Ep 185 When to Quit Your Talk Show, Podcast or Speaking Venture July 3, 2016

How do you know when a particular speech or speaking project, like a talk show or video is a failure and it's time to move on?

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public, to the media, at work and in Life. Speaking with T.J. walker.

This is not a pleasant subject. Nobody likes to talk about their failures, but believe me, I've had plenty of failures. Countless talk shows that have failed, TV talk shows, radio talk shows, speech concepts, and you know, if you haven't failed, there's something wrong. You're not trying hard enough. Edison famously said that he had had a thousand failures before he made electricity and a light bulb. So it was a critical part of his success. And folks, I'm not saying I'm Edison, but I had someone, and forgive me, I forgot who or where it was. Ask me about how do you decide when it's just time to throw in the towel? And I gave my opinion and the person said or wrote back. So that's the best advice I think I've ever heard from you. So I wanted to share with you. Here is the checklist that I apply to a new project. This could apply to a podcast. It could apply to a video show, a TV show, a talk radio show, an Internet show. It could even apply to a website. But I essentially have three questions that I ask myself. I only have to have one yes to justify the continuation. But if I can't get one yes, it's generally a sign of a big problem and it's time to quit. And yes, folks, winners do quit from time to time. They pivot, they change, they redirect their energies to something more effective. I'll give you those three questions in just a moment.

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So here are my three questions, and I'm giving it to you in no particular order. It's not that one is more important than the other. I rate them all somewhat equally in the sense that if I can say yes to one that justifies continuing a particular speech, I might be promoting or a podcast or a video series. So here are the three questions I have, number one. And again, this is not in a hierarchy of importance. Am I having a real impact on people's lives? Am I helping people through this podcast in particular? And I'll show you how I apply this to different projects I've done in the past. So that's the first big question. Am I having an impact? Am I really reaching people Is it changing people's minds? It giving them a new skill, a new perspective? That is a big, big question number two, am I making money from it? Again, money isn't the only thing that matters. It's quite possible to really enjoy doing a TV show, an Internet program, a podcast, a blog, not make any money from it, but it be the single most rewarding thing you do. But obviously if you are making a bunch of money from something, it makes it a lot easier to get motivated, it makes it fun. It pretty much answers the first question of are you having an impact on people's lives? Because it's pretty hard to make money these days if you're not having an impact on people's lives through creating any kind of spoken media format, audio, video, TV show, radio show. I mean, you could argue a Jerry Springer type show makes money, but isn't having any positive impact. So that's the second big question. Is the program making you money? The third big question is am I having fun? Life is short or can be short, folks. And we all like to do certain things to pay for our food, keep a roof over our head. But if you can combine some spoken activity with something that's really fun, why stop it? You may have a passion for jazz music and do a once a week podcast on jazz. Never have any aspiration to make money from it, but it is your hobby, it is your passion. Perhaps you then use this as a way of networking with famous jazz musicians and you interview them and you learn insights and you connect with people that you love, admire and respect. That would be of course, a great reason to continue doing that podcast forever. Just because you love it and it may have a tiny audience, you might not really be having a huge impact on people's lives. You're not making any money. But again, it answers yes to one of those questions. I'll tell you about one of my failures in the past that I stopped doing because it didn't meet the criteria of me being able to say yes to any of these three. More on that in a moment.

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So a handful of years, I'm guessing it was perhaps six years ago I started an online venture called the Pitching Channel and I believe that was the name now. It's been so long, things get fuzzy, especially when they don't turn out as a success. But it was about pitching, meaning giving a spoken pitch to either raise money or for angel investors, for Your company giving a pitch for investors on the public markets, for publicly traded companies giving a pitch for fundraising. So I was looking at one particular aspect of my own expertise because I help people give not only presentations, but pitch presentations. I do work with CEOs and entrepreneurs trying to raise money. So it was, I was looking for something that was a good fit with my expertise that might reach a broad audience. So I interviewed experts on raising venture capital and angel investor money. I interviewed all sorts of investors on how they liked to be pitched. And I was spending a lot of time, money, energy and effort creating content, creating TV shows for video shows, for YouTube online. It was a lot of work. Some of it was interesting at some point, but as I did this month, two month, three month four, what I found is it was very hard to build much of an audience, so I didn't feel like I was really having an impact. And increasingly I found the only guests were people who worked with small startups or with publicly traded companies that were very small and frankly, often a little bit shady, the penny stocks. And I was not completely comfortable with helping some of these people because I wasn't really sure it was a great deal for investors. Now, I wasn't advising people to invest in these, but the market niche of the small cap companies I found not particularly interesting and it wasn't that exciting. So when I stepped back and asked myself the tough questions, am I really having an impact on people's lives? Am I helping entrepreneurs who wouldn't otherwise raise money, raise money? I couldn't honestly say yes. Am I creating something that is as talked about as Shark Tank and is really changing the way people think of how they give financial presentations? And honestly, the answer was no. So it didn't make the criteria there. Next question, am I making money from this? And the answer was no. I was actually losing money because it was too diffused to get sponsors. I didn't have enough of an audience that was measurable in terms of numbers, cost per thousand to sell traditional advertising. So I wasn't making money. And the third question, was I having a lot of fun from this? Well, my interest is not small cap companies and if I were going to do something just of interest to me, it would be more in the political vein, talking about politics, culture, current affairs, not small cap mining companies, for example. So it flunked on that level. So it basically flunked on all three big categories. Wasn't having an impact, wasn't making money, wasn't fun. Nobody likes to admit defeat, but at that point I said, am I just going to continue knocking my head up against the wall and doing something? Because I started. The answer was no. So I pulled the plug, took the website down, stopped. Is that the thing I'm proudest of in the world? No. But I'm sure happy I did it after a handful of months and not after two or three or four years. Because that's the worst of all possible worlds. When you see people slogging away, whether it's a new business, a talk show, some other venture, and you can sense they are not getting a lot of joy, audience is minuscule, they're not really having an impact, they're clearly not making any money, and then it's just a waste. So that's my challenge to you. If you've started a new podcast, you've introduced a new speech that you're trying to shop around, you're doing a new video series, ask yourself those three questions and if it's yes to any one of them, continue. Do it every day for decades if you want. But if you don't get a yes, it's time to pull the plug. Which, by the way, I'm not pulling the plug on this show because it frankly meets all the criteria. I do feel like I'm having an impact on people because I get positive emails from people all over the world. My audience grows, if not every day or every week. Every single month since the inception of this show, the audience has grown. I am frankly making money because I'm getting prospects coming in from this show who then end up hiring me for media training and presentation training. And I get a little bit of advertising revenue. And frankly, it is fun. I enjoy talking about this. So for me this is the perfect trifecta in that it's satisfying all three, but you only need one to make it worthwhile. Thanks for joining me. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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