Entertainment Secrets For Entrepreneurs with Jennifer Lier
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Episode Summary
The key to success is confidence and pursuing your goal in life no matter what it takes. Jennifer Lier, the President of the country’s premier motivational keynote speaker booking agency, National Keynote Speakers, shares her life story from being a shy girl to blooming into a pageant queen and a successful entertainer. Through her experiences in the entertainment industry, Jennifer teaches invaluable entertainment secrets for entrepreneurs, showing us how to present ourselves in a way that entertains and draws people. As a performer, artist, and musician, she shares what creating a great website and pitching things efficiently can do for you. Jennifer also recounts how she got into keynote speaking and shares some tips on how to become one.
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Entertainment Secrets For Entrepreneurs with Jennifer Lier
Our guest is Jennifer Lier. She has an illustrious 25-year career in the entertainment industry. She’s a highly sought-after vocalist. I personally heard her sing, it’s amazing. She’s a headline entertainer, model emcee, on-camera host and was one of the most requested Marilyn Monroe impersonators in the country, which is quite a story in and of itself because her hair is black. At the age of nineteen, she lost over 100 pounds and also conquered her fear of speaking and singing in front of people. Back in November of 1990, Jennifer realized her childhood dream and debuted on the world’s most famous stages of Vegas as a singer in a popular dance band. She went on to win the coveted title of Miss Nevada 1995 and received a talent award at the Miss America Pageant. She continued on to headline over twenty shows around the world including Legends in Concert, the world-famous Follies Bergere.
Her diverse talents led her to incredible opportunities and experiences performing with celebrity icons and being a spokesperson for some of the country’s most recognized companies. When she transitioned out of the entertainment field, she became a partner in Level 10 Speakers, which is a Las Vegas-based bureau delivering both speakers and entertainment to the Vegas market. While still a partner in Level 10 Speakers, she became the Director of Special Events and Director of Corporate Partnerships for Polaroid Museum, which is a hip meeting and event space where Jennifer built from nothing to consistent and profitable training events, weddings and special events. She is the President of National Keynote Speakers, the country’s premier and motivational keynote speaking and booking agency. She enjoys a wonderful life with her husband, Dan. They have two children and she still finds time to volunteer in her community. Jennifer, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me, John. It’s wonderful to be here.
Entertainment Secrets For Entrepreneurs: If you really want something, you need to go after it and settle for nothing less.
I’m going to let you tell your story of origin. You can go back as far as you want. You can start at nineteen when you had this dramatic weight loss or you can go back further as to what caused it. Whatever you think would be a good place to start where we can flesh out some of those details I touched on.
It’s interesting how life turns out. Sometimes kids grow up and they have a great household, great parents, they’re supported and they want to go to school. They know exactly what they want to do. They want to be a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher or whatever. Even times that people are born lucky with a well laid out plan, sometimes we’re not and I wasn’t. I did know that I loved to sing. I didn’t have any guidance or understanding, I did think it was a pipe dream 100%. I was shy. By reading my bio, you’d never know it. By knowing me now, nobody would ever know, but I was painfully shy. To the point where in school if I had a question, I would not raise my hand because I was shy and embarrassed to bring attention to myself and have to speak out loud to ask the teacher a question. I suffered for it, I did through school and I didn’t have the courage to ask for help when I needed it. I didn’t join into things that I thought would not benefit me. I didn’t have that. I wasn’t born with that.
I spent a lot of time at home after school when I was growing up and I was young. I loved music. I would spend hours in my room singing to albums that my mom had. I was young, too young to buy my own stuff. I’m talking five, six, seven, singing to her albums of Barbara Streisand, The Eagles and all of these great artists in music. I would listen to them over and over again. I wanted to be able to hit those notes, have that phrasing and have the harmony skills of The Eagles and the musicality that they had. I grew up loving this music and wanting to master it. It was my happy place. I wasn’t good at school. I stopped. I was terrible. It didn’t compute with me. I liked some things, art was awesome, but everything else was painful for me to be able to do. The music brought me so much joy.
I had a few friends. I wasn’t a lot of friends’ type of person. I might have one or two. I would go out and do my thing, go outside and back then we were active. There were no video games so we were always outside doing stuff. We’d love to more play with the boys. I loved to bike and I loved to throw a ball around. I was that girl. I wasn’t girly, even though I wanted to be. I didn’t look it and I was always plump. I felt more boyish, unfortunately, even though I did try to be more girly. As time went on, I had no plan for my life. My parents weren’t that type that put you into every class, sports, nurtured you or cultured you into where they thought that your talents lie. They weren’t that.
I barely graduated high school, like the skin of my teeth. I didn’t know I was graduating until I went to. I missed the day because I used to ditch school all the time. I was never enticed. I hated school. I missed the day where they handed out your slip for graduation. I had to go to the counselor’s office and I’ll never forget there’s a stack of papers. The counselor was not there. They’re like, “Go in the office. There’s a stack of papers, you should be able to find it in the basket.” I was like, “Okay.” I’m looking through the stack of papers and mine was not there. I’m like, “I did not graduate.” Mine was the last paper in the stack and I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I was like, “Thank God.” As I’m looking at the papers, I’m thinking about what I’m going to tell my parents and everybody else that I hadn’t graduated. I’m like, “I have to do my senior year over or go get my GED.”
I got graduation barely. I think it’s because my teachers liked me and they gave me D’s instead of F’s. That’s how I got out of high school. I think there’s something to be said with that, building rapport, making sure that you have a great attitude. Even though I was shy, I was always nice and helpful. Because I didn’t know how to step out, I knew that if I could help, I would be able to be included. I’m saying that for a reason because that benefited me later on in life. These are a couple of skills that I was able to go, “That worked for me. Note to self. Put that in my filing cabinet.” I’m 100 pounds overweight as I graduated high school. I was home alone because we’re not an active family. We didn’t do stuff. My parents pulled home and watched TV. It was like the ‘70s, early ‘80s family. They didn’t go to the gym. They weren’t active. They didn’t put me in sports. We watched TV and ate and that’s what I did.
I was an eater though. I was an emotional child. I ate when I was sad, when I was happy, when I was bored, when I was angry. I didn’t know how to express it. It was difficult and I was lonely. I didn’t have active parents in my world. What happened was I watched TV and that was my dreamland. I ate while I did it. Needless to say, I ended up having a lot of weight challenges. When that happened and I graduated high school, I was not getting along with my parents. I was told to leave a week before graduation and they said, “As soon as that’s over, you need to get out,” and so I did. At eighteen years old, I had nowhere to go and I was scared to death. I had no ability to figure anything out for myself. At that point, I was like, “I don’t know what to do.”
As the moment I graduated, I called a girlfriend of mine and I asked her if I could sleep on the couch and she said, “Of course.” What I did was I went to her house for as long as I could, slept on her couch. That didn’t last and I slept on some other people’s couches and that didn’t totally last either. I had a car and I ended up sleeping in my car when I need to. At the same time, I’m looking for a job. That was my journey at that time was trying to figure out how to get a job. Through that time, a girlfriend of mine had said, “I know you love to sing.” She was a pageant girl, she was a girl who was small, little skinny blonde with blue eyes. She had that ability and she had people around her. She said, “I know you like to sing. I’m working with this woman. She’s a dance troupe coach. I think you should go and see her. You never know what will happen.” I was like, “All right.”
I meet this woman. She’s like, “Let me hear you sing.” I said, “Okay,” so I sang for her. She said, “What are you doing with that?” I said, “I have no idea. I’ve nowhere to live. I’m looking for a job. I’m trying to figure out how to get to college, even though I barely graduated high school.” She said, “You have unbelievable talent. If you lose this weight, you can do this for a living.” Mind you, I didn’t say that I lived in Las Vegas. My parents moved us from LA to Las Vegas when I was twelve, so I grew up here in the city. For her to say that to me, it was literally making all my dreams come true. I’m like, “What? Nobody ever told me that. I always thought it was a pipe dream.” All the years of singing for myself for hours when my parents were gone after school and pretending that I’m singing to thousands of people.
[bctt tweet=”Be likable and coachable. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I’ll never forget, I was singing Linda Ronstadt. I was a freshman or sophomore. First of all, that was the mid-‘80s about that time. I’m thinking, “Why am I doing this? Nobody knows Linda Ronstadt now. That was several years ago. What am I doing?” Ironically, later on in my life, it came to pass. That’s the reason why I was doing it. Jumping back to where this woman was telling me to lose weight, she said, “Come live with me. You can clean my house for your rent and I will help you on this journey.” I said, “Okay, great.” They literally cleaned out a walk-in closet, put a single bed in there and I slept in there for a year. As I lived with her, she eventually fired me from cleaning her house because I was terrible at it. I did find a job and I was working at a men’s clothing store. My journey progressed and I lost the weight within a year. I was singing karaoke bars and sneaking in because I was only eighteen, nineteen.
Somebody said to me as they heard me sing at one of the karaoke bars in this contest because I would go and grab $100. I’d win a karaoke contest once a week. I’d cycle around Las Vegas to grab some extra money and $100 was a lot of money back then. They said, “You’re amazing. You should go and audition for this band that needs a singer.” I did. They hired me and they were the dance band that I was talking about. I’m nineteen years old. I lied about my age. I wanted it so bad, I was hungry for that. There’s a reason why I’m telling this story because I know people who are reading your blog, I would have done anything for that job. I would have done it for free. I had been doing it for so long, going up to that point to be able to cut my teeth and learn the craft. The guy saw that I was comfortable, that I was hungry, that I wanted it so bad. He hired me and he knew I was lying about my age. There, my journey began.
From there, I did that. It was the most popular dance band for several years. I was still trying to figure out my college situation. Somebody said, “You should try out for Miss Las Vegas going to Miss America.” Losing 100 pounds, I wasn’t in the best shape. I looked good but not exactly swimsuit. That was my next risk to go do, that I won this Las Vegas one, once in Miss America. I had an amazing, exciting time. I started performing in high-level production shows here in Las Vegas. I traveled the world singing and performing with other producers that had shows around the world. I did remarkable stuff. One side note, when I was 28, 29 years old, Legends in Concert came calling me, which is a popular show here in Las Vegas. They said, “We heard that you’re a great singer.” I had done a couple of little small shows with them as a singer/dancer, not in a starring role. They said, “We have a request for a Linda Ronstadt in one of our shows. Can you do it?” I said, “Yes, I can.” That’s something to be said about following your heart, doing what you know and not knowing where it’s going to lead you.
Moving forward, I was in entertainment for many years. I’ve done many amazing things, work with celebrities. I did television, did high-level productions, spokesperson work. What that did to me is it showed me what vision, dreams, hard work and tenacity. If you want something, you need to go after it and settle for nothing less. It’s about doing the things that you don’t want to do. Now that I see what a lot of speakers and people wanting something in their life that is older, we forget what we had when we were young, when we would do anything for that. Oftentimes, I have speakers in this realm that come to me and they want to build their speaking business. They say, “What do I need to do?” I’m like, “First of all, you need to speak more, speak whenever you can. Whether it’s free or not, you need to do it,” and a lot of people could do that. It’s interesting because I’m thinking, “That’s how you get good.”
Entertainment Secrets For Entrepreneurs: For businesses and speakers who are looking for something, look where you’re not thinking.
If you want this, you go and make it happen. If you don’t do those things and you don’t want it bad enough, you’re not going to do the things that you don’t want to do. Oftentimes, people are successful in their 40s, 50s and 60s. They’ve already risen to a certain level and they go, “What do you mean to do something for free? What do you mean start over? What do you mean to be at the kindergarten level?” A little twist at that point as far as where they are, but they’re not there in the speaking world because in the speaking world, they still have to start over. Oftentimes what happens, somebody who’s great at what they do or in their job or their careers, “We can speak to our group.” It goes well. They get a standing ovation. It feels amazing. They’re like, “I am a speaker and I want to do this,” and they come to me, “I’m ready.”
I’m like, “No, you’re not. There’s a skill. Make sure that you’re learning the skill, learning the craft.” This is a craft and there is time involved and investment. There’s money involved with investments. There’s work, promotional material involved with the investment. It’s the same thing in entertainment. It is similar, which is why I’m good in this business, both on the client side and the talent side. As a performer, artist, singer, musician, you need a great website, a great video, a great one sheet, a great everything that lists what you can do, social speaker. When you’re talking about people who are reading this that need to know how to pitch things, make sure that your stuff looks as good as what you’re pitching yourself and your fee is. If you’re a $10,000 speaker, make sure your materials look $10,000 worth.
That there’s consistency in the brand across the video production, it’s for sure all of that is what you’re saying. You don’t suddenly get to Carnegie Hall or performing at the Hollywood Bowl just because you’ve sung a couple of times. Yet some people think, “I should be able to be on this big stage without any experience.” You said something that I want to tap into because it’s near and dear to me as well. I rarely talk about this because it doesn’t usually come up. When I was ten years old, I remember my mom took me to buy clothes for school. They said, “Sorry, but you’re going to have to wear the husky size,” and I was devastated. I wasn’t a particularly athletic kid and I was doing a lot of emotional eating that you described as well. When I was bored it was, “You want to eat something? You didn’t get an A, let’s eat for that. You’re lonely after school, let’s eat comfort food.”
For me, I started swimming and then got on the swim team. That’s when the weight started to come off and I ended up becoming a lifeguard. That journey of husky pants, a chubby little ten-year-old boy to suddenly you’re wearing a Speedo like you’re wearing the swimsuits in the Miss America pageant. It’s a journey that unless you’ve been there, people don’t understand how challenging it is to let go of your image of yourself at ten years old, in your case at nineteen. I think that gives us a lot of empathy for people who maybe don’t fit in right away. It’s because you look a certain way now, doesn’t mean you’ve always felt like you fit in. I wanted to acknowledge your courage and thank you for sharing that vulnerable part of yourself. I think that’s how we all relate to each other. It invites people in to know that. This likeability factor you talked about, is that everything, whether it’s a teacher liking students or doctors liking your patients.
There’s something to be said about that. I knew I was deficient in certain ways. I’ve seen people who are highly-skilled and they’re amazing at everything and a little cocky. They don’t have the graciousness or the heart to go along with that. In every situation, maybe they know they’re skilled and they know how to do it in most situations, but if they’re anything less than either tired, hungry or whatever, they’re not as nice as they typically are or can be. I always knew that. I wasn’t great in everything. I was a little deficient. I was good in a lot of things. I wasn’t great at anything. I knew that I could make up for that in my heart, with my heart, my personality and be able to take that a long way and I did. I wasn’t the best singer in Las Vegas. I wasn’t the thinnest, which was a big thing. I didn’t have the best body. I wasn’t the best dancer, but I was solid and good at everything. On top of that, I had the best attitude and that was everything. People’s association with me is, “Jennifer’s the best. She’s willing to show up and do anything. She’s willing to come.” I was the fourth in everybody’s mind when somebody needed someone or something. It’s about being your best always, whatever that is for you.
I was up for a speaking engagement with a couple of other speakers they were looking at. The speaking girl came back to me and said, “They picked you because they like your energy.” People go, “What?” It’s not because of your video. It’s not because of your book. It’s not because of the testimonials. Likeability factor is synonymous, in my opinion, with, “They liked your energy. They want that energy in the room. They want to work with you.” Before and after the talk, all that stuff could never be underestimated. A lot of people unfortunately think, “If I have all this information about how great I am, that people will hire me and they miss the whole likability factor.”
It’s the intangible that sets you apart from everybody else. I’m working on figuring out a way to teach that to people. I’m working on dissecting that because people come to me like, “How can I be more like you?” I’m like, “Let me think about that.” I want to be able to teach that because I do think that gives an advantage to a lot of people in every single industry no matter what you’re doing. Obviously in sales when your clients love you, in leadership when your team loves you and to be able to understand that. It’s not about being everybody’s friend.
It’s about being able to have the hard, difficult conversations and do it with kindness and care. It truly is about caring about other people. I think that that’s the foundation of it, which is probably what happens with you too because I’ve watched you speak and you care about the attendees that you’re speaking to you. You want them to succeed. It’s not about you being up on stage delivering this and getting a fee. It’s about you giving your valuable content of, “This is what I experienced. I want you to be able to do this. I want you to take this back to your industry to do that.”
[bctt tweet=”What more can I be doing to grow my business? ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I wanted to add to that. You were kind enough to come to hear me speak and then you went the extra mile and this is where your likability factor goes off the chart is you said, “I have some feedback for you.” That goes back to what you were saying about how coachable are you no matter how old or successful you are in any career?
You are receptive.
I’m always looking for any little nuance I can do to improve. I can’t wait to implement what you gave me when I’m speaking on that engagement I just got for being like my energy. That coachability factor, I think for the readers the big takeaway is likability and coachability are what’s going to set you apart of why anybody wants to work with you.
Don’t be the one that thinks that they know everything.
No matter what you’ve done or whatever accolades you already have. I do want to ask you because I know there’s a great story here about your wonderful husband, Dan, who is also a speaker. I’d love to hear how you two met and then how that led to you running your own bureau, the National Keynote Speakers. How did that all transpire from you saying, “I have this expertise. I may not want to be working nights. If you’re speaking during the day, we’re never going to see each other.” Tell us a little bit about that story of the origin of becoming an entrepreneur and a founder of such a successful speaking bureau.
I met my husband on Southwest Airlines, so it’s the other love app, which is funny because I’ve flown as a performer. I flew for a living because I was always flying to events and shows. He was a speaker, so same for him. We were both flying back from Phoenix, so he was also a peak performance coach as well as a speaker. He was coaching Terry Porter, who was the head coach of the Phoenix Suns at that time. I was taking a master voice class in Phoenix. We were both on our way back to Vegas. I sat next to him on Southwest Airlines because you can sit anywhere. He always sat at the exit row, I always sat in the exit row. It was a no-brainer and then the plane was empty.
I went and sat on the aisle seat in the exit row and he was sitting in the window. There’s a long story there, but the short story is we met on the plane. I was interested. I wasn’t looking to date him. I wanted to hire him because I wanted to take my career to the next level. I was like, “Give me your card.” The funny thing was, and he tells a story because he’s like, “I wasn’t attracted to her.” I got on that flight and I looked like hell. I had no makeup on. I was exhausted. I didn’t feel good because something happened to my shirt so I bought this funky shirt in the Phoenix airport that had these horrible cactuses on there. I still even had the sticker that had M all the way down on the thing. It was just not my best day. My hair was all wacky and it was just not good.
I saw this guy and I was like, “I think I could fake a better impression.” I was headlining at the Rio Hotel and Casino at that time. I said, “Come see me there and let’s talk in between shows of like, ‘I need to redeem what I just did.’” Here I am in full makeup and costume and everything. He sees me perform and I knew I had him. He was like, “I see now what you are.” The short story is we became friends and we literally talked every day. He lived down the street, which we didn’t know. We went to the same gym he lived down the street. We were destined to meet somehow, some way. I think God was like, “If you guys can’t figure out the gym, I’m going to sit you next to each other on this airplane and go from there.” We started dating a few months later and got engaged a year later. We got married a year after that. A couple of years into it we got married. He was speaking, I was still performing. I learned about the business.
What was interesting is that I had already been doing corporate entertaining, meaning that for you speakers, a company comes to Vegas or an event city and they hire speakers for their conference and stuff. They also hire entertainment, so I would sing at their cocktail receptions or their galas or I would emcee. I already understood that world. I was like, “Who hires you? How do you get hired?” He told me about something called a speakers bureau. I got it and learned it. I worked with agencies and so it made sense to me. I understood what he was doing for promotion. He was great at his website, his social media when it was just starting then in 2008. I saw how he built his business and I saw how he ran his business. For a few years while I was still in entertainment in the corporate market, selling myself to entertainment companies and corporations that would come hire me through my website, I saw what he did and how he built his business. I also saw what bureaus did with him, where they lacked, where their holes were. I saw other speakers that we knew where their frustrations were, how they needed to build their business.
[bctt tweet=”It’s the intangible that sets you apart from everybody else.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I always kept that in the back of my brain because I wasn’t in shows anymore. I did stop doing shows. I want to be home at night with a family. We had two kids and I want to be home at night every night. Corporate work was easy. I only had to do it a couple of nights a week if I did and it wasn’t late usually, but I wanted to get out of entertaining because I was tired. It’s a lot of work and I thought I wanted to do something new. I wanted to do more. I had more to offer. While I was making that transition, the Polaroid Company came calling and they were opening a museum here in Las Vegas. They needed somebody to consult with them and so I helped them open their museum because they wanted to use it as an event space.
Once that was open, they needed somebody to run it and I was like, “I’ll do it.” I stopped entertaining. I went into the corporate world. I went into sales and marketing and building that business for them as corporate events, a place for meetings, weddings, cocktail receptions and such. I had a great time and loved it, but their partnership dissolved for their company around the country so I was losing my job. Dan said, “Stop pussyfooting around. You know this business. There is no bureau in Las Vegas, you need to open one.” I was scared because I really understood it, but I didn’t know it. I knew I had to learn all the speakers, all the clients, all the industries and all the topics too. I needed to understand, “People in technology or innovation, what do they speak on? What do you mean innovate what?” I saw I had to get well-versed in that and understand it.
Back in the day when I was doing a lot of entertaining, I used to do a lot of spokesperson work too. Companies would hire me in to learn their product and I would learn it in one day or two. I would become an expert in the product and be able to talk about that for a few days. That was my superpower. I think I was lucky in this business because I was able to learn the business quickly, learn the topics, understand it, get into the deep level and be able to talk about it and be able to sell that to clients. We opened Las Vegas Keynote Speakers, it started as, and it became successful in a heartbeat. We started opening around the country.
I had a presence in twelve other cities and it was phenomenal. I was like, “I need a national name,” and that’s when I came up with National Keynote Speakers to house everything that I had. It’s been wonderful ever since. It’s been growing steadily and in a place where people are having difficulty finding market share and getting new clients. I’ve had major bureaus come to me and say, “How do you get new business?” They’ve been in business for many years, so they have their clients that they’ve done great customer service with that they’ve kept. How do they get new stuff? I was like, “I’m not telling you,” but I said, “That was my ability to go in there. I’m looking in places you’re not looking because of my core background.” To people who are looking for business and looking for speakers, who are looking for something, look where you’re not thinking.
[bctt tweet=”Paint a picture of what is possible. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
Look in your own backyard. Are you in an event town, like a major city? Are you going to the Convention and Visitors Bureau and networking with them and saying, “How do you book? Who comes to you? Are you looking at any sales teams or any meeting planners? Are you networking in their networking groups? Are you reaching out to them? Are you giving value? Are you making your presence known?” There are all these different ways that I was able to build. I came from entertainment and I was used to that on the ground level, like boots on the ground world, rather than going, “I’m going to open my website and hope that everybody comes.” It’s different and so I was able to do that.
The concept that there wasn’t a bureau based in Vegas fascinates me because that’s where you heard me speak. There are many companies that are not based in Las Vegas and yet they bring all their people there because they have so many places that have conventions. I would think that there’s always every day a keynote speaker speaking in Vegas. It’s almost like Amazon going, “Let’s do books first and then we’ll do everything.” You went, “Let’s do Vegas, my backyard. I know it and now I’ve got that model down. I can do what Amazon did and scale that across the country.” I also want our audience to take away what you said, which is you asked yourself, “What is my superpower?” In your case, it was learning information quickly and becoming a subject matter expert. That’s what a good speaker has to do too.
When you’re brought in to a new client, you have to learn that industry, their niche, their competitive advantages. When you can speak to them, it’s customized and not seeing, talk to everybody. I’ll never forget when I spoke to a healthcare company and I got off the stage and somebody asked me, “How long have you worked in healthcare?” It’s all of that stuff and not everybody can do it. I think that if someone’s saying, “I don’t know what my superpower is or how do I find it? I’d love your opinion on this,” is your superpower sometimes is something that comes relatively easy to you. Because it comes easy to you, you assume everyone else can do with that too. People point out and go, “I can’t do that. How do you do that?” Look for those feedback comments. What are your thoughts on helping people find their superpower with those criteria?
Entertainment Secrets For Entrepreneurs: If you don’t give everything that you have with the excitement that you had as a child, you’re never going to go where you really want to go.
I think you’re 100% right. I love how you just dialed that down. Your superpower is something that comes easy. You think that everybody else can do it too and you realize, “No, they can’t.” I also think on top of that, being open, willing to learn and do something new. Getting out of your comfort zone and going, “I’m going to really see my creatives also.” This is how I start my day and every business interaction is, “How can I help? Not what can I give you?”
It’s that concept of coming from a place of service. Sometimes it can be something so simple like, “Would you mind buying my book and writing a review on Amazon?” It’s a little ask, some little thing sometimes, I’m looking for this kind of customer or here’s my ideal client, what tips do you have for my website or if you wouldn’t mind re-tweeting something I posted? It’s amazing. How can I help? Some people are hesitant to ask that because they feel like it’s too much of an imposition. I think if you realize that sometimes the help can just be, “I just need to call you when I’m having a bad day.”
There are two things: How can I get help? Also how can I help? How can I serve? My first underlying thing is how I can serve? This thing you were telling me that people want to learn how to pitch themselves better, their products, themselves. When you come from a place of how can I serve you that it opens your mind to a different place. It allows you to ask different questions, get the answers, and then you can speak into what they need. When you’re trying to figure out how can I pitch myself better? Ask what people need. Ask how you can serve. When you can talk about how you can serve somebody, it changes the conversation. It changes the copy on your material. It changes everything.
When you’re having the conversation with the client and you’re asking them more questions, because I’m on a call with a speaker a lot when they’re talking to a client. Sometimes it’s my first call with a particular speaker and they are talking way too much. I’m like, “Ask more questions.” They want to talk, people want to talk, they want to tell you about their problems and tell you about their company. Stop talking and listen. The valuable thing there is that they tell you what they’re looking for. When they tell you what they’re looking for or you can go, “Great.” You allow the client to talk and they really get into it in the beginning, but after a minute they get into it and they say, “John is having trouble here over in this capacity with this team because the team is really struggling with the production and the warehouses. Over here, we’re struggling with morale and this is happening.”
If you let the client talk and do their thing and then you come back at the end and go, “Great, it’s so wonderful to hear. Thank you for talking and telling me about what you’re looking for. What I do is I speak to the fact that a change in overcoming adversity and we’ll talk about attitude and building morale.” You can speak into what they were saying and whatever your topic is at that point, whether it’s innovation or motivation, you can quickly formulate your information and your topic into what they need. This is the disconnect that a lot of people have. I saw this with entertainment. I know what I can do. I know my whole background. I know every scope. I know the scope of every single thing that I can do. The person who is hiring me, meeting for the first time, has no idea. If I don’t speak, describe and give them the pictures and the image of what’s possible, they’re never going to know. If they tell me what they’re looking for and I can say, “I can do this and this for you to create that and to have that objective.” They’re going to go, “You’re the perfect fit.” All of a sudden, I’ve got that job.
Give a picture of what is possible. You’re such a great storyteller, Jennifer, even describing what you were wearing when you met your husband, Dan, with all the medium size M’s on that sticker, that such a visual. It’s memorable. It’s funny and that detail. When someone says, “We need a singer of Linda Ronstadt,” you tell the story of, “I used to sing her songs in my bedroom when I was this year-old, young.” You get two great examples of painting pictures, telling stories that pull people in. That’s the secret of becoming memorable, and as I like to say, irresistible. You are certainly irresistible. I can’t thank you enough for sharing your wisdom, your passion and your story with us. If people want to find you, they can go to NationalKeynoteSpeakers.com. Do you have any final thoughts or inspiration you want to leave us with?
[bctt tweet=”Follow your heart and do what you know without knowing where it leads you. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I feel this, and I say this every single day. If there’s something that you want to do, go and do it and do whatever you can to get there. Don’t let anything hold you back. Definitely remember how you were as a kindergartener. You wanted to try everything. Go and try everything to be successful. Whatever you’re doing, if it’s speaking, if it’s a product that you’re launching or you’re being an entrepreneur or starting a business, go and do it. We can always start over. We can always decide to turn around and go somewhere else, but if you don’t give it everything that you have as a kid, as that excitement that we had as a child, you’re never going to go where you want to go.
Don’t give up. It’s always too soon to give up. Rudy Ruettiger is one of my favorites ever. His saying from the movie, Rudy, “It’s always too soon to give up,” and I agree. Always ask yourself, “What more can I be doing?” That’s my favorite question. What more could I be doing to build my business? Your mind is going to answer you and you might not like some of the answers. It’s going to give you the answers that you need. Sometimes it takes us looking at ourselves like that, and so keep moving forward. Be like that kid that wants to go and live a dream and do whatever you can to get there. You’re going to do it. It’s going to get you where you want to go.
It’s wonderful, inspiring and tactical at the same time. What a great question. What more can I be doing to grow my business? You have given us a lot to think about and you’ve certainly inspired all of us. Thanks again, Jennifer.
You’re welcome. Thanks for having me, John.
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4 Key Questions To Ask When Booking Your Next Speaker
Posted by John Livesay in blog | 0 comments
In speaking for multiple Fortune 500 companies, associations, and other organizations over the past 10 years, my aim is always to deliver massive value. What I’ve found is that most clients are looking for four key criteria when selecting a speaker:
1. They want to make sure the talk has actionable takeaways.
2. They want the talk to be customized to their audience.
3. They want the talk to align with the rest of their agenda.
4. They want the talk to extend beyond the day of the event.
Once you know what you want from your speaker, here’s a very simple, straightforward way to make sure you get the speaker you’re looking for: turn your expectations into questions!
For example, if the four statements above are your criteria for success, then when you’re interviewing speaker candidates, my recommended questions are:
1. What are some of the actionable outcomes from your keynote? If the speaker you are interviewing stammers here, beware.
2. How do you customize the talk to your audience? Everyone DOES customize, so don’t ask if they do. Ask HOW they customize their talk.
3. How will this session affect the rest of my event? An amazing 60-minute keynote is great. But what would be even better is impact after the speaker leaves the stage.
4. What if I want to build on the keynote — what is available after the event? This is really the secret sauce to a great event.
Do you notice how these are not “yes” or “no” questions? You want to ask questions in such a way that the speaker is led to give you examples.
For example, when a client asks me about actionable takeaways, I can share how Redfin’s sales management told me his team was “able to save an angry client, who was planning on leaving, into a happy client by using the tools of empathy and listening I talked about in my keynote.”
When a client asks about how I customize a talk I can share how after giving a talk to Anthem insurance’s audience, using their specific acronyms and examples, someone from the audience asked me “how long I had worked in healthcare.” The event planner received several comments about how much they appreciated how completely I understood their challenges in my keynote.
When a client asks about how my keynote can align with the rest of their agenda, I can share how the Vice President from Intalere said, “Even though you are not here, your presence after your keynote is still felt. You have been mentioned and quoted in presentations from our CEO down to our pitch sessions.”
When a client asks about how they can extend the impact beyond the event, I can share how I always include both a one hour Zoom call 30 days after the event and then another one 90 days after the event. A managing partner from DHR International said: “What a great recap call of all the valuable content you gave us from your keynote last month! We all loved being reminded of how inspired you made us feel as well as being able to ask you real life questions of how we can overcome a specific objection. “
When a speaker is sharing their stories of successfully meeting the needs for other clients, you should imagine yourself in that client’s situation and see if that fits with what you’re looking for from a keynote speaker. If you feel inspired and motivated by the stories a prospective speaker is telling you, then you can be sure that your audience will too!
When you ask these questions of your speaker candidates, you’ll find the pre-booking calls to be much more enjoyable, and you’ll virtually guarantee that you are able to select a speaker who delivers more value than you could have imagined.
Imagine how happy you will feel when you hire the right speaker and you hear comments like, “This was the best speaker we have had in 13 years” or “I not only feel inspired to start using what I just heard at work, but feel like it can help me in my personal life too!”
Can You Sell? with Alex Rubalcava
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
All startup companies want to develop their businesses effectively. However, funding can be a hindrance for some who want to scale. Alex Rubalcava, General Partner and co-Founder of Stage Venture Partners, gives more information about their company and shares their passion for investing in a startup, particularly in enterprise software. Alex shares why and how they filter companies that approach them for potential funding with their three “why” criteria and three “can” questions. Find out what those questions and how you can stand out from the crowd of startups out there.
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Listen To The Episode Here
Can You Sell? with Alex Rubalcava
Our guest is Alex Rubalcava, who is a General Partner and Cofounder of Stage Venture Partners. With experience in both public equity and venture capital investing, Alex has been a professional investor since 2002. He started his career as an analyst at Anthem Venture Partners, which is a leading venture capital firm in Santa Monica. While Alex worked at Anthem, the firm backed startups such as TrueCar, Myspace and Android. After Anthem, Alex launched a long/short equity fund where he ran for nearly ten years. In addition to his investing work, Alex was an active board member at several nonprofit organizations in Los Angeles. He was appointed by Mayor James Hahn to the LA Animal Services Commission. Later, he served on the board of KIPP LA Schools and South Central Scholars. He serves on the board of stage portfolio companies Sightline Maps, Balto Software and WhiteFox Defense Technologies. He graduated from Harvard in 2002. Alex, welcome to the show.
John, it’s great to be here.
What I love to do is to ask you to take us as far back as you want. It could be childhood, high school, college, whatever it was that led you into this passion for investing in startups.
I did not know what a VC was or what startups were when I was growing up. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be a doctor or a lawyer. Those were two things that did not appeal to me. I tried a lot of things while I was in high school and college. I worked selling t-shirts by the side of a road in a motorcycle rally. I busted tables, worked at an advertising agency, in a real estate development firm and a couple of startups. This is all before I was 21. I discovered investing around that time when I got an internship at a venture capital firm. Ever since then, I’ve worked in finance. I think that the idea of helping to finance growth companies is tremendously exciting and I’ve been doing that for my career ever since.
When you were at Harvard, your focus was on government, was it not?
I did study government to college. It was a major that was somewhat relevant but not terribly so. I took a lot of classes in the History of Science, which was a unique major at Harvard that had I known about it when I started as a freshman, I probably should have majored in that.
You have three criteria that you ask someone who comes in to pitch you for potential funding. Would you walk us through those three why questions?
To give a little context, I’ll tell you a little bit about what we do at our firm. We are a seed venture capital firm investing in enterprise software startups. What that means is that we’re investing in companies that are very young, usually one to two years old. Often, they have fewer than ten employees. Sometimes they have a product in the market, sometimes they don’t have yet. Almost always, they are approaching us looking to raise their first institutional funding. They may have had funding from friends, family and Angel investors prior to approaching us but they have almost always raised less than a million dollars. They’re now looking to raise that first $1 million to $3 million of institutional capital.
That’s who they are when they get to us. When they do, we have to filter through the vast set of companies that are pitching on us. To give you a little bit of an idea of the volume, we had about 1,300 new companies approach us, we approached or that somehow got into our database. We met with 500 of them. We did serious work on about 75 and we wrote checks to seven companies in 2018. 1,300 down to seven. These questions that we’re going to go through are how we filter from 1,300 down to seven. The three whys: why you, why now and why us. Why you is a question about the founder. Why are you uniquely capable of building the company that you are building? Why are you uniquely credible? We use the word like credible or capable deliberately because those words are open-ended. You can earn credibility from prior work experience. Maybe you founded a startup before, maybe you are a senior executive at a high growth startup or maybe you earn that because you’re one of the best technologists in the world.
There’s evidence of the fact that you know more about a particular area than other people do. Maybe you have vertical expertise. Maybe you know more about drone defense than anybody else in the world. We try not to be prescriptive when it comes to the type of expertise that we are seeking out. Rather, we try to be open-minded and to recognize that world-class credibility comes in different forms but somebody on the founding team has to be world-class at something. We will then hire around that person’s skills. We don’t look for well-rounded individuals. We look for pointy individuals and we built a well-rounded team around them. We look for pointy people. People who if you graphed their capabilities, they would be no better than anybody else at large numbers of things but at something important for growing their company, they’re one of the best people in the world.
[bctt tweet=”Why you, why now, and why us? Can you hire, ship, and sell?” username=”John_Livesay”]
In terms of why now, we believe that time matters a tremendous amount when it comes to starting and growing in a company. If somebody comes to us and pitches a company, a product or an idea and it could have been built using the techniques and the tools that were available years ago, our interest fades very rapidly. It’s the kind of thing where our belief is there’s so much capital out there, there’s so much entrepreneurial energy that if something was possible years ago, it was tried years ago. Something meaningful has to have changed in order for it to be worth trying again. The why now question is all about where’s the world now? What are our customer’s demands and expectations? Where is the technology in the world now? Is there something recent and important that has changed that will enable customers’ expectations and the capability to build something to be met in the middle?
The example I always use is Airbnb. If the economy hadn’t been bad back in 2008, people wouldn’t have been opened to renting out a room or their entire home to strangers. There was a time that people were so hungry for a solution, if they were losing their jobs or fear of that. They were open to that idea. Had that happen before, the technology wouldn’t have been available anyway for people to be looking like that. The timing was key to their success. You’ve done over 23 of these investments and to go back to that math, I’m fascinated by that. The strategy is the investors invest in 1% of the pitches they hear. That resilience and tenacity that it takes to be a founder seeking funding.
I don’t think people understand the numbers. It’s not to dissuade anybody but if you want to be an actor, you can’t let those numbers dissuade you either. You talk to 1,300 companies, meet with 500, do due diligence in 75 and write checks for seven. That’s even less than 1%. These questions that you’re sharing are helping people, not just getting the 1% club but even the smaller club. If you wouldn’t mind, pick one of your favorites. If it’s possible, companies that are on your website. I’m particularly fascinated by the WhiteFox Drone Defense but anyone you want that you can give an example of the why now.
In the case of WhiteFox, no one needed drone defense years ago because there was not a large consumer market of drones. Nobody was flying around $800 unmanned aerial vehicles. You can go on Amazon and buy any number of consumer drones for $800, some of which can lift a fair amount of payload, fly over any fence and any wall in the world. For owners of sensitive property, whether that is a nuclear power plant, a military base, a stadium, an oil pipeline or anything like that, it used to be sufficient to put up a twenty-foot wall. Maybe put a few cameras along the wall to monitor your wall and your perimeter. If your perimeter extends from that twenty-foot wall up to 20,000 feet into the air and you now have to protect the air column above you, as much as you protected the ground access to your facility before.
A customer need was created there by the availability of these new drone technologies and the need for a solution was recognized immediately by a number of operators. We met with people who have guns that will shoot RF radiation at a drone to try to jam it. We met with people who will send other drones to intercept a hostile drone and throw nets at it. We’ve met with people who are training hawks and falcons to go intercept the drones. For a variety of reasons, we didn’t think any of those solutions were truly robust. When we met WhiteFox, which was founded by a 21-year old college dropout named Luke Fox, we found a company that had what we believe is the only truly scalable solution in the market.
Investing In Startup: Somebody’s always trying to do it cheaper and give somebody an alternative.
That also speaks to one of the key things I want to get your opinion on is what’s your secret sauce? Without competition, in my opinion, and what I’ve heard from other investors like you, it means there’s no market. Clearly, there are a lot of other alternatives out there but they have the best. Would you agree that that’s important that there has to be some competition for the market to be something that the why now could kick us in?
Some of our companies don’t have meaningful competition. We have a company called SPIDR Tech that developed software to help police departments communicate more effectively with their citizens. Imagine if you had vandalism at your home, the police department sent you a text message and an email immediately upon logging your case and said, “Here’s your case number.” Forty-eight hours later, they sent you another one with the contact info and the bio of the detective who was assigned to your case. A week or two later when a suspect had been identified, you got a notification and when that suspect was arrested, you got a further notification.
That chain of communication is almost identical to the chain of communications that you get when you order something from Amazon or a pizza. If you were not a cop yourself, you might not have seen that market opportunity. More importantly, you might not have the credibility to be able to go to a police chief and sell this product to them. The company that we invested in SPIDR Tech is founded by two former cops Elon Kaiserman and Rahul Sidhu. They recognized an opportunity that no one else had. We added their seed around 2017 alongside other investors, including Google and we have yet to encounter a competitor.
That’s very unique because usually if someone is the first to market and they’re growing, that spurs competition. Somebody’s always trying to do it cheaper and give somebody an alternative. That’s fascinating that it hasn’t spurred any competition. I’m sure they’re making the most of it because that’s pretty rare. The third question which goes to the due diligence on the part of the founder that’s coming to pitch you. A lot of people somehow don’t take the time to do this and it’s obviously a problem, especially when they’re going to get asked a certain question.
Why us and that’s one reason why our ratio of deals that we do to ones that we don’t is deceptively stringent. In the sense that we pass on a lot of investments that we’re pretty sure are going to get funded by other good investors, but we would not offer anything to the company besides capital. We also get a lot of proposals and requests for capital that are not well targeted for us. If you look on our website, you will see that we invest exclusively in enterprise software companies. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the number one category of new deals that approach us are enterprise software companies.
[bctt tweet=”Try to be open-minded and recognize that world-class credibility comes in different forms.” username=”John_Livesay”]
To me, it is still surprising that the number two category is companies doing all manner of things with cannabis. We have never funded a cannabis-related company. We are not going to. We are not the smart money there. There are plenty of other people who are the smart money there and yet for some reason, a lot of people doing cannabis deals reach out to us. If any of you are doing cannabis deals, please do not reach out to us. I know nothing about your market. I’m the wrong guy for you but there are plenty of people out there who are the right investor for you.
Let’s say somebody in emerging software technology specifically for B2B, not B2C, you’re very targeted. You have a portfolio that gives very specific examples. You’ve mentioned a few of them and they get to this level of the 75 where you’re doing the due diligence on. You also shared with me there’s another level within the why you that said, if you almost will, I call it double clicking on that with some more dropdown questions. Let’s talk about what those are.
When it comes to investing in a startup, the most important consideration for us at all times is our assessment of the quality of the founder and his or her team. In particular, there is an enormous number of things that can go wrong with the startup, almost all related to the founder. Those questions are often related to speed and execution. The way that we assess the founders when it comes to speed and execution is a set of three questions. Can you ship? Can you sell? Can you hire? Can you ship is about can you deliver a 1.0 product in a workable condition that is valuable to a customer? Ideally, a third party customer who is not your mother or a mother-in-law that’s willing to pay real money for. Can you do that earlier rather than later?
A lot of people come to us asking for money to build out their 1.0 product. Maybe they have no progress on that and assume that we are interested in funding companies that don’t even have a line of code written. Plenty of people get to us were for $50,000 or $100,000 worth of angel capital invested in the company. They’ve developed a product that beats all their competitors and has already been adopted by major companies. Obviously, it gets our attention when someone comes to us having already accomplished that.
It’s way beyond the minimal viable product if you’ve got someone paying you.
I’ll call the first few customers evidence of a minimal viable product but not much more than that. That’s all that’s needed at the stage at which we invest. When we see a company that has been able to ship a product on very little capital that gives us a degree of confidence that when we increase the amount of capital that the company has to work with, that product development will continue to happen on time, on budget. They’ll continue to innovate in an efficient and timely manner. The money will not be spent in endless revisions and refactoring of code bases. When it comes to the second question, can you sell? We are often investing in companies that are selling high ticket software. We tend to have two buckets of companies.
We have companies that are selling software over the phone and email, which means inside sales or something between $10,000 and $40,000 a year. We then have a group of companies that are selling software at much higher prices, around $100,000 a year and up where you have to put somebody on a plane to go sell that software. Regardless of which type of software you’re selling, there needs to be some evidence that the founders and/or some early members of the team are capable of selling the product and they have some idea about where customer leads come from. They have some idea as to what their conversion rates and their sales cycles look like and they have some idea as to what the payback period looks like on that customer acquisition. Not all of that needs to be figured out, when you’re a seed investor you are not necessarily a metrics-based investor in the way that a Series B investors would do, but we are looking for evidence that people are on the way to figuring that stuff out.
This is my world that I love talking about, which is selling and it all starts with a good elevator pitch to even get on the radar. You have to be able to sell yourself and your vision to potential clients but also to potential investors so that they can easily understand who you help and what problems you solve. That’s the first big hurdle that a lot of technical people in particular struggle with. They get into the technology and not the basics of who they help and what problem they solve. Do you ever look for the team to have some marketing plan in place of what their strategy is to generate the leads and all that?
If you don’t know where to acquire your customers, you’re going to play all around and spend money without discipline trying to figure that out.
If you’re selling expensive $40,000, $100,000 software, what kind of training is there going on for the salespeople? How you are teaching them to sell it in a way that they can handle objections that they’re going to get because every sale has an objection.
[bctt tweet=”Something meaningful has to have changed for it to be worth trying again.” username=”John_Livesay”]
One example that we see a lot of startups have an idea that they will be able to sell through a channel because they have seen large companies sell through a channel. If you’re IBM and you have documentation, products that are twenty years old, channels of value-added resellers and the like give me a good way of getting the product to the market. That does not work for a new product. That does not work for a new company.
They want proof of concept. I’m a Cofounder at QuantmRE. We’ve raised some money. We built some products and we are helping homeowners get cash for the equity in their home. We’ve had some initial conversations with, for example, Home Depot who we could send them clients to use that money to remodel but before they become a partner, they want to see thousands and thousands of people using this that they can interview before they would want to do anything big. If you’re only starting in one state, like Uber did before you grow and they’re national. You need to figure out how you’re going to do it without channel partners is what I took away from what you said.
The early good market is entirely the responsibility of the startup. Maybe when you’re at $10 million or $100 million in annual revenue, you can start to think about what a channel strategy would look like, what a platform would look like or any other ways of going to market.
It helps you scale but you need to know where that first hundred thousand customers are going to come from without it.
You need to know where those leads are coming from, how you identify them, how you qualify them, how you moved them through the process. Software for the most part, especially expensive software is sold, not bought. Low-cost software is often purchased and is adopted in a viral way. Things like Zoom is a great example of a company like that but higher ticket software is much more of a consultative sale.
Investing In Startup: If you don’t know where to acquire your customers, you’re going to play all around and spend money without discipline trying to figure that out.
You’ve asked the founder, the why you has been answered as well as the why now and why us but you’re into the weeds with them saying, “Can you ship? Can you sell?” The final question, which I think is key.
Can you hire? The hardest thing for any company is to assemble a great team. You have to convince people who are rock stars at their job, who are probably earning a lot of money, with highly secure jobs, are on track for promotions and are working for companies that their friends from college and their in-laws recognize prestigious jobs, to then come and join you at a startup that nobody has ever heard of. Working out of a random garage or a co-working space with no perks, with no prestige that typically comes from a career and to be in the weeds with you on a tough journey. That is not an easy sale, it’s not easy to convince people to do, especially in a market like California, where there are tons of great startups hiring. You have to stand out from the crowd of all the other startups out there. It is not an insignificant challenge.
Do you have a story of someone that your company has invested in that did make a great hire that made you feel, “They really have this down?”
There are so many to choose from. I don’t even know where I would start but of all the companies in our portfolio, WhiteFox Technologies, our drone defense company, has shown the most interesting ability to hire. They have multiple people who have been presidents and CEOs of companies before working on the team. Luke and his team have been able to recruit all of those people because everybody sees the size of the market, the urgency of the problem and the quality of WhiteFox’s solution.
It has to do with the vision being explained in such a way that people can see it, understand it and want to be a part of it. It’s an emotional decision as well as a logical one in my experience. You’ve certainly given us a lot of valuable content. The why you, why now, why us and if you’re in that next category, how do you get into that less than 1% club? You better have some good answers on can you ship, can you sell and can you hire? Are there any last thoughts you want to leave us with, Alex?
[bctt tweet=”The hardest thing for any company is to assemble a great team.” username=”John_Livesay”]
If any of you are pursuing highly technical enterprise software product and are looking for a seed investor to please reach out. We’re pretty easy to find. My email is [email protected] and we’d be happy to hear from people.
I can’t thank you enough for sharing your criteria and your wisdom. Congratulations on all your success.
Thanks, John. It’s great to be here with you.
Links Mentioned:
- Alex Rubalcava
- Stage Venture Partners
- Anthem Venture Partners
- Sightline Maps
- Balto Software
- WhiteFox Defense Technologies
- SPIDR Tech
- QuantmRE
- [email protected]
- http://www.StageVP.com/
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John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
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