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Eric Z. Yang 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. Follow Eric On Facebook Grab Eric’s Book On Running Online Summits Hello this is the normal text 3

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. twitter: @SpokenAuthority@christineclapphttps://www.linkedin.com/company/9766878www.presentingatwork.comwww.spokenwithauthority.com Victor Ahipene: Speaking nation, what’s happening? Welcome to another episode of Public Speaking secrets here from COVID 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, and the new world that we’re going into. I think it’s going to be really beneficial. So Christine Clapp 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 Spoken with Authority. Little that being said, welcome to the show, Christine.   Christine Clapp: Thanks for having me.   Victor Ahipene: One of those things that I think, we’re obviously on a public speaking podcast, a lot of people have that fear when it comes to public speaking. And then I think a lot of people just put out to be minimum when it comes to obligatory public speaking, which I think most often that happens in day to day life is in the workplace. And so it’s something that I always find really, really interesting because you can teach someone potentially how to give a good keynote presentation. But when it comes to, when you’ve got to insert graphs or information or those repeated presentations that you’ve got, it can be a whole different ball game. So how did you get into that space, the business space and the Presenting at Work and all of that, and your journey?   Christine Clapp: 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 of 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 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 a frustrating experience. I knew that my opponents weren’t better, smarter. They were 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 me 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 Bjørn Stillion Southard 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 measure of success and finding any comfort and confidence as a speaker. I continued 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. What I love is you went from being pretty average to some level of success. The level of success side of things, I think, is really irrelevant because everyone’s bars are so much different. Winning one debate could have been a degree of success, but I think the success there is, and what I love is that extreme transformation. 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 training that you do. You can see it in hours. You can see someone go from stuttering with cue cards to confidently delivering and holding a room in 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 be a business owner, they may not be, but they may just be a person looking to get to the next level on an executive team or to get to a manager and they keep turning down the opportunities to speak. Do you see that a lot? Or is it just something I’ve made up in my head on the people who are turning down those opportunities in work?   Christine Clapp: No, I see it too. The place where I see it is, 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 and 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- 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’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. We 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 ones, the 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 out or they go into it and they go, “Oh look, this is an obligatory presentation that I have to give at work.” rather than an opportunity. And so they just make it like everybody else. Boring, read off the slides, put you to sleep, no enthusiasm into it. Nothing, nothing like that. So that’s what I would love to jump into. I guess the second half of this episode is what are some of the actionable ways that people can present more effectively within their work, within their own workplace? Whether it be, how to, I’m happy to let you guide and have a discussion around it or whether it be like, how to present data, which can often be a bit dry or boring or information. How to incorporate storytelling into the different things. Do you have a system or an approach that you work towards 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, unemotional delivery that does not build rapport because there’s no eye contact. So we want people to start with one sheet of paper, write 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. 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 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, or three case studies. You might talk about three different topics or you might talk about what happened in the past, what’s happening in the present, what do you expect to happen in the future. So a chronological pattern of organization. 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. For any of those structures then, you want to think about the structure of your ideas. You want to think about, how do I add in 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. If you talk about why, how, and what, you might have examples or stories that you tell within each part of that structure. But the important thing is to think about where the story’s fall in 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 hinging on a metaphor.    For example, I’m putting together a webinar in how to have presence in virtual meetings, something everyone’s thinking over 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. 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 Instant Pot or a grill, but you still have to have those fundamentals going into it. Then we talked about the equipment you’re using. Are you using a green egg, are you using an Instant pot? 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 and your setting, and 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 fluent 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 is 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 love when you said practicing at least six times. 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?’    Christine Clapp: Exactly, yeah!   Victor Ahipene: It’s kind of like, ‘It’s going to be crap. Why practice it to make it a little bit less crap or fluently crap?’ I think as soon as you realize you put 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 in the past and the present and 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, you’re going to be a lot better. Because I use a similar analogy to the cooking in the sense of it’s like riding a bike. You don’t begin riding in the tour de France or the Olympics. You start off on 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 road. But if you don’t know how to ride at the start, it’s kind of like, ‘Oh, I can see this person riding. I’m just going to try and 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.’ That’s what I think a lot of people tend to do.    I think people, if you’re listening to this, you’re listening to it for a reason because you want to improve 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 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 know you’ve kind of touched on it already with your answers, some presentations are 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 where there’s still a degree of time restraint. It’s not like, ‘I’m going to make this meeting run 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 ways that you look to integrate information and data?    Christine Clapp: Yes, and it’s a great question. 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 have a lot of data because we worked our butts off to collect that data, to analyze the data, to write reports about the data and we want to show everyone what we did. And I get the impulse to do that 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 Covid19, 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 a phenomenon which is happening 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 one story, I get it. I can feel that it’s an important issue. 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 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 data on a slide, make sure again that you call out all of the unnecessary stuff. 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 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 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 resonate with people on a human level.   Victor Ahipene: Yeah, I love that point in regards to the argument because you see it in the slide. I’ve been to, in previous years, in 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 talking, they’re just explaining what the article says rather than, ‘Does this work better than this? It’s like, ‘Oh, well we researched this and blah blah blah. Here’s what graph number one says.’ And it’s exactly that. And you see people are pulling out their phones or just walking out of this dark place. In a boardroom, you might not be able to do that, but you’re going to lose the tension. And what I find really, really amazing is little things, just such little things. All you’re doing is tweaking what you’re already planning on delivering. You might be cutting a few things out and changing how you present that information, but it makes a huge difference. And then all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Wow, Victor is a really good presenter. 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 opportunities that you kind of see from there.   Christine Clapp: I would say in regard to that, a lot of times people who we work, they’re subject matter experts and they’re serious and they’re hardworking and when we come to them and we say, ‘How can we do this presentation differently and to have this humanistic element 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 sure you’re not telling an off color political joke. Yeah, you definitely want beta test things. But even if people like, ‘It’s a little bit too much.’ or whatever, I think that audiences are really magnanimus 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.’ When you question it like, ‘Should I do that?’ That’s when you should lean into it absolutely 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 questioning, when you’re uncomfortable, that’s exactly where you need to go. Public speaking should not be a comfortable experience. Our line is, the harder it is to give the speech, the better the speeches. And that oftentimes has to come at, where it comes in is 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 are 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. Another example is my fiance was doing her masters for physiotherapy, like physical therapy and the last assignment was to present at this small to medium sized conference. The six of them all had to present and I was like, ‘No, you can’t do it like everybody else has done it.’ The first image she had was like an arrested Tiger Woods. Like, drugged up and drunk and everyone’s like, no one was really shocked. It was like, ‘Oh my God, they’re not starting with the title of the presentation, read off a PowerPoint presentation like that.’ The presentation got the information, it challenged the and blah, blah, blah. You’d kind of hope so when your other half is not bad at helping people with public speaking but it worked. It ended up, guess what? Got the best mark out of their class for the presentation. Why? Because it wasn’t the same boring, dry stuff. And people will remember it to a degree. They’re going to remember a lot more than what they remember from others.   Christine Clapp: Right. In that moment of, when they see the image on the screen and 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’ll be 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 when I started doing this, I’ve been 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 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 really has gone up. So I think more than ever, the go-big-or-go-home is 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? 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 has been an 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 have heard that you’ve got a book or 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, @spokenauthority. We’re also on LinkedIn, Spoken with Authority and of course our website, Spokenwithauthority.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 at publicspeakingblueprint.com. Look, Christine, it’s been absolutely amazing. I really appreciate your time. We 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 ZERO 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.   http://theexpertblueprint.com/video https://www.facebook.com/theanthonykirby/ eVictor Ahipene: Speaking nation, what’s happening? Welcome to another episode of the Public Speaking Secrets podcast. I’m Victor your host today. As always, I’m 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.   I know a lot of the listeners out there are looking to get into the corporate space or the workshop space, or even to up the coaching abilities. I know that my friend Anthony Kirby has been there and done that and has got the runs on the board. Welcome to the show mate. Pleasure to have you.   Anthony Kirby: Thanks mate. It’s nice to have this opportunity to interact with a human. COVID 19 environment we find ourselves in at the time of recording.   Victor Ahipene: Yeah so if you’re listening to this at the moment, we’re both currently in COVID studios which is a very socially distance via zoom. 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.”   Anthony Kirby: 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 as sophisticated as you potentially think it is. So what we think is like very basic is actually in fact not very basic to the people who need our message. That’s the reason why she keeps turning up because we take it for granted what we learn and what we teach. This is the classic example of it right now with people moving into a digital format of life.   Victor Ahipene: Yes. Well that’s, 100%. Because I had three people message me last week asking if I could help them set up telehealth for their healthcare practitioner based things because they didn’t know how to take payments. I said, “Just set up Stripe.” “How do you seat up Stripe?” And use zoom, what zoom?  Don’t underestimate your expertise because they were all super stoked that I could help them.   It was literally pretty easy for me. On what you do, you obviously do a little bit more than teach people how to use zoom and Stripe. which is what I want to touch on and that’s you running workshop, how did you kind of get into it and what do you do when you go into businesses?   Anthony Kirby: All right. I’m in the background of all of this is that when I moved to Australia, which is 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. I ended up doing a lot of sales training through my career, if you want to call it that. Then I decided about five and a half years ago now 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 with bright eyes and all the dreams and all the things that people promise you out there, all the guru’s promise and started 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.   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 going to know more than me. I was super nervous. I had a slide for everything I wanted to say. It was super like rehearsed, very, very kind of sterile. I realized that at the end of 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.   The transition to workshops was almost, well actually to tell you the truth, it was by absolutely need. I started the business with this grand hope of working on a beach somewhere in Vanuatu, sipping on a Pina colada all day living the dream, but it didn’t work like that. I needed to make some money quick because I had a six month old baby. I called up 300 people. There’s a good lesson in this I want to share.   I call up 300 people in this specific industry and said, “Hi, I’m thinking of running this workshop to teach you about sales in this specific niche. Would you be interested in the ticket?” 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. I need to make the offer slightly different.” I learn all about risk reversal, all these like fundamentals of making a great offer. That’s how I feel the first event. We’ve got, I think 43 tickets. We sold at $300 for that event. That was pretty—I mean you’d remember that. We’ve known each other since those days.   Victor Ahipene:  No, I literally remember we were jumping on a four way call, like an accountability call. You’re like, “Oh my God, I’ve got to make 300 calls today because it’s do or die.” My relationship’s on the rocks. My businesses on the rocks. My finances are on the rocks not because the business fundamentals weren’t there, but because of jumped out at without a paddle and my boat’s sinking. I’ve got to quickly learn how to swim. I literally remember that because I’ve referenced it to other people before, like jump out there and do that so yeah, sorry, carry on.   Anthony Kirby: It was massive. I think the biggest lesson from that for everyone is, it’s easy to fall in love with the concept of just a landing page, build a click funnels like Russell Brunson will save the day. You’re one funnel away from magic life. You’ve got to do the work as well. 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’ve got to make the calls. You’ve got to tell people the benefit. You’ve got to learn how to sell first. Once you learn that, then you can fill any room. It’s easy after that and then you’ll get invited to other rooms and it just snowballs from there.   Victor Ahipene: Yeah, I mean I talk about that one should equal one at least, you speak one place and then it should open a door to another place and another place in that space. You went from the paid market to people to try and get into workshops. I can’t remember back then. Did you have also an up sell from there? Was it just get people in a room and just vomit some knowledge on them?   Anthony Kirby: Well, let me share the strategy because I think this is going to be really helpful for a lot of listeners. The strategy was I knew that if I could get these individuals into the room that they had, so these were business 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.”   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, such and such came to my event two weeks ago. I just wanted to check, are you seeing any differences?”   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?”   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.” 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, fortnightly zoom calls, twice monthly zoom calls and try and people in workshop style settings either digitally or in a live environment.   Victor Ahipene: My big question from that is I think a lot of people can potentially, I want to get into the fundamentals of running a workshop for people as well. Before we get into there, I think people can understand all right, there’s multiple ways to sell tickets. You can do your online marketing. You can pick up the phone and hustle, whatever.   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. You’re actually going to these corporate organizations. 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. Am I undercharging myself? Am I overcharging myself and I’m going to lose it?” Where did you be able to figure out their price point?   Anthony Kirby: Two great questions right there. Let’s start with the first bit, which is how do you get in the door and 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. Now, let’s just be clear here. It doesn’t have to be the 300 page bestselling thing. It could be like a 20 page guide that solves their big problems. If you know that, let’s just use an example here, Victor. Let’s say its physiotherapists. I know nothing about physios, but let’s just roll with that because you know 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. They don’t have to go out and get more clients. Then I would just write like a small 10 page, 20 page document about, “Hey, here’s the three things I would recommend you do in your business 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 because that looks rubbish. 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 IngramSpark in Australia or Amazon direct, Kindle direct publishing if you’re in the US 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. 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. 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 for John Smith. It’s not for the receptionist.” 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.” 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 pull up in the FedEx envelope and they pull out your thing. Then they start going, “Wow that looks interesting. 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 Kirby. 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 follow-up. Then you follow up a week later and you say you get through 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 because he’s very busy, but can I just ask one question?   Can you just go and double check with him just for a second and just check whether he’s had a chance to read my guide or read my book?” Then you get the follow-up from there. 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 hungry for the follow-up. If they don’t follow up, 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 fridge. You’re going to need it when your sales records are broken.” Something like that or you could send them a baseball bat with their name engraved on it and say, “Hey, you’re going to need this because we’re going to hit some home runs when you work with me.” It’s just something really out there where people are like, “What the hell is this guy all about?” That’s how you get past the gatekeeper. That’s like kind of part one of that.   Let’s say you’re now at the table, you’re in the boardroom, you’re talking to the board, and you’re presenting to their people and sort of giving them a pitch. The next part of that is, how do you price the service? Most people go in there and they massively undervalue what it means for this business. The way that I do it, the way that I recommend you do it is to break your sales process in a two parts. First part being more of a discovery phase and then not the intention to sell 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. Sales one on one, right? The question I always like to ask is— 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. 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?”   They will tell you. They’ll say, “We want more sales, more this, more that, better retention as a turnover, et cetera.” You want to then get specific about how much, so if a business owner says to me, “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 its worth for you as a business like net profits or end outcome?”   My experience tells me from doing this a few hundred times now that is generally 10 times what you’re going to create and turn over. So if you divided by 10 that should be your fee. So if you’re gone in there and you’re saying a million of extra sales, you can easily charge $100,000. Now, there’s a caveat to this though, because most people will be like, “Holy shit, Kirby. I couldn’t go in there and charge $100,000, no one would take it.”   Well, this is my take anyway. You need to make and 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. Here’s what I’m going to do.” 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. I’ve got to come and make sure they implement.   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. That really works. Now, it might not be that you go in there at 100,000 it might be that you say, “You know what, 30 grand a good number.” So when I was doing this, I was generally ending up charging a client $86,000 per quarter. It was what I was charging.   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 very basic aspect of this. There was never a situation where I was sitting there and the client’s saying to me, “No, 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. 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.” There was massive buy in from me too.   Victor Ahipene: 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 even 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. I mean, businesses that can afford that, the corporate industry.   They understand it. They’re like, “Okay, cool.” We’ll run this at cost neutral and then we’ll come out. That’s such awesome insight because I think that’s the biggest thing. You’ve obviously fine-tuned it and learned it from experience. 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?” Then that just— I know I spoken to a guy who, he was just lucky when he put his first tender into a company 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.” Same work just 10 times the amount because it was a fortune 500 company.   Anthony Kirby: There’s a level of seriousness that comes at that level. 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. He said to me, “Kirby, 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. 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 because 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.” 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. Because we’re obviously we’ve got time constraints and we’ll probably end up having another episode on this end, the more your life into the online space as well. In regards to running an effective workshop, because we’ve all been to a lot of them and 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 work people running workshops as well is just trying to spew knowledge onto people and give them too much too soon.   How do you find that you overcome that? 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 to make that effective?   Anthony Kirby: Yeah, great question. I’m going to give you the exact way to do this. Also the way that you pre-frame next steps as well. It’s kind of like book ending a workshop, we’ll call this. When you start, obviously you’re going to have a brief from whoever’s hired you to do the workshop. There’s an overarching theme that they’re going to want it to run with, whether that’s service, sales, whatever.   Now, when I start a workshop, and you can do this whether there’s three people or 3,000 people, 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. 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. If they’d been forced to go essentially by their employer then 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’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.” What I want to know is I’m going to write it on a piece of paper and put it up on the wall so we can look at it all day. What’s the outcome you want today? Then go around the room if it’s a small room and ask the question so they’ll tell you what they need to have you deliver that day.   If it’s the larger room so obviously it’s not possible to go around one by one, 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 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. 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?” Then Victor would go, “Yeah, actually you have Kirby.” I’d say, “Is there anything else I can cover for you on that before I cross it off the list?”   What you’re doing is you’re closing the psychological loop in their brain. 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?” Then that gets you the foot in the door for the next step.   Also, what you then do is you want to say, “I wanted to give me a piece of paper. 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?   If it’s less than a 10, I want to know what I could have to make it a 10.” That’s how I finished every workshop. The answers you get from that are great because you get feedback. Here’s the power of it, someone who awards 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 and you say, “Hey, I noticed that I didn’t deliver for you. What did I miss?” 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 and sign, “That was the best speaker I’ve seen and I’ve never heard of that person before, but they just nailed that workshop.” You’ll do that if you know what they want to achieve, not what you want to achieve.   Victor Ahipene: 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 in to half day or a full day into something bigger. 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? 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 things are going to be in it, but we’re also going to be doing this as well.” Then yeah, people leave.   Anthony Kirby: They leave satisfied.  They leave thinking, “Wow that was worth my time.” Not like, “Ah, I didn’t really get anything from that because the guy just spewed out all this crap that I didn’t need to know about.”   Victor Ahipene: I also realized that we got it—   Anthony Kirby: Exactly.   Victor Ahipene: That’s the big thing 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. Thank you very much.”   Anthony Kirby: Yeah, exactly. It just works so well. That’s something that 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 had been told to deliver on and that way by switching it up, I knew that I was appealing to 100% of the room instead of 50% or 40% or 30%. That was a game changer in terms of the feedback. It was the game changer in terms of the testimonials. It meant that they were then going out into their respective markets, talking about the guy that no one’s ever heard of.   Victor Ahipene: Which is what you want because then you become—   Anthony Kirby: It’s the name of the game. The other thing as well mate. 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 of him. He or she is the expert.” It’s instant credibility. There’s no way 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 going to have other people tell you how good you are or you can go and show them how good you are. The showing bit is that you can’t dispute the facts.   Victor Ahipene: That’s what I think is really, really interesting. I haven’t heard that before in the sense of be adding it to my toolkit as well. For people to just know that they’re going to leave, ideally with a 10 out of 10 and if they’re not, what is it to bring somebody up and get them from an eight to a ten and spend half an hour on the phone to them because what’s they going to do? You’re unsatisfied or not 100% satisfied customers that you turn into a satisfied one or going to be your raving fans.    Because they go, “That person was actually like—” It wasn’t that they couldn’t answer my question. They just didn’t have time or fit into all of that. Those are amazing tips. Like I say, a lot of people, there’s no one really out there showing people how to get into this corporate space or being able to position themselves. I know that’s a lot of what you do and what you’re helping coaches because 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 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.” You’ve still got to have that level. 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 over deliver, it’s a reflection on them so they want the latter. So the more things that you can do to diffuse that and so that you’re like, “Oh, okay, you’ve got a book or cool, you’ve spoken all around the world or you’ve worked at companies bigger than us.” Whatever it may be. You’ve been in the media. I’ve seen you on TV. You’ve got a podcast.   All of these kind of positioning markers. They help you get in that door, but then all of this other stuff. 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 I think a lot of people were out there doing it as well. Then there’s other people wanting to do it and they’re doing so many things wrong.   Anthony Kirby: Let me leave you with one last tip because this is super important too. I know I’m probably going over time, but it’s worth knowing this. 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 there’d be a low third, bottom third would be Myspace for example. 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.   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 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. That’s how you approach your market.   Victor Ahipene: It’s brilliant. Because I mean it’s kind of even a few take it from the smaller side of things. It’s like, do you go chasing after the solopreneur insurance broker or do you chase the guy with a company of 20 or do you chase ING? The company with a hundred or do you chase the company with 100,000? 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 get down to a thousand so brilliant.   Brilliant points. Oh, there was one other question that I wanted 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. 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 or easy things that you could add on to or pitch after the fact?   Anthony Kirby: The easiest thing to pitch is follow-up training.  Assuming that we’re talking on workshops here. Workshops are very much outcome-based generally. 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 is the accountability. You’re too busy running the business. Let me run your people. We could come in and be that voice. Let me be the white coat on the Colgate toothpaste advert to use the example.” Because 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 because they’ve heard it every week at the sales meeting.   You’re 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 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. That’s easiest thing to pitch. That’s exactly how I do it.   Victor Ahipene: Is that how you package it into a 90 day rather than a two day offering?   Anthony Kirby: Yeah. That’s where you get the value and also gives you continuity of work. At the end of the 90 days, they would see results too. It’s easy conversation to say, “Hey, do you want to keep going for another 90 days with accountability coaching or accountability training?” It’s super easy for them to say yes because you’re already doing it.   Victor Ahipene: Yeah and now people getting results. That’s absolutely awesome. I’ve known Kirby for a while now. I know that 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 heard here.   I know that you’ve just recently launched an online mastermind for people who may have found this valuable. They’re going to, if they’re wanting to either do more of the workshop space or add another leg to their business or develop their online branding and things like that, 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. That is actually free of charge. You can go to theexpertblueprint.com and get the whole online course for free. There’s 50 something lessons in there.   Now, there’s Facebook ads, training, webinar training, event training, positioning training, social media content training. 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. That’s completely free. You can grab that right now. No need to talk to me about that. No don’t need to spend a cent. People who go through that though, generally some of them would say, “I want more support.” If you do, then the inner circle is probably the right call.   That’s just an annual membership to online mentoring, 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 marketing gets thrown in the mix there for a discussion every week.   Victor Ahipene: Well that’s awesome. I will link that plus some other links to find Kirby or over the inter webs at a Public Speaking Blueprint. We’re all about blueprints here dot com and where you can find that. You can find the show notes, everything we’ve talked about because I’m sure there’ll be some things that you want to go back if you’re on the move and jot a lot of those things down. There’ll be in the show notes. Kirby, always awesome catching up with you and chatting. 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.   Anthony Kirby: Yeah, no worries. Thanks for having me. See you guys.  

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 https://www.instagram.com/iice_/ Check out his online training to start a clothing business online: https://iice.teachable.com/  Check out his podcast:  Check out Isaac’s Brand: https://www.yktr.com.au/  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. I want to talk to you as his clothing company called YKTR. Check it out. It’s You Know The Rules. He’s also done a lot for getting his company off the ground which I want to delve into and some insights that he’s gained in a bit of the behind the scenes in that aspect. 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. We’ll get another aspect of that public speaking which is the digital side. With all that being said, welcome to this show, my man.   Isaac John: Thanks bro. Thanks for having me on.   Victor Ahipene: 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 leverage social media to grow?   Isaac John: Short or long version?   Victor Ahipene: Just go, the medium.   Isaac John: Medium, so I grew up in a small town had ambitious to play sort of rugby league. Play for the NRL and sort of was able to do that through my NRL career, very average player through had a lot of injuries and stuff like that. So through injuries I 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 succeed.   Victor Ahipene: Cool. I guess part of that 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?” I’m like, I’ve been physio for the magpies I know quite a lot of sports, like all blacks and whatnot. I mean outside of them getting sponsorships from external companies.   They wouldn’t know how to leverage any of that anyway. I feel like it may be a little bit of a fire onto the flame, but if you don’t have the kindling or the water or whatever, it’s just going to die out anyway. Did you initially leverage that? 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?   Isaac John: Obviously, I understand like 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 because a lot of people would think that they’re like, “Oh because you’re friends with Chicko and Cory. That’s what made your brand grow.”   Obviously, anyone that’s sort of been in business understands that’s probably not the case or anyone that actually knows that’s not the case as well. 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. I understand why people say it and it does make sense. I find that know anything about business or didn’t understand my journey. I just saw me personally just with all these NRL players and I think a business succeeded from that.   I understand that narrative a hundred percent as well, but it used to frustrate me a little bit, but not too much anymore. It’s just what it is that people that don’t know me. People don’t 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. People just see what they want to see. We’re guilty of headline reading here in Australia and New Zealand. It’s just the same thing. They only see the result that I sort of see everything has that’s gone behind it. I do understand that. It is what it is.   Victor Ahipene: Speak on that. They don’t see the behind the scenes side of things. I know you’ve tried other businesses prior to this and then there’s obviously the trials and tribulations that come with particularly the clothing industry. What were the things that when you were first starting out that the mud that you’re throwing on the wall, was there any 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?” Did you have any plan or process to that? Because I’ve obviously seen it’s a fairly decent aspect of what your business is the content that you put out to get exposure.   Isaac John: To be honest, I just sort of went into a blind. Took a few online courses about Facebook advertising in that. Those that kind of helped me out. I’ve seen Gary Vee sort of talk about the best thing I learned, “Ah, someone asks her what’s the best business books or what was this book should I read?” He goes, “If you rely on business books given to your competitors because it’s going to help you succeed.” 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. 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 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. That was just the method that he taught and that’s the one I followed. It just worked for us.   Victor Ahipene: 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 podcasting, like not each one, but as in compared to say your paid marketing or SEO or anything like that?   Isaac John: I don’t know because if you look at the way we use vlogs purely top of funnel so if you understand the funneling system. We don’t try and really try and monetize off it. 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. I don’t think people understand the difference between branding and sales. Branding sort of long term, branding sort of the difference between people buying 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. It’s kind of playing the long game and long tail of it.   Victor Ahipene: I think there’s what you’ve done really well is, I choose whose stories I watch not be necessarily a consumer of like, “Oh, what’s Ice got to say today?” Because a lot of the stuff is great but 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 just understanding different markets and how people are communicating to them. If we were to say start with your vlogging, what have you found has, if people going out there and looking to leverage their brand with vlogging, what are some of your tips on anything for them to get started in that realm?   Isaac John: Make sure you’re just being real. Make sure you’re not trying to fabricate anything. I think a lot of what I’ve been successful at is growing a loyal following with the brand and myself is I’ve been transparent the whole way. 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? 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 everyone tries to put the best version of themselves out there, which is understandable. 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 vlog style becomes like that. They just want to put out this real super polished version like everything’s good all the time. If you look at my Instagram now, I only want to put good photos up. If you look at it now, it’s just screenshots of Twitter and stuff like that.   I feel like being real is super important. 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 don’t live. At the moment, I’m just collecting like sports cards and shit. I’m just documenting and stuff like that as well. So I feel like it’s hard for a lot of people because 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. 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 just comes with the territory as well. If you want to start vlogging, just make sure you’ve been yourself because you can’t get caught.   Victor Ahipene: Yeah. I think it’s interesting. I just finished Russell Brunson’s latest book Traffic Secrets. He was talking about it’s funny, like a lot of the people that I deliberately follow he talks about this like I think it’s five F’s or something when putting out content. It’s like having five different kind of topic streams. For example, basketball cards, league podcasts, clothing, whatever.   So that, 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 potentially branch off into other aspects. Having watched your stuff up and I’d love to hear your side of it. It was deliberate like I see your recording some courses and stuff now. You’ve highlighted to a lot of people who may be in jobs are, “Hey, look, there’s different opportunities that you can have with business.” Then that’s kind of just his there organically lead to, “Hey, I might put something together that can help people.” Or was that part of a plan?   Isaac John: 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 clothing company or how do you podcast? The reason I read those blogs in the initial phase was just to 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. 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, 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.   I feel like that’s the way to moving forward and like say please come in months and YKTR followers. 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. What was the original question?   Victor Ahipene: No, no, that was pretty much how did you go towards the online coaching or those different types of content that you’ve just—   Isaac John: I’ll tell you why I did it because everyone was going, “Oh, can I come pick your brain for two hours and I’ll buy your coffee.” I’ve 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 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 an hour. I’d just done it because I didn’t want to do it, but then people were starting to pay it. A lot of the conversations were only going for like 20, 40 minutes. So I was like, “Yeah, fuck it. Let’s go.”   Victor Ahipene: Yeah and it’s funny man, because I think I heard Tim Ferriss or something. He got in that kind of conundrum with friends when he was first kicking off. 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’ve said in two weeks, if you’ve done everything in two weeks, I give you a thousand bucks back.” It was like, “Yeah, because there’s always the mate that you’re like. Aw man, I’d love to give you a time, but 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.” Yeah, so I found that an interesting one because 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: Yeah, I think a lot of people would just get obsessed with knowledge as well. I was guilty of that. There was a time in my life where I’ve read about a hundred books. I was just like, I say this all the time. You know, when you have a bear in those bunch of useless facts underneath your breath so just like the annoying guy.   Like I could tell your fucking bunch load of shit that didn’t mean nothing. You know what I mean? I was just a bit of know it all and go to coffees with the boys and the boys are just going to shut the fuck up. 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 I’ve got a photographic memory.   If you asked me something right now, “Oh, I 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.” It’s kind of a weird. I said 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. If I’m in a scenario, “Oh there’s like this timeline, but ABC.” It’s sort of being great in that sort of sense.   Victor Ahipene: Run us through and this is the thing that I’m interested in. I’ve been watching of your journey as your YKTR media. How did that kind of come about and where do you see it in the future? Because 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. That’s just the way kind of I see it’s something bigger than you.   Isaac John:  Yeah. Just from a pain point to be honest, I have a modern day journalism just—   Victor Ahipene: What is it for listeners out there?   Isaac John: We’ve actually changed just it to YKTR sports. It’s actually a pretty dodgy place right now because there’s no fucking sports going on. What YKTR sports is just trying to go to an alternative that connects players to fans and fans to players. 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. Then you open up newspapers, they’re just negative, negative, negative all the time. None of the sources actually ever come from the player. That was sort of the pain point from it. 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 down 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 bloke..   I’ve seen his name get dragged through the mud through YKTR and vlogging really flipped the narrative and people that met 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.   Victor Ahipene: That was also an awesome interview, man.   Isaac John: I’ve known Quade since I was three or four and the way he’s portrayed in media was never the way I knew him as a friend and talking to him behind the scenes and stuff. It was very, very different. That was probably the moment we’re like, “Fuck we got some here.” In saying that like everything’s sort of pulled back as well. Like Fox sports are in trouble. It’s the whole rugby leagues in trouble.   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 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.” For me, I don’t really care about that stuff. What’s Cameron Munster doing on Tuesday night? What’s he watching? That stuff seems more interesting to me. That’s what we wanted to put the narrative around.   Also, I’ve done a podcast with Mark Boris one time in his office and after the podcast, he sort of goes we want to do is run a clothing company. At the time I thought I was killing it, “Fuck how good am I going like running this business like ABC.” It sort of just got my mind thinking, I was like, 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 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. It’s still been a backlash from it. I’ve had people turn off like YKTR, not stop buying from like YKTR because of it. Few guys are getting really personal with me because they’ve got a difference of opinion. 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. 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 used 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 an insight into the players and then yours as well in that space because I think I follow a lot of the NBA. I follow a lot of the NBA players or ex-players podcasts and stuff like this where they’re actually like talking to the players.   Isaac John: How good is that?   Victor Ahipene: 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 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. 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. It’s real 110% all credit to everyone. We’ll go back to the drawing board stuff yet you go, “Oh that guy seems like an idiot.” Then they actually get on to a platform and it’s like, “Oh man, they are actually a human being, which a lot of people forget.”   Isaac John: Oh that’s the biggest thing because 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. They’re overpaid and all this sort of stuff, but we going to realize this is just normal people just like everyone else. 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.”   That’s what a lot of people don’t realize that everyone is just normal. I say this a lot, like if you want to hang around football players don’t talk football. That’s like number one rule 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. The amount of football that we actually talk compared to other things. It’s probably about 90 to 10 by 10 percent football. I haven’t seen another route.   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. It’s about 10 of us in there like Kalyn Ponga, Connor Watson, Andrew Fafita, Ardia Savea, Aaron Smith.   Some of the biggest names in sports right now, what we do is talk sports cards or what are you trying to collect? You feel like a little kid again. You do realize that people were just normal people. I just want to show that side of players because I’m sick of him getting bagged for I don’t know just for doing shit that anyone else would be doing at 21 and 22 having to bury or pissing on the street. Come meet the person.   Victor Ahipene: Yeah and that’s what I think everyone listening to this should take away from this. You can tell from it. It’s just an authentic conversation they were having. 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, 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. He’s an example. I’d say most people listening to this podcast know and if you meet him in the street, he’s not the dude go and I’ve heard stories about other guys like Kiyosaki and stuff—back in the room, they won’t talk to you unless it’s not like 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 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 spent time with me over maybe a couple of days that are come stay and you’re like, “Oh bro, you’re completely different.   It looks like you’re always on the go all the time.” When I get home I’m fucked. I really enjoy my space as well and people got to realize like a lot of my content comes from me just being on my own. 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. Just got to realize that there’s a balance there somewhere.   Victor Ahipene: Yeah, cool. Finally, just give us a bit of a breakdown. What’s your number one tip obviously apart from the authenticity to getting lots of content out if you’re a solopreneur or you’re that speaker out there, what would you say the best way to start building that personal brand?     Isaac John: Find what your medium is. Are you a writer? Are you comfortable in front of a camera? Are you better speaking to someone as well? Find out what your medium is and just try and make sort of Gary V based on their content pillar strategy.   I find podcasts the best because when you can video them too. You can record them and then three you can turn them into written and stuff as well. 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 strip from that is huge.   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 that you can put on a Spotify. They can put on podcasts if you put it on YouTube.   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 ago, where I was a year ago. Document and journey is always important from that sort of standpoint, but understanding where your brand or your personal brands voice is best documented.   I enjoy writing as well. I can cover across all three bases, which are pretty lucky to do. I’m confident in doing and don’t care if I can fuck up as well. I think that’s a big part of it as well. I see a lot of people trying to vlog and 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. Find what suits you and just roll with that.   Victor Ahipene: Well, we’ll do a hundred podcasts and get better at it. Do a hundred podcasts, real quick. I appreciate you jumping on man. It was really last minute. I’m sure there’s a ton of knowledge that we can strip into one minute videos and repurpose into wave audios and have them all over the net. If people want to follow you, find out more about either you, your clothes or what you’re doing on social. Where can they go? What can they do?   Isaac John: Hit me up on Instagram at iice_ for their Instagram name for ages. Probably not the best one, but as we can find me YKTR_ find us on Instagram as well. You can find me on YouTube, The Ice Project. YKTR in YouTube, but probably podcasts. I think the last project find me on Spotify and ITunes. They’re going on there.   Victor Ahipene: We’ll link all of that in the show notes at publicspeakingblueprint.com. Man, it’s been a pleasure. 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: I definitely will affect us. To what extent? Who knows? It’d be all day on the 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. Instagram – @sallyprosservoice TikTok – @sallyprosservoice Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/SallyProsserVoice/ LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/sally-prosser/ Twitter – @sally_prosser Website – www.sallyprosser.com.au Podcast – www.thatvoicepodcast.com | Apple Podcasts | Spotify 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 because we’ve got Sally Prosser who is a voice and presentation coach. 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. Welcome to the show, Sally.   Sally Prosser:  Thanks for having me, Victor. Good to be here.   Victor Ahipene: Give everyone a bit of a background. 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? It could go on for a bit, but in a nutshell, I started out as a speech and drama teacher. For anyone out there who’s done a Stedford growing up, poetry, prose, that kind of thing? 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 don’t think I can continue.”   At uni I studied law actually and also journalism. I worked as the broadcast news journalist. I did radio then moved into the area where you had to blow dry your hair TV, unfortunately. Then I went from news reporting to PR, which is called crossing to the dark side. The journalists who cross crossover to PR, that’s what they’re called. I was the spokesperson for Brisbane’s water and Sewerage Company. There you go. The glamour girl for sewerage.   Victor Ahipene:  Yeah. Does that need lots of spokespersoning?   Sally Prosser:  Well, you know what they say, if you can sell it then you can sell anything. Then I was there awhile I was there in the corporate setting that I started to understand how much of a skill public speaking, 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. So about a couple of years ago I left and I’ve started my own business.   Victor Ahipene: Nice. Kind of diving into that aspect on the corporate side, do you find it to particular level that—to put it bluntly, like sucks at the presentation fears, the presentation side? Is there a middle manager person? Is still happening at the CEO or the C level side of things? Or is it those people aspiring, interested from someone who’s going to been in there on the ground level seeing it?   Sally Prosser: I saw it at all levels. 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? If they say yes, they say, “Oh thank you, I’m not applying.” It’s extraordinary.   Victor Ahipene: It’s crazy. I worked with someone who was in the air and one of the big four or five or whatever it is, accounting firms. It was kind of in the middle management space and then once he improved his presentations, it was like three months later he got a promotion.   Sally Prosser: Absolutely. 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.   Then, yeah, I’ve seen right through to CEOs and board chair people who freak out. I have one client. She’s just such an amazing woman. I’m sure that any meeting that she chairs, everybody is sitting around just hoping to impress her. She tells me that she feels sick with nerves every time she walks in.   Victor Ahipene: It’s really crazy that, not necessarily that they can get to that level, but how they’ll surround themselves with amazing people, who are amazing at different areas. They’ll work really hard in particular skill sets. Then like that one is the one that they often let down.   I think, obviously there’s all well. There’s the fear and everything that I don’t have the gift of the gab, etcetera, etcetera. 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 go through how it kind of amplifies everything. 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 want to get out in front of an audience or you want to be able to lead and lead your team and lead your company. As those who have got their ability to communicate that are going to be probably the last out the door apart from those with really elite skill sets.   Sally Prosser: Yeah. I totally agree. I think 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: So you’ve gone out from on your own since then and you obviously help people with both. It was kind of all the aspects of what you’ve developed from the presentation side of things, from the vocal side of things. Obviously, it helps understanding that PR and being the spokesperson and that sort of thing.   I’d love to dive in today into some of the voice side of things because I know you can have the voice for radio and the face variety as well. You don’t necessarily want to end up like the Australian reference, the Wally Lewis on the TV who speaks like this. Like he is reading off a teleprompter and he absolutely sucks at it.   I see that even when I can—you can sometimes tell on social media or on LinkedIn, on YouTube, people who are still using teleprompters and then not overly natural. 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.   I see it coming in affecting their voice in different ways. Then obviously there’s people who are speaking off the cuff and then maybe monotonous in the way that they present. I don’t think there’s really a question in what I just rambled on about, but when it comes to voice, what are the things that as business owners, as professional speakers as 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 because being a news reporter, I work with a lot of broadcast journalists with what I do. It’s always the same thing. We want to be telling the story, not reading the script. This is something that happens with people who aren’t too experienced with videos.   You see it on social media. You do say it in public as well. I call it a high school awards night syndrome. When every single line 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 read, we take more pauses than we do if we’re just speaking naturally. That’s one of the things that I work on. If you want to sound natural, pay attention with the pauses.   The second thing we do when we read, 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. The to, the have, the from the, ugh. All of these words should usually come out as to, have, from. Because they’re all sandwiched in other words.   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 and that comes with practice of course.   Victor Ahipene: Yeah. I think those are 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, you start riding a tricycle or a bike with training wheels or whatever it may be.   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. I’m 100% not going to get them all right the first time.” Do you follow different vocal coaches 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. Are there certain drills that people can work on say on a daily basis, even if they’re not presenting just in front of the mirror or just in the car on the way to work or when they’re in the shower that can work on your vocal tonality or trying to have a bit more inflection or a bit more excitement or whatever it may be in their voice?   Sally Prosser: Yeah, absolutely. I actually have a free one minute warm up people can do. If you head to my website, which is https://www.sallyprosser.com.au/. You can click on the warm up there and it’s all there for you. 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. All of us can sit our posture up correctly and I say, “Pretend you’re wearing Victoria’s secret angel wings.” As soon as you put your wings on your shoulders, we’ll come back and unlock your knees. He rolls through the shoulders.   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. Oxygen fuels our voice. 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. How can I be breathing wrong? But breathing is habitual. It’s not actually natural. Its habits that we formed and a lot of us have formed quite bad habits.   We’re breathing far too shallow up inside our lungs. If you’re doing it right is take a deep breath. If your shoulders rise, then you’re breathing too shallow. What you want is wanting to have your hands down your tummy and as you breathe in your tummy expands. 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.   People might have heard speaking with the diaphragm. That’s the power muscle for your voice. So a few deep breaths, just breathing in for one and out for two. You want to have more on your exhale. That’s a good little warm up you do. Also good to come nerves before you speak. You’ve got your body set up. You’ve got the breath coming in.   Then the third one and I called buzz. Buzz is getting vocal chords to wake up. Vocal chords is so 17 or so muscles in there that had to come together to make a sound. 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, me on a Sunday morning after too much, too big a Saturday night.   Sally Prosser: Then we have buzz 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. Our vocal chords are like two little chicken wings and we need them to come together nice and strong to get a sound.   The warm up that I use is count Dracula, which is like, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. That brings my vocal chords together and gets the air flowing through as well. Now the quick warmup is praying like a donkey with the lips. This sounds very silly. I’ve actually got a podcast episode all about this, which is kind of embarrassing, but this is what you do to warm up your voice.   Anybody out there who’s doing public speaking and not warming up, it’s the equivalent of 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. 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: I think there’s some big ramifications. My voice is sounding horrible at the moment because 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 horrible.” I’ve helped a lot of people with podcasting as well. 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. That being said, I think there’s a lot of ramifications as well with that. 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. Then you’ve got those lips that are going [lip sounds] into the microphone. You can’t not necessarily announce you ate your words or get them out there. Your mouth is dry. Your lips are dry, which obviously stress vocal chords further. 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.   Then you end up straining. 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 masses. All of a sudden, they haven’t had everything warmed up. 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.   I think it’s really, really important because it’s one of those invisible ROI’s with your presentation that you never say, “Wow, I saw Sally on stage and she had such a great voice.” Occasionally you’re going to say, “Oh, that person had a really cool voice.” The majority I will, I think of great presenters. They’ve got this great presentation. They’ve got great body language. Everyone just walks off and go, “That person was a great presenter.”   Sally Prosser: Yeah. 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. 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 don’t do things right. In my experience, people who are professionally public speaking, they tend to have some good techniques that they use. 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. I think it’s very, very important. From a say someone who’s speaking in the board room or delivering a presentation to their company or whatever. That kind of everyday person. Are there certain things you see people once they start learning these things, maybe try and overcompensate.   You were saying earlier when the certain people over pronounciate words that wouldn’t necessarily come off your tongue is—are there other things along that inflection at the wrong times or too long of pause, too short of pause. Anything else throughout kind of— I think a voice is, it’s the verbal but also the nonverbal use of the voice.   The pause is using your voice to add to it. From your side of things, what are some of the things I throw out that phrase? You’ve warmed up your voice. You’re out on the stage now. You’re nervous. I’m sure a lot of your students are still got reaching nerves. Some of them, when they’re stepping out there, how do they remember, “Oh God, I’ve got to breathe through my stomach. I’ve got to do this. I’ve got to do this.” 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 warm time because there’s times when you’re really, really nervous that’s you need to have things just there ready to go. That’s when the training comes into play.   While you’re on stage, I always just go back to the body and the breath, 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. You were talking earlier about in the board room, different things that I’ve seen people do, 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.   Lower, lower pitched is better, or 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. If you’ve seen the Wolf of Wall Street, that’s scene with Matthew McConaughey and Leonardo Di Caprio. 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. I’m so important because I’m at the board table. The problem with that is, yeah, you love because that voice sounds very fake and very put on. When people are trying to stake with credibility, it can backfire Victor Ahipene: For people, because they’re obviously going to be hearing this. If you were to give an example of say that back of throat, what you just did versus say something deeper down throughout the chase, what would they kind of sound like for people out there?   Sally Prosser: Yeah, it’s different by the brain. You’ve got to visualize where the sound’s going rather than swallowing it back down here, the back of the throat, and think like you’re doing a very posh kind of queen accent. Instead of that, we want it to vibrate. I’m talking about the sound waves vibrating down in the walls of our chest.   With that exercise you can do is just put the palm of your hand on your chest and as you say just try, “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. Then you say, “Ahhh, good morning.” Your voice is very forward and free as opposed to good morning where the voice sits back there.   Victor Ahipene: I think being able to hear that obviously with those drills of being able to, you are demonstrating a beautifully with your hands on the audio, but I think being able to hear that and been 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 audible difference on what it sounds like.   They’re both deeper voices, but one sounds ridiculous in the nicest possible way. The other one sounds natural.  I’m not sitting there going like, yeah, 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 present? It wasn’t like it sounded terrible, but it was like if you spoke how you naturally speak with obviously a few deviations for when you’re actually giving the presentation. It sounded really good, but it sounded fake. People were just going to switch off because it doesn’t sound—   Sally Prosser: I know and I work with a lot of reporters. 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.” I’m like, “No, no, no.” We’ve got to have a forward police. The investigations are ongoing. 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%, 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. It’s not an unusual thing. You can watch the best. The ones who are, I don’t know, Good Morning USA or the biggest news branches versus maybe your regional one or just the person who like, “Oh, that person doesn’t vibe of me for some reason like yours.” I was throwing Wally under the bus. The guy I referenced earlier, he’s a sporting great who is not—   Sally Prosser: Yeah how dare you say anything about Wally.   Victor Ahipene: He’s a sporting great, but even my girlfriend sitting there going, “What is he doing on TV?” 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.   I think it’s a very good on him for going out there and then doing that. It’s a very important aspect and the difference of, I think in my personal opinion is the trust. 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% his voice.   Sally Prosser: Yeah. Because he clearly sounds like he’s reading the words, not telling the story. 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. 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.   Vocal variation is one of the main things, but more presenters could do it. We also want to voice where the breath flows freely out. To demonstrate that, hopefully my voice is doing that now. 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: If you were to put it into a sentence, I tend to find that the end of their voice with inclination just that’s dropping off. The closer it gets to the full stop because they run out of air. They don’t pause for say that hypothetical comma 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. What’s also interesting is often it’s not enough air getting in. It’s a restriction in the throat, not letting the air go out. It’s almost like it’s the body holding it in going, I’ve got to save some for later. 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.” Finally letting the muscles of the throat open up and let that voice go. That’s why it’s really one of the good exercises you can do is just to sigh. Have a nice big sigh. Ah, ah.   Victor Ahipene: 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 people presenting in general can improve in that aspect. What are they tending to do wrong? What’s the kind of 80, 20 of that?   Sally Prosser: Oh, there’s so many things that we could talk about. 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 the flat line on the heart monitor. That’s what we’re doing to our audience if we don’t change things around. There’s three things you want to change. We want to change up the pitch. We want to change up the pace. 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 softer or if 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. With pitch, you don’t need to be getting out there and singing, Do, Re, Mi. Everyone should just aim to be able to go up and be able to go down. If you can go up and go down and be able to vary that through your presentation that will be a big start.   The next one is pace. So you’ll find that you’re more likely to speak too fast. That’s me or more likely to speak too slowly. Identify what your default is and then try to mix it up. Last of course, volume—volume I’d be careful with because you don’t want to go soft unless you know you’ve got the attention of the whole room.   Going softer is one of the things that more of my professional speakers will do when they’ve got a microphone, they’ve got a whole audience. They’ve got that option to go down here so people can really listen to what they’re going to say. You don’t want to do that if people can’t hear to begin with.   Victor Ahipene: Yeah. I heard something really interesting, even from the professional speaking side of things is, understanding or respecting the audiences kind of nervous system in that lower pitched voice as often something that’s more intense or something that’s more personal. People can’t maintain that anxiousness of what it is from an emotional level for 30 minutes. You have to take them.   Again, like you talk about 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. This is going on a bit of a tangent from there.” I think it doesn’t matter even if it’s in a board room. You obviously still want people to listen. You can use it effectively and there, but you hear that people’s emotions can’t be held on edge for long, long periods of time.   Sally Prosser: That’s right. 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. It’s 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. 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. Keep changing it out.   Victor Ahipene: There we go. It’s the most powerful thing. Like I say, all of these are so important in presenting yet your audience don’t necessarily put their finger on it until it’s bad.  I shouldn’t say never, but more often than not, you’re not walking out of a presentation and say, “Wow, that person had great voice, vocal variation and great pausing.” But you go, “Man, that person was monotone. Man, that person spoke really quickly.”   Sally Prosser: You don’t come out and say, “Wow, the use of rising and falling inflections.” Unless you make—   Victor Ahipene: Exactly. It’s why I say more often than not, your audience isn’t go into that. Sally Prosser: If you learn how to do it, it’s absolutely a skill that you can learn and practice and master. 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.   Victor Ahipene: Often 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. In my mind I’m going, “I have no idea what am I talking about.”   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. I appreciate you coming on and sharing it. If people want to jump over and find out their 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 and if you want to play effectively.  If people what to do that, again where can they go and what can they do?   Sally Prosser: Hey, it’s my website. Its https://www.sallyprosser.com.au/   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, 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.  

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. TEDx coaching & free resource “5 Common TEDx Mistakes (and what to do instead)”: https://brianmillerspeaks.com/tedx-coaching/-Brian’s blog: http://HumanConnection.blog-Podcast: https://www.beyondnetworkingpodcast.com/-Book: https://ThreeNewPeople.comFacebook, Twitter, and Instagram: @bmillermagic Victor Ahipene: Speaker nation, what’s happening? Welcome to another episode of Public Speaking Secrets. Super excited to have you here. I hope your 2020, the new decade is kicking off brilliantly for you. It’s certainly has my end to end today. We’ve got somebody who we’ve already been speaking off air. He has flown down the road just a few weeks ago.   We got that close from the other side of the world, but now we’re back on now I’ll say far sides. His name is Brian Miller. He’s a former magician. He’s 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. 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: Give everyone a bit of a bit of a background like magician turned, speaker. Were you a silent magician or does that—? How did you kind of transition into the speaking world from the magician side of things?   Brian Miller: Yeah. 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. He also is a former magician turned speaker. What’s interesting is that if your listeners heard his story recently, 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.   I actually ended up speaking purely by accident. I never wanted to be a speaker. I never intended to be a speaker. If I’m being really honest, when I thought of speaker, I thought of motivational speakers. I thought they kind of word lame. I really thought motivational speaking was lame. I was not a fan of Tony Robbins and nothing against, not a knock on him. That is what I imagined speaking was. I was in college for philosophy and my plan was I was all set to start a PhD. I’d been accepted into PhD programs for philosophy right out of undergrad. I come from a family of academics, scientists, and mathematicians.   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. I started doing it in high school instead of working at McDonald’s. Basically, it was my part time job in high school doing magic shows. Then I continued to support myself through college and at the last hour, I decided I wanted to try to make a living as a magician.   So I abandoned ship, which was a really rough phone call home to mom and dad. That was not ideal. It took years before they really came around. I mean they supported it. They were like, “Okay, do your thing, but when it fails, you’ll obviously go back to grad school.” It was kind of like that. Like, “All right, whatever, you’re 22. You have time to fail.” I don’t think anybody really took it seriously. What’s interesting is that speaking, even though it ended up being an accident for me later in my career, it was laid out. 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 how our language relates to the world, if at all and meaning and semantics and stuff like that.   So speaking was always an interest there. Then as a philosophy undergrad, I had a paper two years in a row accepted to the largest undergraduate philosophy conference in North America. 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. Speaking was right there in my Ethos, even though I then abandoned ship and decided to try to be a magician.   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. I was doing the starving artist thing. 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 at McDonald’s or some retail location. I was really determined not to get a part time job. It felt like it would be a failure. I’m not sure I now agree with that, but that’s how it felt at the time.   So I came up with this idea to create a philosophy lecture that used live magic demonstrations to explain the philosophy concepts. I came up with a title, it’s called Magic, philosophically speaking. I wrote a three or four sentence description and this was 2011. I just hit Google and manually found the email address of every department philosophy chair at every single college campus in the Northeastern United States within driving distance.   So I emailed 400 philosophy chairs or something stupid like that and said, “Hey, I think this would be really good for your—I’m a philosopher and a magician and I think this would be good for your students and even open it up to the community.” Amazingly, eight or nine of them got back to me and five of them booked. I mean, think about the percentage. That’s nothing but five of them booked and each of them paid $500, $600, $800 a pop.   These weren’t big engagements, but at the time I was broke that was a huge amount of money. 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, find some money and try that.” For all I know some of these department chairs pulled it out of their own pocket, you know what I mean? I went and did that series of lecture show things.   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. I spent months panicking, actually writing the lecture. I came up with this idea of doing a 90 minute lecture, broken up into three sections. Each 30 minute section would tackle a problem in contemporary philosophy from three different areas of philosophy.   I took metaphysics, 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. 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. Speaking never cropped back up until I got yanked into that world with the success of my TEDx talk. 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. It’s funny. I think it’s a very similar journey that a lot of people come or go down. It’s like they accidentally, not accidentally stumbled in, but like you say, connect the dots looking back and it was like, if I knew that is what I was meant to do. It would have been a bit easier.   Anyway, with the TEDx thing, because you would have worked with a lot of people as well. It’s this big shining beacon. It’s the Northern light that yet that you follow for your directions and a lot of people are really want to be a TEDx speaker. I want to give a TEDx talk. 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 how did that all come about?   Brian Miller:  Nope, it’s equally ridiculous and random. The worst answer to this question I get, as you might imagine, these days I coach a lot of well not a lot. I don’t promote my services as a speaking coach, but because of the fact that my TEDx talk did over 3 million views and at one point was in the top 1/1000th 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. I usually one person at a time case at a time, I will decide to work with if I have time for it.   Because that’s not where I make a living. I make a living on stage speaking. Having said that, the number one question I get asked is how do you get a TEDx talk? 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 I’m not sure.   I think we might be somewhere within the same age. I actually have no idea. I could be off by 10 years, but I was in college when YouTube was invented. Maybe we are or are not the same age, no idea. I was in college when YouTube was invented so I remember when TED talks showed up on this new thing called YouTube. It was a big deal and I’d been following them.   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. This guy at the other end of the line just said, “Hi, is this Brian Miller?” I was like, “Yeah.” He just said, “Oh, my name is Parag Joshi. 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.”   I just said, “I’m walking into an event right now. I have to get off the phone. Yes. Can you call me back tomorrow?” That was it. He’s like, “Yeah, sure.” 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?” He called me the next day and basically what happened is this guy Parag who’s become a good friend in the years since. He took his, this is so weird and winding, and 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 not enough clients. 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. It worked. It worked great. For a couple of years, I did magic lessons there.   That entire group of people, the staff at this performing arts center became my friends because I moved to Connecticut on a whim. I had no friends and no colleagues because I’m self-employed and no way to meet people. They became like my best friends. This guy Pirog, he was taking his daughters to their music lessons. He was waiting for them and chatting with the studio coordinator, Casey. He asked her. He said, “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?”   She just went, “Brian Miller.” Now, this woman Casey, she’s my best friend in the world. She was a bridesmaid in our wedding. Me and my wife. Her and her husband and become like the couple that we date, you know couples that are in relationships with other couples. 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. What are the odds of that? He called me on that. I accepted his invitation and then 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. I floated a bunch of different ideas to some of my colleagues and friends in the industry. 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. That ended up becoming the how to magically connect with anyone talk.   Victor Ahipene: From there obviously, went on was fairly, obviously not fairly, but really successful in regards to its reach and everything like that. It’s a fast, fast forward along that. Did you, after that go, “Hey, I wouldn’t mind doing more speaking.” 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?” How did that transition from magic teacher and magic performer then transitioned into your keynote speaker?   Brian Miller: So when I gave the talk at that point I was a relatively successful magician. I was touring nationally. I was making a good living by no means at the top of the world. I was making a good living. I was putting my wife through her masters so doing well enough. I’d broken through that.   My management, I was chatting 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 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, and we can probably increase my rate as a magician by a couple hundred bucks.” That was the goal. That was the bar. 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 significant or something. 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. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves. 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 do 45 minutes at our conference? Can you basically do the TEDx talk but just do it for 45 minutes?” We started saying, yes. We didn’t even know what to charge. We started asking people looking it up because we knew what the charge is a magician. We knew that market, but we didn’t know the speaking market. We started saying numbers that seemed ridiculous. Thousands of dollars, $5,000.   Like to us as a magician, that was lunacy saying those numbers. Come to find out those are low budgets in the speaking world. So people to our surprise had no issue with those budgets. 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 pitch something and then if someone bites then we figure out how to do it. 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’m going to buy, I’m actually going to put my credit card down and put a deposit because I want that. Then it’s like, “Well, okay someone has paid for it. I know it’s worthwhile and I know what its worth.   Now I know what I need to do to create that, to deliver that value.”  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 and not even because half of the TEDx talk I did was magic tricks to pad it. I didn’t even have that much. For whatever reason it was striking this chord, 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. It was 2015 when I gave that talk. 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. I also got lucky in that I gave this talk about connecting in the same year that the entire world, if you remember right around there, took a really weird turn into being very divisive, very distracted. It was kind of the beginning of the world that we now live in. It’s really broken, divisive world. I was the talk, the title had magic in it, but it was about connecting and the thumbnail was like a fedora wearing goofball and a suit and with a piece of rope in his hand.   It was like every weird thing you could have never planned just collided. That’s why I call that luck. I was just a magician. I had no idea. Impostor syndrome never hit me as hard as it did when I started giving these speeches for these four or five, $6,000 price tags knowing 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 attention. The fight with people on their phones. These were people who thought I was an expert. They were leaning in and I felt that responsibility and it really hit me.   So I spent the next year just in an attempt to get to conquer my imposter syndrome. I thought, the only way to conquer the imposter syndrome is do not be an impostor. I just devoured for a year. Ask my wife, I disappeared for a year into books and videos and conversations. I read everything you could re-watched every video you could watch, talk to every person I could talk to who studied connection, communication, perspective, psychologists and philosophers and sociologists and academics.   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. After a year of just trying to not feel like an idiot, when I was giving these speeches, I became the “expert”, nobody’s really an expert, but I became the “expert” that people thought I was when they were paying me. So that first year was a lot of growing pains, lot of getting out of your comfort zone, lot of learning to become an academic. All of a sudden my career came full circle where I realized I had just skipped the PhD and became an academic. It was kind of weird. It’s a really weird detour through magic tricks.   Victor Ahipene: Stupid amount of awesome learnings within—they’re part of your journey. I think. For instance, I see a lot of people out there and they go out and they write out three or they 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 very much in your camp and I know a lot of other people are in the sense of build the plane while you’re flying or 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. Why are you guys not signing me up to speak or not doing anything like that.” The other thing is, there’s that aspect of luck, 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 if you don’t get it, I’m impressed with anybody who doesn’t get it.   Brian Miller: If you don’t get it, you’re not trying hard enough or you haven’t taken it seriously enough.   Victor Ahipene: Yeah. 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 “why is me—“the kind of victim mentality? Why does this never happen to me? Did you message 400 universities? Did you go and start teaching something, other opportunities happen to happen because of that? No, you didn’t. It’s about putting yourself outside of that comfort zone and then luck happens off the back of it.   You can’t necessarily predict what’s going to happen, but if you’re not out there taking action off the back of it. I think a couple of really, really cool things off the back of that and not being too set in stone. In regards to, you got these, and this is just me hesitant, I guess. TEDx talks, they have this, if they do have that virality about them at say a quick op shot and then YouTube decides, “Okay, we’ve had enough of that one for the time being.” It kind of tapers off. It doesn’t go, “Yeah, oh, 3 million, 30 million, 300 million.”   Simon Sinek or along those lines, you kind of transitioned into the speaking world, how did you then leverage the talks you are giving into further talks? Did you have to develop your kind of the outreach side of things or was it like, “Hey, I did an awesome job and performance there. More people are referring me on to other organizations.” How did that kind of look from your next 12 months from there?   Brian Miller: At the beginning, we were approaching it the only way we knew how, which was how I built my magic career. It turns out that the speaking industry was not anywhere near as similar to the magic industry as I expected or hoped for. Magic seems like it’s this kind of highly specialized thing, but at the same time, most people book a magician for their event by going on the internet and searching. Yes, at the highest corporate levels, they’re obviously going to work on referrals and people they already know, 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 magician. I know what keywords they’re going to be searching for. I know how to target their demographic or their geographic 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.   Public speakers are just people who become really good at the art of speaking. You can bring them in to talk on any topic. 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. 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, we have our own message. 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 talk about, I don’t know— well, what were you talking about before the Great Barrier Reef energy conservation of their natural resources. Like, yeah, could I? Of course I could.   Because 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. 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 flown 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 call to action. 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? It’s worth every penny.”   The way to get those gigs, no one’s booking a speaker for five, 10 20 grand by Googling speaker near me in Melbourne, Australia or whatever. 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. I’m not talking about celebrities so excluding the people who are already famous for something, but 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 in 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 us personally 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 $500 budget or even a thousand dollars budget. Again, there’s nothing wrong with being that that person. 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.   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 TEDx talk.   We are just trying to take our old model and shove it into this new industry and it didn’t work. I probably lost a lot of potential by making that mistake, but we didn’t know any better. 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.   It’s amazing how you can forget to do the thing that you know when it comes to yourself. It’s really easy to give other people advice. That’s why you see doctors smoking right outside the ER. You’re just like, “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 putting out there on stage that I was getting hired to come speak about and making meaningful connections with everyone.   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. 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.” 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: That is awesome. In regards to kind of that connecting with people like you’re saying, you don’t know if you’re talking to the potential, someone whose husband’s in HR or wife’s an HR person at another company and they do the hiring for their events and they go home and they rave because they had that personal connection with you. It’s very much the Gary V model of some dude stops him at the airport and he’ll give them that five or 10 minutes or 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 always going to be the people who are like, “Oh, okay that didn’t resonate with me at all.” I had other things on my mind at that time or whatever and they’re going to disappear. Those other ones, it’s like, you can either be the snob. You can be the person who’s like, “Oh yeah, I only want to talk to the CEO of this company.”   Or you can be the person who’s like, if I just want to connect with people and take everything to the next level with them and allow them to ask what they want to ask or share what they want to share or get off their chest because and that’s what I freaking love about being able to present and speak to people is when you do it yes, you get a bit of 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 back of your neck 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 or whatever it may be. It’s just like a whole different level, which is what I—   Brian Miller: The feeling of being seen of being understood is so powerful and it’s becoming rarer and rarer in a world that is very divisive and all these different silos and bubbles that 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 standing in line waiting for coffee 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. In that moment, it’s amazing how good it feels to be seen as a person with value. We just don’t do it anymore and people are desperate for it.   Victor Ahipene: 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. Like you said, no one’s really an expert, but if you’re thinking that you’ve got an area of expertise or knowledge, like you were saying, go and obsess on it. Go and get the first 10 or 20 books to start with off Amazon in that space.   Go on, watch a hundred or a thousand hours of other thought leaders in that space on YouTube and buy other people’s courses and learn and see, are you on the right track? 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 filled up with some magic tricks to get to there. So 45 minutes and going, “I’m only scratching the surface on what I write.”   Brian Miller: Right? When I get booked now and someone says, “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?” Because I do six hour workshops now and that’s not enough. There’s just this wealth of stuff that I want to talk about. Actually the hardest thing now is choosing which 45 minutes is the right stuff for this particular audience. This group of people sitting in front of me today.   Victor Ahipene : I honestly think being able to have something that you can speak for three minutes, 30 minutes, three hours, and three days is what allows you to help minimize that impostor syndrome is what helps you go, “Yeah, okay, well look, I’m not struggling to fill out 30 minutes.” I’m sitting there going, “Shit, how do I only speak for 30 minutes of value”.   There’s a lot of extroverts who think they’re good speakers because they just love the sound of their own voice and they just speak for 30 minutes. Yeah, of value and once you kind of hit that point, you’re like, “Oh man, I’m legit at this or I’m good at this.” Yeah, not drinking your own Kool-Aid too much. Obviously, but I really, really value that point because it’s something that I say to people. You’re never going to know too much about your area of expertise. Everybody who’s kind of deemed in that “expert” area has learned from other people. Go out and kind of divulge in and get as much as you can in that space.   Brian Miller: I want to highlight real quick. One of the things you said which was so important and I think it might’ve flown by anybody listening just now, which was that you said, find people what do you agree with, what do you disagree with? That disagree with is really important. At some point when you start to form your opinion on your content area, when you start to become something of an expert, it’s easier and easier to just find people who agree with you because there’s a wealth of that.   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. 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 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. No, 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. 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: Well, there’s a ton to dissect in everybody and what I really loved about this episode is it just shows that 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.   Our employee look to be that expert speaker rather than the hired gun out there because it’s going to be more impactful, more impactful for you even though 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 stronger. 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 book getting in touch and following your journey week and they go. What can they do?     Brian Miller: Great. Thanks so much, Victor. This was a pleasure. I feel like you and I could talk for three more hours, or 30 more hours probably. But if somebody wants to find out more about my work, if you just go to threenewpeople.com. All spelled out, threenewpeople.com although I think if you put the number three and instead I also own that domain and a forwards to there. I think past me was very smart about that, but threenewpeople.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. If you’re listening to this podcast, many people like we were talking about earlier, people like Seth Godin and people like Chris Voss who’s coming on soon in my next season. People that you’d be really interested in hearing from. 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 that you’ll get if you just pop your email in. So threenewpeople.com.   Victor Ahipene: Brilliant. Well, we’ll link all of that for all of you at 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 the world of public speaking. I appreciate your time and I look forward to hopefully liaising better next time. We’re on either side of the world.   Brian Miller:  Absolutely. Well, Victor, thanks so much again and happy New Year.   Victor Ahipene: 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 Marketer 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.    In this episode find out how you can: Cut through the noise and be seen as the go-to authority in your space Create a platform to drive change and have a greater impact on the issues you care about Leverage your digital presence to match your offline achievements Get invited to speak by influential groups to prestigious events Understand the value of personal branding and are committed to building your reputation for the long-haul LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandawilliamsau/ Instagram: @amandapandawilliams Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/makingheadlines/ Website: www.yellowpanda.com.au Book a call: https://calendly.com/yellowpanda/15min   Victor Ahipene: Speaking nation, what’s happening? Super excited to have you back. I’ve been off the mic for a little bit 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.   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. She has done and an extremely awesome way. I’m looking forward to getting someone 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. With all that being said, welcome to the show, Amanda.   Amanda Williams: Thanks, Victor. It’s great to be here.   Victor Ahipene: Now, give us a bit of a quick background. 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 with. I’m working in politics as a major advisor. So my role back then was essentially looking after the public image of politician. That was everything from sort of digital footprint, websites, and 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 speeches. I’m basically doing everything I can to support them as talent in politics. I guess it was sort of a natural sort of progression then to may once I left politics to start doing that for entrepreneurs.   Victor Ahipene: Nice. If we were to look at, I guess what PR kind of all entails, because I talk about this in different things that I’ve put out. I help people get onto stages and to me there’s online and this offline stages, but a stage is just to me are way that you can amplify your message to have a bigger impact to people.   It’s not what a lot of people think of as your traditional stage that you’re standing on your keynote presentation, your sales presentation, and 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. Then there’s also this other stage. I know you help get people on to say 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. 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 of all of the things that you need to be doing to stand out, to be building yourself as an authority. Then there’s all those extra things that we do as well. Essentially like my role is to be the pimp of all of those things, a pimp of public images. 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 by dominating your own social media channels so that you get to the point where, if the media are looking at someone to interview on a certain topic, they are reaching out to you. Essentially it’s about having eggs in all of the baskets so that like all of this work that you’re doing and sort of putting yourself out there publicly becomes sort of your business card and it just opens doors.   Victor Ahipene: What those doors and you can use examples, happy if you don’t use names and things for your clients. But, a lot of people will be like, “Oh yeah, cool. I get in the newspaper or I get a magazine or onto the radio.”  But that might run workshops or do sales presentations or whatever it may be and they’re going to like, “This doesn’t give me this tangible money in my bank straight away.”   Amanda Williams: Yeah. Funny you mentioned that because I literally just uploaded a new blog to my website last night, which was talking about, is PR any good for online stores? It was talking about how difficult it is in PR a lot of the times to actually measure like ROI. Sometimes I’m lucky enough for my clients to let me have a bit of a peek behind the scenes. In one case, 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 pay activity.   That activity specifically was a TV segment on the today show so that’s pretty premium. It’s national TV. 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. So, in terms of ROI, its a little bit of [inaudible 00:05:54]. This morning actually, because 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.   We’re looking at close to just over $17,000 in sales for being on TV. Like that TV segment to buy, which is not the way you want to go because that’s advertising. That’s getting people [inaudible 00:06:19] it’s a metering that you want to actually be a guest. It’s what will social proof. 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 industry retainer for PR is around 12,000. I don’t charge that much. But, 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 [inaudible 00:06:55] so you have a service that you’re trying to sell. It’s 100% worth it.   Victor Ahipene: I mean that’s the cool thing because I look at it from— it’s building this whole ecosystem of social proof because even if you’re trying to get onto a stage, they’re going, “All right, how can I de-risked this investment of hiring you or even just letting you in front of my protected audience?” Whether that be a company, whether that be an event.   They go, “Okay, you have been on a nationwide TV show.” That is going to put down one barrier of, are you good at presenting or another TV show maybe going, are you good when you are on TV? Yep. That’s cool. Then you look at the ad side of things, you can start using that as CNN or you grabbed that snippet and you put it in there.   This is like secondary, it’s not even invisible ROI off the back of that because 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.”   Amanda Williams: Yeah, like particular 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. It’s had over 6,000 engagements. Like repurposing that content 100% what you want to be doing with any of those media are chasing like coming back.   You mentioned before too about the credibility and people want to say [inaudible 00:08:28] 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, public speaking on camera at least, like some kind of 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.   As part of the sort of pitch kit and the media kit, 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 as well.   Victor Ahipene: Cool. 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 some of that PR attention.” 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. 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: So I think, again just going back to what I just said about sort of having some of that information available to producers or anyone that you’re pitching to. Let’s start with a media profile, like an interview talent sort of shape. We do those for our clients.   So we’ll have, 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. Then we’ll have some like key milestones and sort of a bit of a brag section about things that you can brag about. We also throw in a few quirky things too like we got a client who actually had been in an MMA fight. We actually spoke about the similarities between getting the crop beaten if you want an MMA fund selling multimillion dollar business that actually got picked up by business news Australia.   It’s about getting really creative about how do you present yourself as a star essentially? 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. 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 shot or they 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. I guess like that talent interview profile shape because as you know in the podcast, first thing they want is to know, what things can you speak about? What sort of questions should we ask you?   Before you can even answer those things, you really have to think about, it’s not about like personal branding 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’ve got to have those real life anecdotes to go with it.   Victor Ahipene: Yeah. It’s definitely the “what’s in it for me?” situation. Okay, I’m awesome at all of this, which can benefit whoever you’re putting my message out to 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 lead balloon. From say a a person who 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?   Amanda Williams: A couple of things to look out for 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 launched a new food and beverage app on the Gold Coast. It’s an ordering app, so it’s called Y queue.   You skip the queue, you order, you turn up, and collect your coffee or food or whatever it may be. At the time, there’s a lot of negativity and escalades around the eight to deliver and the delivery app industry and the issue that it’s causing for food and beverage businesses in terms of being profit destroying, et cetera, et cetera.   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 9. Well my contact channel 9 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 Gold Coast businesses had already jumped on board because I was so fed up and frustrated with the [inaudible 00:13:31] and wanted to basically give it a go. We’ve got some great coverage to have.   We got television coverage and news set of coverage. We’ve got magazines coming out, food bloggers, like a bunch of people. It was just really clever to be up to jump on that national story. Let me talk about, I’m not just jumping on and piggybacking national stories, but also specific times this year. At the time of this podcast right now, we are actually, we’ve just come into some of this week and we’re going to Christmas holidays.   A lot of publications especially online, even television are looking at the file type articles that do relate to this this time of year, but they are hungry for content. We can actually 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: I think that’s part of everything that you should be planning, I guess in the seasons of your business is like, “All right, when do I want to be? When am I releasing a certain thing and what sort of PR can I have to build into that to get those hundreds or thousands of people coming to my website to either sell my product or build anticipation and all of these things really built in?” Because I really love, I talk about like the different authority strands is kind of– I call it the star, but 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 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, we’ve got Amanda who’s been in the 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 a viral blog piece and then the media pick it up. Or an event organizer picks it up and then they reach out to you and then you speak there and then it just flows on from there.   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, if it’s a local piece to try and leverage that up or what things you can potentially do with leveraging that or utilizing that media into your business or into your brand.   Amanda Williams: Yeah. Going back to what you said about having a bit of a plan and having sort of a bit of a goal as to what you’re setting out to achieve. I just want to quickly mention [inaudible 00:16:42] this is me if I didn’t that so many people are too late when they think it’s, “Oh we’re going to get payout. We’re launching like next, next week. We’ve got to do this now.” Generally I said everyone, it takes three months. Sometimes they can take three months, the strategy, the coming up with a pitch, waiting for something that is going to come along in the media that you can actually jack on onto.   Then, 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 there. In regards to the content that you’re putting out, as you said 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, going and speaking on stage is really putting yourself out there so that you can actually be found by journalists as well. That’s really important.   Then, another thing I might add as well is that and you already know this, but 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, you’re going to stand out against so many other people who are basically just chicken. 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 you are in, the better around talent you are to be getting like full of big media opportunities.   The more you will stand out and that’s what it’s all about is about trying to stand out. Then finally what you saying about, repurposing that content and putting it out there as well. Definitely pushing everything out through social channels is really important. A lot people to even go back and they share old content and news pieces like on anniversaries, like, “Oh my God, a year ago we’re on television. I might check these out.” That sort of thing. Writing speaks about the experience and sharing it up through that way as well. Asking friends to share it.   Offering complimentary businesses too to share it with their audience as well. It really is such a golden opportunity once you have it in your hands. Once you’ve built this really cool article that’s printed on a legitimate new thought or website or blow authority or this video footage from this TV segment. You can put it anyway. You can kind of go to town with the spam thing because 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 heard of people too recently making sure that they’re trading their cover images on my Facebook and on their LinkedIn as opportunities to also say as seen in and actually designing cover banners that actually push out some social proof as well.   Generally speaking, Australia have an issue with whole poppy syndrome and whenever we’re on the state, we always get picked on for it. You guys have a problem with tooting your own horn, whereas a lot of people in the rest of the world don’t. We really should be doing it more especially we’ve earned it. We’ve actually genuinely earned, 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. When you have that rare opportunity to actually drive social proof home then drive it. Don’t look at [inaudible 00:20:14] in the mouth.   Victor Ahipene: Yeah. That’s the big thing as well that not even just speaking, but if you write a book or you get published in the media or whatever it is, you have separated yourself from the crowd. 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, 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 paying for an ad in the newspaper and you’re getting a free column written about you or you’re writing that column or they’re paying for that five minute spot on TV and spending $20,000.   Instead you’re getting it for free and you can spend 20,000 on promoting that to your own following and all those sorts of things. Yes, a lot of people say, “I’ve written a book and I have.” I was speaking to someone I like, but look, you actually went to the effort of doing that. Whether it’s an amazing book or a crappy book. You’ve done something that a lot of people won’t ever do. So yes, sing your own praises 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—   Amanda Williams: Oh yeah, 100%. I talk to entrepreneurs who are absolutely crushing it. A lot about young entrepreneurs when we’re talking people under 40 who are turning up a millions of dollars each year in that businesses who have legitimately said to me, “Oh, I’m really like courses about going out on social media or like talking about business and what I do.   I’d really like to become more of [inaudible 00:22:01] in 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. I really don’t like that.” I think, Ooh, it’s almost lacking. You got to ruffle feathers and the mission is actually to find the hay. 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 just not putting yourself out there. It’s really interesting because I actually thought of this the other day. I’m going to run a blog on it soon. You know the old phrase like it’s not what you know until you know. I feel like in 2020 we need to update that. I mean right now 2019 we need to update that. It’s not what you know, but who you know and who knows you.   Because honestly like your influence and 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 all over the world. I’m not shy of reaching out to like massive influencers, celebrities, and very well-known business leaders on Instagram.   Because I actually grew my own following on Instagram too, I’m thinking 17,000 at the moment. My Instagram obviously will 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’m in business. They see my content. 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.   I’ve built some really good connections and I’ve got some exciting things in the pipeline for next year. As a result of being able to create this partnership through my Instagram account, through the authority that I’ve built there. You think about the amount of people in business who B2B like, so important and so crucial. That’s the big picture.   That’s like PR is a long game because if you keep working at this over time, as a combination of doing a PR as a combination of getting out there and getting on stages and standing out and doing all the shit that no one else would do, you’ve got that opportunity to build that influence to that level where basically, open up 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 profiles, you said utilize these videos, clippings as much as you can or pieces from the media. As long as you’re giving credit, it’s all good? Any tip back or—?   Amanda Williams: No, I generally re-sharing. I mean, look, I’m in payoff so it’s all about, do it now. Don’t wait off with permission because it just won’t happen. But in my experience and between politics [inaudible 00:24:49] almost 10 years in the game. I’ve never had a problem with that. I mean, [inaudible 00:24:55] asked us to send us the footage to you and they send it to us.   Victor Ahipene: Yeah. I mean, I can’t imagine them being angry that they’re getting more publicity about this show. This is another show.   Amanda Williams: That’s it. I mean like a lot of the podcast is that we actually pitched to actually ask in the interview like, “How can you help us push this out? How will you help advertise this?” They want to know that you’ve got some channels that you can be putting it out to and that you can help promote them too. It’s like a win-win for everyone really.   Victor Ahipene: Yeah. Well, I think that gives us a pretty good insight. If people are wanting to get their ducks in a row to get started. Then look at what’s topical, start planning three months in advance, start looking at how PR fits into not just your speaking strategy but your business strategy. Because regardless if you’re just trying to be a speaker, it’s still a business that for the majority of you out there, it’s another leg of your business. Choose what you’re going to attack. Attack it and then add on the next aspect of it.   Then go 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 find you, get in touch.  What can they do? Where can they go?   Amanda Williams: Well, I live mostly on Instagram, which is @amandapandawilliams. It’s enough fun trying to lift my LinkedIn game as well. I’m on there too, but the websites, the agency is yellowpanda.com.au.   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 speaking to people and making new contacts as you know. That’s why I’m in this game.   Victor Ahipene: Before we completely finish up, so I’ll will throw out all the links to publicspeakingblueprint.com. Who are the people that you work with? Who’s your ideal person that you work with?   Amanda Williams: Essentially its people who want to have all of this done to them and predominantly I find that that is people who they didn’t made into business may be around five years. 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/ PR/service as opposed to just PR.   So I actually work with entrepreneurs to get them nominated for awards, help land speaking gigs, and do a lot of the traditional payoff stuff and 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. Yeah. If you are an entrepreneur who wants to step up your public image and your game to build some influence, you just don’t have the time or [inaudible 00:28:00] 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 publicspeakingblueprint.com. We’ll check in those couple of blog posts that you mentioned as well to help everyone find that and get a bit more insight, but appreciate it. 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 salesy2) Be the logical decision for the go-to service/product provider in your space3) 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!  I want to make sure you have 100% clarity on how to created the best unique branded system, position yourself to audiences and craft the perfect presentation (everytime). I don’t want you to waste your time endlessly trialing different presentations that bomb. Its a waste of both your audiences and your time (and money). That’s why my strategy session is FREE. Book a call today and see how you can create a highly profitable proven presentation and get it infront of your ideal audience in the next 60 days!Click here to book a time http://bit.ly/2MonEV3 Be sure to check out all the 5 Days of the Speak 2 Sell Training Series Access Day 1: Access Day 2: Access Day 3: Access Day 4:   Victor Ahipene: Hi Team. Congratulations. You’ve made it to the final day. I’m super excited to be sharing with you a system that I’ve developed that fits into the Speak to sell model and that is called the story selling. Now, a lot of you would have heard about storytelling and experienced that over the years and you go, “Hey, what’s the difference in these two things?”   There was a very slight difference, but the result is huge. It’s the difference between generating revenue from your presentations or getting a nice pat on the back after your presentation. That’s what I want to take you through today. This fits into my whole speak to sell presentation framework that I’m going to show you as well throughout this. You’re definitely going to want to stick around. Now, the big difference between say storytelling and story selling is as humans we don’t like to be told what to do.   We want to be taken in a journey and feel like we discovered the solution for ourselves. We discovered that it was the right thing for us to be able to do. What story selling allows us to be able to do is implement and thread throughout our presentation our business, our services, and our results that we’ve got. A lot of presenters are quite scared to do this because they feel like they are selling too much. Of course this has got selling in it, but I want to share with you a quick story about Josh, one of my students.   He went and used this framework that I’m going to show you in a minute and intertwined success stories and a presentation he was giving. It was a keynote presentation so there was no pitching whatsoever from stage. We intertwined that. Initially he was a bit apprehensive going, “Oh, maybe it feels a bit salesy.” Out of 150 people there, he was voted by them, The Best Speaker of this conference. He generated multiple six figures from the presentation and ongoing work for his products and services that he does. That’s why I say you’re only one presentation away from making six figures from stage.   You’ve just got to get that new killer effect. You’ve got to get the right presentation in front of the right people at the right time and the right time in the sales process. They’re new to it. That they’re not know that they need it. Do they know that they need it, but they don’t know who can offer it? Do they know that who can offer it? Then you can start implementing your sales process. People who are at different stages and it’s all about understanding your audience. I know that can feel like a lot to take on, but we’ll break it down pretty succinctly here.   Our first step in the story selling and what I want you to understand is, you will need to use some of this or authority that the results that you’ve got. The expertise that you have, the authority positioning that we worked on earlier in the week and you’re unique system, your supermodel speaker system. All of these they’re going to fit into here for you to be able to take people on a particular journey because that is what a presentation is. It is controlling the narrative.   Too often I see people up on stage saying, “Hi, my name’s Victor. Today I’m going to be talking to you about and my first point is this. My second point is this. My third points this.” So for my first point, blah, blah blah. People fill the gaps. You’re not taking them on a journey. You’re telling them where the destination is. If people go, “Oh, I already know how to sell. Switch off, or I already know how to build my authority.”   They switch off. Whereas if you can keep things like an open loop, you’ll hear it on TV after the break on survivor and you go, “Oh that sounds grumpy. I’m going to stay and watch after the break.” It’s something to keep people engaged and keep people thinking. That’s what we want to be able to do both with what you learned yesterday in the public speaking blueprint that you’re going to incorporate that framework into each section in here.   So let’s jump into it. The first area of our story selling with a dollar— this is what you can use for your speak to sell presentations when you are on stage. You’re going to want to start off with social proof for a story. That story may be highlighting pains because the big thing that we want to be doing through here is overcoming people’s objections. If you’re familiar with sales, if you overcome every objection that the person has then there’s no other logical option apart from using your products or services.   If they’ve got a price complaint and then you overcome that well then they’re going to buy. If they don’t think it’ll work for them and you overcome that, then they’re going to buy. If they don’t think that they’ve got the time and you overcome their time objection, then they will buy. With all of these, it’s exactly the same if you’re just trying to be a keynote presenter and get out a message. You’ve got to overcome people’s internal dialogue. The things that they have been normalized through society for them to be able to create a change.   You’ve got to figure out what your audience’s objections are and then work back from there. Social proof or a story. With Josh’s, we started with social proof. He was speaking at a conference of dental owners. He does marketing for them. He used the event organizers email that he sent. It just came up on the screen and it said, “Hey Josh, thanks again just giving you an update. The clinic that you started the marketing on, we’ve had to turn it off.   We took over this clinic. It was 30% full. Now we have a waiting list after 60 days of taking it over.” Josh was able to get up there. People would already paid this person money and he was being able to position themselves as an authority, working with the event organizer. He was be able to position himself as having the expertise, seeing the results that they had gotten.   It was just that. It wasn’t a planted email. It was just something that he had been able to get. Then he was able to ask the question, how many of you out here would like to be able to see how we did that? Your story or your social proof would be different depending on your space or your industry. The story may look into all of these, or it may just be the thing that sits there grounded. From there, you want to show people that in the right place. Are they in the right place for what you’re going to offer?   That can be the big promise that you are going to bring to them today. What I’m going to show you today is and this is where your unique branding system comes in. The three step method a or my painted abc’s to be able to lose weight rapidly and keep it off for whatever it may be. You want to give a promise to keep people hooked, to want to listen to your next step. There’s difference within all of these. Then you’re going to want to position yourself as that or authority and the expert.   Again, going to want to use a story to integrate the things, the successes that you’ve had, that your clients have heard, people that have used your products and services have had. So you become relatable as someone that people go, “Oh, I can relate to that but now they are one or two or three steps ahead of me. That’s something that I can potentially achieve.” Just like I said a few videos ago, it’s about bridging that gap from where you are to where you want to be. It’s exactly the same in the situation.   You are ideally on stage to help people get to where they want to be in a particular area of their life because you are already there or your clients are already there and they are in a position where they want to be there. Being able to run through that story, you may have seen it at different times. It helps break down the barrier if you’re making seven figures and these people were making $50,000 a year. They’re going, “Oh, I can’t relate to this person. They are just an outlier.” You have to bring that back in because they’ve put up an objection wall into that.   From there, rather than thinking of it as a point, you’re going to have to show them your first point is, why the vehicle that you’ve chosen, not your car, but for my instance it’s public speaking and storytelling to sell or speak to sell. Why it is important for them in their business or in their life whatever it may be. It’s not about showing them the how to do it. It’s about showing them that why they need to do it.   The first thing you have to do is show them that the vehicle that you’ve chosen, it may be your products and maybe your services, whatever it may be, is the right thing. That’s actually a point that you’re going to use to break down one barrier. They may have been doing long runs and you may be showing them that at your high intensity exercises, the way to go for whatever goal they’re looking to achieve.   They may have been doing cold calling. You’re going to show them their online marketing as the solution that they want to go. It’s the comparing the old way versus the new way. The new way is the vehicle that you are going to be putting forward to them.   Following that, you’re going to have two maybe three points that are objection overcomes. Things to help people overcome particular objections that may be, well this takes lots of time or I don’t understand technology or whatever it may be. For example, I’ve got a podcast presentation that one of the objections are is people think that they need really expensive equipment and a lot of expertise to be able to do it.   I break that down to show them how they can get started for under a hundred dollars and do it all from the comfort of their own home with a laptop. That’s overcoming an objection. I wasn’t showing them how to do the editing, doing the uploading, all of those things. It was overcoming the objection that, “Oh, I need a recording studio. I need all this high tech expensive editing equipment and software to be able to create the podcast.”   Then there’s other objections. I don’t have a list or I’m not famous and I show them a systems that I have used. The overall hell is not what I go into. It’s the why and to a degree, the what. This is the system that I use. It’s my three-step such and such system for outreach and growing your podcast. It’s not showing them each step. It’s going, “Oh, okay, this person did it with no list or no following or wasn’t a big name in that particular industry.   That something else that I can do.” So you’re hammering and breaking down all these self-limiting beliefs and these preconceived ideas that your audience have so that when you get to your first close, when you start introducing them to your solution, you are the logical option. You’ve positioned yourself as the authority and the expert here. You’ve shown that you can get results. You’ve shown that the vehicle that you use is better than the vehicle that they’re currently using. Or if they’re not using anything at all, you’ve overcome the two biggest objections.   Then you can have your first close and you can start stacking your offer. There’s a difference between features and benefits in what you’re trying to show is what the benefit of your things are. You can stack those different things on top. When you’re doing each step, first you’re showing it how they can mastered the vehicle. Then the next two things, how they can overcome those different objections.   If it’s a time objection, how can your things save them time? If it’s a money objection, how can it either save them money or make them money? If it’s a time objection relative to health, how’s it going to save some time preparing their meals or eating or making good decisions or overcoming the psychology or the eating habits that they have? Whatever it may be. Then finally you’re going to go for your sleeping clothes. You often see it may be people doing a price drop, “Oh, its $10,000, but today you can get it for 500” or whatever it may be.   I use six different closers from stage depending on the product I’m offering, the services that I’m offering, and the different price points that I’m going to offer because there’s going to be different products that different people require. I want to make sure that people are getting the most benefit they possibly can when they use my products or services.   Because when they get to that level, I want to make sure that they’ve got particular things in place. If I’m going to be working with people at a really high level, getting them booked onto stages. I want to make sure that they’ve got all the previous things set up. If they haven’t then I want them to go into that product or service.   There’s different ways and at different price points that you’re going to be able to generate that for people. It’s key to be able to use stories to highlight in all of these sections, your business, your results, that you’ve got, testimonials that you’ve got and intertwine it. Even if you can’t have a close, if you do all of this, you’re going to have a killer presentation that people are going to be like, “Ha, that broke down a lot of my barriers.”   So what happens after that? You’ve broken down the barriers. They take the first step that you have with a call to action. Your call to action, maybe telling them, “Hey, you need to go and get a social media manager.” We’ve talked about the things you need to be looking out for. Who are they going to go running to when you get off stage because you are the social media manager? Of course you because you position yourself as that will authority or expert right from the start.   I hope that this has opened your eyes up to the power of the speak to sound method and what is able to be achieved when you can get on stages or host your own events or become a keynote speaker, whatever avenue you have decided to go down, all of these previous day’s work for every single strand of those five different stages.   I would love to chat with you further. If you would like to get some clarity on the previous five days, what you’ve worked on and we can map out what your next 60 days is going to look like for getting onto the right stages with the right audience and checking that your presentation is on point. Then, I would love to offer you a complimentary phone call for making it this far.   There is a link down below. I would honestly love it. We’ll be on there for 30 to 45 minutes. I’m pretty confident that in that time we’re going to hit actionable steps for you to take.   I hope you’ve enjoyed it. Let me know how you have back. Main thing is book in a call and let’s make sure you’re on the right track. Thanks again for committing your time. I genuinely want more people out there to spread their message.   If they get there from learning some of the systems I have to offer, then it makes my reach that a little bit further. Again, thanks a lot and get out there and use that speak to sell method.  

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 success3. 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!  I want to make sure you have 100% clarity on how to create the best unique branded system, position yourself to audiences and craft the perfect presentation (every time). I don’t want you to waste your time endlessly trialling different presentations that bomb. It’s a waste of both your audiences and your time (and money). That’s why my strategy session is FREE. Book a call today and see how you can create a highly profitable proven presentation and get it in front of your ideal audience in the next 60 days! Click here to book a time http://bit.ly/2MonEV3 Be sure to check out all the 5 Days of the Speak 2 Sell Training Series Access Day 1: Access Day 2: Access Day 3: Access Day 5: Victor Ahipene: Hi team. Welcome to day four of the Speak to Sell a video series. We’ve already set up the foundations of our speaking career so to speak. We’ve got our unique branded speaking system to figure out how we can package and position ourselves as an authority in our particular niche and then figure figured out what type of speaker you are.   I hope you’re starting to get some clarity around all of this because what we’re going to do now is put the skeletons together of what your presentation may look like. Now, this is something that has taken me 18 years from when I was first up there, stuttering and stumbling and shaking my way through my first ever presentation at the age of 13 to five years later being a qualified public speaking teacher. Then combining that with my entrepreneurial life and learning how to sell from the stage, whether that be online, offline, or anything in between.   So what I want to take you through today, this proven formula is where I call my public speaking blueprint. It is something that regardless of you decide to go down the consultant side of things, if you want to run your own workshops, if you’re looking to do more in the online space, if you’re looking to be a sales presenter or even a keynote presenter, this what I’m going to show you is going to be absolutely imperative to that.   Not only is it going to give you that proven formula for success when you are on stage, what I mean by that is, a.) It’s going to keep your audience engaged b.) What it is also going to do is make sure that the content and your message you’re putting across is the right message at the right time for your right audience. Because when we do that, we get them to make a change and hopefully that changes wanting to work with you, buy your products, your services, whatever it may be.   Finally there’s going to save you a lot of time and frustration so you’re not having to go up there and like a standup comic. Try and see what works and what doesn’t work for your audience. Sure, you’re going to fine tune this along the way and put things in and take things out, but if you have the right system from the get go, it’s going to be a wonder that you just make better and better and better as you go. Now, there’s proven formula.   Once you start looking at the great talks and the great speeches, you’ll see that it falls in to a certain system. The thing with the system, and here’s the thing, a lot of people try and take this system or model other people, but they miss the key fundamental and what that is with this public speaking blueprint is you need to be reverse engineering everything.   You do not start with step number one in your presentation, you finish with it because if you start and there’s this imaginary step that this is the key that all speakers are missing who are missing the target when they are on the stage. What that is as your one overarching message.   You should be sitting down before your presentation, before you even start mapping it out and seeing what it looks like and say, “What is my one overarching message? What is the thing that if this audience finishes listening to me, they walk out? What is the one thing I want them to do? What is the one thing I want them to implement? What is the one thing I want them to change?” Now you can start to see how regardless of your presentation, whether it be a sales presentation, a keynote presentation, even communicating with your staff, you need to know what is the one overarching message.   If you don’t have that, then is a lot harder to make sure that you have the right content. You get that? If you just go, “I think I need to teach them this, this, this and this.” You will and we’ll talk about shortly in up saturating them with information and that is one of the biggest problems that experts in their industry.   People who know a lot about a particular thing tend to do with people when they’re not understanding where they are on a particular buying cycle or knowledge cycle towards a particular topic. Before you even start getting into outlining it, you need to figure out what is the one thing you want them to do at the end of the presentation. It may be going and purchasing a product or service off you.   If you’re doing a sales presentation, it may be going home and changing one thing and their diet if you’re in the health and wellness space of maybe having breakfast every day or skipping breakfast every day or changing for fizzy drinks, for water, whatever it may be. It’s just that one thing that we’ll start the flow on effect because we’ve worked out with our unique branded speaking system that we can teach on a lot of these different things. But if we start to overwhelm people, if we give them five things to do, look, I’ve had a previous life as a physio therapist and when I first started off, I knew all of these exercises that would help my patients get better. Here’s the thing, when I gave them too many exercises, they end up coming back and saying, I didn’t get any time.   I didn’t have enough time to do them all. What I learned over the years was if I gave people one or two exercises at the most, they would go away. They would make some progress. Not necessarily as much as if they did do all five or six or 10 exercises, but it started the ball rolling and what that allowed me to then do is build trust with them because they’d got some sort of result will benefit. Then the next step along was, “Okay, I can add some more and I can modify the current ones.”   Being able to see them for multiple treatment sessions allowed me, not from a business perspective but from getting better perspective allowed me to take on the full journey to get them where they wanted. If I didn’t do that, I gave them five, they did nothing. They get frustrated. They get frustrated because they are not continuing to get better or reach their goals. Then what would that lead to?   It leads to them falling off my list, not coming back to see me and living with some kind of pain or restriction or limitation that I had done them a disservice by giving them too much information. That’s something that I want you to absolutely avoid. Get your one overarching message, crystal clear and then it makes everything a lot easier to work back to. Then once you’ve got there, you can then work out what is my CTA, what is my call to action?   Is that hey, “Sign up for my product or service.” Like I said earlier, “Hey go home and change something in your breakfast. Change something in your life. Follow your loved ones and tell your loved ones you love them, whatever it may be.” There needs to be your call to action. Your call to action as the next step you want them to take. Everything else that you talk about just get breaks down the barriers that they’ve put up inside their own mind, whether it be a lack of knowledge or their own self-limiting beliefs.   Once you have done that correctly, that call to action seems like the logical option. For selling or selling from stage, if you can break down all the previous objections, your call to action, “Hey, you should work with me because I am the logical choice. You should use my products or you should use my services because I am the logical choice because I’ve shown you all the reasons that all the ways that you can do it and the reasons that you should do it. So why would you not possibly do it?” Part of that comes from understanding your audience as well.   Once you have your call to action crystal clear, then you can say start working on, as I said though, overcoming those objections. This is where I like to call the flow or the waterfall because we’ve spoke about it now, unique branding speaker system that you want it to be a logical progression. When people don’t start with the one overarching message, they start having kind of two or three or four stigmented points. They don’t link together. They don’t flow together and they don’t make any logic.   So your audience is sitting there and they’re listening to a presentation. They feel like they’re listening to a different presentation by the same person. I’m sure you’ve been in an audience where you’ve been like, “Okay, I’ve spoken about that now they’re speaking about this. Now they’re speaking about this.” You want it that you’re not selling and for my next point and for my next point and for my final point, you can just carry on presenting.   You are often, this will be some aspect of your unique branded speaking system that you can say, “This goes here and this and this.” For the majority of your presentation, slightly different if you’re a consultant or if you’re in workshops. These points will be in conjunction with story selling which we’re going to go into depth with tomorrow. It’s also aimed at breaking down the psychological barriers that are self-limiting beliefs that people have.   It may be, will this work for me a price? Is it going to take too much time? Will it get me results personally? Or I’ve tried something like this in the past. You can highlight that with success stories or breaking down those limiting beliefs. Then what you want to finally do. You’ve got all of this.   Then you can start working on, “Hey, what is the story or stories that I can introduce my presentation with? Not only that, what are the things that I can highlight these different points with for my points to make more impacting. What you’ll learn tomorrow is why stories sell and facts tell. We don’t want to bore people with fact after fact after fact. We want to highlight it with things that they can find relatable and rather than starting your presentation with, “Hi, my name is Victor. What I’m going to be talking to you about is 0.1, 0.2, 0.3.” Then at the end finishing with, so in conclusion what I talked to you about was a, b, c, and d.   You can see that’s a very, very common formula. A lot of people pick up from primary or high school. What you want to be doing is controlling the narrative. You’re not telling them what points you’re going to be talking about. You don’t want to be telling them. You’d be taking them on a journey where you come onto the stage and you highlight to them with a story, something that they can relate to.   Something that helps break down some of those barriers and a lot of the time these two things, they flow together. Your story may be one of your points or your story may have all of your points encompassed in it. What you want to be combining in here so there’s two invisible things. There’s your one overarching message which sits in through here.   Then there’s your unique branding speaker system where you may be taking one point out of it. You may be taking one aspect out of the multiple steps and you’re combining it in here to take people on that journey.   So what I want you to do is go and have a look at a few different presentation speakers that you like within your industry and see how many of them are doing this well. See if the other ones are doing that, “Oh my God, I’m going to bore you to death.” When you’ve done that, make sure to—I’ll see you all tomorrow on our final session where I’m going to show you the six-figure strategy to close even if you’re not too loud to sell it from stage.   This is something that one of my students, Josh used to generate multiple six figures the first time he ever spoke from stage. It was just a couple of very subtle tweaks that resulted in him being voted the best speaker, having never spoken from stage. You want to be tuning in for this because the things that he did before we tweaked it with the things that I see time and time again in different speakers doing. I don’t want you to make that mistake. I look forward to seeing you all tomorrow and start having a look at some presentations today.