Should You Speak on Stage?

Transcription

What’s up guys? Welcome back to the show.  I just got back from Portland, Oregon. I was there speaking at the Nutritional Therapy Association Conference.  There’s probably close to about a thousand health coaches, nutrition consultants, nutritional therapy practitioners, all sorts of cool people.

I want to share a couple of really cool insights I got from the event. I think this will really, really find you well. First and foremost, if you’ve never been to Portland, go to Portland, it is a great city. That’s the first time I was there. If you’re a foodie like I am and a healthy foodie, there’s some amazing restaurants there. It was almost like it would be tough to find bad food in Portland. It’s just got a really great food scene, really great vibe. I was really impressed. It’s somewhere I would definitely go back and spend more time. So if you have not been, I encourage you to go and I have no affiliation to the Portland Tourism Board it is just my act of good goodwill.

Introducing today’s topic: Speaking on stage – Should you do it?

So yes, that was in Portland and we were down there for three days. We had a talk on a Saturday morning and then we had a booth as part of our arrangements where we could have conversations with people who are interested in learning more about what we do and how we might be able to help them. So it was a really, really cool experience.

It’s always nice to go face to face and have conversations with people because when you’re on the phone, phone is great, but face to face is another level, right? So there’s like eye to eye, toe to toe. Yeah, you can kind of get a better sense of where people are at. There were a few people that listen to the podcast who were there, which is awesome. So if you guys are listening, thank you so much, I appreciate you guys and it was great to meet you, and it’s just fun to connect with people who are in our space, right?

That’s why we love serving our audience because I just really love health and fitness and wellness entrepreneurs, because we’re all here to do good things for other people.

So a couple of takeaways from this event that I think you’ll appreciate. First and foremost is a lot of health experts love speaking, right? For the most part, a lot of health experts that I’ve known over the years, a lot of them want to just spread their message. They want to speak from stage, they want to write books.  I think it’s great, I love speaking as well.

One of the things I want to share with you is what I said to this audience, “This talk that I’m giving you right now is a webinar.” As we got into the presentation, I talked to them about that and when I was on the plane ride home, I was really thinking about it.

Is it worthwhile to travel around the country as much as I love traveling and do the whole speaking circuit, right? Now, the answer for me is a hell no, because I’ve got three kids and a wife that I actually want to see. But there’s a lot of speakers out there, professional speakers who are on the road like 200 plus days a year going from one event to the next. I think speaking from stage is an amazing positioning platform. It’s a great way to connect with an audience and share your message. But I do think that a lot of speakers do it improperly. They just show up and they take off. They look at their keynote fee and then that’s it, right? And some people, their keynote fee is $500, other people’s $100,000, my keynote fee is $25,000. I don’t even ask for that, because I would rather have an opportunity to give away some really great stuff. I’m more interested in building relationships with people, and spending a few days there. Not just like one hour in and out, and seeing if there’s an opportunity to do some work together.

So when I look at like, does it make sense to fly across the country? In our case with two extra teammates, ready to usher team members, the cost of food, hotel is taken care of for us. Flights thankfully were taken care of for us by the events. But you know, if you’re not in the situation where you have all these things taken care of for, you have to factor in all these expenses, you have to factor in that it’s your time, it’s your energy. You can only stand for so long. You can only have so many conversations before you’re like, “You know what? I’m going to just go to my room and lay down. I don’t want to talk to anyone.” And that’s kind of how I feel after three days. I’m like, don’t talk to me, I just want my space. And here I am talking, how ironic. So speaking is awesome, but it depends on your lifestyle. If you want to travel every single day, hey, give it a shot.

The webinar and choosing what you do based upon your desired lifestyle

But what I found to be even more powerful is having a webinar, because if you think about it, the webinar, at least in my case, is the exact same talk I give from stage. But now with the webinar I can sit on my couch, I can play with my kids, I don’t have to leave my house if I didn’t want to. That webinar, as I’m recording this is being  listened to by hundreds of people.  I have no idea where they live. I don’t need to see them face to face, but my message is on their computer screen if they’re watching it right now.

I just want you to let that sink in for a second. The power of leverage here, of technology, gives you massive amounts of freedom. Because what most speakers do is they travel around repeating the same message over and over and over again. What a webinar does, and when I talk about webinar, I’m talking about like an evergreen automated, you record it once, let it play type of webinar, not a live webinar every single day of the week.

So you record this webinar once, it’s a really good training for instance, okay? And then it’s done. You put it into a platform that now hosts the webinar online, people can register and watch it whenever they want. And when you have a pipeline built like we do, what ends up happening is that a percentage of those people eventually enroll with you.

We speak to a lot of people who ask us, “Yuri, how are you getting clients right now?” They’re like, “You know, I’m speaking in a couple of events.” I’m like, listen, first and foremost, you’re probably not speaking at a level where it makes sense for your business. You might be doing a lunch and learn here, a small talk there. You might pick up a few clients cause, you know, speaking in person is a great way to do that. But the thing is that it’s not scalable, at least not if it’s you doing most of the speaking. So you’re really limited to your time, if speaking is something you are thinking of doing as the main way of generating clients for your business.

The difference between “having to” and “choosing to”

I think it’s great. But again, it’s not scalable. You’re trading time for dollars and that is not a way to run a business.  You’re basically a hamster on a wheel, right? You’re running from one thing to the next. But here’s the difference when you have a webinar. When I’m in Portland, I can do that by choice. We don’t do many of those. We might do two or three of them a year, because we have our own event, Healthpreneur live, which by the way is September 27th through 29th. If you’re interested, hit me up on Instagram. We’re only opening up 20 spots for non-clients. Okay? So I’m at @healthpreneur1, if you want to be part of an amazing three day experience and you fit our criteria let me know, cause it’s just, I can’t even describe it. It’s just a magical event. As we have that event, we’ve got three mastermind meetings throughout the year.

I’m part of another mastermind, so I’m traveling already seven times throughout the year. I can’t do, you know, a thousand speaking events. So when I do pick and choose those events that I go to, or when I’m hosting my mastermind or I’m taking part in the mastermind that I’m a part of, I don’t need to worry because our perfect client pipeline, which revolves around that automated webinar is still running even while I’m doing those things.

Just think of what that could do for your business, where you could take off on a vacation or go to whatever you want to go to, the gym, on a trip, to a different events and you don’t, let’s say you were speaking at the event, you don’t need that event to make your month. Like you don’t need that event to be like, I need clients from this event. It’s a thing you want to do because you love doing it, but you have this predictable sales process, this perfect client pipeline that automatically is bringing you clients even without the speaking.

So what that allows you to do is that gives you a lot of freedom of choice to say no to certain things and to say yes to things you love to do. And the challenge is that when you have to do things out of necessity, you really start to despise them. And that’s what happens. That’s what happened to me when I was training clients, it’s like I love working with clients, but I really got sick and tired of it because I no longer had the choice. I had to train clients, I didn’t choose to train clients. Right? There’s a very big difference between having to and choosing to. And so, when you’re in a position of having to, it’s very stressful and it can lead to burnout very quickly. Not just burnout, but just like, you start to detest what it is you’re doing and that’s not a great place to be. Right? So you want to be loving what you’re doing. And in order to have that happen, you have to have the right systems and processes in place to bring clients in automatically for the most part with very little of your involvement.

The importance of certainty and connection

So, that was a real big takeaway. Like, I mean, it’s something I’ve thought of for years anyways, but it’s just a reminder of speaking is great, but you cannot build a scalable, sustainable, successful business just on speaking alone. Especially if it’s just, “Hey, I charge $1,000 from my talk,” and I’m done. Listen, I mean, I don’t ask for my keynote fee because if I’m doing an event, will typically do anywhere from five to 10 times that amount just in the back end, which means that the relationships we build with clients that eventually decide to work with us is infinitely more valuable to me and the company than a $25,000 keynote fee. Right? But again, most speakers don’t think like that because their speakers, they’re not business owners, they’re not entrepreneurs. And I want you to think like an entrepreneur, which means you got to think about this stuff. So that was the big takeaway. You have to have a webinar, you have to have this process that’s dialed in and working for you.

Second thing is you learn a lot about people when you speak with them in person, a lot. I mean, we did over 1300 enrollment calls last year alone and there was a lot of takeaways from that. But when you’re in person with people, you get that same stuff, but there’s also something you don’t pick up as easily on the phone, which is the general energy that comes off of someone. So let me give you two great examples. I was speaking to one young woman at the event who is relatively new to starting her business and she was asking me like, you know, “Do you think I’m at a good point to start doing this and making this work?” And I told her, I’m like, “Listen, let me ask you a question, are you confident in your ability to help people?” And she was like, “100%.” I’m like, “You just answered your own question,” because all that matters is that you have that confidence and certainty and she did.

She did and she had this charisma and this energy and this presence, which is kind of like an X factor that not a lot of people talk about, right? Because it does make a difference if you have that presence. There’s this kind of like unspoken energy that is just persuasive. And she had that and I told her, I’m like, “Listen, you are at the very kind of basic stages of your business, but you could do this on your own. You can keep your money, but you’re going to save your problems and it’s going to take you a lot longer. You can work with us, you can step into the fear of like, do I have the money for this? But we’re going to get your results a hundred times faster.” And that’s something that you can pick up on the phone, but in person it’s just so much more powerful.

The second example was a lady who came by and actually her friend brought her over. She’s like, “Hey, you got to talk to the Yuri, he and his team are here to do some awesome stuff,” and right away I knew she wasn’t our perfect clients. It was instantaneous. You’ve probably had these moments in your life where right away it’s not even, it’s like an energetic judgment. I could tell that she wasn’t an expert, I could tell that she didn’t have confidence and I could tell that she wasn’t sure of herself. Like in a split second, I made all three of those conclusions. Now, I gave her the time of day, we had a quick chat and I, you know, kind of just probing went a bit deeper and those things came to surface. Now you can say, “Okay, Yuri, well, you’re, you know, the cognitive bias or looking for that stuff.” Not really, because she was very wishy washy. She wasn’t sure about, you know, what she could do and she wasn’t certain about it.

And those are the types of clients that I cannot help, because building a business is hard. Attracting clients and getting them to give you a good chunk of their money to transform their life is not easy. It’s not giving away a pamphlet, like you have to be certain about what it is you’re selling. And if you’re not, well the prospect is not going to be certain about you being able to help them. So what I loved about spending time at the event was, listen, I’m not, like if you know me, I’m not one of those guys who is like too cool for school, where I’d like pop into the event for an hour and take my helicopter out. And I’m like, I don’t converse with the regular folk, that drives me crazy. Like when people go to, I’m not going to name names. When speakers go to events and I don’t know if it’s an egotistical thing, or I’m too cool to hang around with the common people, or I’m too busy, which might be the case, right?

Because obviously, you know, not everyone can hang around for three days and maybe it doesn’t make sense for them, but I really believe that there’s a lot of goodwill you put into the market when you stick around and actually have conversations. Like I was at our booth, right? I’m not one of those like, I’m going to just hide in the green room because I was a cool speaker type of guy. I was out there in the trenches having conversations with people. And I think there’s a lot of value there, because this was a great example of what happens in business where, as the business owner evolves in their business, they become more of the CEO, they become less accessible, they become, you know, really, really inaccessible, right? For the lack of a better term. What ends up happening is they become so disconnected from their audience, and I think that the CEO of a company should actually be spending most of their time with their market.

Why spending time with people is important

And that’s why for me, I spent a lot of time with our clients. Like I don’t have to, but I want you, I want to see what’s working for them. I want to see where they’re stuck, I want to see how I can make things better for them, I want to talk to people who are not our clients, but are kind of our perfect audience. I want to figure out like what’s holding them back? What are their frustrations? Like, where are they stuck? Right? Because the more you can do that, the more intel you have to bring into your marketing and your messaging. You don’t have to do survey, monkey surveys, so you’ve actually had a conversation with someone, you’ve helped somebody. If you’re in a clinical setting, or in a one on one coaching setting, you’ve had these conversations, you’ve worked with clients and you have all the data you need. But it’s tough to do that when you’re hiding behind your computer or hiding behind other people, and gatekeepers, and you are kind of sitting at the top of the ivory tower without any connection to your marketplace.

And I really think that if we look into fortunate 500 companies, I don’t necessarily know all of their stories, but I would venture to say that most of their upper management are so disconnected from their customer that they can’t even relate to them anymore. Right? They’re flying the private jets, you know, they’re making $1 million a month, that’s fine, right? But you still have to be connected to your audience, because you can very, very easily lose sight of what your customers or clients are actually going through. And that empathy is really important, so I really enjoyed that elements of being at the event for that reason and it’s all just fun to kind of just hanging out with people and kind of, you know, just like having fun, right? Because, that’s where we’re all here to do. So those are two of the big takeaways that I wanted to share with you, is one is I think speaking is overrated quite honestly for building a business.

It has to be done very intelligently, very strategically and quite honestly you’ll make a hundred times more and impact more people who’ve got a good webinar and a good pipeline from your home. And second is, I guess ironically is that spend time with people in person is important and you don’t have to go to events to do that. Like maybe, you can have a meetup around, you know, your neighborhood with people in your space for, or people that you may want to work with, right? Just like no strings attached. Like no Tupperware party. Like, “Hey, here’s the thing I’m going to pitch you,” but just like, actually like bring people together, have conversations, break bread together, right? Build that community, build that tribe. You’ll feel more fulfilled and what’s going to happen is those people are going to choose you. When they’re ready, they may not be ready now, but when they are, they’re going to choose you because you made them feel special.

You went out of their way, you went out of your way to give them a bit of time. And I think that goes a long way in a world and a day and age where we’re so disconnected yet so technologically connected.

So, that’s the takeaway from the Nutritional Therapy Association Conference events. Hope this has made sense for you. And again, if you want help building out in your webinar and your perfect client pipelines, you have more of that automated client acquisition. Then, hey, well, that’s what we do every single day? Actually, as of this recording, Brandy, one of our clients, and she maybe, she’s listening to this, she enrolled two clients last week alone at $5,300 a piece. That’s $10,600 in one week. And she actually deployed her perfect client pipeline the week before. So within two weeks, actually not even two weeks, within one week of deploying her pipeline, she made over $10,000. That’s what can happen when you do things the right way.

Now, I’m not saying that’s going to happen in one week. It might take you a little bit longer, but our program is built to help you do that. So if you want, are interested in seeing how we might be able to help you inside of our Health Business Accelerator coaching program. Remember, we don’t just talk to anyone, right? We want you to jump through hoops and there’s a very specific reason for that. We want to make sure that the right people are on the phone with us and it’s the same way we teach our clients to kind of filter out their perspective clients.

So if you’re interested in going on the next step and you want to get more clients, you want to scale your coaching, you want to add, you know, an additional 10,000 or more per month to your revenue, that is our program designed to do that. Then go to healthpreneurgroup.com/training. Watch our free online workshop.

If it resonates with you, book a call, the link will be provided under the end of the training and if you like what you see, we’re going to have a chat, we’ll figure it out. If there’s a mutual fit, if we can serve you where you’re at, where you want to go, we’ll craft a game plan and we can take it from there. Is that cool? So thanks so much for watching today. I hope this one has found you well. Hope you got some good insights and nuggets from today and I’ll see you the next episode.

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