead of that we want it to vibrate and I’m talking about the sound waves down in the walls of our chest. And so when an exercise you can do is just put the Palm of your hand on your chest and as you say the just try it. Ah, you got to visualize that your voice is not at the back of the throat but somewhere out in the distance. So whether you visualize a horizon or a Frisbee or a space flight, I don’t know anything that’s out there. And then you say, ah, good morning, your voice is very forward and free as opposed to good morning where the voice sits back there. Victor Ahipene: Mm. I think Penn, Alberta here that obviously with those drills of being able to, um, you know, cause you are demonstrating a beautifully with your hands on this, um, on the audio but, but uh, I think being able to hear that and you know, Ben, those droves have been able to go down and put your hands on your chest and fill those vibrations and being able to actually hear that orderable difference on what it sounds like. Yeah. They’re both deeper voices. Um, but one sounds ridiculous and the nicest possible way and the other one sounds natural and I’m not sitting there going like, yeah, I I remember back at school, there was a couple of friends that I did public speaking with and I used to be like, why do you have a fake voice when you, and like it wasn’t like, it sounded terrible, but it was like if you spoke how you naturally speak. Yeah. With obviously a few, few deviations for when you’re actually giving the presentation. And it sounded really good but it sounded fake and uh, yeah, people were just going to switch off cause it doesn’t sound . Sally Prosser: I know and I work with a lot of reporters and it’s a cycle of the reporter satire voice. They’ll often just speak normally to me like this and then say police say investigations are ongoing. And I’m like, no, no, no. We’ve got to have a forward police. They investigations are ongoing, you know, and so you can still sound very serious and credible. This is part of the reason why people are losing trust in the news I think. Victor Ahipene: Yeah, I think 100% and um, it’s a, it’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good example because regardless, most people see the news wherever they are in the world and it’s not an unusual thing. Yeah. You can watch the, the base. Yeah. The ones who are, I don’t know, good morning USA or the, you know, the biggest news branches versus maybe your regional one or, yeah, just the person who, you know, like, Oh, that person doesn’t vibe with me for some reason like yours. I was throwing Wally under the bus and the guy I referenced earlier, he’s a, he’s a sporting great. Who is, Sally Prosser: did he say anything about, well Victor Ahipene: great, but um, yeah, even my girlfriend sitting there going, what he doing on TV? Cause he, yeah, he does. He never sounds natural, like anything that’s coming naturally out. Unless they’re talking to him about rugby league and it’s not off the teleprompter then he sounds like a normal human being that you can relate to. And I think it’s a very, very, it’s a very good on him for going out there and then doing that. But it’s a very important aspect and the difference of, I think in my, my personal opinion is the trust. Like I don’t, I don’t think of them as untrustworthy, but I just switch off with his message that he’s delivering because of his voice. 100% Sally Prosser: yeah. Because he’s, he clearly sounds like he’s reading the words, not telling the story and you know, we’re very attuned. Even if we don’t know the technical reasons behind it, we’re very, very attuned to a genuine sounding voice. And that’s why we want the vibrations to be forward, not hidden at the back. We want the phrasing to be natural. We want variation as well, which is something we haven’t really talked about. But vocal variation is one of the main things more presenters could do with a, and that’s, we also want to voice where the breath flows freely out. And so to demonstrate that, hopefully my voice is doing that now. But you’ll hear some voices which are very restricted like this and the air, they actually holding their breath while they’re talking. Victor Ahipene: Hmm. And they, yeah. If you were to put it into a sentence, I tend to find that the end of the voice know with inclination just that’s dropping off. The closer it gets to the full stop because they run out of air, they like . They don’t pause for say that hypothetical, calmer. And if it’s a hypothetical comma, but that comma, they would otherwise sit in the sentence they have that comma that otherwise sits in the sentence. Sally Prosser: Yeah, absolutely. And what’s also interesting is often it’s not enough egg getting in. It’s a restriction in the throat, not letting the air go out. So it’s almost like it’s the body holding it in going, I’ve got to save some for later. And we know this is true because when we get home after a long day or a long week, we’ll sigh, we’ll go, Oh, you know, I finally letting the muscles of the throat open up and let that voice go. And that’s why it’s really one of the good exercises you can do is just a side. Have a nice big sigh. Ah, ah, and Victor Ahipene: last, last thing I wanted to touch on, what you just brought up was kind of that vocal intonation throughout presentations. Where do you feel, not just presenters on TV, but you know, people presenting in general, um, can improve in that aspect. Like, you know, what are they tending to do wrong? What’s the, the kind of 80, 20 of that? Sally Prosser: Oh, there’s so many things that we could talk about. Uh, so bad vocal variation is a good one. I talk about avoiding the vocal flat line. So if you imagine a very bit of a sad image in a way, but you know the flat line on the heart monitor, and that’s what we’re doing to our audience. If we don’t change things around, and there’s three things you want to change, you want to change up the pitch. We want to change up the pace and we want to change up the volume of our voice. So with the pitch that’s the most talked about. One, if we sound the same pitch, no matter if we go louder or if we go go faster or if we go slower, if we just stay on this one pitch, our brain is going to fall asleep. This is why people are meditation tapes have a monotone because we actually feel like going to sleep. Sally Prosser: It’s a good tip though, for anyone who’s got children out there, you want them to go to sleep when you read them their bedtime story. Don’t read with too much animation. If you goes straight into a monotone, they’ll be more likely to go to sleep and with pitch, you don’t need to be getting out there and singing. DOE Ray, me, everyone should just aim to be able to go up and be able to go down. And if you can go up and go down and be able to vary that through your presentation, that will be a big start. Uh, the next one is pace. So you’ll find that you’re more likely to speak too fast. That’s me. Oh, more likely to speak too slowly. So identify what your default is and then try to mix, mix it up. And it allows of course, volume volume I be careful with because you don’t want to go soft unless you know you’ve got the attention of the whole room. So going softer is one of the things that more of my professional speakers will do. You know, when they’ve got a microphone, they’ve got a whole audience and they’ve got that, that option to go down here so people can really listen to what they’re going to say. But you don’t want to do that if, if people can’t eat to begin with. Victor Ahipene: Yeah. And I heard something really interesting, even from the professional speaking side of things is understanding or respecting that audiences kind of nervous system in that like that lower pitched voices obviously as often something that’s more intense or something that’s more personal and people can’t maintain that anxiousness of, of what it is from an emotional level for 30 minutes. So you have to take them and again, like you talk about it gets, it gets people’s engagement, but it might be slower and quieter and then a bit louder and faster and then people are like, Oh, okay, cool. Oh, there’s a bit of humor and yeah, this is going on a bit of a tangent from, from there. But I think, yeah, it doesn’t matter even if it’s in a board room. Yeah. You obviously still want people to, to listen. Um, and you can use it effectively and there, but yeah. That, that uh, people’s emotions be held on edge for, for long, long periods. Sally Prosser: That’s right. And it’s not about having a low voice or a loud voice or a slow voice. It’s about having a voice that has range. There is no fast without the slow. There is no, the low doesn’t have the impact if you don’t have the high, it’s all in. The contrast is the ability to keep people on the edge of their seat and keep people guessing. Most people will go to a room and they’ll sit down and somebody will bring up the PowerPoint and they straight away switched off because they know what to expect and know what to expect to the presenters. So one of the best things you can do is just keep its people guessing. Victor Ahipene: Hmm. Keep changing it out and there we go. It’s a, it’s the most powerful thing I like I say all of these are so important and presenting. Yeah. Your audience don’t necessarily put their finger on it until it’s bad. Until it’s bad. You never have a person go, you never, or I shouldn’t say never, but more often than not, you’re not walking out of a presentation and saying, wow, that person had great voice, vocal variation and great pausing. But you go, man, that person was monotone. Sally Prosser: Ben, that person spoke. You don’t come out and say, wow, they, they they use of rising and falling inflections unless you make, yeah, Victor Ahipene: exactly. It’s why I say more often than not, your audience, your audience doesn’t go into that. Sally Prosser: If you learn how to do it, it’s, it’s absolutely a skill that you can learn and practice and master. So once you can, it’s like the dark arts. People don’t even really know why they like hearing what you’ve got to say, but they do. Yeah. Victor Ahipene: And often do. You can disguise what you’re actually saying with just it sounding super intimidating. Sally Prosser: Oh, Victor, yes. I’ve got away with not knowing what I’ve been talking about just because I have such an articulate voice. There’s been times that I’ve said, that’s a very, very good question. Thank you for asking. I’d love to look into it and get back to you. Sounds good. And in my mind I’m going, Oh, no, ID. Victor Ahipene: Well with all of that being said, I think hopefully people can now go out there and see the value of what your voice can do to a presentation. So I appreciate you coming on and sharing it. If people want to jump over and find out their one minute, uh, that one minute warm up that they can do and hopefully get into on a daily basis because we know you need to practice to actually get out on the court and play, uh, and if you want to play effectively. So I, you want to do that again? Where can they go and what can they do? Sally Prosser: Hey, it’s my website. It’s www dot Sally ProSight, S A L L Y P R O, double S E R.com Dot A U. Victor Ahipene: Brilliant. Well, if there isn’t sit in a bit of voice, I don’t know what is, appreciate your time and I look forward to, yeah, we just found out they were down the road from each other. I look forward to catching up in person and a take again, hopefully seeing what magic happens. Sally Prosser: Absolutely. Sounds great.

Getting onto a stage is one thing. Being memorable and impactful is a completely different kettle of fish. In todays episode Kenyon Salo talks about his transition from starting out as a speaker to doing what he loves (both on and off stage) full time. As one of only five members on the Denver Broncos Thunderstorm Skydive Team, Kenyon is seen each week flying into Broncos Stadium at 60+mph, ending with a soft tip-toe landing on the ten yard line. With over 6000 skydives under his belt and travels that have taken him all around the world, he’s determined to live life to the fullest and help others do the same. Through his passions for adventure, storytelling, and connecting with people, he found a simple process to guide others on a path to what most of us crave – living a more fulfilled life. For those aspiring speakers or anyone looking to level up this episode is an absolute must. Connect with Kenyon Salo Facebook Instagram Twitter Website Victor Ahipene: Speaking nation. Welcome to another episode of public speaking secrets. Super excited to take you massively behind the scenes today at to the dark arts with uh, of public speaking with Kenyaon Salo. He’s our guest today. He is the James Bond of public speaking. I’m going to link a video to his speaker reel on our website@publicspeakingblueprint.com later on because you need to see this is super high energy and I’m super excited to be able to get an insight on how he created his message and so much more today. So welcome to the show Kenyon. Kenyon Salo: Victor is so wonderful to be here. Thank you so much for having me. I’m fired up and you know, I love that it’s such a global world where you can be on one side of the world. I’m on the other and we’re able to have this conversation and be able to share any tips or bits of information or storylines that might be able to help some people along the way. Victor Ahipene: Super excited and yeah, exactly. It’s a, I was talking with someone on this side of the world a few hours ago and then someone on the other side of the world and then, uh, yeah, it’s, it just makes it, makes it awesome because yeah, the skills that we have with public speaking, they’re so transferable in the lessons are very similar. But to dive into that, like how did you get into the, the world of public speaking? Yeah, the keynote presentation space. How did that all kind of come about for you? Kenyon Salo: Well, for me, I am horrendous at dancing, drawing, doing any type of art or along those lines. But if I look back through my entire life, one of the key things through my entire life is that I’ve been pretty solid at communication. And even 20 years ago, I would look at some of the greats like Tony Robbins and I would see him on stage and I would say one day I want to be able to do that. And it was a process because everything I did in my life was geared around that communication side of things, that leadership side of things. And what I realized is that no matter what job I did, the most favorite part of my job was teaching, training, facilitating, speaking in front of others. And it wasn’t until 2015 when I finally had my message and then that’s when it was like, you know what? I’m going to do public speaking, I’m going to be a keynote speaker. I’m going to push this for full time and let’s make a career out of it. So an overnight success in 20 years kind of thing. Victor Ahipene: Nice. It’s, it’s really interesting you say that because I know a lot of having been to like Tony Robbins events, uh, everyone, no, not everyone, but a lot of people leave it and they decide I’m going to be a life coach or I’m going to have as big an impact as what Tony Robbins does or, yeah, I’m going to end up what, what tends to happen is a lot of people just try and do what Tony Robbins does the same impact as Tony Robbins. Like I’ve heard, um, some other speakers say, yeah, their first ever event. They had people dancing and clapping and they had like 25 people at the event. They’d got their family up the front and they were clapping and dancing and Oh yeah, I was trying to do the whole Tony Robbins, uh, you know, getting people into a prime state and that sort of stuff, which is, which is great.But I said, then they came out as a speaker and they didn’t have the same energy. They weren’t eight foot tall, they didn’t have a lumbering voice that went over and it didn’t fit there, calling their message, uh, everything that didn’t really associate with it. So it’s, it’s really interesting when I, you know, people like, I want to do what Tony Robbins is doing and I’m like, you gotta do you, you can, you can share the message to have impact. Um, but yeah, you’ve really got to find your, your own voice and your own style and otherwise, yeah, we’re going to have a hundred different, Tony Robbins is in 99 of them aren’t going to be doing a very good job. So run us through that 2015 what happened? What, what gave you your message, your calling? Where did that come from for you? Kenyon Salo: Well, ultimately building on exactly what you just said there, which is about authenticity. And for me, I had seen, studied, read, watched, just devoured as much content as possible from great speakers and trainers and leadership to understand what they’re doing and how they’re impacting the world and how they’re able to deliver it to those audiences. And not just people that were thought leaders, but also people like comedians, entertainers, actors, actresses, all along the lines. Anybody that was performing in front of an audience was where I took inspiration from. But also where I took learning from. So the ultimate scenario is understanding what the message is so that that way you’re authentic to yourself. That when you stand on stage, your 100% you. And if you’re not, people will, they’ll, they’ll know it, they’ll call BS on you, they’ll know if you’re not living the life that you’re telling people to live or you’re not living the message that you’re speaking about. And so for me, it was a transformation where all of a sudden I started realizing that I was living what I deemed a bucket list life. And so the message, the bucket list life came out of it and digging into the core values of the bucket list life, which was create more experiences, share more stories and live more fulfilled by helping others. I realized that I could teach, share, facilitate and train on those three concepts and design the entire keynote around that. And authentically it’s exactly what I would have been doing, was doing and would continue to do in my life. So I knew that I had finally found my message and then that was the platform that I could speak about. Victor Ahipene: That’s brilliant. And how, I mean obviously I’ve, I’ve seen your, your speaker rail and had a look at some of the stuff that you’ve been able to do it and it’s, yup. Pretty enticing and, and it allows you, I guess to create that authentic message that yeah, you see that video and you’re like, yeah, I believe this dude. Like, yeah. Not many people want to. Yeah. Just to spoil it. Throw themselves out of a plane and land in a football stadium. Like that’s not something that you fake once off to be like, yeah, now I can give this, this presentation on stage that you’re all going to believe in. Like, yeah, it’s something that people are, okay, this is authentic. This guy is living, you know, his bucket list life. When you were starting to put that together, say in 2015 what were your avenues that you would look in it to get onto stages then site or now was it like, you know, Hey, I’m going to find my local rotary club. Um, yeah, I’ll put on my own events and speak. How did, how did it kind of all come about with that? Kenyon Salo: Well, it’s a little bit of luck and a little bit of lightning in a bottle, but also being skilled and ready when the opportunity showed up. And that’s what happened for me where a Bureau reached out and said, Hey, I’ve heard your name a couple of times. I feel like I should reach out to you. Do you do public speaking? And I was like, well, well yeah, I’ve done a couple of events. Like friends had asked me or local type of smaller events for uh, towns or cities or, or chamber of commerce type of thing. And this Bureau reached out and said, look, I’ve got an engagement for a school. And I think schools are phenomenal places to start because the budgets really fit that new speaker and that new speaker can go in and have a pretty large audience to begin with. Sometimes a couple hundred, 500 on that type of level. And I think that’s phenomenal. So for me it was $500 for my first engagement. The Bureau took their 25% I got three 75 and I thought, wow, this is amazing. I made $375 for like an hour and a half to speak out. I thought I had really made the next level, but I had no idea that in the speaker world that you could make two thousand five thousand five figures. I was like, no way. And as I started to design my keynote and really dig into that, I said, you know what? I want to flip the industry. I want to be able to look at what the new trends are and make the differences and impact those audiences. And so I went from 500 to five figures per year, or I did that in a year. So, so that one jump from $500 to five figure engagements was a huge jump. But here’s the thing, you can’t just raise your prices and expect to get five figures. The quality also has to exist. So I made sure that the quality was there all along the and have continued to do that since that year. And it has been a phenomenal lifestyle ever since. Victor Ahipene: And what would that, have you stayed with the Bureau and what’s your advice on on that side of things for aspiring speakers? We’ve got some speaking agents coming on the show soon, so I’m looking, looking forward to getting kind of both ends of the spectrum of what people have experienced with, with using them. Kenyon Salo: I’m a huge, huge fan of bureaus and agencies. Look, they have 20,000 contacts in their email list that you don’t have. And so partnering with them, and I know I hear people all the time like, well how do I give up 25% what business out there keeps a hundred percent profits? It’s not the way it works. The fact that most speakers, let’s say you do 10% in marketing and 25% to a Bureau, you still get to keep 85 sorry, 65% come on now. That is unbelievable. So I’m all for bureaus. I love working with them. The more that you can partner, I don’t do exclusivity. I move along the lines where I want to make sure that I’m working one on one with all the bureaus and that every Bureau has an opportunity to book me because bureaus work in regions and you want to be able to hit that region with that Bureau because they have those connections. And then you basically build up your satellites and then they help you get your events and sure you’ll have some stuff coming through referrals or your website and things along those lines. But again, bureaus are our friends and they will help you build your business much faster than you could do on your own. Victor Ahipene: And what have you found from a reaching out to a particular, say a new Bureau that you’re looking to reach out to? What are the, the assets or the things that the ducks that you can have in a row that can make you more appealing for them to say, yeah, I want to not only take you on but get you in front of people. Cause that’s the, yeah. Oh, we want someone who’s going to talk about a particular thing and it’s, yeah, they’ve got to decide from five people. How do you get yourself to the in the door first and then to the top of the list. Kenyon Salo: It’s very similar to banks. So banks are happy to give you money when you don’t need it, but when you need it, they’re unlikely to give it to you. And so that’s kind of how it works with bureaus. So when you’re first starting out as a speaker, you can knock on all the doors, you might get lucky, you can get that one, especially if they’re local to you. That’s absolutely helpful. So a regional Bureau or local Bureau that’s close by, that absolutely helps. But there is a point at which as you build your brand, your online brand, your videos, your testimonials and things like that, you can use those assets to be able, well, it’s a build your business and reach out. So the longer that I’m in the industry, the more assets and stronger assets that I build, like my demo reel and my testimonial reels and the website, I use those to be able to reach out to be able to connect with bureaus. Kenyon Salo: Now here’s a little inside tip bureaus have lists of people like waiting lists that want to, people that want to get in and they’re getting hit up five, 10 20 times a day. They might have a list of two to 500 people that have reached out and said, Hey, I would love to be a part of your Bureau. So you have to figure out how to be the gold that once all the sand is sifted, you’re still sitting there. What’s the thing that’s going to make you stand out then anybody else? And so that’s something that I have really focused on. I work closely with my team and so when we present our marketing materials and we reach out to bureaus to get new bureaus, we make sure that we’re doing something that they haven’t seen, something that’s new, something that’s exciting, something that’s going to catch their attention. So that they’ll at least take a look further about, Hey, who is this guy, what is he doing? And let’s have some conversations to see if we want to bring them on to the team. So that’s, that’s pretty huge right there Victor Ahipene: and now. That’s awesome. Those are awesome insights and awesome tips. With your speaking career, how have, have you just stayed with the keynote presentations or have you used that as an end to, like you were saying, run deeper trainings on your particular topics? Yeah. Not at conferences and things or, or do you stay on the, on the speaking circuit? Kenyon Salo So for me it’s a complete pathway, StepStone pathway to where I want to go. And first and foremost was do as many speaking engagements as possible and continue to do them. And the reason why that is is because that’s the easiest way I start having income comment and build the brand and really get an idea of what your message is from the stage. So I really continue to focus on as many engagements. I do some breakout sessions, but those are only in addition to a keynote if they want a keynote and for me as a speaker to stick around for a breakout session so I can do that. And then the next step was speaker training. And so a handful of people that were training and helping them get to where they want. And so the team and I are focusing on that and we are launching speaker training, a full program at the end of March. Kenyon Salo: And again, it’s somebody that has an issue continuing to do it. And then the third step is branching out to these three day weekends where start to live that life. But again, you have to be able to show you’re doing it. I see so many people that are trying to do three day weekend trainings and they still haven’t gotten their act and their life together. So you have to be able to show that you’re doing that, you’ve done it and that you’re living in authenticity because then people will listen and then they want to be able to learn from you. And I think that’s super, super valuable. I think I will always do keynotes and I will continue and love to also do like three day weekends, maybe a five day full-on seminar retreat type of thing once a year. Victor Ahipene: Yup. And I mean I think that’s, that’s the ability to leverage your time even further when you’ve got individuals who can, you know, or pay you for your time over a weekend and you can, you can multiply that from a business standpoint obviously from an impact, but you know, w in the way that we’re there that we’re speaking. Whereas yeah, I need, the company pays you to come in and give the keynote presentation and then all the audiences are there. And I think you get a different buy and obviously your presentation if it’s enticing and you get buy in there, uh, when giving a keynote, that’s important. But when people are actually putting their own dollars and cents, uh, in front of you to for your time, then you get that kind of different psychological buy-in. They want to make sure that they get a result off the back of it too. Victor Ahipene: So, you know, different approaches. But yeah, I think it’s a, it’s a way to, yeah, future proof yourself as well in the sense that know a recession is going to come one day and some companies will tighten the purse strings when it comes to hiring keynote speakers. And then there’s going to be a whole lot of people looking to add another boat or their string to make themselves, yeah. Either it’s speaking to their resume or to be able to make themselves more hireable. So I think it’s a, it’s a brilliant strategy in, in that system. Kenyon Salo: And I think that’s very important because to build a successful speaking business, it takes time. And I know a lot of people that are like, Oh my gosh, I’m gonna book five speaking engagements a month. I’m going to do 50 60 70 a year and I’ll, I’ll, I’ll start doing that this year. Well, it actually doesn’t work that way. It is a, you get one this month, another month goes by, two months you get another one. And then you go from there. And a lot of people say, well, how do I, what is my price point? And the key to understanding price point is you can raise your prices if you’ve done 15 to 20 engagements at a current price point in a calendar year or in the last 12 months, and that if you’ve done that, then go ahead and raise to the next level, but you can’t just skyrocket to the, to the next one unless, unless you’ve got maybe something that’s a ridiculous quality and straight out the gate that’s going to work, but most of the time you have to just understand each level within the industry and be able to build up from there. Kenyon Salo And so where I’m going with this is yeah, you’re going to have to have another source of income. It might be a full time job where you take one or two days off a month to do the engagements that you get. You work on your business at night, you do your job during the day and then you eventually are able to transition out of it. But it will take time. It will take years and it’s a, it’s a labor of love for sure. Victor Ahipene: It’s awesome. I think that’s probably the best insight, the four people out there looking to get into that speaking lifestyle is yeah, you see the, and I love Gary, but you see the Gary V’s of like, you know, go hard, hustle, hustle your face off and all that stuff, which I’m not saying don’t do, but don’t expect that there’s going to be five or 10 speaking engagements that are going to pop up in the next month. As soon as you start hassling your face off because a lot of these events are going to be, or organizations are going to be, they don’t organize it three weeks out. They’re not like, Oh yeah, we need some speakers. Oh, that’ll be good. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll get, we’ll get Kenyan on. And um, yeah, it’s all sorted. Like there’s back and forth and all the rest of it that comes with it. And there’s a lot of forward planning from these places to make sure that I’ve got the right people.  Kenyon Salo: that’s right. And I often tell new speak or speakers or people in general that want to get into this industry. The best marketing that you can do is what you do on stage. And what I mean by that is you have one hour to present your best self and there’s gotta to be somebody in the audience that’s got to say, here’s my business card, I’m interested in you coming to my event, my company, whatever it is. And the thing is is that the turnaround time is not instantaneous. That’s exactly what you’re talking about, Victor. The turnaround time is sometimes six months, sometimes 12 months from now. I just got an email today from somebody had seen an event that was three years ago and they said, I saw you with this event back in 2017 and I’m interested in talking to you about coming to this event that’s a three year turnaround from that event. And the general rule of thumb is for every event that you do, you get at least one more speaking engagement. Sometimes it’ll be two, sometimes it’ll be zero, but the average is one more speaking engagement from a referral from that event, and that’s how you build your business over time so that that way it’s sustainable, Victor Ahipene: I think. Yeah. When you think about that, yeah. If you’ve, if you find and buy light, you know, whether that be your Bureau, your marketing or whatever. If you find 50 yourself over a period of time, then yeah, you should have another 50 coming in off the, off the back end and the future, and then you keep your market and then you know that stuff slowly builds and builds and then all of a sudden you’ve got a sustainable business. I think that’s really, but people should go back and listen to what we’ve just talked about because once you get that in your head, it’s not, you know, we’re not here to live in this like, Oh, let’s be realistic. Look, you’re going out by yourself trying to be a speaker. Like that’s not living in a realistic world. Everyone’s going to tell you it’s not going to work or it’s too hard or you’re not Tony Robbins or you’re whatever. Victor Ahipene So we’re not saying let’s be realistic, but when you can actually have some strategy and systemize and look to future, look into the future for what you are going to do, then you’re going to have, I think, a lot more success and you’re going to be able to uh, handle those ups and downs that we all go through and, and business ownership a lot better. When you were saying, yeah, your best marketing card is you being up on stage, what, what are the things that you’ve found, and I know I’m not talking so much about the authenticity or you’re your own personality, what have you found have been some of the, the secret sauce or the magic that have allowed you to create good online, not online, good onstage presentation. Kenyon Salo: Yeah. Victor, what you’re talking about there is stage craft from the second you step on stage to the second that you leave the stage. That stage craft is ideal. And ultimately the simplest way to explain it is let go of the data of everything you think you should say or you have to say in that timeline. Let go of the data and think about how you make your audience feel. Because at the end of the day, most of the time they’re not going to remember. Even if they wrote it in their book, they’re probably not going to go back and reference it. The audience is going to remember how you made them feel. And so my goal throughout the presentation is to make them laugh, to make them have aha moments. Some of them maybe have a tear that comes down their face, but they’re going to at least feel deeply . I want them to be able to have one simple take away. And that takeaway from my presentation is say yes. Say yes to life. Just say yes. And that’s the thing that they remember. They walked back to their personal lives. They go back to their professional lives and they remember, wow, that was an amazing presentation and I’m going to say yes today. And if that’s all they remember, my job is done and hopefully they’re also like we should say yes to bringing him in to the national event or the global event. We like that. Victor Ahipene: Yeah. It’s brilliant cause that’s something I talk about that one overarching message when you’re starting to make that presentation is what does that one thing that people will walk away with because everyone worries about, Oh, I better give them all these statistics. I better, you know, tell them all these different stories. It’s like everything just needs to work towards making sure they walk away with that one thing because yeah, everyone’s going to what you’re presenting differently. Everyone’s going to listen to some things. Some people are going to get a a text message or they’re going to get lost on their phone and they’re going to miss a certain part of it. But if they can all walk away and say are really liked. Yeah, I had a voice coach on now and our last episode and we were like, it’s these invisible ROI is that people don’t realize you never go, Oh, that person has such great tonality and such great focal depth and great pausing, but you also come, people leave and go, man, that person was monotone and the message was boring and or they spoke too fast or they spoke too slow. Victor Ahipene: Um, but you know, when you’ve got them right, people will never like, Oh, they nailed that because obviously, yeah, it’s just kind of an expectation when you are and as speaker that you have these things. If you don’t, it sticks out. Um, so yeah, I think that’s a, another entirely beautiful message is when you’re getting out there, what is your, what is your one message and you see it with people’s marketing of what do you speak about? Oh, I’m a, this center that in this end or that in a, you know, I, I’m talking about this and this and this and this. I can talk about whatever or who, who’s your target market or anyone and you’re like, come on. I, it’s not, um, yeah, of course you could talk to anyone but who, who can you speak to? And I think I, I don’t know from from your point of view, but the clearer you get on that, it’s easier to, to approach an organization or to put your marketing material in front of them when you know that their audience fits your target demographic. Kenyon Salo: That’s exactly correct. And you talk about the thing that that is a thing for me where speakers are like, I’m going to do leadership. Well what are you guys talking about? Leadership? Well that’s great, but what’s, what’s your angle? Oh it’s just leadership. I’m great at leadership and they don’t re they haven’t fine tuned it. And then that is why they end up in the pool of 500 speakers on a list that haven’t even been considered for a Bureau as opposed to exactly the thing that makes them stand out. And that is the thing that our team drives that point home again, what is it, the bucket list life. What makes your presentation special? It’s super high energy. Great for opening and closings. Who don’t you speak to generally rooms full of engineers or attorneys or or things like that. They’re, they’re tougher audiences for me. What’s your ideal audience? Well, 50 50 split or sometimes if it’s a geared a slightly more towards female, definitely helpful for my presentation. That’s wonderful. What’s your ideal audience size? Five to 600 can you handle a large audience? Yes, I did. 8,000 in Australia. It’s those types of things of knowing exactly how you’re going to answer questions and not seeming desperate, but instead being absolutely positively 100% belief in yourself and what you do. Victor Ahipene Yeah, I think that is, yeah. You say you’re going to be a leadership speaker or you’re not Simon Sinek, so you’re down the list. Yeah, that’s right already. And so it’s, you know, what is your point of difference? How can you get clear on your message? Cause once you’re clear in your head, you can start being clear to the organizations that are talking to you, the bureaus that are talking to you. And then, you know, knowing that your presentation, that you’ve got your one overarching message, your one takeaway message, because you’re clear on who they are, you’re not missing your unit with a bucket list. I’m sure engineers, they’re just all analytical and lawyers just want to argue on every reason why you don’t want to have a less than. Yeah. You know that it’s not going to have, you know, you’re going to have some introverted, uh, engineers out there who don’t want to go RAR, RAR and jump up and move around in a presentation. Victor Ahipene So it changes your whole vibe and yeah, that’s the difference between getting, yeah. When you got the right audience, and I, I’m just hesitant to guess, but there’s a difference when you’ve got the right audience and then one or two of them are coming up saying, we want you to speak at our next conference versus wow, that didn’t hit the audience at all. We don’t want you to come and speak at our audience again. Exactly right. You nailed it. That’s exactly right. Well, I appreciate all your, all your time. I think there’s a ton in there for people looking to get yeah. Any, any level of the speaking battle, particularly giving eye a clear framework on those people looking to get their feet in the water, get into the schools, get really clear on your message, get your uh, your, your understanding of everything you’ve really shared a lot. Victor Ahipene: So I’d, I’d highly recommend people listen to this a couple of times and just really look at what are the areas that you have ticked off so far in your speaking aspirations and your all your career and what are some of the, the, the holes that you can plug in that funnel. And if you would like more info, then we’ve got all the show notes and all the links@publicspeakingblueprint.com but Kenya want to welcome you to speak a nation and if people want to find out more about you and a we’re what you’re up to, where can they go and what can they do? Kenyon Salo: Absolutely. It’s Kenyan sailo.com so you can check out the webpage, check out the hire me section, all that stuff there. Especially for coaching or any other ideas. And additionally, Kenyan say low on all social media platforms and please friend may please reach out. I love helping speakers because what I realized is the more speakers that I help with their message means that it’s the more audiences that I’m having a chance to impact, even if I’m not on stage. Victor Ahipene That’s brilliant. Well, I appreciate your time and I am sure you’ve had an impact on many of the audience out there today, so you enjoy the rest of your day and I can’t wait to share the stage with you in the future. Great. Thanks Victor.

Brian Miller is a former magician turned author, speaker, coach, and consultant on human connection. His TEDx talk “How to Magically Connect with Anyone” has over 3 million views worldwide, and he now coaches aspiring TEDx speakers on crafting and honing the talk of their lives. Connect with Brian Miller Facebook Instagram Twitter Blog Podcast Book Victor Ahipene: Speaking nation, what’s happening? Welcome to another episode of public speaking secrets. Super excited to have you here and I hope your 2020 the new decade is kicking off brilliantly for you. Uh, it’s certainly has my end to end today. We’ve got somebody who, uh, we’ve already been speaking off air, Hey has flowing down the road just a few weeks ago. We got that close from the other side of the world, but I’m now we’re back on now I’ll say for sides. His name is Brian Miller. He’s a former magician, these turned author, speaker, coach and consultant on human connection. And we’re going to dive deep. He’s also a TEDx speaker like myself. We’re going to learn a lot in regards to both as speaking side of things and how he connects with people to be able to boost that. So super excited to have you here and welcome to the show, Brian. Brian Miller: Hey Victor. Thanks so much. It’s a pleasure. Victor Ahipene: So give everyone a bit of a bit of a background like magician, magician, turn, speaker. Were you a silent magician or does that, does that? How did you kind of, I guess, Mike, that transition into, into the speaking world from, from the magician side of things? Brian Miller: Yeah. So I know you, you recently had on Tim David, who’s a friend and mentor of mine and actually how you and I were connected and he also is a former magician, turned the speaker. But what’s interesting is that if your listeners heard his story recently, uh, the fact that we were both former magicians is basically where our stories and in terms of their similarity, we had a very different path in spite of both being magicians. So I actually ended up speaking purely by accident. Uh, I never wanted to be a speaker. I never intended to be a speaker. I, if I’m being really honest, I thought like when I thought of speaker, I thought of motivational speakers, right? And I just, I thought they kind of word lame. Like I really did. I really thought motivational speaking was lane. I was not a fan of Tony Robbins and, and nothing against, not a knock on him, like, right. But like I, aye. That is what I imagined speaking was. So I, I was in, um, college for philosophy and my plan was I was all set to start a PhD. I’d been accepted into PhD programs for philosophy, uh, right out of undergrad. And I come from an a family of academics, scientists, mathematicians. So like go to grad school, become a professor that was set out for me, like laid out all my life. That was always the path my life was going to take. But I got really into magic when I was a kid and I started doing it in high school instead of working at McDonald’s. Basically it was like my part time job in high school doing magic shows. And then I continued to support myself through college and the last hour I decided I wanted to try to make a living as a magician. And so I abandoned ship, which was a really rough phone call home to mom and dad. Uh, that was not ideal. And it took years before they really came around. I mean, poured it, right? Like I don’t want to sound like that. Like they were like, okay, like, I mean do your thing, but when it fails, you’ll obviously go back to grad school, right? Like, it was kind of like that, right? Like, all right, whatever, you’re 22, you have time to fail. Um, but no one, I don’t think anybody really took it seriously. And what’s interesting is that speaking, even though it ended up being an accident for me later in my career, it was laid out. When you look at, you know, how Steve jobs said, you can only connect the dots looking backwards. For me it’s hysterical to look backwards and realize I was always going to end up being a speaker first.I was going to do a PhD in philosophy of language. That was my area of interest was, uh, how our language relates to the world, if at all. And, and, you know, meaning and semantics and stuff like that. So speaking was always an interest there. And then as a philosophy undergrad, I actually, uh, aye had a paper two years in a row excepted to, uh, the largest undergraduate philosophy conference in North America. And two years in a row. I presented that paper at that conference and two years in a row I was awarded the president’s award for best presentation. So was right there in my, you know, kind of in my ethos, even though I then abandoned ship and decided to try to be a magician. So in 2011 I was struggling to get my magic career off the ground. I had some gigs, I was doing all rights, but it wasn’t nearly enough. I was having trouble paying rent and buying food and I was doing the starving artist thing. And at that point, just in an attempt to find some way to make some more money that did not involve getting a part time job, uh, at, you know, McDonald’s or, or some retail location. I was really determined not to get a part time job. It felt like it would be a failure. Um, I’m not sure I now agree with that, but that’s how it felt at the time. And so I came up with this idea to create a lecture, a philosophy lecture that used live magic demonstrations, uh, to explain the philosophy concepts. And I came up with a title, it’s called magic, philosophically speaking. And I wrote a three or four sentence description and it was, this was 2011. So I just hit Google and manually found the email address, every department philosophy chair at every single college campus in the Northeastern United States within driving distance. Hey, I think this would be really good for your, you know, I’m a philosopher and a magician and, uh, and I think this would be good for your students and even open it up to the community. Huh? Amazingly, eight or nine of them got back to me and five of them booked. So I mean, think about the percentage, right? That’s, that’s nothing but I mean, five of them booked and each of them paid five, six, $800 a pop. Like these weren’t big engagements, but at the time I was broke. That was a huge amount of money. And you know, these were philosophy departments. They weren’t corporations or anything. They didn’t have a budget for speakers. I was just some guy and they were like, well, that sounds good. Let’s, let’s find some money and try that for all. For all. I know some of these department chairs pulled it out of their own pocket, you know what I mean? So aye. I went and did that series of, uh, lecture show things. Um, Oh, it’s worth noting when they booked. I didn’t have it. I didn’t have a lecture. I didn’t have anything. I just had a title and three or four sentence description. So I spent months panicking, actually writing, uh, the lecture and I came up with this idea of doing a 90 minute lecture, broken up into three sections. Each 30 minute section would tackle UN a problem in contemporary philosophy from three different areas of philosophy. So I took metaphysics and epistemology and moral philosophy, one big contemporary problem in each and then used live magic demonstrations and audience interaction to make those concepts stick and make it fun. And they were a big success and then nothing else ever happened with that. I then started to find success as a magician and for years I just built my career as a magician and speaking never cropped back up until I got yanked into that world with the success of my TEDx talk. So that, that is the very strange and winding path I took to end up in speaking, having no intention of being here. Victor Ahipene: Okay. It’s awesome. And it’s um, yeah, it’s funny, like, yeah, I think it’s a very similar journey that a lot of lot of people come or go down. It’s like they accidentally, not accidentally stumbling, but like you say, connect the dots looking back and it was like, well, yeah, if I knew that I was always made to do, it would have been a bit easier. But, anyway, wait with the TEDx thing, because you, you know, you would have worked with a lot of people as well and it’s this kind of, it’s this big shining beacon. Um, yeah, it’s the Northern light that yet that you follow for your directions and a lot of people are, I really want to be a TEDx speaker. I want to give a TEDx store. Having that kind of come about from you being a magician, was it off the back of those lectures that someone heard about it or, um, yeah. How did that all come about? Brian Miller: Nope, it’s equally ridiculous and random. Um, I’m I the worst answer to this question I get, as you might imagine the these days I coach a lot of, uh, well not, not a lot. I, I don’t promote my services as a speaking coach, but I, because of the fact that my TEDx talk did over 3 million views and at one point was in the top one 1000th of a percent of the most popular TEDx talks ever given. I’m sure that’s not true anymore, but people reach out to me on a regular basis and I usually one person at a time case at a time, I will decide to work with, um, if I have time for it. Cause that’s not where I make a living. I make a living on stage speaking. Um, having said that, the number one question I get asked is how do you get a TEDx talk? You know, and, and I have the worst answer for this question because the way I got it was I was invited, I wasn’t trying to give one, I never considered giving one. I was obsessed with Ted and TEDx talks because, um, I’m not sure. I think we might be somewhere within the same age. I’m actually have no idea. I could be off by 10 years. But I was in college, uh, when YouTube was invented. So maybe where we are or are not the same age. Yeah, no idea. Yeah. But I was in college when YouTube was invented, so I remember when Ted talks showed up on this new thing called YouTube and it was a big deal and I’d been following them. And what happened was I got up call as I was walking into a magic gig from a number I didn’t recognize, but I’m self employed. So I answered it. And this guy had the other end of the line just said, hi. Uh, is this Brian Miller and I was like, yeah, and he just said, uh, Oh, my name is Parag Joshi. Uh, I am a local high school English teacher in Connecticut, but I’m running a TEDx conference this year for the first time. I got your name from a couple of different people wondering if you’d like to speak at our conference. Okay. And I just said, uh, I’m walking into an event right now. Uh, I have to get off the phone. Yes. And can you call me back tomorrow? And like, that was it. He’s like, yeah, sure. And then that was it. Phone call was over and I did that. I don’t even remember that event. I’m sure I wasn’t conscious the entire time because I was just like, what? And he called me the next day and basically what happened is this guy Parag who’s become a good friend, uh, in the years since he took his, this is so weird and winding, you’re going to have to forgive all the tangents it takes to get to this story. He took his daughters to a local performing arts studio for their music lessons. Well if you backtrack all the way back to 2010 when I moved to Connecticut and I had no, uh, not enough clients, aye. One of the first things I did was I sought out a local performing arts studio and offered to teach magic lessons thinking if I teach kids magic, maybe some of their parents will then want to hire me for parties. And, and it worked. It worked great. And for a couple of years I did magic lessons there. Um, and that entire group of people, the staff at this performing arts center became my friends cause I moved to Connecticut on a whim. I had no friends and no one and no colleagues because I’m self employed and right. No way to meet people. So they became like my best friends. And so this, this guy Pirog, he was taking his daughters two is their music lessons and he was waiting for them and chatting with the studio coordinator, Casey. And he asked her, he said, uh, you know, I’m running a TEDx conference this year at the local high school. She’s like, Oh, that’s great. He said the theme of the conference is illusion versus reality. Do you know anybody who’d be good speaking at it? Hmm. And she just Brian Miller now, this woman Casey, she’s my best friend in the world. She was a bridesmaid in our wedding. Uh, me and my wife, like she’s, you know, her and her husband and become like the couple that we date, you know, a couples that are in relationships with other couples. And so the chances of him just being in there and saying that and mentioning the theme of the conference to the person that from years and years earlier had become my best friend. I mean, seriously, right. What are the odds of that? So he called me on that. I accepted his invitation and then had again had no idea what I would talk about. I had two months to get it ready and I was just a magician. I had absolutely no idea what would be worth talking about. And I floated a bunch of different ideas to some of my colleagues and friends in the industry. And the only idea I floated that I was not interested in is the one they all thought I should talk about, which was perspective taking. And that ended up becoming the how to magically connect with anyone talk and Victor Ahipene: from, from the obviously when on was fairly, you know, obviously not fairly, but really successful in regards to to its reach and everything like that. So it’s a fast, fast forward along that. Um, did you, after that go, Hey, I wouldn’t mind doing more speaking or was it the people reaching out from being exposed to that presentation that were like, Hey, we’d love you to come and start speaking? Like how did, how did that transition from um, yeah, music, music, magic teacher and magic performer then transitioned into your keynotes? Brian Miller Yeah, so when I gave the talk, I was, I was at that point, I was a relatively successful magician. I was touring nationally, I was making a good living, um, by no means, you know, at the top of the world. But I was making a good living. I was putting my wife through her masters. So doing well enough. So, uh, and so I, I’d broken through that and my management, you know, I was chatting with the, when we were getting ready for the talk and the couple of months there, I was chatting with my manager who helps guide my career and, and what we were hoping, what we were hoping the TEDx talk would do is we thought, well, if we can somehow scrape together 10,000 views, we were like, 5,000 would be great. If we can get 10,000 views, we can probably increase my rate as a magician by a couple hundred bucks. That was the goal. That was the bar. We were like, that was the pipe dream. Maybe we can become a $1,500 magician or a $2,000 magician instead of a thousand dollar magician if we get enough views on this TEDx talk, because that’ll look really, you know, significant or something. That was the, that was the goal. So when it did 10,000 and then it did 100,000 and then it did a million and then it did 3 million, uh, we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. And the calls started coming in. People all over the world were seeing it and reaching out and asking if I could come, basically, can you just come do like, can you do 45 minutes at our conference? Can you basically do the TEDx talk but just do it for 45 minutes? And we just, we started saying yes and we didn’t even know what to charge. We started just, well I don’t know. We started asking people looking it up, cause I, we knew what the charge is a magician, we knew that market, but we didn’t know the speaking market. So we started saying numbers that seemed ridiculous. Right? Thousands of dollars, $5,000, like to us as a magician. That was lunacy saying those numbers. Um, but you know, come to find out those aren’t, those are low budgets in the speaking world. Right? And, and so people to our surprise had no issue with those budgets. And not only that, but again, same situation is when I had done those lectures, this had been a story of my career, which is we, we pitch something and then if someone bites then we figure out how to do it. Like we always pre-sell. I’ve always done that naturally. Just why invest a tremendous amount of effort into something if I don’t know if there’s actually a market for it or an audience for it. So when someone says yes that I would, that I want, that I’m going to buy, I’m actually going to put my credit card down and put a deposit because I want that. And then it’s like well okay someone has paid for it. I know it’s worthwhile and I know what it’s worth. Now I know what I need to do to create that, to deliver that value. Right. So we uh, we basically, I just got to work taking the 15 minute TEDx talk because that’s all I had to say in the world on that topic. I mean I had 14 minutes and 11 seconds to say on perspective taking, which was mostly G and not even cause cause half of the TEDx talk I did was magic tricks to pad it. I didn’t even have that much. So Mmm. But for whatever reason it was striking this chord, you know the, the talk was about how to take on perspectives that are different from your own to bridge the gap and create connection and understanding the way that I had learned to do that as a magician. That was the goal is to teach people how to do, how to connect with others the way that magicians learn to connect with audiences. And it was 2015 when I gave that talk and I just got lucky and when I say I got lucky, I don’t mean I didn’t work hard. I don’t mean that I didn’t have talent. I don’t mean that I wasn’t entertaining. All of those things were true. But I also got lucky in that I gave this talk about connecting the same year that the entire world, if you remember right around there, took a really weird turn into being very divisive, very distracted. And it was kind of the beginning of the world that we now live in is really broken, divisive world. And um, you know, so I, I was, uh, the talk, the title had magic in it and, but it was about connecting and the thumbnail was like a fedora wearing goofball and a suit and like with a piece of rope in his hand. And you know, it was like every weird thing you could have never planned, just collided. And that’s why I call that luck. Mmm. So I didn’t, I wasn’t, I was just a magician. I had no idea. And I didn’t, I, impostor syndrome never hit me as hard as it did when I started giving these speeches for these, you know, four or five, $6,000 price tags knowing I wasn’t sure I wasn’t an expert in this stuff. They were acting like I was, the audience was treating me like I was. They were listening for real. I wasn’t like when I was a magician where you had to fight for their attention. College students and dining halls that weren’t paying. It’s like, you know, the fight with people on their phones. These were people who thought I was an expert. So they were leaning in and I felt that responsibility and it really hit me. And so I spent the next year just in an attempt to get to conquer my imposter syndrome. I thought, well, the only way to conquer the imposter syndrome is do not be an impostor. So I just devoured for a year, asked my wife, I disappeared for a year and to book and videos and conversations with them. I read everything you could read, watched every video you could watch, talk to every person I could talk to who studied connection, communication perspective, you know, psychologists and philosophers and sociologists and academics. Mmm . It turns out the way people become experts is just by obsessing over a very niche topic, more than anyone has in their right mind. Would ever do. And after a year of just trying to not feel like an idiot, when I was giving these speeches, I became the quote unquote expert, you know, nobody’s really an expert, but I became the quote unquote expert that people thought I was when, uh, when they were paying me. So that first year was a lot of growing pains, lotta getting out of your comfort zone, lot of learning to become an academic. And all of a sudden my career came full circle where I realized I had just skipped the PhD and became an academic. It was, it was kind of weird. So really weird detour through magic tricks, stupid amount of awesome learnings within . Victor Ahipene: They’re part of your journey. I think like for instance, I, I see a lot of people out there and they, uh, they go out and they write out three or you know, work out three keynote presentations that they’re going to do or they decide they’re going to put their expertise into a course and they go and create the whole course. Whereas I’m, I’m very much in your camp and I know a lot of other people are in the sense of, uh, build the plane while you’re flying or, you know, pre presale that idea, get it out there and, if people actually want it, it’s not because it’s the best kept secret behind the scenes. You go, Oh, well I’ve got the greatest thing in the world. Uh, why are you guys. Yeah. Not, not signing me up to speak or not, not doing anything like that. And the other thing is like, yeah, yeah, there’s that, that, um, aspect of lack, which I think everyone gets somewhere along their journey in different ways, but it’s also having that willingness even with the imposter syndrome, because yeah, if you don’t get it, I’m impressed with anybody who doesn’t get it. Brian Miller: You’re not trying hard enough or you haven’t taken it seriously enough. Victor Ahipene: Yeah. And I, I think with that as it’s willing to be able to go, okay, yeah, cool. I’ve got some luck. Am I willing to go all in on it or am I willing to take another chance on it? Because a lot of people, um, yeah, Oh, why, why is me a the kind of victim mentality? Why does this never happen to me? It’s like, well, did you miss EJ 400 universities? Like did you go and start teaching something? Can then, you know, other opportunities happen to happen because of that. No, you didn’t. So it’s about putting yourself outside of that comfort zone and then luck happens off the back of it. You know, you can’t necessarily predict what’s going to happen, but if you’re not out there taking action off the back of it. So I think a couple of, of really, really cool things off the back of that and not being, not being too set in stone in regards to, you know, you got these, and this is just me hesitant, I guess. You know, TEDx talks, they have this, yeah. If they do have that viralocity about them at say, yeah, a quick op shot and then, um, YouTube decides, okay, we’ve had enough of that one for the time being. Um, and it kind of tapers off. Um, yeah. It’s, it doesn’t go. Yeah. Oh, 3 million, 30 million, 300 million. Um, Alicia Simon, Alicia, Simon Sinek or, or, um, yeah. Along those lines, how did you, um, from from a, you know, you kind of transitioned into the speaking world, how did you then leverage the, say the, the talks you are giving and two further talks. Did you have to develop your kind of the outreach side of things or was it your like, Hey, I did an awesome job and performance, uh, there more people are referring me on to other organizations. How did that kind of look from your yeah, your next 12 months from there? Brian Miller: Yeah. At the beginning we were approaching it the only way we knew how, which was how I built my magic career. And it turns out that the speaking industry was not anywhere near as similar to the Madigan industry as I expected or hoped for. Um, you know, magic seems like it’s this kind of highly specialized thing, but it like it is. But at the same time, most people book a magician for their event by going on the internet and searching. And yes, at the highest corporate levels, they’re obviously going to work on referrals and people they already know, but the, but when you’re a magician, it’s a fairly easy to just advertise on the internet to just do straight forward internet marketing. Because I know the kind of person who’s looking for a, I know what keywords they’re going to be searching for. I know how to target their demographic or their geographic range, you know, region, whatever. But what you learn very quickly in the speaking industry is that unless you are simply a public speaker, not a professional speaker, and the difference here is really important, right? Public speakers are just people who become really good at the art of speaking. So you can bring them in to talk on any topic, right? You’re, if you’re a local event and you say, Hey, we’ve got this 10 minute spot, we need someone to talk on behalf of this new product we have or whatever. We need a public speaker, someone who’s good at speaking to learn our stuff and deliver the talk. That’s a public speaker. And they are commodities. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s a million of them. There’s a million people who are just good at speaking and we’ll come talk about whatever topic that company wants them to as opposed to being a professional speaker. Professional speakers have our own, we have our own message. You don’t, you don’t hire me to come talk about what you want. You will hire me to come talk about what I talk about. No one hires me to come, you know, talk about, I don’t know, uh, you know, uh, well what were you talking about? But uh, before, uh, the, the great barrier reef energy conservation of, of their natural resources. Like, yeah, could I, of course I could. Cause I’ve, I’ve, I’ve become really good as a speaker so I could take my skill as a speaker and learn your script, but I’m not going in to speak about that. You can’t ask me to come speak about what you want. You’re only going to hire me if you want my message, my story, my experience, my perspective, and that’s what professional speakers do. And that that is the difference between someone who gets 500 bucks to go to some local event and talk about whatever they want and to talk about. And somebody gets five grand, 10 grand, 20 grand to come give a 45 minute speech halfway across the world, be phoned first-class and put up in resorts and all this other stuff that seems impossible, certainly did to me when I started. That only comes when you have a very, very clear message and a very clear, uh, call to action, right? When you’re actually delivering something that’s going to bring more value than the 10 grand. They think, yeah, we’re paying 10 grand, but so what? We’re going to get a hundred grand worth out of this. So who cares? Right? It’s worth every penny. So the way to get those gigs, no one’s booking a speaker for five, 10 20 grand by Googling, you know, speaker near me in Melbourne, Australia or whatever. Right? No, that’s not who getting hired by Google searches. The only people getting hired to give those kinds of speeches, the ones at the top of the industry. Right. And I’m not talking about celebrities. So excluding the people who are already famous for something that people like us, who are professional speakers, getting five figure rates, how are we getting booked? We’re not getting booked on Google searches. We’re not getting booked from advertising. We’re getting booked because of our connections. The industry, it is a relationship. Business. Speaking is a relationship business. People only hire speakers that they either know of, they know personally, or they know someone who knows of or knows personally, right? That’s it. Other than that, if they can Google for a speaker, you’re not going to get booked for 10 grand. If they’re Googling, they have a budget, they have a low, they have a $500 budget or even a thousand dollars budget. And again, there’s no nothing, there’s nothing wrong with being that that person, right, by all means you do you. But if this professional speaker flyer around the world give keynotes and workshops and consult if that’s what you’re looking for, you need to build relationships. So that, that was a super, super, super long answer to what you originally asked me, which was how did I actually turn the TEDx into a career that first year, I almost failed to do it. I almost didn’t capitalize on the success of the TEDx talk because we were trying to do new internet marketing based on the Ted X talk. We are just trying to take our old model and shove it into this new industry didn’t work. And I probably lost a lot of potential, uh, by making that mistake, but we didn’t know any better. So once we figured that out, I started leveraging every single speech. Every time I’m on stage, every handshake, every person I meet is someone that I need to make sure I connect with, which of course ironically is what I talk about on stage. But it’s amazing how you can forget to do the thing that, you know, when it comes to yourself, right? It’s really easy to give other people advice, right? That’s why you see doctors smoking right outside the ER, right? And you’re just like, how? How could you possibly, well, it’s really hard to take your own advice. So when I really started to live and breathe the message, I was actually, you know, putting out there on stage that I was getting hired to come speak about and making meaningful connections with everyone. And when I say with everyone, I mean not just the people you think can book you. I mean everyone. That is a very difficult thing to do. I wrote an entire book about it, right? Three new people. That entire book is about adopting this mentality of showing up for everyone. You meet on a daily basis personally and professionally. Learning to look people in the eye and say, I hear you, I see you and I’m here for you. And if you can make that your life’s philosophy, obviously your personal life will be better, but you’ll find your professional life, especially in a relationship industry starts to take care of itself. Victor Ahipene: Nice. Awesome. And I think that’s, uh, yeah, there’s an, in regards to kind of that, that connecting with people, is that like you’re saying, there’s going to be, you don’t know if you’re talking to the potential, you know, someone whose husband’s in HR or wife’s an HR person at a, at another company and they do the hiring for their events and nights they go home and they rave because they had that personal connection with you. Um, yeah, it’s very much the Gary V model of I, yeah. Some dude stops him at the airport and he’ll give them that five or 10 minutes or um, you know, being able to genuinely connect with people, because I’ve always said it, people will not come to the back of the room and want to talk to you if they didn’t feel moved or touched or have some sort of opinion. There’s, there’s always going to be the people who are like, Oh, okay, that, that didn’t resonate with me at all. Or I had other things on my mind at that time or you know, whatever. And they’re going to disappear. Those other ones, it’s like, yeah, you can either be the snob, you can be the person who’s like, Oh yeah, I only want to talk to, you know, the CEO of this company. Or you can be the person who’s like, if I just want to connect with people, um, and, and take everything to the next level with them and allow them to, you know, ask what they want to ask or share what they want to share or get off their chest because that deep. And that’s what I freaking love about being able to present and speak to people is when you do it, um, yes, you get a bit of, um, you know, people love listening to podcasts and learning like this or they love watching a YouTube video, but having that visceral ability to have the hears on the Beck unit stick up or have their aha moment drop in a room and then potentially be able to connect with that speaker or that workshop facilitator, facilitator or whatever it may be. Um, it’s just like a whole, a whole different level, which is what I, yeah, absolutely. Brian Miller: Feeling of being scene of being understood is so powerful and it’s becoming rarer and rarer in a world that is very divisive and, and, and all these different silos and bubbles that w the social media has shoved us into. We have forgotten how to do that. And when someone shows up in your life, especially a stranger, when you haven’t experienced sit standing in line waiting for coffee and, and the person standing in front of you actually turns around and strikes up a conversation for 20 seconds and it doesn’t have to change your life. But in that moment, it’s amazing how good it feels to be seen as a person with value. And we just don’t do it anymore and people are desperate for it. Victor Ahipene: Mm. So before, before we ran out, there’s one other thing that I hope listeners out there picked up and it was your ability to be an expert in, like you said, like no one’s really an expert, but you go, if you’re thinking that you’ve got an area of expertise or, or knowledge, like you were saying, go and obsess on it. Go and get the first 10 or 20 to start with off Amazon, uh, in that space. Go on, watch. Yeah. A hundred or a thousand hours of, uh, you know, other thought leaders in that space on, on YouTube and by other people’s courses and learn and see are you on the right track? You’re, where do you disagree? Where do you agree? Because the more and more knowledge that you get on that particular subject is what is going to be able to turn it from a 14 minute presentation with, you know, filled up with some magic tricks to get to there. And so, you know, 45 minutes and going, ah, I’m only, I’m only scratching the surface on what I write, Brian Miller: right? When the, when I get booked now and someone says, you, we got, we need you for a 45 minute keynote. I’m like, Oh, I only have 45 what am I going to talk about in only 45 cause I do six hour workshops now and that’s not enough. You know, and like there’s just this wealth of stuff that I want to talk about. And actually the hardest thing now is choosing which 45 minutes is the right stuff for this project. Particular audience, this, this group of people sitting in front of me today. Victor Ahipene: Hmm. And I, I honestly think being able to, you know, have something that you can speak for three minutes, 30 minutes. Yeah. Three hours, three days is what allows you to help minimize that impostor syndrome, uh, is what helps you go, yeah, okay, well look, I could, you know, I’m not struggling to fill out 30 minutes. I’m sitting there going, shit, how do I only speak for 30 minutes? Uh, yeah. Our value of value. Like, you know, there’s a lot of extroverts who think they’re good speakers because they just hide the sound of their own voice and they just speak for 30 minutes. But yeah. Of value. Once you kind of hit that point, you’re like, Oh man, like, yeah, I’m, I’m, I’m legit at this or I’m good at this. Or, um, yeah, not drinking your own Kool-Aid too much, obviously, but I, I really, really value that point because it’s something that I say to people, like, you’re never going to know too much about your area of expertise. Um, and you know, everybody who’s kind of deemed in that, you know, quote unquote expert area has learned from other people. So go out and kind of divulge in and get as much as you can in that space. So yeah. Brian Miller: And I I want to highlight real quick, one of the things you said which was so important and I think it might’ve flown by the anybody listening just now, which was that you said, you know, find people you know, what do you agree with, what do you disagree with that disagree with is really important. Like at some point when you start to form your opinion on your, your content area, when you start to become something of an expert, it’s, it’s easier and easier to just find people who agree with you cause there’s a wealth of that and what you need to do if you’re going to keep growing and become a deeper and deeper expert with a larger base of knowledge and information. and wisdom hopefully. Right. The difference between knowledge and eventually to be wise about a topic is you have to actively seek out people who disagree with you. And, and not people who disagree with you on a whim, not the people on Facebook making silly comments who don’t know what they’re talking about. Know experts who’ve studied for years or 10 years or decades, who disagree with you with a lot of data and an experience and opinions to back it up. Ah, okay. Because when you find someone who’s got really fantastic arguments that disagrees with you, then you start to really learn about that topic. Victor Ahipene: That’s a little some, well, there’s a ton to dissect in the everybody and it’s, I, what I really loved about this episode is it just shows that you, even if you never thought you’d be a speaker or you’re on a particular journey now and you know, you’ve got a message that you do want to share, it can be a winding journey. You’ve got to have that kind of perseverance through there. But yeah, I employee old to look to be that, uh, that expert speaker rather than the hired gun, um, out there because it’s, it’s gonna, it’s gonna be more impactful, more impactful for you, even though, you know, it may be stroking the ego side of things, but it’s going to be more impactful for you to want to get up and do it every day as well as for your audience because you know that you can control the narrative a lot, a lot stronger. So with all of that being said, I really appreciate your time and want to welcome you to speak a nation family. If people want to find out more about you, your, your book, um, getting in touch and, and, uh, following your journey week and they go and what can they do? Brian Miller: Great. Yeah. Thanks so much Victor. I mean, this was a pledge. I feel like you and I could talk for three more hours, but uh, or, or 30 more hours probably. But, uh, if somebody wants to find out more about my work, if you just go to three new people.com, uh, all spelled out, three new people.com although I think if you put the number three and instead I also own that domain and a forwards to there. So I think past me was very smart about that. But three new three new people.com right there. You’ll see my book obviously, but you’ll also see an email box you can put in your email and gain access to all of my free resources. Literally the book is the only thing I charge for. That is the only thing. I have a weekly blog and a community. I have a biweekly podcast with legends and leaders of industries. A lot of people that you, if you’re listening to this podcast, many people like we were talking about earlier, people like Seth Goden, uh, and, and people like, uh, Chris Voss who’s coming on soon and my next season. People that you’d be really interested in hearing from. Mmm. And yeah, you can toss your email in there and get a bunch of resources and based on the conversation we just had, one of the resources you’ll get is called meet your three, seven ways to open a conversation with anyone. This is an exceptional free resource. Victor Ahipene: that you’ll get if you just pop your email in. So three new people.com. Brilliant. Well, we’ll link all of that for all of you@publicspeakingblueprint.com as well. You can find this in all our previous episodes. Look, it has been an absolute pleasure diving into the art of human connection, but also how to be able to leverage that into, into the world of public speaking. So I appreciate your time and I look forward to hopefully liaising better next time. We’re on either side of the world. Absolutely. Well, vector, thanks so much again. And a happy new year. Happy new year.

Amanda Williams is the founder (but also goes by the title of ringleader and professional attention seeker) at Yellowpanda PR. When we first met a Digital Markter event in 2015, she was responsible for building the public images of politicians through media relations, online marketing and personal branding. These days she manages the personal brands of trailblazing young entrepreneurs in addition to PR launches for startups through to iconic international brands like Disney Pixar. Get in touch with Amanda Williams LinkedIn Instagram Facebook Group Website Book a call Victor Ahipene: Speaking nation, what’s happening? Super excited to have you back. Uh, I’ve been off the mic for a little bit, uh, getting things done in the real, real world. But I am back with a whole bunch of awesome interviews with people who are designed to help you learn the secrets to getting your message onto stage and in front of more people. And I’ve got a good friend of mine today, Amanda Panda Williams, who is the chief cheerleader for and ringleader for Yellow Panda, which is a company that helps people who are looking to get their message out there. Do that with PR and personal branding. And she has done that and an extremely awesome way. So I’m looking forward to getting someone, you know, who’s often doing the behind the scenes for the amplification of the message rather than the person actually out on the stage. But she does that as well. So with all that being said, welcome to the show, Amanda. Amanda Williams: Thanks it’s great to be a here. Victor Ahipene: Okay. Now give us a bit of a quick background. Why, you know, what, what is it exactly that you do in regards to kind of the PR and personal branding and how did that all kind of come about? Amanda Williams: I guess it comes from my background to start ways. I’m working in politics as a major advise us. So my role back then was essentially looking after the public image of politician. Um, so that was everything from, you know, that’s sort of digital footprint. So websites, social media, I’m dealing with the media, doing those video relations, I’m doing that sort of Stripe payoff stuff, but also working on local issue campaigns, writing this speeches, I’m basically doing everything I can to support them as you know, talent in politics. So, um, I guess it was sort of a natural sort of progression then to may once I left politics to start doing that. So entrepreneurs. Victor Ahipene: Nice. And what’s, yeah, if we were to, to look at, I guess what PR kind of all entails, because I talk about this in different things that I’ve put out. As you know, I help people get onto stages and to me there’s online in this offline stages, but a stages just to me are way that you can amplify your message to have a bigger impact to people. So it’s not just you, what you, a lot of people think of as your traditional stage that you’re standing on your keynote presentation, your sales presentation, your workshop that you might run. It can be a stage like this, a podcast, it can be a webinar that you run an online summit. But then there’s, there’s also this other stage and I know you get help get people on to say, you know, a morning TV show or the news and things like that, like these digital and written print medias that are a massive stage that have huge authority. Um, so talk us through a little bit of that and why I guess it’s important that as a speaker we start looking at this as one of the stages we should be getting our message out into. Amanda Williams: Yeah, I mean like you just rattled off such a long list already. All of the things that you need to be doing to stand out, to be building yourself as an authority. And then there’s all those extra things that, that we do as well. So, um, essentially like my role is to be like the pimp but the pimp of all of those things, a pimp of public images and that doesn’t just start with getting on the stage as you said, it’s about trying to get those opinion pieces full leadership paces. It’s about building your personal brand up through your own content, your own blog paces, you know, by dominating your own social media channels so that you get to the point where, um, you know, if the mayor are looking at, well someone to interview on a certain topic, they are reaching out to you. So essentially it’s about having, you know, eggs in all of the baskets so that, um, you know, like all of this work that you’re doing and sort of putting yourself out there publicly becomes sort of, um, your business card and it just opens doors. Victor Ahipene: And so yeah, I mean what those, what those doors and, and you can use examples happy if you don’t use names and things for your clients. But uh, yeah, a lot of people will be like, Oh yeah, cool. I get in the newspaper or I get an a magazine or yeah. Onto the radio. But, yeah. That they might run workshops or do sales presentations or whatever it may be and they’re going to like, what that this doesn’t give me this tangible yeah. Money in my bank straight away. Amanda Williams: Yeah. Funny. Yeah. Funny you mentioned that because I literally just uploaded a new blog to my website last night, which was talking about, um, you know, is, is PR any good for online stores? And it was talking about how difficult it is in PR a lot of the times to actually measure like ROI. Um, and you know, sometimes I’m lucky enough for my clients, let me have a bit of a peek behind the scenes. And in one case, you know, having a look at some of the metrics in a Shopify store and say how many sort of visitors came across as a result of a payoff. Puberty activity specifically was a TV segment on the today show. So that’s pretty premium. You know, it’s national TV. Um, we actually got inside the store and saw that we had around almost 10,000 visitors hit the website as a result of that. Going to air, sorry. Um, in terms of our live run, a little bit of masculine this morning actually, cause I’ll put a post up on LinkedIn about it. The suppression by bright and I’m started up going to math. But if we look at a modest set of conversion right around 2%. So we say 2% of the 10,000 people that visited the website bought a product for 89, 95. Um, we’re looking at close to just over $17,000 in sales for being on TV. And um, you know, like that TV segment to buy, which is not the way you want to go because that’s advertising, you know, that’s definitely at people. And telling them how would you Bob, whereas it’s a metering bot, you want to actually be a guest. Um, it’s what will social proof, um, it would be tens of thousands of dollars to actually just have a segment that went to three to five minutes on a national television show. So when you’re looking at ROI there, when the average sort of, I mean the average industry retainer for PR is around 12,000. I don’t charge that much. But you know, definitely if you’re doing monthly activities where you’re getting that kind of traffic to a website, whether you’re selling a product or you are trying to get bumbling sate so you have a service that you’re trying to sell, um, it’s 100% worth it. Victor Ahipene: Hmm. And I mean that’s, that’s the cool thing because I look at it from, again, this whole, it’s building this whole ecosystem of social proof because yeah, even if you’re trying to get onto a stage, they’re going all right, how can I de-risked the investment of hiring you or even just listing you in front of my protected audience, whether that be a company, whether that be an event. And they go, okay, you have been on a, on a nationwide TV show. Um, yeah that is going to put down one barrier of, you know, are you good at presenting or another TV show maybe going I you good when you are on TV. Yep. That’s cool. And then you look at the ad side of things, you can start using that as CNN or you, you grabbed that snippet and you put it in there. And so this is like secondary, it’s not even invisible ROI off the back of that cause you’re sitting there going, well we had an ad with a random picture of our product. Now we had a clip when we were showing it on national television and that is giving us a 10 times return on investment and that one’s giving a two times return on investment. So Amanda Williams: yeah, like that, that particular, um, that segment, once it had been uploaded to Facebook and re-purpose as a Facebook video has gone in front of about 60,000 people, I think last count and it’s had over 6,000 engagements. Um, so yeah, like repurposing that content 100%. What you want to be doing with any of those media are chasing like coming back and you mentioned before too about um, you know, the credibility and people want to say hi present a lot of the time television wants to see how you present before that even put you on television. So it’s really important to actually have some examples of yourself. Um, public faking on camera at lace, like some kind of, you know, show real will go a long way in actually showing your presentation skills because I have very little reluctance to have fresh talent on, might have never been on TV before. Um, so I mean, as part of the sort of pitch kit and the media kitten, the way we build our clients up, they’re ready for that opportunity is that we would actually have some of that video footage to be able to pitch along to a producer beforehand, forehand as well. Victor Ahipene: Cool. Well we’ve kind of got a bit of an understanding of like, Hey, this is how a PR can benefit our branding benefit our business. If we’re starting to look at, Hey, how do we go out and start getting that, uh, some of that PR attention or what are some of the ducks that we need to have lined up in a row? Obviously outside of say a going and getting someone awesome like yourself to manage that. But if someone’s looking to start getting some traction and there were even just lining up the things that they need before they go hire somebody, what should they be doing? Amanda Williams: Yeah. So I think, again, just going back to what I just said about sort of having some of that, um, you know, information available to producers or anyone that you’re pitching to. Let’s say, well let’s start with like a, a media profile, like an interview, talent sort of shape. Uh, we do those for, of clients. So we’ll have, you know who they are, a short title about what it is that they do, a really short bio. It’ll have a bunch of talking points, the different things that they can actually speak on to from experience. Um, and then we’ll have some like key milestones and sort of a bit of a brag section about things that you can brag about. Um, we also throw in a few quirky things too. Like I’m with a client who actually had been in an MMA fight. Somebody actually spoke about the similarities between getting the crop bait. Now if you want an MNI fund selling multimillion dollar business that actually got picked up by business news Australia, I’m sorry, it’s about getting really creative about, you know, how do you present yourself as a stock essentially? Like, how do you present yourself as a talent and making sure that you’ve got all of those things generally on like a two page brief. And then I generally make sure that that’s in a Dropbox folder along with complimentary sort of assets, like images in case they want to use a head all I want some photos or they want, like I said before, some video footage, I’ll be presenting a bit of a show reel any previous media that you’ve been in before, all that sort of thing. The first thing is to really get like your pitch kit in order. And I guess like that talent interview profile shape, uh, because as you know in the podcast, well first thing they want is to know like what things can you speak about, what sort of questions should we ask you? Um, yeah, before you can even answer those things. Like you really have to think about, you know, it’s not a bad dude personal branding and um, and becoming an authority is about how you help other people. It’s got nothing to do with you. It’s that how do you serve other people? What are they interested in? Those are the things that you need to make sure that you’re actually pointing to with your talking points and your topic. You’ve actually had happened in your life. You know, like you’ve got to have those, those real life anecdotes to go with it. Victor Ahipene: Yeah. It’s definitely the, what’s in it for me situation. Yeah. Whether it’s a night. Okay, I’m awesome at all of this, which can benefit whoever you’re putting my message out to. Uh, rather than it’s exactly the same when you go and give us a presentation. The person who just talks about themselves and isn’t relatable, it just goes down like a, like a lead balloon. Um, when from say a a person who, you know, that they’ve put some of that stuff together, when are the times, I mean obviously it’s every time is a good time, but what sort of things would you be going to the media about, say from a press release side of things? Um, yeah, Amanda Williams: a couple of things to look out for. Yeah. Like what time of year it is. I guess anything specific around this time of year. The other thing is just like watching to news Jack. Something like a car in a fire or something that’s happening, but you can like just jump on the back haul. We’ll piggyback essentially. I’ll give you an example of that. We actually just helped, um, mulch a new food and beverage app. Oh, on the gold coast. And um, it’s a, you know, a, an ordering app, so it’s called Y queue. You skip the queue, you auto, you turn up, um, and collected coffee or food or whatever it may be. So, um, at the time, um, there’s a lot of negativity and Escalades around the eight to deliver and you know, the delivery app industry and the issue that it’s causing for food and beverage businesses in terms of being profit, destroy, destroying, et cetera, et cetera. And that had been a national story break on the today show on this particular day about it. The first thing I do is contact a local gold coast channel nine, um, well my contact channel line. And so this national story about on a local level, including the fact that this new app had been developed and that over a hundred GoldQuest businesses had already jumped on board because I was so fed up and frustrated with the 18th Liberty and wanted to basically give it a go. Sorry, we’ve got some great coverage to have. We got television coverage and you set the coverage. We’ve got magazines coming out, food bloggers, like a bunch of people. Like it was just really clever to be up to jump on that national story. But let me talk about, I’m not just jumping on and piggybacking national stories, but also, yeah, yeah. Specific times. And VA at the time of this podcast right now we are actually, you know, we’ve just come into some of this week and we’re going Christmas holidays. Um, a lot of publications, especially online, even television, uh, looking at the filetype articles, um, that do relate to this this time of year, but they are hungry for content so we can actually, you know, write a decent up ad or a decent article or a blog even and pitch it out. You’ve got a pretty good chance they’re getting kicked off. Victor Ahipene: Mm. And I think that’s part of everything that you should be planning, I guess. And the seasons of your business is like, all right, when do I want to be, you know, when am I releasing a certain thing and what, what sort of, what sort of PR can I have to, to build into that to get, you know, those, you know, hundreds or thousands of people coming to my website to, to either sell my product or build anticipation and, and all of these things really built in because I give the like I really love, I talk about like the different authority strands is kind of, I call it the star, but it’s, it’s, you can be speaking that build your authority. You can use the press or the media, like the T of it. You can be an author and you can be, I guess doing your own media or it can be your, you know, your results or your experience that you’ve got and all of them feed into one another. Because if you’re about to get interviewed, I introduced onto onstage, it’s like, yeah, and we’ve got Amanda who’s been in the, yeah, wall street journal, the New York times or the this and the that. As soon as you walk on stage, you’re already held at a higher credibility or efforts. You’re going into the media and it’s like Ted speaker, well, okay, going to take this person on because they’ve got their credibility and all of these things. You don’t need all of them to be successful in your business or in your speaking. But what you got to realize, you talked about it earlier is the opportunities they all open another opportunity for the other. You might write a book or, or a viral blog piece and then the media pick it up. Or uh, an event organizer picks it up and then they reach out to you and then you speak there and then, yeah, it just flows on from, from there. Um, what other things that you would do to, I guess, leverage or what would be the best things to be able to leverage off to either get more publicity off, you know, if it’s a local piece to try and leverage that up, um, or what you can, things you can potentially do with leveraging that or utilizing that, um, media into your business or into your, you know, your brand. Amanda Williams: Yeah. So I’m going back to um, what you said about, you know, having a bit of a plan and having sort of a bit of a goal as to, you know, what you’re setting out to achieve. I just want to quickly mention cause we competitive and this is me if I didn’t that um, so many people are too late when they think it’s, Oh we’re going to get payout. Wade watching like next next week. Like we’re going to do this now. Like generally I said everyone, like it takes three months. Sometimes they can take three months. It might, the strategy, the coming up with a pitch, you know, waiting for something that is going to come along in the media that you can actually Jack on onto. And then, you know, speaking to journalists, doing the follow up and then actually saying adventure ends with story, like it’s generally around three months. So people need to be thinking like at least three months of events. That’s my warning you there. Um, and, and in regards to, um, the content that you’re putting out, as you said, like you can be found as well, so it’s not just about pitching but making sure that you’re riding regular paces though as you said, you know, going and speaking on stage and, um, really putting yourself out there so that you can actually be found by journalists as well. That’s really important. And then, um, another thing I might add as well is that, um, and you already know this, but you know, speaking scares the shit out of people and so few, too many people are actually doing it. So if you’re willing to actually get up on a stage and talk, like you’re going to stand out again. So I’m going to other people who are basically just chicken. Sorry. I mean they say that the sooner you can get used to like just putting yourself out there and being comfortable in whatever public situation UI in, um, the better around talent you ought to be getting like full of big media opportunities. Um, and the more you will stand out and that’s what it’s all about is about trying to stand out. But then finally what you saying about, you know, um, seeing that content and putting it out there as well. Um, definitely pushing everything out through social channels is really important. Um, a lot people to even go back and um, like older content and new spaces like on anniversaries, like, Oh my God, a year ago we’re on television, I might check these out, that sort of thing. Um, well, it’s about the experience and sharing it up through that way as well, you know?Yeah. Asking friends to share it. I’m offering complimentary businesses too to share it with their audience as well. Like it really is such a golden opportunity once you have it in your hands. Like once you’ve built this really cool article that’s printed on, um, a legitimate, um, new thought or website or blow or authority or um, this video footage from this TV segment, um, you really liked, you can put it anyway, you know, like you can kind of go to town with the spam thing cause that sort of thing is quite rare and unique. So yeah, 100% goes to that and yeah, make sure that you let people know that that’s what you think saying. So a lot of people will put the logos as seen on their website. I’ve had of PayPal too recently making sure that they’re um, trading Beck Hava images on my Facebook and on their LinkedIn as you know, right. Opportunities to also say as seen in and actually designing cover banners that actually, you know, push out some social proof as well. Um, you know, generally speaking, Australia have an issue with whole poppy syndrome and whenever we always get picked on for it, you know, you guys have a problem with tooting your own horn, whereas a lot of people in the rest of the world don’t. And we really should be doing it more. Especially we’ve earned it. We’ve actually genuinely, um, we’ve worked really hard towards thing. A person that can cite something, have it printed in media, then you should be really proud of that and you should definitely be putting it out there, especially when it’s becoming like everything’s so easy to like fake it to make it these days, especially social media. Um, you know, like when you have that rare opportunity to actually um, you know, drive social proof home, then drive it like, sorry, look a gift horse in the mouth. Victor Ahipene: Yeah. And that’s the big thing as well that not even just speaking, but like, yeah, if you write a book or you get published in the media or whatever it is, you have separated yourself from the crowd. Like, I know that’s a scary thing for a lot of people is not having that tribal mentality and being, I don’t want to be the one that sticks out, which is the Australian and New Zealand way. But what you’ve also got to understand is if you’ve got competitors or whatever you want to call it, if you’ve got other businesses in your industry, which you likely do, they, if they’re not doing that, it means that you’ve got an anterior advantage over them because you’ve got the social proof or you’ve gone to the lengths to get yourself into the media with that, you know, that paying for an ad in the newspaper and you’re getting a free column written about you or you’re writing that column or you know, they’re paying for that five minute spot on TV and spending $20,000 and instead you’re getting it for free and you can spend 20,000 on promoting that. Um, so your own following and all those sorts of things. So, yeah. Yes, yeah. A lot of people say, I’ve written a book and you know, I have, and it’s, I was speaking to someone I like, but look, you actually went to the effort of doing that. Yeah. Whether it’s an amazing book or a crappy book, like you’ve done something that a lot of people won’t ever do. So yes, senior owned praises. Um, because a lot of people were too scared to put themselves out there for fear of not even failure for fear of sticking out and um, and, and yeah. Amanda Williams: Oh yeah, 100% I spoke to, I talk to entrepreneurs absolutely crushing it. Like what about young entrepreneurs when we’re talking people under 40 who are turning up a millions of dollars eight year in that businesses who have legitimately said to me, Oh, I’m really like cautious about going out on social media or like talking about business and what I do. And you know, I’d really like to become more of a Holt later and baseload the next month. Boris is my industry. But every time I go out and stick my neck out and post about work, all my mates on there and rag on me and like pay me out. And I really don’t like that. And I think, Ooh, you know, I like, it’s almost lacking. You got to ruffle feathers and you know, like the mission is actually to find the height is the mission is actually to get people like annoyed, like actually get onto people’s skin. Because if you not doing that then you don’t have an opinion. You know, you don’t, you know, you know, you just not putting yourself out there. And it’s really interesting cause I actually thought of this the other day and I’m going to run a blog and it’s soon, but you know the old phrase like it’s not what you know. So you know, I feel like in 2020 we need to update that. I mean right now, 20 on a day when they don’t say that, but it’s not what you know. But who you know and who knows you because honestly like your influence and how you know, how many people are watching you and following you and know who you are. It opens up doors. I use it all the time to connect with people like all over the world now it’s, I’m not shy of reaching out to like massive influencers, celebrities, you know, very well known business leaders on Instagram. And because I actually grew my own following on Instagram too, I’m thinking 17,000 at the moment. Um, so I Instagram, what does it rank like your messages when they come through in order of who’s got the most followers and that sort of thing. But because as I say that they say that I’ve got, I’m in business, I see my content, like it’s all basically set up to be like this sort of online business card for them to sort of stuff me out. But everyone gets back to me and I’ve built some really good connections and I’ve got some exciting things in the pipeline for next year. As a result, as a result of being able to create this partnership, um, through my Instagram account, through the authority that I’ve built there. And you think about like the amount of people in business who um, you know, beta base like, so important, so crucial. Um, sorry. Yeah, like that’s the big picture. That’s like AR is a long game because if you keep working on this over time, you know, as a combination of doing a PR as a combination of, you know, getting out there and getting on stages and standing out and doing all the shit that no one else would do, um, you’ve got that opportunity to build that influence to that level where basically, or if not doors you can get in front of people that you would never normally even expect back to you. Victor Ahipene: I want to just before I forget to ask about it, are there any photo pars with, you know, you said utilize this, these videos clippings as as much as you can or um, pieces from the, as a, as long as you’re giving credit, it’s all good, right? Tip back or Amanda Williams: No, I generally resharing like, I mean, look, I’m in payoff, so it’s all about like, you know, do it now, the light off. So don’t wait off with permission cause it just won’t happen. But in my experience and you know, like between, you know, politics, I’m going to, I just see for almost three years now, you know, I’ve a 10 years in the game, I’ve never had a problem with that. Mmm. I mean, Hey Bay and Austin to send us the footage to you and they send it to us. Victor Ahipene: Yeah. So I mean, I can’t, I can’t imagine them being angry that they’re getting more publicity about this show. This is another show. Amanda Williams: Yeah. Yeah. I mean like the pod, a lot of the poems is that we actually pitched to actually ask in the interview like, how can you help us push this out? You know, like how will you help advertise this? Like they want to know that you’ve got some, you know, like channels that you can be putting it out to and that you can help promote them. So, so it’s like a win win for everyone really. Victor Ahipene: Yeah. No. Well I think that gives us a pretty good, uh, insight. Yeah. If people are wanting to get their, get their ducks in a row to get started, and then you look at what’s topical, start planning three months in advance, you know, start looking at how PR fits into not just your speaking strategy but your business strategy. Because regardless of if you’re just trying to be a speaker, it’s still a business that, you know, for the majority of you out there, it’s another leg of your business. Um, so you choose what you’re going to attack, uh, attack it and then add on the next aspect of it. And then, you know, build, build that authority. And then you can start utilizing it. Appreciate your time as always. You always have good chats, whether the Mike’s recording or not. If people want to save on a find, you get in touch. Stoke. Yeah. What can they do? Where can they go? Amanda Williams: Well I live mostly on Instagram, which is Amanda Panda Williams. Easy enough fun trying to lift my LinkedIn game as well. So I’m on there too. Um, but it, the websites, the agency is yellowpanda.com that I do. Um, I’ve got lots of helpful case studies on there that you might get some inspiration or ideas from pretty much spell out how we’ve managed to get success by client from this. So feel free to check out that and the blog and don’t ever be shy. I love baking people and making new contacts as you know. Um, that’s why I’m in this game. Victor Ahipene: And so, but before we completely finish up, so I’ll will throw out all the links to their public speakingblueprint.com. Who are the people that you work with? Who’s your ideal person that you work with? Amanda Williams: Um, so essentially it’s people who want to have all of this tons of them. Um, and predominantly I find that that is people who they didn’t, you know, business, there may be around five years. Um, they’ve got the budget to be able to afford to have sort of that management because what I offer is more of a personal brand management slash payoff service as opposed to just PR. So I actually work with entrepreneurs to get them nominated for awards, help land speaking gigs, do all of the traditional payoff stuff on the content creation. Basically all the stuff that they’re too busy for, which is keeping them in visible. I take care of that. I actually make a bit of a joke. It’s kind of like a weekend at Bernie’s package. They could literally be dead. They’ll be dragging them around, making them look alive everywhere. I’m sorry. Yeah. If you are an entrepreneur who wants to step up, um, your public image, you, your diamond builds some influence, you just don’t have the time or mrs skill set to do that yourself, then I am your best friend. Victor Ahipene: Excellent. Well, I appreciate it. Again, we’ll link all of that public speaking blueprint.com and we’ll check in that, those, uh, a couple of blog posts that you mentioned as well, uh, to help everyone find that and get a bit more insight, but appreciate it and I’ll look forward to catching up, hopefully in person again soon. Amanda Williams: Yes. Thanks so much for having me.

Our Speak to Sell challenge is almost over – we are sooo close. Well done on being an action taker. This is where the rubber meets the road! If you aren’t selling from stage you are doing your audience a disservice. There are 3 core components that 90% of Speakers get wrong when they use stories to speak and sell from the stage. We dive into all 3 in on the final day. Today, I’m going to show you how I use Storyselling to ethnically sell from stage without having to be salesy or manipulative. These are the exact same steps Josh used to generate multiple 6 figures from his first ever live presentation from stage (check out his case study further down the page) .When you master Storyselling you will… 1) Be able to ethically sell without feeling salesy 2) Be the logical decision for the go-to service/product provider in your space 3) Motivate your audience to take action and create a true transformation Need help? Now is the best time to take action… And to chat to me!

This is 18 years of trials and tribulations, with some wins and loses along the way. What started off as my Public Speaking Blueprint where I helped people build confidence with Public Speaking morphed into this…. The Speak To Sell System.This is the framework you can use regardless of the setting, preparation time, or audience to be able to give a captivating presentation every time you step in front of an audience. Over the next 15 or so minutes, you will learn… 1. The most important first step you need to focus on for any presentation (that 90% of speakers don’t do) 2. How to reverse engineer speaking success 3. 2 Key Reasons why this framework will eliminate your fear of speaking to any sized audience. Need help? Now is the best time to take action… And to chat to me!