171: Pete Vargas — Leverage Public Speaking to Your Advantage

Well, we all know that public speaking.

Can be powerful, but you don't want.

To be a public speaker. You're not a public speaker.

Public speaking is uncomfortable for you or.

You just don't like the idea of that. We want to talk about how to.

Leverage speaking when you're not a public speaker.

How to engage and get on stages, how to connect with people and grow your business with stages. We're talking with a great guest on this about how to grow your business with stages, even if you're not and have never been or don't want to be a public speaker, but how to leverage that.

Listen in.

Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach, Bill Gallagher. So on the show with me today is Pete Vargas. Pete, welcome to the show. You're outside of Colorado Springs.

Did you say Colorado Springs? Yes, sir. That is where we're at.

There you are with four kids starting at like six months all the way to 11, right?

That is correct. 11, nine, six and six months. Months.

Oh, I can't even imagine. My kids are grown now. My daughter lives in la, my son lives in Berkeley. She's a photographer. He's a on stages all the time and He's a startup CEO with a funded team. And 20 and 22.

I.

Our daughter's here this week and like, I just can't imagine going back to some of those early ages of development again.

I don't want to.

It. It's a lot of work, man. It's a lot of work. But man, but yeah, I guess every season of life has its, you know, amazing things and it's difficult things with the kids and, and we're in a cool season and you know, and all of them, with all of them, but you know, it all, all of them, all of them have their, you know, times like our, our son's now going into junior high, you know, so that's, that's a big, big thing. So yeah, it's a lot of fun and a lot of fun.

I think that there are a couple.

Stages that stand out for me and one of them is that age where.

They can kind of self manage but.

They are still like kids at heart. So it's like 8 to 14. I like that one a lot. And then I really do like this one where they're adults and they are largely living their own life and we get together for dinners and things like holidays and stuff like that and I can just appreciate and be proud of them.

That's awesome. Well, I'm in the 8 to 14 with a couple and, you know, none with the other. But no, I appreciate that. That's awesome.

So before we get into this core thing, so let me just say a little bit more. So, guys, you should know, Pete is. He's very accomplished. He's worked with some big names, amazing folks. Michael Hyatt, Damon John, Dean Graziosi. I don't know who else. And you've been on stage with Michael Phelps, Robert Cialdini, Howie Mandel, lots of Brendon Bouchard, lots of people like that. The world of. And I think about this as public speaking. But you say stages. Yeah, maybe that's my first question. What does that mean for you? When I first heard you refer to that, it just seemed odd to me.

Yeah. So a lot of people think about right away the words public speaking come out. And there's a perception of what that is. And perception is you get paid a keynote fee, you go out on a stage, you travel a whole lot, you go from stage to stage and you have a career. You're either a public speaker or you're not. And so that is not what we're advocating for. We're not. There are some people, and great ones that have made an impact on my life that are in seasons of life to be able to do that. But I believe the majority of people. There's just too many war stories that I have experienced in my life of folks who are on the road 220 days and the things that they lose as a result of that. I just, I just. It's tough for me. It's a really tough thing. And there's a lot of people who do it really, really well. Like, you know, I think of somebody like, you know, you know, just, just good, good, good buddies of mine, John Acuff does it really, really well. He limits the amount of times that he goes out. He gets paid a great fee, and he's limited. He limits it because he has a family. And so a lot of people immediately perceive public speaking as a career. And I. And then take it one step further. I'm either afraid of it or I don't want to go out and be a road warrior. And that's not what I'm talking about. That's, it's, it's a piece of what I'm talking about. But a lot of people think that's all it is when I talk about stages. Stages are a way to grow your business, grow your movement, grow your nonprofit. And when people understand how to do stages correctly and stages. Right. And understand that there's eight offline stages and eight online stages that you can be on and start to look at the holistic business model of speaking. Not one piece of the business model of speaking. It can completely transform their organizations and it can completely transform the way that people begin to work with them quicker. Shortening the sales cycle by providing an incredible amount of value on a stage in an hour. So that's. I'm. I'm. Yeah. So that's kind of what we fight for and fight against.

Yeah.

So that's really helpful, I think so. Personally, I have used public speaking in stages both to grow my business and as a business and as a coach today and a podcast host and like that. I frequently do public speaking, but I made a very intentional decision not to be a regular full time speaker. I mean, among my friends are people like Jack Daly, Dave Rendle, Mike Michalowicz, who. That's their thing. And I see them and the number of stages and speaking gigs that they're on as their core business is exhausting to me to look at. And I remember my dad for, for a period of time was a public speaker and was on the road and.

It was very up or down, which is why I focused more on that speaking or the stages as a vehicle for me, but not the core business itself.

That's exactly right. It's a vehicle. It's another traffic source. It's another way. It's a very powerful way to get the customer, the donor, the vote, the movement, the whatever you want, the buy in the. From your, your employees. Like when you communicate internally and you get to buy in from your employees and they buy into your story and now they share your story in the same way you're sharing your story. Like a very powerful way to bring business in. It's been around for 2,000 years. Here's the thing, like, here's the big case. Why stages? Why.

Wait, no, hang on, wait, hold it, hold it. We're getting ahead of ourselves.

Okay, cool.

Let's save that for a minute. Let.

Okay, I'll save. We're gonna get it.

So let's go back and I'll cue you back. You won't lose that thought. But let's talk about your background. How do you get to this place? What made you who you are and like that. And, and then let's talk about this particular business and what you do and like that.

Yeah, I love, I love. Yeah, it's definitely didn't come from understanding. Like, I wasn't, I didn't go to college to get a college degree on stages or how to use stages to grow your business. I was. I grew up in the inner city of Dallas, Texas. Early memory was mom and dad tugging and screaming at who was going to keep me and who was going to keep my sister, because they got divorced at a very young age. And my dad got me. And over the next six years, it started a really abusive relationship, both verbally and physically with my dad. A lot of terrible memories in those six years. And my grandmother took me away from him in sixth grade and in middle school, I had the chance to hear a couple of people like David Robinson and Emmett Smith, two of my heroes. Got to hear people like Rick Rigsby and Susie Merrick and, you know, just a lot of incredible speakers that. That prompted me to want to be a better man. They just prompted me to want to be a better man. And so my dad came back into my life in my teenage years. He got discharged from the military, and I just wanted to make things right with them. That's it. Bill. I wanted to figure out, how could I have a. How. What can I do to get my dad to tell me he's sorry and literally have that relationship with my dad? And so we tried a lot of things through teenage years. Church and counseling. He had seven siblings. I come from a big Hispanic family, and he had seven siblings that would constantly tell him to make things right with me. And nothing worked. And so I just kind of had. I went to college thinking I might just not ever have a relationship with my dad, a good one. It was very surface level, but there was a lot of hurt and a lot of pain. So I went off to college. I thought I was going to be Jerry Maguire, like, full transparency. Like, I really thought I was going to be Jerry Maguire. And the motivating factor was because of the fact that of those speakers who made an impact on me when I was a young kid. And I quickly realized you had to go to law school if you wanted to be a really good sports agent. And so I decided not to go to law school. And I just had it a little backwards. I didn't realize that it wasn't athletes that I was going to represent. It was people with powerful messages that were transforming folks. Business like you and transforming people's mindsets and their relationships and their health and their finances. It wasn't athletes that I was going to help get their message out to the world. It was people who were making a difference in many different sectors of society, corporate and government. And Family and arts and entertainment and on and on and on. And so I got a business degree in college, thought I was going to be a big business guy. And I got a call. I got a great job in Dallas to go actually start a business or be in a corporation. And I got a call from my pastor, and he said, pete, we want you to come back and take over as youth pastor in Hereford. And I'm like, pastor, I have no Bible training, no theology training. Like, why do you want me? And he said, we're. Our youth group has, you know, decreased. When you were here, it was like, you know, 50, 60, 70 kids. And it's now, you know, a few dozen kids. And I just believe that you'll come in here and you'll love on the kids and you'll help them see opportunity and hope and. And I don't know why I did it, man. To this day, I don't know why I did it, but it was the difference between an $80,000 job and an $18,000 job. I actually have my W2s from those days just to remind me that I didn't go do something because of money. I just knew I was supposed to be in Hereford, Texas. And the first Wednesday night I showed up, I was expecting a couple of dozen kids. I was afraid because this was the first, like, real stage I was going to speak on. And three girls showed up, Jori, Stacy and mackenzie. And my wife was there with me. And we told those girls, like, listen, we're committed to this community. We're committed to growing this youth group. And the way that we're going to do that is we're going to bring speakers in. I'm going to bring in Super Bowl MVPs, I'm going to bring in Harlem Globetrotters. I'm going to bring in CEOs, I'm going to bring in financial advisors. I'm going to bring in health and wellness experts, musicians, artists, you name it, I'm going to bring them in because I want our kids to be holistically healthy. Not just spiritually healthy, but mentally and financially and understand what it means to be a giver and not a taker. I remember when Virgil Slence taught my kids how to be givers and not takers. I remember when Tyler Merrick talked about things to my kids and just. It was phenomenal over those. The girls bought in that day. And every speaker I brought in, every speaker I brought in, our youth group grew in number and in depth. And literally, I believe the same thing for everybody listening Every stage that you speak on your business or your organization should grow, like, really grow in finances and in depth. And so over four years, Bill, we grew that youth group from four kids or three kids, excuse me, to 800 kids. It was actually documented in our big Hereford brand newspaper that they built this. We had to build a youth facility that was. We had to raise a million dollars to build this youth facility because our kids had outgrown the room that we were meeting in. And literally, when I went to the church board, they voted unanimously 100%, because my kids had already raised tens of thousands of dollars to put down the down payment for the building. And so we grew that youth group. And, you know, I got the opportunity to officiate two out of those three girls weddings. And one of the cool. One of the coolest parts of the story is probably the 20th guy that I brought in. His daughter was the first girl killed at Columbine. And he left his. She left her family with six diaries and a paper called My Ethics, My Codes of Life. I really would encourage your listeners to read that paper, Rachel Joy Scott's My Ethics, My Codes of Life. I had somebody read it last night, and they text me and they thanked me because she had this big idea on how she could change the world in that paper. And unfortunately, she passed away at 17, wasn't able to do that. And her dad's desire was to be the one to walk that out and live that out and change both the educational sectors and the corporate. Corporate sectors. He believed he could change the climate and culture of schools and workplaces. But he was struggling when he came into Hereford, Texas, like he is. He was no longer in the news in 2003 because Columbine wasn't in the news. And he spoke literally that morning to all of my kids. And I knew my youth group was about to grow again. And he said something. He said, there's five people in your life that you love, and I want you to go tell them how much you love them. Because on April 20, 1999, I had no idea this was going to be the last day that my daughter was here with me. And he said, I want you to bring those people back tonight to the parent event. And some of them you're not in good standings with, some of them you're not in good standings with. And I was just in tears on the front row. This was the one, the first time, where the speaker made, like, a deep personal impact. All the speakers that impacted me, but this one was real. This one, like, hit Home because of the fact that I'm 23 years old. I don't, don't know, like I just haven't made things right with my dad. And so that night I brought my dad back to the evening event and he sat on the back row, very, very prideful man. And at the end of the presentation, my dad didn't say a word to me. There were a thousand parents and grandparents in that room and they were hugging their kids and their grandkids. My dad didn't say a word to. And a couple weeks later I got a letter in the mail. And my dad basically said he didn't even drop the letter off. Like he could have driven two minutes to my house. Instead he went five minutes to the post office to send it because it was a hard letter for him to write. And he said, I'm sorry for the father I've been here. My son is having an impact on hundreds of kids lives and I can't have an impact on my only son's life. I'm asking you for a second chance to do things right. And he told me for the first time in a decade, multiple times, how much he loved me and my wife. And I read that letter. I'm 23 years old, but you would have thought I was a nine year old boy, eight year old boy, because I was just crying. And something subconsciously inside of me that day committed my life for the rest of my life to stages. Because I thought what just happened in one hour that nothing else could get my dad to do. And that's the power of what happens when people begin to take stages seriously is like they can begin to move the needle. They control the microphone, they control the influence, they control making a difference. And so the last part of the story is I solicited his cell phone number. The man who spoke on that stage, I solicited his cell phone number. I said, why aren't you getting this message out to more people across the world, world? And he said, I'm trying. But like a lot of business owners, he was trying a lot of things and some of them were working, some of them weren't a lot of bright, bright shiny object syndrome. I said, listen, get on stages in front of your ideal clients, provide significant value, give away a free resource and watch what happens as they go deeper with you. And here's where people miss the stage thing. A lot of the times is I call it a dream stage. I said, darrell, you got to get you on dream stages. I didn't really know what that meant. At the time, I knew what it meant. He goes, oh, Pete, I'm already talking to parents and lots of parents and lots of students. I said, but Darrell, parents and students don't control the budgets and the calendar of the schools. It's who controls Bill, who controls the budgeting calendar of schools. I'm sure you know this.

The school board, the politicians, the principals.

The board, the attendants. Yeah, all of the administration. Exactly. So we literally. He said, that sounds great, but I've never done this. So we got him on his very, very first stage in front of, in front of administrators. He provided 60 minutes of incredible content. They were deeply moved. They knew what it took now to change the culture of their schools. Some of them went back to change the culture of their schools, but many of them, like 90% of them in the room, like 350 of them in the room, asked for the free gift that we gave away that day. And over the course of the next two weeks, that one stage generated five times the revenues that they had generated over the last 12 months in their nonprofit. And not just five times the revenues. Five to 10 times the reach and the impact that they're now having in schools from one stage. And that was the beginning of the stage to scale method that we've just really perfected since 2003, that's been responsible for booking 25,000 stages across the world. That's what we did over a 13 year period from our offices. And those stages generated tens of millions of dollars. But now over the last year, our students themselves with this system or methodology, have booked 47,000 stages on their own in the last 18 months. So kind of what took us 13 years to figure out, our students have 2x that in 18 months. And we just believe like stages are an incredible way to make an impact and like you said, be a vehicle or be a source of traffic and not have to be a professional speaker to do that.

I think about different moments where some stage, some public speaking event created an opportunity for me that accelerated. And in every case, it was real, raw and powerful. It was surprising. It was a compelling story. So years ago, with my online marketing and software development company, I was around talking about being profitable and getting real results in the middle of the first.com boom. And that got a surprising. I mean, people would come and mob me afterwards because it was so contrary to the things that were happening at the time. For many, it was an era of pets.com and webvan and companies just losing gobs and gobs of money for who knows what ever return. We still have that today with Uber and we work and things like that. The companies that we're not sure if there's an end game for them, but. But that was a surprising message. And then I also think about. I spoke at a regional EO event some years ago, and I. I just opened with the story of my dad's suicide, and I talked about dealing with all of the ups and downs in life and how do you grow and thrive as an entrepreneur and develop your business against all the shit that comes your way. Right. And. And it was real and powerful and raw. And. And after that, over that year, I was invited to speak 24 more times in 12 countries over that next year as a result of that moment. And it led to all kinds of business and stuff for me.

Wow. Wow.

Now there was no free offer and it was only 18 minutes.

And guess what you don't need. We have. I mean, I think of Amy yamada. She had 15 minutes on a stage and she just gave a free resource away. And she moved the crowd, just like you moved the crowd in those two scenarios. And literally that 15 minutes generated a quarter of a million dollars in her business the next 12 months. But she gave so much value. And connection, connected. It's not just about content, it's about connecting to. And that's what you do so well. And so, like, listen, it's not just Daryl Scott who impacted my life. I mean, I heard Vern on a stage, and Vern made me think about my business differently. Like, just made me think about my business differently. I heard somebody on a stage that made me think about my faith differently. I heard somebody on a stage that made me think about how I parent my kids differently. And so the power of the. Of your audience to control the microphone with stages and be able to connect with people and then serve them by giving them something of incredible value. It's literally one of the fastest ways to get your message out to the market and to stand above the noisy world of, like, the online world. Like, it's what separates so many people from being, you know, in, you know, the noisiness of the online world. So I'm. Yeah, I'm a big advocate of it. And I just think that public speaking, which we help so many people who are in public speaking, which simply means that they're getting paid keynote fees to make a living doing it. But that's only one way to do it. It's only one way to do it. And so when people begin to understand how to do this, well, it can be game changer for them.

Well, I get a really nice keynote fee today, but I'll tell you, it's not always necessary. Some of the best returns happen for things with organizations where I might give them a substantial discount on the thing. So I need to make a little bit of money and cover expenses. I don't run around investing like I might if, if the business was, but, but I could. In my old tech business days, I spoke for free as long as they paid the travel expenses. And, and sometimes those things that you do for certain groups are really, really successful. When I speak to ypo, to Vista, to groups like that and to industry groups, the returns can be enormous.

Yes, they can. They definitely can. I mean, I can speak to that here in a minute. But yeah, they can be extremely enormous when you do it correctly.

Why don't you talk, tell us the other story about working with Chandler Bolt.

Yeah, so. So champ. Yeah, so Chandler Bolt was, isn't, is. He's an online marketer. He does a lot of things digitally.

It certainly is.

He's an online marketer, he does a lot of things digitally. He learned how to do online marketing and digital marketing really well from some of the greats and he built a zero to multiple seven figure business as a 24 year old. Huge, huge advocate of Verns. Loves, I mean, loves, you know, scale, I mean just love scaling a big guy. And so I met him and, and I said, Chandler, why aren't you using Stages as another traffic source for you? And there's like been told that it's a rat race and I'm gonna have to be a road warrior and I'm gonna have to go from town to town and I'm gonna have to be on the road for 200 days. Everything that I just fought against at the beginning of the show. Right. You know Bill. Right. And I go, no, you don't have to do that. He goes, okay, let's test this out. So he lived in San Diego at the time and we had him go speak to 27 chiropractors because there are local stages and everybody that's listening here, there are local stages in your backyard that you could be on every single week or somebo your team could be on every single week. That's what we're doing with Michael Hyatt and Dean and Tony is speaking teams like that.

How do you find those, how do you find those local opportunities if you. If for our listeners?

Yeah. Instead of finding them, that's a whole show in itself. We'll just Give a. And I. We. You and I didn't plan this. We'll just give a free resource that has all of the thousands of stages broken down by niche and industry that, that we've already done the research for your listeners, and so we'll give that to them at the end of the show today, if you're cool with that bill, and we'll just give it to them. Perfect.

Because I think that's a lot. I have people all the time who tell me, I say, look, you need to get the message out there more. This is a compelling story. And they're like, great. How do I find these things? And I'm always like, I don't know. People tend to find me not the other way around. But it would be good to figure out, especially when you've got something new to figure out and to find the local ones. Not necessarily. I mean, I do a lot of stuff around the world, but to find stuff even in your immediate driving distance.

Yeah, Like a local marketing agency has no desire to be, most of the times, a public speaker. A local financial advisor does have no desire to be a quote, unquote, public speaker, but they are trying to attract customers and they're hosting dinner seminars where they might or might not get the right attendee. Why not go to the local dentist or the local chiropractors who come together every month in their backyard? And so that's the whole mentality of that. There was a woman that told me, pete, I'm looking for female entrepreneur stages, and I can't find any. And literally in 13 minutes live with her, I found a thousand stages that she could be on all across the US within 13 minutes, 14 minutes, something like that. We found that. And so it's not hard to find them. That, that, that giveaway will be an amazing resource for everybody. It's thousands of stages at the local, the state, the national, the international level. And so back to Chandler. So Chandler found a local one. 20. We found 27 chiropractors. He drove 10 minutes, he spoke. His team was there connecting with those people. Nine of them became customers. He ended up doing 20 or $25,000 in total revenues that day. And his mind was blown because he said, if I can do that with 27 people, what happens if I take this thing seriously? And so in 2018, he decided to double down on stages. And he did some local, he did some at the state level, and he did some at the national level. He didn't do it, and he did one at the international level. He actually Went to Australia once, Chandler did, you know, 15, 20 stages. And over the course of that year, on December 31, 2018, you can see the post on his. On Facebook, he said, at the end of 2018, last year, we were sitting in the same shoes and we had done $0 from revenues from Stages this year, because of Pete's methodology and him really helping us see this, we had a big goal to generate a million dollars from stages in 2018. And as of December 31, we hit a million dollars in revenues generated from the Stages that we spoke on this year. And this is not a guy who wants to be a professional speaker, but he is a guy that has. Is a business owner that now took his business to another level just by saying, wow, this is an incredible, incredible source. And so for all of the founders out there that have maybe big companies, you know, I think about folks like Michael Hyatt, I think about Rachel's challenge, that the company that I just told you, when it was all said and done, Darrell had 50 different speakers in one given year that would go out and share the message because most of the organizations couldn't necessarily afford his keynotes because his keynote fee raised. So I want to make sure people understand, like, I'm a big advocate of keynote fees and I'm a big advocate of people who want to make professional speaking and doing it the right way. But it's only one way to do Stages. It's only one way. And so the beautiful thing is he created a team of speakers that, that went out and shared the message. You know, Michael Hyatt and company, a team of speakers to go out and share the message. Dean and Tony, a team of speakers to go out and share the message. Because the CEO or the personality or the. The head honcho might or might not want to go out and do it, but they have people on their team that could go out and be the ones to do it. So whether, you know, with Chandler, that wasn't the case, he wanted to spearhead the effort, but there's a lot of ways to be able to do it. Bill.

Yeah, I don't mind doing that at all. I get a nice fee, but.

For.

Corporate groups and for private company things. But if somebody says, oh, we're doing this thing at a fantastic resort and you can bring your wife and have a couple extra days, I've often waived most or all of the fee for something like that.

Yeah.

Oh, you're going to make it nice for me. Okay, good. I do two and a half days with a group of a couple hundred entrepreneurs on Santorini next year.

Right.

And, you know, but I get to bring the wife along. So that's also tell the story about the starting the new business. So Brad Martinow, you want you to talk about that? Yeah.

So Brad, Brad's a great example. He had like a digital marketing agency. He had a kind of like a. A marketing automation company. And he was just trying to launch his business. And you know, I tried to launch my business a couple of years ago, three years ago. I. This is our fourth year in business and we reinvented ourselves four years ago to take our, you know, our digital programs, our workshops, our coaching consulting to the market. And Brad and I had very similar stories. Like, I was trying a lot of things. I was trying a lot of content. He was trying a lot of content. We were both trying to do a lot of ads and paid traffic and a lot of different things and not necessarily working. And so he literally went on one stage, presented an incredible talk. After that talk, he did multiple six figures from that one talk and sixth division was launched from that one stage. So a lot like Darrell Scott's one first stage. How it. Five times the revenues from the last 12 months. That's what happened with this same gentleman who had like a marketing automation company. And so that's where I want people to see, like, there are a lot of businesses out there, not all, but a lot of businesses that don't really think about stages from this perspective. And Brad did it, launched his business and guess what? He does all those things now. He puts content out. He runs paid advertising, he has a referral program. He does all of that. But he still. Stages are still part of the angle for him. And it's. He only does 8 to 10 a year. 8 to 10, the right stages a year is all he does today.

So let's talk about what makes a great talk. Because I've seen people, I can remember one in particular that I saw recently at a conference and event speak twice. And I just thought, wow, that was terrible. There's no way I'm hiring them. What is it that makes one that gets the engagement result? Because I think if you've ever done any, you'll know that some really clicked and some didn't. So will you share a little bit of that with us?

Yeah. So I'll tell you actually. So one of the things that we do, and this is really. I want to, I want, I don't want to just give like theory to this. I want to tell you, like nuts and bolts of what makes a great talk. But I want to give a little foundation to that. So there's the person who controls the stage, and I call them the meeting planner. Just as a generic term that could be. They're an event producer, they're a CEO, they're the executive director, they're the programming director, the speaker director, the conference director. There's a lot of titles, but they control the page. They're the ones that allow people on the stage. And So I have 10,000 hours on the phone with them. Jim Collins, good to great. And I interview them every single week on Inside the green room with PV3, because I constantly want to know what they're thinking about, how do they create such great events and what's going through their minds as they're hiring speakers. And so I say that because once a year, I do what is similar to maybe the American Idol for speakers, where I bring in 60 to 100 meeting planners, and we have 100 people that can kind of compete in a competition that gets nailed down to final 30 and then nailed down to a final 10, and the final 10 go on night two of my big conference. And it's the people, the meeting planners, who are judging them that make the decision on who actually wins. And literally, first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, they're all winning stages because a lot of them are best kept secrets, and all of a sudden, they're not anymore. So between that, between the podcast and between my conversations, I'm going to tell you what they say, because what they say matters, what I say doesn't matter, but what they say matters, which is why we have such a track record of booking stages. So here's what they want. They want to majorly win and feel heroic. That's the first thing. Like, when they put you on the stage, they want to feel heroic. They never want to feel duped. I heard, I interviewed a guy yesterday. He's like, I've been duped by a couple of speakers, Meaning they were very difficult to work with. They didn't show up and prepare. Like, they didn't put any time into preparing for that audience. Or they did something completely different than what they communicated that they were going to do. So they feel heroic. They don't want to have to sweat in the back of the room because you're not knocking it out of the park. So the first thing everybody needs to think about is how do I make them heroic? And which leads me to, like, an incredible talk, does a few things, and we use a proprietary process called the Story braid framework. Not story brand. Story brand is something different. Story braid framework. And it's three parts. It's the heart, it's the head, it's the hands, and it's the heart. Heart, head, hands, heart. Majority of time is spent in the head, meaning teaching them your genius or your secret sauce or your magic or the, the things that you do so well that they're there to learn. But it has to begin with the heart. And that opening heart is so critical and you don't have to spend a long time on it. And guess what? I've spoken at ypos. I booked Darrell Scott at a YPO San Diego. Thank you. I can't think Craig is his first name. Can't remember his last name. Wow, that was 12 years ago. But listen, an opening heart does a couple of things. It connects with them as a human. Like I already connected with Bill two or three times as a human today because of some of the things he said. And the reason why he was a freaking home run on the stages he was on is because he connected with them. So you can connect by a joke. We have people that connect by dancing. I connect by helping people understand like who I am as a father. But connection, human connection in that opening heart is important. But the other thing that's important in that opening heart is helping the audience see that you are ordinary and that you've been in their shoes dealing with what you, what they're dealing with right now. But you're also extraordinary. You've gone somewhere that they want to go in their business. So they don't want to understand just one or the other. They want to understand them both. But the ordinary needs to be before the extraordinary. If you come out there and you start talking about how incredible you are right out of the get go, I'm telling you, I know it firsthand because I've been to hundreds of events with our speakers. Walls go up, people are checked out. So the open heart, human connection, ordinary, extraordinary, quick like 10% of your time right there. Maybe 5% if it's super analytical crowd, but 5 to 10% of your time is really spent there. The good indicator is 10%.

So the, the open heart is the first one. Right? Share yourself, open up, connect to people. Right. Relate, connect, share. Yeah.

And, and help them see that you've walked in their shoes, but you've also done something that they want to do in their businesses as well. So that's all the opening heart. That's. That's it? Yeah, that's the opening heart. Then, you know, then you go to the head and.

Right.

And. And the head basically says, hey, in the next, you know, 30 or 40 minutes, I'm gonna show you how to move from here to here. It's not here to here, but in the next 40 minutes, I'm going to show you our process on how you use pages to grow your business. And now everybody's locked in because they know that you know how to do it well, because you sure showed it in the ordinary and extraordinary. They start getting their papers out, you're.

Gonna break it down.

And for the next 60 to 70% of the time, you teach your genius, your proprietary process, your process, not somebody else's process, your process. But Pete, a lot of people do what I do, but nobody does it the way that you do it. And you have a process in which with your flavor, with your flavor that you teach. And in the middle of that process, I want you being to begin to share some stories of, you know, case studies and examples of people. Like, the process is typically best suited at three to five steps that are part of it. You get much more than that and you're giving them way too much. So, Pete, what if I have 15? We'll bundle those 15 into like three major headers. 15, like really, like, that's really, really important. And so the next part of it is teaching your proprietary process because in that they will see why you move from. This is you teaching them how to move from ordinary to extraordinary. And so that's the head part.

Head what?

Then third part is hands.

Hands.

Call the action. Call to action. Get them a quick win in their business. Get them a quick win that moves them from A to B. And this is going to be counterintuitive to what everybody's told folks. A quick win is not by giving them your book, because the reality is most of them aren't going to read your book. And if read. If they don't read your book, they don't know how genius you are. So a quick win says, how can you get them give them a free resource that moves them from A to B. And so I'll give you a couple of examples of what that looks like. Somebody told me how to, hey, I want to give you this guide on how to rent your house back to you and to your company and how you do that X amount of times a year and what it can do for your taxes. Wow, that's quick. I implemented in like 15, 20 minutes. I got the win, I got the tax savings. I did it. It was Amazing. So now when that person follows up with me and starts talking about their consulting packages, I sign up for them because they already got me a quick win in the free resource that they gave me. I think about what we did, even with like, you know, like we work with Daymond John in New York, and one of the resources, like everybody wants to know what are the things that makes, you know, Damon that go through your mind to say, this is an investable company that I want to invest in. So we helped him create that guide that are the, you know, key components of making sure, you know, what, what we look for when we're looking for an investable company. There's a time in his presentation where everybody leans in and wants to know that, and that's the time where he's able to give that, you know, really away. And it's a powerful gift that serves every single person. So what is that quick win that you can actually get people in their business or in their life that shows them moving from A to B, not A to Z. Your book is A to Z. Your programs, your consulting, that's A to Z. But get them some type of quick.

Win, One piece of it.

Yeah. Somebody yesterday gave me a free resource from stage that showed me how to get 10 hours back in my week every single week. Perfect. That's a perfect example. So that, now is that, is that.

Tool, that free resource, something that you're going to do in the moment, like an exercise in the room, at the, the table, in your chair? Or is that something that they're going to like download, sign up for, etc.

It's a great question. We love for them to sign up for it by a contact card, meaning an actual physical card, not an opt in or text opt in. Because when you give away a great resource, you should see 70, 80, 90% of the people turning that in back to you at the end of the presentation. And, and, and give it. I mean, like, and it's best if it were something that you've charged for in the past, because now it's really valuable. I will give you one example of someone who did an activity, because I think an activity in the room is beautiful. There's a gal that was at like an entrepreneur conference and she said, I want to show you how to reduce stress in your life in three minutes every day. And literally she walked us through this kind of like meditation that we had to self analyze how stressful we were right there. A lot of entrepreneurs in the room. Eights, nines, tens. And we had to actually write our score down, hold our score up with our two fingers. And then she walked us through the process. And then in that process, we then reassessed at the end of the three minutes. And I, you know, I really believe like 95% of the audience's number went down. And so in that experience, she then said, I want to be able to give you this guided thing that you do any part of your day in three minutes that will allow you to do that in your own day, on your own time when you need that. Every person took to that, every person took that, especially every person who saw their stress level drop in those three minutes. It's perfect. She's helping getting them quick wins in their life. And now when she took that to one stage, her coaching and consulting calendar from one stage was full. She said for the next nine or 10 months from the very first stage that she gave that away from. So it's powerful. So that's the third part. That's the third part, Bill. And then got it. And then the.

So I. And you could do a mix of the two. It sounds like, like, like I do a talk on the big mistakes that we see scaling CEOs make.

Yeah.

And, and I can share personal things and I can open with the heart. But then I can also have them look at which of the sort of the mistakes they're most guilty of and have them reflect on and generate something. But then I could offer like the formal assessment tool for free. I could offer the how do you correct these things? What are the tools and practices that correct your biggest sort of mistake area as the follow up?

I'll tell you what and I'll give you a great idea that's even more powerful that we're doing with a lot of our customers and a lot of the people we serve. These, these people who run events love to know where their, where their people's weak spots are and where their deficiencies are in their business. They love to know that because they want to help serve that that's their heart.

Right. Serve that right.

So if you can make sure and begin to create an assessment that, let's just say it's $10 and now you give that to them, ask them to send that out ahead of time, which most of them will, and let them know that you're going to build the custom results of what the audience and attendees say into your presentation. So now what happens is you get all of the data ahead of time and you're able to in the slide before you transition into the head section. So at the end of the heart section, you can say, this is the Data that you CEOs told me. And so this is where you're at based on the assessment. Kudos to the 70% of you that took it. The 30% of you that didn't. You can still take it within the next 24 hours. That comp code will still work for the next 24 hours. So you just gifted a $10 gift to every single person in the room, which is really powerful. But I want to show you how to move the needle in these areas. The majority of you say you're weak here, here, and here. And so I'm going to make sure and spend some extra time there in these next 40 minutes. So let's get rolling. And now they've got the data of like, it's so powerful. They've got the data. And after the fact. That's exactly right. For all of the different people who struggle in the different areas of your assessment, you could then follow up after the fact to really have a targeted approach to people based on what their deficiency or their weak spot was, because everybody in the room's weak spot might look a little bit different. One of the most powerful ways to do it, you're heroic for the person running the event. You capture data and information. You're able to, you know, create a little bit of customization into your presentation just based on their data. And now you can follow up powerfully after they've heard your talk as well.

Yeah. So we just want to create an online version of our assessment that was a pay per play that we could give away to people who attend conferences.

That's right. And build that into the negotiation when you're talking on the front end as well. And then listen, we close with the heart. It's the final piece. We close with the story of ourselves or our customers or life or someone famous that basically reinforces the things that you just taught that day. Everything that you just taught that day. Something that will reinforce the importance of it is how we love to close some people. Open loop on the front end heart and close loop on the back end heart. Some people tell two completely different stories. But. But closing how we started, we believe will separate every single person from literally being the one that people are constantly talking about. Providing incredible value at an event.

I think it's really great because I know that if, like, I want to arrest and grab attention early on, I want to hook and engage people, not just with a thought or a stat or something that gets Their attention, which is effective, but that actually connects to them, that makes them feel something. Laugh, cry, whatever, inspire, or all of the above. But then also to finish in that place finishes with a strong emotional piece. And like, we know from Simon Sinek and from others that those emotional connect to actual decision and action. The emotional core starts there. So I kind of hear that coming in with whatever your closing story is. That really is like, wow.

Yes, absolutely.

Absolutely feel something, right?

Yes, sir.

I once told Vern, I'm like, oh, I'm really well known for making, like, I can make 1500 people cry, you know, and he's like, oh, my God, don't ever do that. I'm like, no, no, no. Cry like in a. Because they're deeply moved because they see something beautiful and noble and like that. Not cry because they feel bad about themselves.

Yeah, absolutely.

But cry because they inspired. Because I've touched them, I've moved them, I've inspired them in some way and. But I think it, like, you can't. I mean, I probably do that a little bit more, but you can also make people laugh and you can have people get their humanity and, like, that kind of thing. I'm doing with John Ratliff and some others, I'm doing a comedy challenge this month in New York, and we're going to go do Stand up all these CEOs and entrepreneurs, which will be really fun. But I think that's also a powerful kind of place, right? Can you make them laugh a little bit?

Absolutely, Absolutely. I think, I think humor is. I think humor is so important. Some people do it better than others, but you can start feeling out what, what jokes, you know, really resonate and that type of deal. So. So, yeah, I absolutely believe it. It's not just about cries, it's about laughs. And I think that's what an incredible, incredible, you know, person does, is that they, they know how to. They really. How to know how to do that. Well.

So we've, I think we've given people a lot of folks and I, I use some personal kinds of things to. Not because I want you to get mine, but to create some real examples so people can begin to think about their own business as well and how they grow and how they use this idea. So finding stages. We're going to give people a resource there, and then you just broke down the whole kind of formula for it. But I think we want to point people to your. To your business as well. We're going to do. We're going to suggest people go to ystages.com right?

Yeah. Whystages.com and we've got an incredible workshop that we run once a year and it's a couple thousand dollars and we actually do it that people have paid in the past and we actually do it it for free once a year where we really dive into this methodology and teach people the entire methodology. We talked about today about how to be great on stage, but we really dive into how do you get on these stages and then how do you actually attract customers from those stages. So not just the workshop but also the free giveaway as they opt in. They will also get the free giveaway for all of the stages as well. And if you have listeners listening to this in the future when the workshop is actually close down, don't worry. The free resource that I talked about today will be available throughout the course of the year. That resource will make sure is there for people to get no matter what.

Bam. So that's awesome. That's huge immediate takeaway value. If you've heard stuff today that you'd like to do a little bit more, there's going to be a free resource and free opportunity there@ystages.com Pete I'm so grateful. I want to remind our listeners that we've got a talk a guest like this with something interesting around your scaling your business every week. And so if you like it and subscribe, you can subscribe either wherever you get your podcasts or you can go subscribe on our website@scalingcoach.com where you'll find a searchable listing of all the past episodes along with the show notes, the links, their resources, free downloads, everything. There's over 175 now there. And we'll also give you a copy of the book Scaling up for free if you just pay the shipping and handling. So all that@scalingcoach.com of course you can find a coach, you can do all that kind of stuff right there. I also want to give acknowledgement and say thanks to Vern Harnish, the creator of the Rockefeller Habits and the Scaling Up Framework. He is our guru and and creator of all this work. This particular show, like most of ours, is produced by Lucy Summers. The audio production is done at Podfly Productions. The audio editing is done by Albert Burge. The show notes are compiled by Ayn Kadina, proofread by Tim McGowan and if you liked it, please leave us a review. And that helps us to grow the show and and pass along to somebody else that you think could get some benefit from it. We love to hear back from you as well. If you've got a comment, a question, something you'd want more of or less of, or any of that, send us an email to info scalingcoach.com thanks again everyone for listening. Keep scaling up.