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If you’re ready to host your own event and anxious to get started but feel overwhelmed by all the things you need to do—from negotiating with hotels to coordinating with A/V providers, managing a volunteer team and figuring out what you are going to say and do while you’re hosting—you’re not alone! My guest today helps companies, coaches and celebrities create Powerful and Profitable events. Shay Wheat is CEO of Grace & Ease Productions, Inc. Shay is a Certified Event Producer™ and the creator of popular programs such as “The Powerful Event Process” and “The Ultimate Event Planner Certification Program.” Grace & Ease Productions produces in-person and live virtual events ranging from 200 to 4,000+ attendees. They have collaborated with many well-known celebrities including Lisa Nichols, Dr. Claire Zammit, Bill Baren, Alison J. Prince, Josh Turner and many others. Shay’s clients have made over $24 million in revenue, gaining over 3,500 new clients and changing the lives of more than 16,000+ attendees.

This podcast episode is a little different than the rest. It’s a personal conversation with my good friend Jim Mitchem about some serious topics, ranging from battling cancer to remembering a dear mutual friend, Nathan Richie, who passed away June 16, 2018. Jim is a branding consultant and award-winning senior copywriter who has convinced people to think differently about things for more than two decades. Since 2002, Jim’s company Smash Communications has helped drive revenue for his clients via consistent messaging that elicits action across a range of media. As Jim says, “Copywriting is my superpower.” He’s the author of several fictional books, including Minor King and Mongoose, as well as a non-fiction tribute to man’s best friend, Gone Dogs: Tales of Dogs We've Loved. Jim is one of the most honest and kind people I know. I hope you’ll enjoy our conversation. Find out more about Jim at Quick Like Mongoose. RIP, Nathan Richie.

There’s a tendency to discount your price in order to get ‘quick wins, land more customers or keep existing customers happy. But there’s a better strategy to win more clients—using value-added incentives. Marco Torres believes that value-added incentives such as complimentary travel packages beat price discounts. He joined me on the latest episode of the Go For Launch podcast. Marco is the founder of Marketing Boost, which has helped thousands of business owners worldwide boost sales and scale their businesses by as much as 5-fold through the use of incentive-based marketing. And his Facebook group is home to more than 28,000 active business owners who are raking in sales with his advice and amazingly affordable subscription program. During our interview, my brain was spinning with effective ways to use Marketing Boost. I hope you’ll get a lot of value out of our conversation and check it out.

Today’s podcast is all about learning how to create meaningful and inspiring online events. My guests are Daniel Moss and Michelle Garrison, the Co-Founders of We & Goliath. We & Goliath helps companies host more meaningful and inspiring events online. Their full-service formula combines smart strategy, platform savvy and innovative video that captivates, awes and inspires. Whether you want just live stream production or full-service virtual event management including event planning, technology, and marketing strategy for a multi-day event ... they can help tackle your Goliath. Michelle Garrison is a serial entrepreneur, digital strategist, and creative director, who’s started companies and campaigns on the edge of sustainability and community-building trends for the last 20 years. She’s helped companies reach triple-digit growth, and her projects have been featured in The Boston Globe, Washington Post, HGTV, Dwell Magazine, ABC, NBC and CBS. Daniel Moss is a senior event strategist with more than 20 years of experience leading and training agency and nonprofit teams. He’s designed digital campaigns for large online and in-person events supported by lead nurturing automation, omnichannel retargeting and conversion rate optimization. His clients have experienced 7X attendance online vs. in-person, 5X monthly email signups, hundreds of #1 search engine rankings and 53% conversion rate boosts that increased revenue by $43,000/mo.

Most people think growing older and losing their edge is inevitable. But the truth is, the way in which you grow older is entirely malleable. Just because your chronological age is rising doesn't mean your biological age has to as well. It's time for a new paradigm. You can turn the clock back and stay at the top of your game at 40, 50, 60, and well beyond through precision performance longevity. My guest is Julian Hayes II, an executive health consultant & epigenetic atelier, and the host of Optimal Health for Busy Entrepreneurs. His journey began in his pursuit of becoming a doctor. However, he left school after one year to pursue a bigger dream. Now, he's the founder of The Art of Fitness & Life. This bespoke concierge health & performance advisory firm helps entrepreneurs, and executives live longer, richer, and healthier lives. This is accomplished through leveraging their unique DNA, data-driven health metrics, personalized bio-specific programming, a "performance team," and high-tech toys. On an organizational level, the firm helps companies elevate their bottom line through precision performance longevity. Julian has also written nearly 200 columns at Inc, along with frequently being published over at Entrepreneur, SUCCESS, Chief Executive, CEO World, Business Insider, Bodybuilding.com, and many more of the world's largest publications. He also is the author of the book Body Architect: A Real-World Guide to Ignite Your Fitness, Look Awesome Naked, Quiet the Inner Voices of Self-Doubt, & Design a Lifestyle on Your Own Terms.

If you ask many entrepreneurs how their life is going…and you’ll hear a lot of lies. “It’s great! I’m in control! I’m my own boss! I can do whatever I want, whenever I want!” The reality is, entrepreneurship is often miserable, as you become chained to endless days of working, tedious tasks and time away from family and friends. So how can you get control of your business, family and life as an entrepreneur? That’s a topic my guest is very familiar with. For more than 20 years, Fabienne Fredrickson has powerfully mentored thousands of women business owners to grow, then scale their businesses, earning them tens of millions collectively each year while increasing their time off to enjoy lives they love. Her Leveraged Business methodology is based on her nearly 15 years of experience in generating multiple 7 figures annually with three children at home, while taking 14 weeks of unplugged vacations each year. It is proven to work. Fabienne’s revolutionary book, The Leveraged Business: How You Can Go From Overwhelmed at 6-Figures to 7 Figures (and Get Your Life Back), is a definitive roadmap on how she’s done it with heart and how you can too, without sacrificing your life.

If you’re like many people, still trying to ‘e-blast’ your prospect manually without a great way to track the results—it’s time to make your inbox more sales focused. My latest guest on the Go For Launch podcast is Joel Stevenson, the CEO of Yesware. Yesware is a leader in sales productivity software. It helps both individuals and large companies scale their email marketing efforts, with templates and campaign tools; integrations with Salesforce and other software; phone tracking, a meeting scheduler; and more. Prior to joining Yesware, Joel was the general manager and founder of Wayfair’s B2B division, which he grew to several hundred million in revenue. Before joining Wayfair, he held a variety of sales and marketing roles at Ariba, Innovus and Verizon. He earned an M.B.A. from the Yale School of Management, a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Illinois, and studied Chinese at Harvard-Beijing Academy. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and their four children.

Julie Broad is the founder of self-publishing services firm Book Launchers and an Amazon Overall #1 Best Selling Author who knows what it takes to be a successful self-published author. Through Book Launchers and her popular YouTube channel, BookLaunchers.TV, she helps subject matter experts write, publish, and promote nonfiction books that will boost their business. Julie’s titles include More than Cashflow, which topped Amazon, and The New Brand You, winner of the Beverly Hills Book Award for Best Sales book. Her latest book, Self-Publish & Succeed, captures her leading tactics to write, publish and market a nonfiction book. An expert on writing a book with marketing in mind, Julie teaches the best approaches to write a book that builds your business and allows you to have more impact and influence with your brand. Her advice for authors and investors has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur.com, Yahoo! Business, CTV, the Toronto Sun, and many local and national TV shows. Born and raised in Canada, Julie currently resides in Los Angeles with her husband and son.

Webinars are one of the most powerful marketing and sales tools available. But many people avoid doing them due to the concerns over how much time and effort they take. Fortunately, there are ways to take full advantage of webinars while avoiding the hassles. The secret is to learn how to automate webinars the right way. Melissa Kwan is the Cofounder and CEO of eWebinar, an automated webinar solution that combines pre-recorded video with real-time interactions and live chat to deliver an engaging experience for attendees. She joined me on the Go For Launch podcast to discuss the journey of starting eWebinar, and their mission to make it the best software for automated webinars. Melissa has spent more than a dozen years in startups and has built three successful companies without venture capital backing. Her previous startup, a real estate tech company, was acquired in 2019. Melissa and her team at eWebinar believe that by automating the repetitive and tedious task of giving the same onboarding, training, and sales presentations over and over, they free people up to focus their time on something else they value more.

Making sales one-by-one is a noble undertaking. But to exponentially grow your business, affiliate sales can be a game-changer. To learn more about the ins-and-outs of affiliate sales, I asked Dominick Keenan to join me on the Go For Launch podcast. Dominick is VP of Sales at ClickBank, a global affiliate marketplace and e-commerce platform. He has had several roles within the ClickBank sales organization including affiliate manager and business development before taking the role of VP of Sales. He focuses on supporting ClickBank’s current vendors and affiliates as well as growing ClickBank’s business. Prior to joining ClickBank, Dominick worked in business aviation and commercial lending. He holds a Bachelor's Degree in Aviation Management from Rocky Mountain College, and an MBA from the University of Montana. If you've ever thought about adding affiliate sales to boost sales of your company's products or services, you will get a lot of valuable tips from Dominick.

Ignition is revolutionizing product launches and go-to-market planning, strategy and project management. Joining me to discuss Ignition's recent beta launch and features is Derek Osgood, Ignition's founder and CEO. Ignition is a collaborative, go-to-market platform that assists product and marketing teams in bringing new goods to market quickly and efficiently. Prior to his current role, Derek spent over a decade leading and scaling marketing teams at brands like Playstation, BBVA and Rippling. He has launched over 100 products working as a Product Marketer that have collectively generated over $1B in revenue.

This episode of the Go For Launch podcast focuses on how to diagnose business gaps and create your business battle plan. My guest is Stuart Leo, the founder and CEO of Waymaker.io—an intelligent business management and strategy platform that helps leaders build a better business in 30 days. Stuart is a global thinker in strategy, systems, and leadership development. As the founder of Waymaker.io, he has led the creation of Waymaker’s Leadership Curve, a new way of building clarity, alignment and remarkable results in any organization.

Feeling overwhelmed at work? Amanda Hamilton can help you reclaim your time and delegate with intention. She joined me on the latest episode of the Go For Launch podcast. Amanda is the founder of Hamilton Raye—“Your Outsourced Admin®”— which brings professional remote administrative support to startup organizations and businesses. Prior to starting Hamilton Raye, she spent 10 years working in the corporate retail industry. She had a very successful career in production and sourcing where she had the opportunity to learn best practices for staying organized, managing constant changes in priorities, and finding process efficiencies to reduce workload. Loving the scope of her work and her team, but craving personal and professional growth, she longed to work remotely in order to live and work anywhere she pleased. Intrigued by the ‘digital nomads’ she would often read about, Amanda decided to take her fate into her own hands. As Amanda started to connect with founders, CEOs, and small business owners, she saw an opportunity where these individuals were wearing multiple hats and looking for more time in their days and weeks. She says the most necessary piece of being a business owner is to maintain maximum efficiency and productivity, by keeping your schedule moving and remaining highly organized.

Using traditional SEO tools and manual writing processes, it can be hard to scale quality content. But with artificial intelligence (AI), you can create a scalable strategy that will ensure all of your content is at the highest possible quality. My latest guest on the Go For Launch podcast is at the forefront of helping companies use AI to scale their content creation efforts. Pankil Shah is the CEO of Outranking.io, an AI platform for writers, editors and SEO professionals to create content that ranks. He is an entrepreneur, founder and content marketing expert with more than 10 years of experience in leading product and growth for tech companies. Before starting Outranking.io, Pankil led growth for an enterprise database company, scaling revenue using content marketing. He also co-founded Vclassrooming.com, a learning management system aimed at improving K12 learning outcomes. AI can help you improve the relevancy of your content, increase conversion rates and make sure that you are always on top of what people are looking for.

If you don’t have a clear message and image, you could be wasting as much as 80% of your marketing budget. Joining me to discuss this on the Go For Launch podcast is Orsolya Herbein, better known as Orshie. Orshie is a partner at Brand3, a virtual marketing and branding agency. On the podcast, she shared actionable tips to help business owners rethink marketing, stop wasting time and money, and accelerate their business growth.

It seems counterintuitive to many people: You must narrow your focus to Increase your chances of success as a professional services provider. The saying is true, "The riches are in the niches." My latest guest on the Go For Launch podcast is an expert on helping firms focus. Sean Campbell is founder and CEO of Cascade Insights. As a professional services firm owner for over 20 years, his work has spanned consulting engagements with the Fortune 50 to startups you’ve heard of; the sale of his first professional services company; and the growth of delivery, sales, marketing, and operational practices inside professional services firms. Sean has been training, mentoring, and educating all his life. An exceptionally well-regarded conference speaker and author, Sean has delivered talks for Fortune 50 companies and top-tier conferences. He has also been the author of several books on technical as well as business topics. Sean brings a wealth of knowledge when it comes to surviving and thriving as a service firm owner or the leader of a practice area inside a larger services firm.

Storytelling. We all learned and loved it as kids, but many of us forget about the power of storytelling in the context of promoting our businesses. In the latest episode of the Go For Launch podcast, I spoke to Ben Worthen about this topic. Ben is CEO of Message Lab, an award-winning agency that combines journalism, data and design to craft content and create experiences that get real results. Ben and his team help clients figure out how to tell stories that people actually want to hear. Ben developed his storytelling and investigative savvy working as a journalist for 13 years, winning many national awards for news and feature-writing. In 2007, he joined The Wall Street Journal, where he covered the tech industry and wrote more than 50 Page One stories. He also was editor-in-chief at Ready State and head of content at Sequoia Capital. Over the last two years, Message Lab has won seven Content Marketing Awards and has been a finalist for 16 more. Current and former clients include Facebook, Google, GoDaddy, ServiceNow, Elastic and Silicon Valley Bank.

Tracey Bissett is on a mission to redefine the world's economic future by increasing the financial literacy of entrepreneurs, also known as financial fitness. With over 20 years of experience in the financial services industry, Tracey helps entrepreneurs across all industries. As Chief Financial Fitness Trainer of Bissett Financial Fitness Inc., Tracey educates and empowers entrepreneurs to take control of and live their financial lives with confidence. A former executive at TD Bank, one of Canada's Big 5 Banks, Tracey has worked with thousands of entrepreneurs to secure the financing they needed. This hands-on experience coupled with her formal financial education gives Tracey unique coaching skills about all things money-related. Tracey is also a professor at Centennial College’s School of Business and regularly leads speaking engagements to increase financial fitness awareness. Get a free monthly meeting template at https://cashcoach.biz.

Ron Carucci is co-founder and managing partner at Navalent, which works with CEOs and executives to enable transformational change for their organizations, leaders and industries. Ron’s newest book and passion, To Be Honest: Lead with the Power of Truth, Justice and Purpose, is based on 15 years of research and more than 200 interviews with leaders around the world. To Be Honest explains how four factors—Clear Identity, Accountability, Governance and Cross-Functional Relationships—affect honesty, justice and purpose within a company. When these factors are absent or ineffective, the organizational conditions compel employees to choose dishonesty and self-interest. But when done well, the organization is 16 times more likely to have people tell the truth, behave fairly and serve a greater good. For three decades, Ron has helped some of the world’s most influential executives tackle challenges of strategy, organization and leadership. In addition to being a regular contributor to HBR and Forbes, and is a 2-time TEDx speaker and has been featured in Fortune, CEO Magazine, BusinessInsider, MSNBC, Inc, and Business Week.

Tim Parkin of Parkin Consulting is a global consultant, advisor, and coach to marketing executives of many world-renowned brands. He specializes in helping marketing teams optimize people, process and performance to accelerate growth. By applying more than 20 years of experience merging behavioral psychology and technology seamlessly, Tim has unlocked rapid and dramatic growth for global brands and award-winning agencies alike. Tim is a speaker, author, and thought leader who has contributed to AdWeek, Forbes, MarTech, TechCrunch, and dozens of other marketing outlets. He is also a member of the American Marketing Association, the Society for the Advancement of Consulting, and was inducted into the Million Dollar Consulting Hall of Fame. For free resources from Tim, text Grow to 8443113200.