My Death Threats after The Today Show and Good Morning America

One of the best strategies you can employ as a professional speaker is to write a controversial book and embark on an aggressive media campaign. It’s one of the most profitable things we’ve ever done. But if you’re going to follow this path, beware of the potential attacks. After my first appearance on The Today...

Backstage with the Father of the Internet

Back in 2003, I was speaking at a business conference in Washington, DC, at the Gallup Building. The program was packed with many of the leading academics from around the world, as well as top business executives and consultants, including Dr. Martin Seligman, Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihlyi, and Vint Cerf, the Father of the Internet and...

Bill Gove’s Million-Dollar Advice on Keynote Speaking

Bill Gove, the father of professional speaking, was my business partner for the last 5 years of his life. We we were on the road nonstop from 1997 to the end of 2001, when he passed away suddenly one month shy of his 90th birthday. This man taught me how to become a million-dollar speaker,...

Onstage with President George W. Bush

One of the greatest lessons Bill Gove, The Father of Professional Speaking, taught me was to always be prepared for my big speaking opportunity. Bill would say, “practice, practice, practice, just like you did as an athlete, and when your big opportunity arrives, you’ll be ready. That’s what happened on December 9, 2001, when we...

Backstage with Entertainment Tonight’s Leeza Gibbons

Lezza Gibbons is the consumate entertainment professional, and also drop-dead gorgeous, which were two of the many reasons I was thrilled to be interviewed by her onstage at UCLA. We met in her dressing room before the show, which had 2,000 people LIVE at Royce Hall and another 50,000 watching in movie theatres across the...

How to Set Your First Speaking Fee

This ranks among the most popular questions for new and emerging professional speakers, and the best answer is probably not what you think. The speaking business is comprised of tens of thousands how people trying to break in, yet only hundreds that are successful. The breakdown ocurrs when people assume that the speaking business is...

How to Become a Professional Speaker

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...

Professional Speaker Concierge Service

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...

Speakers Boycotting Television Losing Millions

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...

Going Onstage with Les Brown at UCLA

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...