Dr. Nido Qubein, President of High Point University, is one of the most successful speakers of the second half of the 20th century. In 2005, he took the helm of HPU and transformed it into one of the finest small colleges in the country. This man is a true genius, and he’s helped guide my...
How do you become a professional speaker? Don’t believe everything you read or watch about this online. There’s a lot of money in selling people how to get rich quick in professional speaking. From ‘just tell your story’ to ‘just get on as many stages as possible’ to ‘get discovered as the next big motivational...
How would you like a concierge to escort you into the richest segment in the professional speaking industry? (Fortune 100) Or would prefer to cold call? In 1997, Bill Gove and Larry Wilson ushered me into the corporate market as a speaker. They showed me how to break into the biggest companies, build a massive...
In 1997, I formed a business partnership with Bill Gove, the 85-year father of Professional Speaking. I was 32 years old. We were Mutt and Jeff. Bill and I referred to our partnership as “The hustle and the muscle”. Our goals were clear: I got Bill back on the platform (after 20 years of retirement)...
The latest speaker marketing lie is that professional speakers get discovered. This is NOT how the business works. This idea is sold to people who are trying to break into the business, and earnestly trying everything possible. If you’ve fallen into this trap, don’t feel bad because it’s easy to do. In this video I...
Back in 2001, I was a rookie professional speaker that had just cracked the $1 million per year mark in speaking revenue. I was working national and international conventions with an average audience size of 3-5,000 people. But…what I really wanted was a book, but I wanted it to be a book that sold at...
If you’re professional speaker, and you’re not leveraging traditional television interviews, it’s literally costing you a fortune. Social media is all the rage, and most likely the television of the future, but the major creators, purveyors and pundits of social media skew heavily in the under 40 demographic, which is NOT the demographic that hires...
500 million people watched the hit movie, The Secret. I missed the casting call, but Bob Proctor assured me that if they ever made a sequel, I’d be in it. Sure enough, in 2009, both of us got the call for “Beyond the Secret”. The movie turned out to be a flop, but we had...
It was July 17, 1998, the speech that changed my life, and the night Bob Proctor would call the best of his speaking career. It’s a story Bob was too humble to tell, but it’s the single greatest speaking story I’ve ever heard. Bob Proctor was my mentor and close friend for 25 years. We...
Why do so few non-celebrity professional speakers ever quailify for the National Speakers Association’s Million-Dollar Speakers Group? I’ve been a member of this group since it’s inception, (2009) and its always been a tiny percentage of NSA’s membership. The year I was chairman, we had 39 speakers out of 5,000 qualify…worldwide! So what are these...