I am writing this while flying high from our Accelerate Live 2017 conference in Minneapolis. You, my valued blog readers, will be benefiting from some of what I learned from the experts who participated. Specifically, the hustle required to build a million dollar speaking business.
The theme of our event was moving your business towards a million dollars. Ryan Estis, Seth Mattison and Kindra Hall, all of whom are successful professional speakers, were three of our key guest experts. Each was there to share their personal journey of building a successful speaking business.
But here’s the thing. Not only did each of them provide stellar content to the room full of ambitious and driven speakers but, when not on the stage sharing, they were in the back of the room taking notes and learning from others. They didn’t have to be. Each of them could have done their thing and then went on their way, getting back to their incredibly busy lives.
This brings me to the first requirement if you want to build a million dollar speaking business:
Never Stop Learning.
The people who achieve their goals and reach epic milestones in their career, like getting booked for between $18,000 and $30,000, are the people who strive to do better every single day. They aren’t coasting. They aren’t settling. They are taking every advantage to better themselves and learn – no matter what level of success they have achieved.
“I was surprised that Jane was surprised when I told her I’d bet money I learned the most of anyone in the room. “Success” can be a tricky thing — Sure, business has been “exploding” but it was also very stagnant. Stagnant in the way we were working, stagnant in the way we were trying to grow. It would be easy to do the work — even GREAT work — the same way we always have. But I don’t think stagnant success is what any of us, in this role, want. We want dynamic impact. The only way to beat stagnant success — obsessive learning.”
The second requirement for building a million dollar speaking business:
Never Stop Hustling.
Now, the term hustle can be taken wrong, so let me be clear. Hustling in this context means that you are working every angle on a lead in order to create opportunities for yourself.
The morning of our event, Kindra Hall spoke for Target, a client she just started working with. One thing Kindra understands, though, is that this gig wasn’t a ‘one and done’. She will continue to work (HUSTLE) to provide them solid value and build the relationship so that they will book her again and again.
“The true masters embrace the necessity of learning and growing and beating on their craft during both the highs and the lows of the journey. They’ve bought in entirely to the fact that past success, those moments when operating at the pinnacle of their craft, the mountain top reached, even then it’s still not a guaranteed predictor of future results. At the peak they still keep tweaking, grinding, obsessing, and sweating the details. Always looking to get just a little bit better.
On the flip side, they’ve also learned to embrace the dark valleys that will inevitably show up along way. They’ve accepted that only in the darkest most difficult hours can true transformation take shape. The valleys are where they learn to embrace the present moment and fall in love with the journey, not the results. The valleys are where they become aware that failure is a learning tool and an inescapable part of becoming who they were destined to be. They’ve learned to fall in love with the process of becoming great every single day.”
The third requirement for building a million dollar speaking business:
Never Stop Improving.
What several of our 7-figure speakers agreed on was that when it came to their presentation, they were in continuous improvement mode. About 70 percent of their content would be tried and true, while 30 percent would be customized for each audience.
Their epic presentations were always a work in progress.
When testing new materials, they typically place it later in the program, once trust with the audience is established. By testing and honing material, continuous improvement of the product – the speech, your #1 form of marketing – can be achieved.
The idea that every speech, results in at least one more speech, was a common theme and if you speak 50 times in a year, there should be another 50 in the pipeline as a result.
That’s hustle!
Ryan’s mantra, which he lives by, is: Stay Humble. Be Hungry. Always Hustle. And it is clearly working for him.
The biggest message that I took home from our stellar three days together was that getting to a million dollar speaking business takes work.
A lot of work.
It’s no cake walk and there is no magic pill. Knowing this, we asked each of our attendees to do homework every day for 7 days prior to coming to the conference. We needed them to understand that the weekend was about rolling up your sleeves and taking the first step on a very hard journey to building a million dollar speaking business.
I can clearly see that just about everyone in the room understood that. And for each of them, the learning, and hustling, didn’t end when they left Minneapolis. It was just the beginning.
Are you ready to hustle in order to reach your Wealthy Speaker goals?
