Be A Broker Of Fairness With Rich Gibbons
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Employee loyalty is a competitive advantage. So how do you keep them? In this episode, John Livesay has the guest who can boil it down to one tip. Rich Gibbons, the President of SpeakInc, dives deep into the value of becoming a broker of fairness and what it brings to the industry. The one thing that needs to be everybody’s North Star is that you are not trying to stack the chips in anybody’s favor. Rich emphasizes how being fair to everyone makes you more advantageous in your business. Also in the business of selling himself as a speaker, he then shares why he thinks the key to finding the right speaker is finding someone who listens. If you wish to know how to keep your employees loyal, learn the speaking culture, or simply gain great nuggets for success, then you should not miss this conversation!
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Listen to the podcast here
Be A Broker Of Fairness With Rich Gibbons
Our guest is Rich Gibbons, the President of SpeakInc, a bureau that books the top speakers in the world. He said, “It is important to be a broker of fairness. When you are easy to work with, it becomes a competitive advantage.” Find out his secret sauce to keeping his employees loyal. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Rich Gibbons, who’s a native of Connecticut and Glasgow, Scotland. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He joined Speak Inc in 1991, which is one of the top speaking bureaus, and now serves as the company’s president. He has been closely involved with the International Association of Speakers Bureau, IASB, and is a past president of the organization.
Because of his knowledge and expertise in the industry, he has been sought after as an expert witness on legal issues involving professional speaking. He has also been involved with the Corporate Event Marketing Association, serving as a board member. He and his wife, Heather, have three children. Shout out to Julia, Jackson, and Max. In his spare time, he enjoys mountain biking, road cycling, windsurfing, motorcycling, and skiing. Welcome to the show, Rich.
Thanks for having me, John. That was a fun recitation there.
I’m always curious to have someone tell me their own story of origin of how you get started in the speaking business. You can take us back to being in Scotland and coming to America or wherever you want to start your story. You have been speaking for a long time, which is something we are going to dive into.
I first moved to San Diego, California, 33 years ago. When my wife and I first moved here from New York, we showed up in California. We didn’t have jobs and no contacts. We didn’t know anybody. I went to my alma mater and looked up the alumni directory and thought, “There is got to be somebody from our school out in San Diego.”
Sure enough, I saw that one of my fraternity brothers was out here. He was a couple of years ahead of me. I looked him up and came to learn that his wife, Ruth, had started a speaker’s bureau. I didn’t know what a speaker’s bureau was. When I paid her office a visit, I saw all these books, audio cassette series, and VHS tapes of these fascinating people. Ted speakers weren’t a thing back then. It’s that genre of subject matter experts and a lot of interesting people.
I would say to her on a Monday as I pay her office a visit, “Would you mind if I borrowed this series of audio cassettes? Can I take this book for a week? I want to look at this VHS tape.” It was almost like going to the library. I would check these things out and come back a week or ten days later and return that stuff and walk off with other stuff.
I was a real voracious curious consumer of the content of people like you that have a tradecraft and area of expertise. The arch of their story is endlessly interesting. She and her husband were working closely. When it came time for them to expand and grow the business beyond just her, they thought, “This Gibbons guy seems to be interested in the product.” This summer 2023, it will be 32 years. It must have been an idea whose time had come.
One of the things I found intriguing in your bio is you are being called an expert witness. I’m guessing there is a story there of some of the cases you have been called on. How do they even find you? One of the things that a bureau does, for those people who aren’t familiar, is all the contracts and getting the money upfront. If a speaker doesn’t show up, you have a whole roster of other people for backup, which gives the client peace of mind.
There are a lot of details and now, contracts are getting more complicated, from what I have been hearing. Tell us a little bit about what SpeakInc and your brand’s expertise is in those kinds of contracts. If you have a story of being on trial because we watched those shows on TV. We know how an expert witness is coming up and the defense is going to try to discredit it.
Our company and companies like ours, my brethren in the industry, or industry colleague friends across the lecture circuit, we serve as an intermediary between the companies and the trade associations that engage the talent, and that universe of talent that is out there. We want to be a broker of fairness. We want it to be fair for both parties. The one thing that needs to be everybody’s North Star is that you are not trying to stack the chips in anybody’s favor.
[bctt tweet=”Be a broker of fairness.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Our role is to make sure that there are no areas of ambiguity and that everything is clear. We have all had more familiarity than we would probably like with force majeure provisions coming out of the pandemic. A lot of people pre-pandemic were like, “Force majeure? What is that?” Everybody knows what force majeure is now. We are being an advocate for a level playing field and making sure that expectations are set with a great deal of clarity.
The second thing you asked was about the expert witness thing, which was entirely passive. I received a phone call one day from an attorney locally here in San Diego, California, who had been referred to me by a colleague of mine in Texas. It was related to a medical malpractice case for a popular, prolific, and bestselling author that had been a host of Oprah’s favorite or Oprah’s Book Club.
She had a book club where she would pick a book. She had her favorite things. It could be products to buy during the holiday time. One author that she raved about was Men Are From Mars, Women are From Venus. She had the whole audience participating in that situation where women have this wake-up call where he is not that into you if he is calling you Friday night to go out Saturday.
It wasn’t the Men Are From Mars, Women are From Venus. It was a similar author who had his moment in the sun and sold a lot of books. He had a heart event and was purportedly mistreated in the healthcare facility. There was a lawsuit. The insurance company was defending. Oftentimes, expert witnesses are brought in to weigh in on arcane industries or cottage areas of commerce that are not that well understood by people who are extramural to it.
When I was invited to participate, I went to a friend of mine who was a litigator and an attorney. I said, “I got this phone call today. I’m shying away from it.” We found out that I was being collared to be an expert witness. He said, “You should do it.” I’m glad I did it because it was illuminating and fun. His prediction came to pass. That was, “You will be part of a deposition and a dialogue where your area of practice will be the topic of conversation. No one in the room will know what they are talking about except you.”
That was absolutely the case. I was shocked at how authoritative the old expression, “Often wrong, never in doubt.” These attorneys were definitive and authoritative. I would listen to them and think, “That’s not remotely a reality.” There’s always a place for an expert witness to inject a little bit of truth into the conversation.
Most people don’t even have a clue that it exists as a profession. I remember going to a doctor’s office. The doctor is looking at the job title or profession on the medical intake form. I wrote, “Professional speaker.” He goes, “Is that a thing? People make a living speaking.” He couldn’t wrap his head around it.
When I learned that my fraternity brother’s wife had started a speaker’s bureau, I said, “What the heck is a speaker’s bureau?” They were like, “We help these groups and identify talent for the platform.” I thought to myself, “That must be like shooting fish in a barrel. How many companies can be doing that?” You then get into it and you realize, “It is competitive.”
Let’s talk about speaking because what you do that I don’t think people first think of is selling. You are in the business of selling yourself as a bureau to get clients to pick you to find their speakers, and you’re in the business of selling the speakers that you have on your roster as being the right fit. One of the things that stood out for me when I was browsing your website is the key to finding the right speaker is finding someone who listens.
I have a whole belief premise that soft skills, listening, empathy, and storytelling are what make us strong. You got listening on your website. We are on the same page here of how important that is to figure out even if you are the right fit sometimes as a bureau, let alone a speaker. If you could speak to that a little bit about how important listening is, and how you have that be part of your culture.
For a company like ours, as a non-exclusive bureau, we don’t have a backroom with a dozen names under contract that we get gigs for. It is not like that. Our marketing communication, branding, and positioning in the market are not unique to us, but it is the wall we are leaning our strategic ladder against. We can be impartial assets and counselors to those people putting together agendas.
Broker Of Fairness: There’s always a place for an expert witness to inject a little bit of truth into the conversation.
Oftentimes, it’s the number of event stakeholders and executive leaders that want to get their fingerprints on speaker selection. They want to talk about a theme. There’s the almighty budget, and the cross-section and demographic of the audience. These event stakeholders can take 10 to 15 minutes to tell you about one slot, the opening general session or the closing keynote, what they want people to think and feel, and how they want their audience to change their orientation after the program as opposed to before it.
You can take the same briefing and description of all I have mentioned and share it with ten people, and you can get ten different answers. There is a lot to interpretation, follow-up questioning, and understanding of who has worked well in the past and who has maybe not hit the mark. Getting a feeling for the entire fabric of that entire landscape tells you a lot. It becomes the curation process and suggesting candidates that will align well with what is being described. It is not an art form, but it is not going to be reduced to software code anytime soon.
I want to double-click on something you mentioned, “Listening includes deep questions beyond the initial question.” In the world of psychotherapy, would you go to a therapist with your partner and say, “The romance is gone?” That is what is called the presenting problem. People think, “As soon as we get their romance back, everything will be fixed.” The therapist will usually say, “That is the presenting problem. There is something else going on that has caused the romance to go away like lack of trust and hurt feelings.”
That is their job to do that. As a sales keynote speaker, I work with the audience on thinking of themselves as doctors, asking questions like that, and not taking the first problem that a client gives you as, “This is our big problem. If you solve this, we will hire you,” or whatever. Sometimes it is as simple as saying, “Anything else on your mind? Anything else that you want this event to be? Anything else that is a concern to you?”
You get down to another level, especially if they are interviewing you and maybe elder bureaus or maybe other speakers, and I’m the one that said, “Anything else?” Everyone else goes, “You want them to hit their quota. I can do that. Bye.” If I say, “Anything else?” They go, “We also like them not to take rejection personally, be a little more resilient, or whatever else they are struggling with.” I can then go, “I can do this and this.”
If I don’t ask the question, they don’t often give you more than the first-level answer. I thought that is a great example of what you are saying there. With events in particular, there are many moving pieces. They almost need you to be a therapist sometimes and realize you are not alone in this. That is part of the messages.
That’s a great way to put it. I feel a little bit like a fossil making this observation, but so much of what my colleagues and I did when I first got in the business back when dinosaurs roamed the land in the early 1990s, everything was phoned and faxed. I don’t even think the email was a thing back then. There is so much automation, and everything is very digital that I will be diplomatically insistent.
A lot of my colleagues, both my partners here, as well as my industry colleagues, to the point you made two minutes ago about anything else. You can’t ask anything else over email or text. That is got to be eyeball-to-eyeball. That is why having these conversations over Zoom or Teams, there is more of a dialogue. It can be more conversational.
There is a famous speaker who came of age in the late ‘80s. He had a great firm that has stuck with me for three decades that is prescription before diagnosis is malpractice. It’s a lot about that to the extent you are making recommendations before you have heard the whole story and unpack all the nuances of the meeting landscape and direction.
There is such a huge ecosystem there that to have that conversation, and to the point you made asking open-ended questions, “What else would you like me to know about?” The stuff you pick up in those dialogues. Sometimes it is not possible if you are working with an agency or a production company and you are a couple of degrees from Kevin Bacon. You are not right at the coalface. It is a little bit of the telephone game. You don’t get that granular detail.
When you are talking with a CMO or a director of events, and they have a seat at the table, they understand the details and nuance of how they are putting that together with the energy and the theme, and where they sit in the evolution of their company and organization. When you have the dirt under your fingernails familiarity with everything they are dealing with, it makes you pick up these minute details in what they are communicating. To the extent you know the minute details, background, experience, and history of the speakers, you can make those connections that are hard to do when you get a macro, generic, or general brief.
[bctt tweet=”‘Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.'” username=”John_Livesay”]
Sometimes if you are talking about the details, it can be as simple as when you land or get to your hotel, text the bureau and the client. Let everybody know you are there. That is one less thing they have to worry about, especially if there is bad weather, canceled flights, or 100 other things. That requires a speaker to not be self-focused the whole time and realize that you are just one cog in this big wheel. If you can take that, that is one of the easiest things you can do to be known as someone who is easy to work with.
From what I have heard from having the pleasure of being with you in person here in Austin, that is a big criteria on which speakers you recommend. Are they easy to work with? That is one thing you can do to be easy to work with. Are there other things that people should be aware of? Is that a competitive advantage of being responsive and easy to work with? I love you to speak a little bit about that.
If you look at a pie chart of these are the things that the event marketer and meeting professional has to worry about for the annual sales kickoff or the global customer conference, there are enumerable things they have to chase after and that are keeping them up at night. If you are a 6% slice of the pie chart, but you are 45% of the headache, you are upside down there.
I want to come back to what you said. Are there things that the speaker can do? The days and hours leading up to the start of a huge event are filled with heart attack emergencies and migraine headache-inducing problems that the event owners have to solve in real-time. Meetings start on Thursday morning, and here it is Tuesday afternoon and we have a huge problem. They got to figure that out.
That is not the time for a speaker or a bureau to be in their hair asking about AV tech needs or something that could have been dealt with several weeks earlier, straightforward and simple. We tend to think of that 2-week or 3-week zone leading up to the event. You got airfare, air itineraries, and ground transit. You will be like, “We will figure out the tech check as we get closer.” There are those things that are a bit more plastic in real time. If there is anything that can be taken care of far in advance, it should be taken care of far in advance.
What experience bring is anticipating problems before critical thinking in action. It is what you described. One of the things that I’m also impressed with because I’ve had the privilege of meeting not just you but several other people virtually and then in person, Lisa Warren and Jenna George, is this incredible loyalty. This is the problem that many companies of any industry of any size struggle with. How do we attract good talent? Done. How do we keep them?
The loyalty factor is huge in speaking. I’m sure a lot of people will go, “I got to lean in here.” Rich is the president. He probably sets the tone. There must be some culture that keeps people from being wooed away. For whatever reasons, people leave jobs because people say, “They don’t leave the job. They leave their boss.” I’m guessing reading goes into it as well, making people feel they have concerns and flexibility. If you had to boil it down to one tip you could give people who have employees, what could they do to keep people loyal?
First of all, thank you for your generous observation. The principles of this company are proud of our brand and our reputation. One of the things that we are most proud of, as you rightly noted, is the tenure of our team. Yes, if you have seen my business card, it says president on it. I am lucky to be surrounded by incredibly smart people and partners. It is not remotely a lonely experience because there is a new problem to figure out every day, and I don’t have a patent on being right. My wife would certainly confirm that I don’t have all the answers. I don’t have all the answers.
The extent to which we are a collaborative operation, and this is a long-winded answer to your question. It is a little bit hack need and almost a trope that the proverb like, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” We are emblematic of that. We have been in the business for 33 years. We must have some level of tenacity and longevity in the business.
It is a function of going together that every single time we run into something, somebody’s background and industry connection, the way someone is wired, whether it is a fellow agent, colleague, or journalist who is deeply involved in finance. Everybody has their little niche of experience. The collaborative nature certainly helps out. It is certainly not unique to our company or us.
Some of my best friends in the industry at other companies also have ESOPs. They also have some of the key staff that are stakeholders and shareholders in operation. I’m thinking of the company that went flying out of my head, Upstate, New York, a yogurt manufacturer founded by a Turkish entrepreneur. All of his employees are part owners in the company.
Broker Of Fairness: If you are a 6% slice of the pie chart, but you are 45% of the headache, you are upside down there.
Is it Chobani?
Yes, I see it in the grocery store every time I go. He is looking at the world through a prism of abundance and realizing that you can’t dominate your team and ring their best effort out of them without them coming along for the ride. Any successful operation has that notion of, “We are all in this together. Whether we fail to succeed, this is our success or problem.” If you look at a company like Chobani, it is emblematic of the notion that when people feel like their opinion matters, their perspective is valued, and they have a stake in the action, how can that not breed loyalty in ownership and buying?
I want to take that one step further. Thank you for that wonderful answer, and show it as not just nice to have. You are not spending a lot of time training and interviewing people. One of my favorite phrases as a sales keynote speaker is, “What this means to you is?” When you are presenting your bureau to a big company, and they are saying, “We are looking at you and two other bureaus. One of our big points of differences is we have one of the most, if not the most, loyal teams out there.”
You insert the phrase, “What this means to you is?” You can start painting that picture of if someone has got a turnover all the time and you are working with the bureau that has a different agent servicing you year after year. There are no history and no frame of reference. You are starting from ground zero versus us. We have a history together. That allows us to build on that history together. There is a shortcut in a language we develop and trust. That is the other ROI that people don’t always put together and connect those dots.
Some of my aging colleagues who have these incredibly immersed, deep, and loyal connections where they know the entire events team have spent innumerable hours at these events and chasing after things that are maybe technically one of my principal partners of the last 25 years. I think of him at an event and receiving this celebrity who had traveled to the event with her toddler in the entertainment industry.
He found out at the 11th hour that the car service that had said they had a child’s seat did not have a child’s seat. This car service, like an hour, needed to go pick up this celebrity at the airport. It is like probably a Lincoln Town Car thing. There he was. He was running off to Target to purchase with his company credit card a car seat.
Nowhere in your job description say, “You will be responsible for purchasing a car seat.” There is enormous loyalty that is earned on the part of the agent to the degree they are swimming in the water column with the event pro onsite, “We found out about this problem.” To the degree, we as a team are able to say, “No problem, we will chase it down.” That creates an enormous amount of connection and loyalty that is not unique to us. There are lots of other colleagues I have in the industry that would do the same thing, but I think buyers, to a great degree, understand who is leaning in and who is phoning in it.
Any last thought or a quote you want to leave us with, Rich?
My colleagues love to give me heat and static. As my Scottish mother would say, “That is good. It will knock the sharp corners off you.” I don’t have any sharp corners left, but one of the things they tease me about, and it is well earned, and I am guilty as charged, is how somewhat hand-ringing and OCD to the extent to which I overthink things.
One thing I have been trying to embrace and move forward on, and I can’t remember who said it, or it could be a dozen different people that have said it, but the quote I read that stuck with me was, “Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.” That notion of the 1.0 version of whatever you try that is new, might not be your best effort and product. You might be trying, but the end result might not be the best.
As one of your guests shared, when you were talking about speaking with Wayne Dyer’s 74th birthday, “Did I live the same year 74 times in a row or 74 different years?” I’m butchering that quote, but the point is to try new things, get outside your comfort zone, and be okay with doing it poorly because you can’t get to the 6.0 or 7.0 version of anything without doing the 1.0 or 2.0 average mediocre.
[bctt tweet=”Loyal employees create value.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That is something that you asked for. Is there anything you like to say in closing? That would be it. All of us during a time of such, it is awfully hack needs observation, but we live in a time where market change, technology change, and all the tools that we have at our disposal are changing fast, radically, and yet so powerfully that we need to be comfortable.
Particularly me, I need to be comfortable with maybe coloring outside the lines once in a while and being okay with imperfection because I’m not like that. I have colleagues who I admire because they are quick to try new things and new approaches. I’m a little too hand-ringing in the corner with a T-square and a protractor. In this day and age, that is not how to be.
Thanks for inspiring us to remember to loosen up a little bit, how to create people who are loyal by letting them feel seen and heard and creating a culture of us, and more importantly, reminding us all that we can all lean in a little bit more instead of phoning it in. Rich, if someone wants to hire speaking, what is the best place to send them to?
They can certainly go to our website, which is SpeakInc.com. We are on social media and everybody’s got an email.
Thanks for sharing your wit and your wisdom with us, Rich.
It is a pleasure, John. I admire how present you are, and it is super fun talking to you.
Likewise.
Important Links
- SpeakInc
- Rich Gibbons – LinkedIn
- International Association of Speakers Bureau
- Corporate Event Marketing Association
- Men Are From Mars, Women are From Venus
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Providing Value To Your Clients: How Francisco Rodriguez Built The Largest Speaking Bureau In Latin America
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Providing the best value for your business clients starts with knowing what they need. If you are like Francisco Rodriguez, who made it his mission to build the largest speaking bureau in Latin America, then it means being ready to communicate with your customer and fill their specific need. In this episode, John Livesay interviews Francisco on how he built one of the most successful businesses in South America. Learn how Francisco pivoted his old company to form Smart Speakers, and what he’s learned that helped him grow and scale his company. Tune in for more great business stories as John Livesay hears more success stories.
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Listen to the podcast here
Providing Value To Your Clients: How Francisco Rodriguez Built The Largest Speaking Bureau In Latin America
My guest is Francisco Rodriguez Aguirre who is the President of the largest speaking bureau in all of Latin America. He shares with us his secrets to his success starting the bureau Smart Speakers and says that when you provide expertise, you give your clients the best outcome. His whole focus is on being the best partner that he can be to his clients and finding innovative ways to bring in new content to events to make them a huge success. He said it’s not enough to have the right expertise as a speaker, you must also have the right attitude and be easy to work with. Enjoy the episode.
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I’m honored to have Francisco Rodriguez Aguirre who is the Founder of Smart Speakers, the largest and biggest speaking bureau in all of Latin America. They’re in countries like Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the US and Mexico. We had the pleasure of meeting at an event that our mutual friend, Josh Linkner, produced. We instantly clicked. He is someone who leads from the heart and speaks like a poet. Francisco, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much, John. I’m honored to be here with you.
The honor is all ours. There are so many impressive things about your background from you winning an award at MPI to going to school at UCLA and getting your MBA. I’m going to let you take us back to your own story of origin. You can go back to childhood. You could start at UCLA, wherever you want to start your story on how you started to discover your passion for communication and how you got into the speaking bureau business.
I first started in a family business that was radio. We were such a big family so it was difficult over there to cover an important part. I took my MBA and when I finished the MBA, I love all training, knowledge and after reading such big names, I’m getting so much knowledge. I said, “I love this.” I started a company that used to make events for selling them. We used to do the Sales Summit or Marketing Summit, events where we used to bring great speakers from Mexico and Latin America with great minds from all over the world. Over there, we have Philip Kotler, who was the great Father of Marketing. We have Seth Godin and Al Ries. We have these big names.
When we’re doing these events, we used to produce everything. We used to hire the place where it was going to be. We used to do the marketing to know which best subjects that the business people would like to have and who are the biggest names that would be in these events. We were very successful but a lot of competition started to come when we did this in Mexico. The business started to be not as good and it started to be more risky. Some of our clients that come to our events because there were corporate events for business people started to tell us, “Are you able to make an event for my company like this? This speaker is great. Can you book this speaker for us?”
[bctt tweet=”Always try to get the most value for your clients. If the client is happy and sees that their objective was accomplished, you’re going to have a happy client.” username=”John_Livesay”]
In the beginning, we said, “No because we are doing this,” but afterward, when we started to see that the business was not going that good, we said, “Let’s try it.” We started two lines of business. One line as a speaker’s bureau but we weren’t speakers bureau yet. We started hiring speakers. Another is as a meeting planner. Being a meeting planner specializing in conferences doing like these kinds of events. We were growing but my passion was not in producing the whole event. I was always with my team.
We were great at getting good content and researching who has the newest option and curating that great content. With my team, I was like, “Let’s do this speaker’s bureau.” We saw it in other countries. We set our webpage and we started to create the speaker’s bureau a 100% professional one. We did this in 2010. We did our first event in 1999. We started selling speakers in 2006 and making private events as a meeting planner in 2006. We stopped in 2007 doing our events.
What I love about that story is you have incredible insight and empathy for the stresses and needs that an event planner has. You aren’t just trying to figure out what they need or what pressure they’re under. You were in their shoes, which allows you a competitive advantage for someone who doesn’t understand it from the inside out.
That ability to say, “I know what you need. If that speaker’s plane is delayed and they don’t notify you when they land, you’re worried about that. We make sure that we have our speakers tell you when they get into the country so you don’t have to worry about it.” You’re anticipating problems that other people wouldn’t even think would be a problem but you’ve done it so that makes you a great partner for the event planners.
I was in the shoes of the meeting planner but before, as an end client.
You know both sides.
Speaking Bureau: Big differences are not that big and something that is great is that we can bring the best speakers from one place to another place.
In the beginning, we used to be a client of speaker’s bureaus and buy it for us. We used to be meeting planners but my passion was with the speakers. I used to study so much about speakers and looking for new content. I started looking more for that so that our business grew so much bigger from speakers and as a meeting planner. What started to happen was something that I didn’t like. We used to go to events and we met some meeting planners that used to be our clients or speaker’s bureau. I said, “I don’t like this. I have to choose one of both. I’m not able to play in both.”
We stopped being a meeting planner. We have everything. Our speaker’s bureau business and the meeting planner. The two things are focus and being a partner because in their part when I was a meeting planner, we have that competitive advantage and understanding because we were one of them. Sometimes, I could compete with them. That’s why we stopped being meeting planner. When we did that is because we have a good business from being a meeting planner. That’s when we said, “Let’s go international.” We started in Mexico City, Columbia, Chile, the US and Costa Rica.
Are there differences between the audiences in those different countries? Do you find that maybe Costa Rica prefers a different audience than people in Chile?
There are some differences but something great is the same language and culture because many of these countries are Latin America. Those big differences are not that big and something that is great is that we can bring the best speakers from one place to the other place.
If one of your clients has multiple offices in these countries, they might hire you to find one great speaker to speak multiple times to their different countries.
We can bring the best of Chile to Mexico and Mexico to Virginia or the US to Mexico. Many clients tell you, “What new do you have? What innovations in the speakers do you have?”
[bctt tweet=”Focus on being the best partner to your clients and they are loyal to you.” username=”John_Livesay”]
When someone comes from the US to speak at Mexico or any of these other countries that you’re in and the speaker is not fluent in Spanish, people might be curious about how does that work? Do you use a translator there? Do they have to pause? Are people listening to something like at the United Nations? What is the typical setup for language translation?
We use simultaneous translation. We have some good translators. They almost do it at the same time. If you’re a speaker, you shouldn’t speak very fast.
You got to pause a little bit. You can still keep your pace going. If you’re telling a joke, you can still keep all of that going. The audience is listening to something while it’s being translated. They provided a device.
They have their headphones. In many events, half of the people have headphones and of all the people speaking.
The speaking business was heavily impacted by the pandemic shutting down live events. I’m imagining that many of your clients said, “We’re going to have a virtual event. We still need to meet. Can your speakers give us virtual presentations?” Tell me about that transition. Were you able to keep some live events and convert them to virtual? People are doing hybrid events. What are you seeing?
Most people have something awful. I guess that it happened the same to you because we were going great with a lot of bookings and suddenly, everything came down when it was declared that this was a pandemic. I remember they stopped the flights to Europe and the US. Everybody canceled everything. In the beginning, we were trying to negotiate some of them, we used to say, “For May or June.”
Speaking Bureau: We were blessed that our industry was able to transform this way.
It was very difficult because of lots of agreements and things. It was awful. We started doing a webinar once a week. We bring speakers to these webinars and we made alliances with MPI and the Human Resources Association of Mexico. We did four alliances so that we had our own clients as well as the clients or the members of the other associations. We were reaching that it was able to do it in a virtual way in the speaking business. We did with some meeting planners and some events inviting their clients and our clients to show a way to do it.
We even had a webinar where we discovered a speaker that was training in how to do a virtual event. We even teach the meeting planners with this speaker how you could make your live event and how you can convert it into a webinar. We did this event. We spread the word. The clients started coming to us and the meeting planners telling us, “Let’s have a webinar. What options do we have? I still have to connect with my clients, with my people.” We were blessed that our industry was able to transform this way. We were with the speakers and say, “You should watch our video on how you can make it entertaining.”
You can’t just speak. You need some special effects, some music and all kinds of other things to keep people engaged in breakout rooms and polls to take so that the audience is entertained and not just watching a Zoom call. If you have a lot of major clients on your website, what is your strategy on how you keep these big clients happy? Do you have something as a part of your culture when you train people and hire new people around customer service to let them know we have to do not the minimum but go beyond what’s expected?
In Latin America, in general, we are very customer-oriented. We always try to get the most value for our clients and speakers because we like long-term relationships. If the client gets happy and he sees that his objective was accomplished, we’re going to have a good client both the speaker and us. We are always trying to get more value in the pre-event. The first thing is how we are going to meet the goals of the client in the best way.
We always have these pre-event calls but sometimes, it could be 1 or 2 pre-events calls. In the event, depending on what is the objective of the client, we are going to get this value and after the event. That is not just something that good speech that was great but everyone can forget afterwards. We are looking for ways to engage more with the client.
Having some ongoing follow-up, I know when I get engaged for a speaking event many times, I’ll say, “Let’s package in a 30-day and 90-day follow-up.” A lot of clients love that because it reinforces what they heard. It’s a check-in to see if they are, in my case, starting to tell better stories, are winning more business so that the objectives are measurable of what it was like before the talk and workshop and what’s happening afterward. I’ve had a lot of clients say to me, “We picked you because of that ongoing connection beyond the talk. We know it’s going to be reinforced.”
[bctt tweet=”Having the right attitude is just as important as your expertise.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That’s the real result that they looking for that they are going to make difference.
Do you have a favorite story of a speaker that you like to use and it has gotten great results that made you and the client happy?
Following calls with videos that reinforce the main idea or topic is something that is not that difficult. It could be videos of 1 or 2 minutes. The best customer service is not but you want to reinforce. If you do it that once a month, you keep the idea coming in.
Short little videos that recap the message make the client feel like it’s customized to them.
Before, we were not used to seeing that many videos live. We were not used to Zoom and all of these things. This is a new era and these things are great.
What is one thing that you’re excited about coming up in 2022 in the speaking business?
Something great is the Harvard events and how we are having new tools and more benefits from the speaking industry. In the beginning, as we were talking about it was awful but at the end, it’s a barrier. For example, we hired twice Pep Guardiola who is the soccer trainer of Manchester City. He was in the champions in number two but he was the trainer of Barcelona. With Barcelona, they won so many titles. He is the best soccer trainer of all time.
Speaking Bureau: The first thing is how we are going to meet the goals of the client in the best way. So we always have these pre-event calls.
He is a trainer and the champion of England and being the second in Europe. With this virtual thing, we are able to get personalities like him while he is playing with other teams. Usually, if we wanted to bring him to the US, Chile or Mexico, he would have to spend at least three days coming from Europe. Now you have a mixture of virtual and personal. This is something great that you can take the best of both worlds.
Is there a favorite quote that you would like to leave us with, Francisco?
Always deal with the experts. That’s the best thing that you can do. We’re looking for the best speakers that our clients need according to their objectives. We are the experts in hiring speakers and matching the needs of the client with the right speaker. That’s why we are able to get the right speaker but all this great content and the speakers that are easy to work with. There are some great speakers. You have great lawyers and some doctors. It’s everywhere. We have some other speakers that sometimes could be a little bit difficult to work with. Some others that they like to get value to the client. We can get the right speaker with the right content and with the right attitude to get their objective.
It’s not just the right speaker at the time and content, the magic secret ingredient is your expertise in making sure that that speaker has the right attitude. I can’t thank you enough. If people want to find out more about your bureau, they can go to SmartSpeakersWeb.com. Thank you so much for giving us such a global perspective and congratulations on all of your success.
Thank you very much, John. It’s a pleasure to be with you.
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The Speakers’ Spotlight: Using Complementary Skill Sets As Leverage with Martin and Farah Perelmuter
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
When two skill sets match, it would definitely be an unstoppable joyride to success. It is the awesome secret sauce of entrepreneur couple Martin and Farah Perelmuter, Founders of Speakers’ Spotlight – a speakers’ bureau on a mission to change the world by helping clients put the right speaker in front of the right audience at the right time. Having taken the leap of faith to entrepreneurship, the power couple shares how they came up with their business, the value of complementary skill sets, and the concept of due diligence. Firm believers of building a business on trust, Martin and Farah tip us with the lessons they learned from the success of their first business and how they were able to apply it to the Spotlight Agency.
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Listen To The Episode Here
The Speakers’ Spotlight: Using Complementary Skill Sets As Leverage with Martin and Farah Perelmuter
On this episode, I have not one but two guests, Martin and Farah Perelmuter. They took an entrepreneurial leap of faith back in 1995. They started Speakers’ Spotlight with a strong belief that the needs of conference organizers, meeting planners and speakers could be served in new and better ways and that speech can be a catalyst for positive change. They also believe that if they built this business on a foundation of trust, then the strength of relationships with clients and speakers would ultimately determine their success. They literally started in a spare bedroom in their apartment where they shared a desk, a phone and a computer. They had no clients, no experience, no staff and no money, but they had a clear vision and a strong belief that with a lot of hard work and a little luck, they can make it a reality. Since that time, Speakers’ Spotlight has grown into the world, one of the world’s largest and most respected speakers’ agencies. With the best team in the industry and an incredible roster of speakers, they are proud to have raised the bar of professionalism, service and integrity to a new level. Welcome to the show, Martin and Farah.
Thanks for having us, John.
I love to ask people their story of origin and I just hit the tip of the iceberg. Let’s start with what came first, the romance or the business idea?
I fell in love with Farah long before the business was even a seed of thought in my head.
Complementary Skill Sets: People who have complementary skill sets are the best cofounders.
How did you guys come up with it? You have your own separate careers, but you were together as a couple and then said, “We want to work together?” Tell us how that all came about.
Martin was practicing law and I was in advertising and marketing. One day my uncle came to me and he told me that he wanted to be a speaker. He asked me if I would work on his promotional materials. If I can help write them and design them. I said to him, “I would love to, but what’s a speaker?” I was in my early twenties. I had never seen a speaker. I didn’t realize that there was a whole world out there of professional speakers who spoke and got paid for it. I said to him, “Before I start working on your materials, I really need to go see a speaker.” I ended up seeing a whole bunch of them and I got involved in the speakers’ world. Martin and I ended up doing a year of research in our spare time. We recognized that there was a real opportunity out there to start our own business and that’s how it all started.
Was it easy or hard to convince Martin to leave his legal career and do this?
That’s the easiest decision I’ve ever made. I had already made the decision to leave the practice of law. I decided it wasn’t for me and I’ve been trying to figure out what to do next. We were experimenting, doing some research on the side while we were working and trying to understand the industry. Then it got to the point where we needed to get married first. Farah’s the oldest of three daughters and the first in her family to get married among her siblings. It was a big wedding in Farah’s hometown of Winnipeg, and there were about 300 people at the wedding, 293 on her side, seven on my side was the final count.
[bctt tweet=”Love what you do and who you are spending time with, and you will be happy.” username=”John_Livesay”]
She grew up with a very big family. I grew up with a tiny family and her parents, I think had probably told all of their friends and relatives that she was marrying a nice boy who had a good job as a lawyer. I had to stay in the practice of law until after the wedding so that at least we could keep that charade going through that. A few weeks after we got married and came back from our honeymoon is when we both quit our jobs and started full-time doing this business together. It was a bit of a scary moment because we went from two incomes to zero basically overnight, but we had put a lot of thought and planning into it and off we went.
It really is a leap of faith and faith in yourself.
In a very short amount of time, we got married, we moved into our apartment, we quit our jobs and we launched Speakers’ Spotlight.
If you ever look at one of those lists of most stressful things to do, a change of job is one, change of relationship status and moving is one of the most stressful things. We did them all basically at the same time.
If we can survive this, we will survive anything.
That was our mantra.
We were so happy. We hated our jobs so much and we were so excited to start our own and start the whole entrepreneurial journey.
What’s so fascinating is people who have complementary skill sets are the best cofounders in my observation and experience. The fact that you have this advertising and marketing is a big part of making sure your own website and how you present the speakers comes across. A big part of your business are contracts and making sure that’s all done properly and everyone is living up to what’s promised in the contract. If the client promises to have a projector there for the slides and there isn’t one, that can be a problem and vice versa. Your legal background comes into play on both sides there.
[bctt tweet=”Take the high road and be a good person.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Complementary skill sets are the key thing. It took us about six months of working together to figure out what our relative strengths were and create our roles so that they were quite distinct. I think for the first six months or so, probably 90% of what we did overlapped and then after that, it was probably less than 10% where we realized that we both had separate strengths and we started playing more to those strengths. That’s when we started to see things, I wouldn’t say take off at that point, but progress in the right direction.
Anyone who started their own business knows that one of the keys to success is getting clients and selling yourself. Especially in this industry that you’re in, there’s a lot of competition, which is fine, but you have to come up with some things that make you different and you’re able to articulate them so clearly on your website. I want to go over them because I think everyone is going to be able to say, “How can I apply this difference that’s working so well for Martin and Farah to my own business?” Ideally, people will understand your own branding better and what you’re bringing to the table. Let’s talk about the first one, which is this concept of due diligence and how do you decide who’s going to be fortunate enough to be in your roster because your reputation’s on the line as well.
I can say that when we first started, we found eighteen speakers who felt sorry enough for us to let us market them and represent them. It was tough going in the early days. Even those eighteen were all excellent speakers, we really tried to identify who some of the top speakers were in Canada at that point and try to work with them. Over time, we got to the point where in a typical year we would get over a thousand speakers a year approaching us, sending us either by email or phone or in the mail their packages or reaching out about representation. We realized early on that our reputation is everything. One of the most important things is making sure that the people that we’re representing and recommending to clients are going to be outstanding, not just in delivering a fantastic presentation, but all aspects of the engagement from the time that they secure it themselves right through and after the event. I can mention a couple of things that we’re looking for. Farah probably has things to add as well. Obviously, speakers need to be experts in their field and have some expertise, a point of view and have very good platform delivery skills.
Those are all a given, but I always think the ultimate test is if you are going to introduce that speaker to a room of say 500 of your biggest clients. It was an industry-type gathering or a client event, how would you feel about making that introduction? Would you be incredibly proud to introduce them and excited to unleash a speaker on that audience or would you be introducing them and may be heading for the exits because you aren’t exactly sure how it was all going to go down after that? If the answer is the latter, then they shouldn’t be on the website. They shouldn’t be on the roster at all. I really believe that we’ve got to be incredibly proud of people that we represent and feel passionately that they can make a difference with that audience. That they can move the needle and help an audience with whatever the objectives are, whether it’s professional growth, personal growth or whatever that may be.
Complementary Skill Sets: Integrity means walking your talk and doing what you say you’re going to do.
In terms of their topics, we need to make sure that it’s a topic that’s being requested by our client. It’s something that’s important now. It’s something important for attendees to hear about. It’s something that is perhaps newsworthy. We’ve worked with a lot of publishers so we know beforehand what will most likely be a big book in the marketplace. We know where the buzz is going to be. We often get to read those books first and we can sometimes get a heads up on those big authors and speakers. Also, many of our speakers are authors too, so we know what books they’re going to be working on. We can let our clients know this is going to be a topic that you’re going to be interested in and you may want to think about the speaker ahead of time. Also, if we know that a big book is coming out and we know the seats are going to go up, we’ll try to secure that speaker before that happens to our clients. It’s about relationships. It’s about knowing our speakers and our clients well. It’s a partnership.
You both have said so many great things here. Martin, the thing that jumps out for me is this nice alliteration about proud and passionate of what you’re offering. Farah, your insights are fascinating about the inside scoop of a new book that’s about to come out and then how you can capture that trend for your clients and possibly even get them at the current rate before all the buzz and demand comes when the book comes out. There are really fascinating strategies there. Then this other difference that you have, which I think is very interesting is no-commission sales agents. Your team is incentivized to do what’s right as opposed to the most expensive thing and that must pay-off a lot with going back to one of your cultural words of integrity. Do you have a story around that where you put your clients’ best interest in mind first and how that’s paid off for everybody?
I don’t know if we even have a specific story because it’s truly something that we do every day. The early days of the business, when it was just Farah and me for the first several years and then we hired our first employee. In terms of client-facing sales point of view, it was mostly Farah and me on the marketing side for the first few years. We knew we were going to do the right thing and we were really playing the long game. It was all about building trust and long-term relationships. When we started to hire salespeople, one of the things we wanted to ensure was that this culture that we had already been building around long-term relationships, trust and integrity was maintained.
It wasn’t really a brilliant brainstorm. It was, “How do we compensate people fairly but also ensure that they’re doing the right thing?” I’ve always had this belief that the most expensive speaker for an event is not necessarily the best speaker for the event. You want to listen to what the client is looking for, what their objectives are and make a recommendation based on who you think will have the biggest impact regardless of fee. We don’t even call them salespeople here because I don’t love the term, but when we started hiring people to work directly with clients and making recommendations, it’s one thing if we say, “Recommend the best speaker for the job, not the most expensive.” If they get compensated differently based on the fee, there’s a disconnect.
[bctt tweet=”Put the time in. There is no shortcut to success.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Even though I think the best sales professionals will still do the right thing and not be motivated by the size of the commission, it really disconnects. It can create a bit of a problem if we’re saying one thing but then compensating people on something else. Essentially we decided from the time we hired our first salesperson that what we’re going to do is incentivize them based on the number of engagements that they booked, but not tie it to the fee. Everybody has a target of the number of engagements that we hope and expect that they can book in the year, but it doesn’t matter what the fee is. A booking is a booking. That way, the incentive is to help the client find the right speaker because we know that if we do that, then the chances of that speaker working with us again in the future goes up significantly.
It wasn’t a brilliant brainstorm. It’s just the way we do things from the beginning. It made common sense to us, but the surprising thing is in speaking with a lot of people in the industry. I’m not aware of anyone else that does it that way. In fact, I’ve had people in the industry say, “How does this exactly work? I don’t understand how your salespeople are motivated if they don’t get a commission.” It is unusual, which is one of the advantages of starting a business when you have no idea what you’re doing. You don’t know the right way to do things, so you do things based on what makes sense, based on your values and so forth. That’s the way we’ve been doing things since day one.
Another thing is our team is very collaborative, so they work together quite a bit. If someone’s working on a client and they’re not quite sure what the right fit is, they’ll often ask other agents in the office and they’ll come together. They’ll talk about similar industries and other clients within that industry. There’s a lot of brainstorming and collaboration going on. It’s very much a team.
You really have defined what my definition of integrity is, which is walking your talk and doing what you say you’re going to do. The fact that you’ve set up your sales team not to be commissioned for the highest fees because you said that’s not your goal. Your goal is to get the best speaker regardless of the fee, then you’re walking your talk. That’s a big point of difference for people and then it leads right into your third big difference, which is this collective experience. When people are engaging with Speakers’ Spotlight, they’re not just getting one person. They’re getting the collective mindset of everyone there, that the team is collaborative. That comes from, “If I win, we all win,” and creating a culture of that, which I think is so important in whatever business you’re in.
Your fourth one, which I’m really fascinated with, is you manage the details and mitigate the risk. For everyone, many times when you were talking about what makes you different than everybody else, you’ll just state facts or features. What Martin and Farah have done here is they talk about the benefit to their potential client of mitigating the risk by managing the details. That is such a great example. Are there any stories of where a speaker’s flight got canceled or delayed and how you didn’t depend on the speaker to figure it out? Do you guys help the speaker?
I’ve got one that comes to mind. Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen very often. We’ll book on average in the last few years about 2,000 engagements a year. Unfortunately, we can probably count on one hand a number of times that something happens. It could be a serious illness. It could be unforeseen travel delays, but it doesn’t happen often. One of the things that we tell our clients is over 99% of the time, the speaker’s going to be there. Everything’s going to go smoothly and it’s all good. You don’t have to worry too much. However, one time out of every 300 or 400 engagements, something does happen. If that’s your one event, then it doesn’t matter. It’s a rare occurrence, it’s your event.
The one that comes to mind for me is the blackout that happened maybe ten or twelve years ago, where the entire Eastern Seaboard lost power and everything was shut down. We had a situation where there was no power in the office. There was no power anywhere and our computers were down, everything was down. We started flipping through files and tried to see if there was anything coming up that we needed to notify a client about. It was in August. Fortunately, it wasn’t a super busy time of the year in terms of conferences. It turned out that we did have a conference and we had a speaker booked for the next day at about 12:00 noon. When we looked in the file, we saw that at that moment when literally the lights went out, he was on a plane from the Western part of the country flying into Toronto.
We didn’t know where this plane was going to land, if it was going to land to Toronto or somewhere else. We immediately called the client on his cell phone and it was chaos. I could hear on the other end of the phone. They were in the hotel. The power had gone out at the hotel. We let them know that we were monitoring the speaker’s flight. However, we probably needed a backup plan just in case. I reached out to another speaker that I knew that was local and was available and I let the client know that the client was familiar with his work, so they were very happy with him as a backup plan. Long story short, the speaker’s flight was diverted and he landed in a place called Thunder Bay, which is about a twenty-hour drive from Toronto. He was hoping to get on a flight later that day or perhaps the next morning, but there was no guarantee he was going to make it.
[bctt tweet=”One of the keys to success is getting clients and selling yourself.” username=”John_Livesay”]
We had speaker number two, his name’s Mike Lipkin and Mike was on standby. He talked to the client, the client briefed him and he was ready to go and he said, “I’ll be at the event, ready to go. Even if the other speaker is able to show up, don’t worry. I’m happy to be there.” Mike showed up at the hotel the next morning. I went down there as well. I was on the phone with the other speaker who was still not sure if they were going to make it or not and they were still stuck in Thunder Bay. I lost touch with the speaker and I didn’t know where he was. We couldn’t reach him. We were counting down, there were maybe 30 minutes until the speaker was supposed to go on.
Fifteen minutes and they were getting ready to introduce him and the first speaker came running through the door. He basically had been able to practically parachute in and made it. We got the situation where we had two speakers ready to close this conference. Mike said, “I’m happy to back it, but why don’t we let the other speaker catch his breath and get ready? I’ll go out, I’ll do 20, 30 minutes if you want, just to get things going and then I’ll hand it off.” The client’s next question was, “Are we going to have to pay for the both of you?” Mike said, “No, I’m happy to do this. I’m here anyway. I’d love to do it.” He did the first twenty minutes or so, handed it off to the second speaker, his name is Alvin Law who has an incredible message. His message is, “There’s no such thing as can’t.”
If you ever meet Alvin and have a chance to see him speak, you’ll know why. He’s an incredible person. It was ironic if the person whose message is, “There’s no such thing as can’t,” can’t make it to the engagement but he did. He made it. He proceeded to get a standing ovation. It was just an incredible way to end the conference. The nice thing was on the spot the client hired Mike to keynote their conference because they were so impressed with the first twenty minutes. It all worked out. Things don’t always work out perfectly. That was an example where we thought afterwards if they hadn’t worked through an agency who was there partnering with them. Pulling on all of our resources and collaborating with our own team with our speakers and so forth, then it would have been a very different situation. That to me is my favorite story about mitigating risk, managing details, collaboration and so forth.
It says a lot about the team that you have, not just the team working for you, but the team of speakers and that willingness to do what it takes to make the client happy and that trust. That’s my big takeaway. Plus, I love any kind of story. I have a big emphasis on storytelling myself, on a little bit of drama and the way you described running in at the last minute and almost parachuting in. All that is what makes a good story and there are a lot of takeaways besides mitigating the risk and the details. If the quality of the speakers we have would go that extra mile even if they weren’t being paid and even if they had to back off at the last minute, that’s collaboration. Sometimes with two speakers sharing the stage, if they haven’t rehearsed or practiced together to have that be cohesive, it doesn’t always work. The big resolution of that was the other guy getting hired, but the irony of talking about there’s no such thing as can’t and, “I can’t make it to the event,” of course, he got a standing ovation.
Complementary Skill Sets: The great speakers are the ones who are really focused on the client and the audience and not just on themselves.
He made it. That was the amazing thing. In the back of my mind, I was thinking, “What if he doesn’t make it?” One of the things that you asked me in terms of what we’re looking for in speakers and the due diligence part is, we are looking for team players and people who are good people. Not just great speakers, but we’re fortunate that I think everybody that we work with, we feel we can count on. They’re good people that care about not just themselves looking good on stage because that’s not what they’re there for. It’s really about making the client look good, putting the client first, putting the audience first and being there to serve. That that’s what the great speakers do. There’s always a little bit of ego involved. You can’t get up in front of a large group of people without having a healthy dose of self-confidence, but the great speakers are the ones who are focused on the client and the audience and not just on themselves.
I also want to mention that one other thing that makes us a little different is we don’t have any contracts with our speakers. When we sign on a speaker, we fully talk about what the relationship entails, what the objectives are and what we both want to get out of it, but then it’s all on a handshake, integrity, honesty and transparency. There’s no contract.
That goes back to not paying salespeople commission for the highest paid. It’s all that mindset of trust. Before the show started, Farah, you’ve mentioned that you and Martin have started a second business, which is complementary to Speakers’ Spotlight. It’s called The Spotlight Agency. Tell us a little bit about how you decided. Did you see a problem that needed to be solved and you said, “Let’s start a separate business from that?”
We saw an opportunity that could be filled. What happened was we represent many high-profile personalities and celebrities. Over the years, aside from hosting and speaking, other opportunities came our way. In about 2006, we started a division at Speakers’ Spotlight called the Celebrity Division. Within that division, we started doing these extra types of projects. There were celebrity endorsement projects and spokesperson roles and some TV. What happened was that division started getting bigger and bigger and we realized that it was a slightly different target market. We felt that in order to grow that part of the business properly, we should really separate it. We started a new corporation called The Spotlight Agency. That is a separate entity from Speakers’ Spotlight. It’s growing quickly and we have part of our staff looking over that business and it’s exciting.
[bctt tweet=”You have to come up with some things that make you different.” username=”John_Livesay”]
It’s some of the same staff like Lucy, the Paw-sonal Assistant, your dog comes to the office. Lucy gets to work on both businesses, I’m guessing.
Lucy does whatever she’s asked. She’s very busy.
She’s very busy keeping everyone’s emotions on keel during any snow storms or delays.
Growing a business in the first place was not something we intended to do. When we started Speakers’ Spotlight, we did not have a huge aspiration. Much of it was a lifestyle change. We saw each other in our previous jobs and we wanted to do something together and take control of our careers and our lives. We thought the best case scenario is one day maybe we’d have three of four people working with us and we would get it out of the apartment. It organically grew. We’ve got about 34 employees now. It grew beyond what we had expected. With Spotlight Agency, it wasn’t something that was initially planned, but it fit really well. I’m sure you’re familiar with Simon Sinek’s work around Start with Why.
Our why with Speakers’ Spotlight is this idea that a speech can change the world. If we get the right speaker in front of the right audience at the right time, that’s when the magic can happen. I’m not so naive to think that people are going to walk out of a speech and their entire life is going to be changed, but I do believe that it can plant the seeds that are necessary to make some small differences, whether it’s at work, at home or in their community that can lead to positive change. That’s the goal behind Speakers’ Spotlight. With The Spotlight Agency, the businesses are similar in that they’re matching talent with organizations or brands.
One of the things we realized is that you can affect positive change in other ways too, not just through a keynote. It might be a marketing campaign. It might be a spokesperson campaign. Those kinds of things can have a profound impact as well. That was what made it an easy decision once we decided to move forward was it really fit well with our core beliefs around Speakers’ Spotlight. It’s similar businesses yet as Farah mentioned, very different in the sense of who the clients are, the whole process of putting deals together is quite different. The companies are quite distinct and yet share common values and beliefs.
I think it’s brilliant. It’s a nice use of skill sets and connections while expanding your brand that allows you to still stay to your core business and then have a brand extension that allows other skills to come into play and possibly different talent. Some people crossover and some don’t. It’s what I would see happening.
It’s interesting to have one business that’s 24 years old and another business that’s pretty new in some ways and it’s in rapid growth. It’s really interesting to watch.
[bctt tweet=”You owe it to yourself to find something that’s going to be meaningful and fulfilling.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That was going to be my next question. What lessons have you learned from the business that’s been around so long that you’re applying to this new business that people could say, “I need to be sure I’m doing this because I’m growing my business fast?”
One thing that I find that makes us really different from a lot of businesses out there is that we never borrowed any money and we never went into debt. Also, it’s the type of business we have, but it’s a service-based business and we had it out of our apartment. We didn’t hire people until we needed people and we grew it slowly. We bought what we can afford. We never borrowed from the bank or from our parents. We didn’t have that huge stress on us. We’re in some ways within the same with The Spotlight Agency. The Spotlight Agency are the same offices and we didn’t hire a ton of people out of the gate. We share some of the same staff and we’re doing it slowly and properly.
What a great takeaway. You’re not under stress with the decisions you make because you do not have to pay back a debt in the culture you created and not living beyond your means or spending beyond your means as a business. All these startups that get millions of dollars and then they blow through it because they have it as a very different mindset. That’s what allows you to work with top clients whether it’s Coca-Cola or McDonald’s or all kinds of people. Are there any last words of advice or thoughts that you want to share with the people?
I think this applies to anyone but particularly younger people. The two most important decisions that people make in their lives are the choice of career or job. One is what you choose to do for a living and the second is who you choose to spend your time with whether that’s your spouse or partner or someone who doesn’t have that close friends. I really believe that if you get those two decisions right, your life’s going to be pretty good. If you love what you do and you love the people that you spend the most time with, things will be great.
Complementary Skill Sets: It’s important to be not just happy but to be challenged, to be fulfilled, and to feel that we’re making a difference.
If you love your spouse and you hate your job, you’re probably not going to be happy all the time. If you love your job and hate your spouse, you’re probably not going to be happy. I believe that if you get those two decisions right, there are no guarantees or anything, but that puts you on a great course. I really think that those are two decisions that we have control over, in particular on work and in quitting. Having gone to law school, putting all that time in, getting hired at a prestigious firm and walking away from that, wasn’t an easy decision at the time, but it was the smartest decision I made because I knew that it wasn’t for me.
It’s for other people that might want that life and that’s great. I have a lot of respect for people who do that work. I think knowing yourself and knowing subjectively what is going to get you out of bed in the morning and want to go. We spend a lot of time at work and it’s important to be not just happy but to be challenged, to be fulfilled and to feel that we’re making a difference. That is critically important. If you’re doing something that you don’t love, I really think people, if they can, you owe it to yourself to try to find something that’s going to be more meaningful and more fulfilling.
The first one is that to achieve success, there aren’t shortcuts. You can’t beat the system in creative ways. You have to work hard work, you have to grind it out and you have to work and make it happen and then hopefully it will become easier. They have to put the time in.
Those are two wonderful tweets. Love what you do and love the people you’re spending time with if you want to be successful and happy. There are no shortcuts to achieve success, put the time in.
[bctt tweet=”The two most important decisions that people make in their lives are the choice of a career and who to spend their life with.” username=”John_Livesay”]
One last thing is to take the high road and be a nice person.
That is an amazing secret sauce. If you’re easy to work with and people like working with you on and off the stage, then they’re going to rehire you, refer you, all that stuff. People just assume that everyone takes the high road and as a good person, but if you are, it can be the difference between who they pick sometimes. I can’t thank you both enough. What a pleasure to get a sense of your relationship, your business, your family, your dog, the people working with you and the stories. It was all great. These are very useful information and I know that you’re going to be as successful with The Spotlight Agency as you are with your business, the Speakers’ Spotlight. Congratulations to you both and thanks for being on the show.
Thank you so much.
It was really a pleasure to chat with you.
Links Mentioned:
- Martin Perelmuter
- Farah Perelmuter
- Speakers’ Spotlight
- The Spotlight Agency
- Start with Why
- Speakers.ca/
- https://www.TheSpotlightAgency.com/
- Quantmre.com
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