Dan: The biggest difference between that speaker and you, it's not talent. It's that they have a system and a process to get on that stage. That's it. In fact, I've seen really, to your point, Austin, I've seen really talented speakers never get seen, because they don't have a process. I've also seen really average speakers, and that's not a knock, it's just the case. Really average speakers get booked and paid like crazy because they have a system, they have a process.
Austin: Welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. I was looking at your Instagram. It's my favorite place. Anytime I'm gonna go have a conversation with somebody, Instagram's my favorite spot to go because you just never know what you're gonna find on there. It's a lot of fun. I saw you're either just releasing or just about to release a book about killing busyness. Is that accurate?
Dan: I like that you think that it feels like it's just being released, because that was one of the goals in that. No, actually it came out a couple of years ago.
Austin: What?
Dan: Yeah.
Austin: That's not how you phrased it in the Instagram video.
Dan: No, I think it was just this idea, like this is why I wrote it. But the video that I did on the book was just this feeling that I get, but it's still very applicable. And the idea was it's applicable today. Right?
Austin: Yeah. More than ever, possibly. That's great. But given the context of the world and the conversation I hear people talk about, never once did I consider this has been out already. Cause everybody needs this right the second. And so for those of you that have no idea what I'm talking about, Dan wrote a book essentially arguing against the idea of being busy. Fair summary. And I have just been thinking about this for really the last couple of years. One of my mentors told me about a book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, which is all about getting rid of this intense holding on to all the tasks and the responsibilities and the stuff that's just chaotic that we feel like if we're pursuing aggressively, we're getting more done, and we're not. In fact, sometimes the more busy and hurried we feel, the less productive we are. It reminds me of that Navy SEALs thing. It's like slow is smooth and smooth is fast. It's counterproductive to try to rush things.
Austin: So, anyways, long story short, I saw the content of that book and was like, gosh, every single person in the world needs to hear that. And especially the people listening to this show who are entrepreneurial by nature and are constantly just grasping for ideas and playbooks and things that will help move the business forward. And so, anyways, I'm curious, why is that the angle? What's the impetus for this?
Dan: It's because, well, I don't think, I know it's because I lived this life for a long time, for many years. My history, my background is that I was in the corporate space for over 20 years. And I thought that being busy actually meant something. And I think I was actually using it as some form of currency even at times. And we even do this, I think, to this day. By default, we walk up to someone and be like, hey, how's it been? How are you doing? How is life? And the knee jerk reaction is, it's really good. I've been busy.
Austin: Busy every time.
Dan: And it's like, what does that even mean? What does that even look like? And I make the joke sometimes too that I'm married, we have three children, and we have a high schooler, a middle schooler, and an elementary schooler. And I have a friend of mine, I always make this joke, she is married with two cats. And every time I talk to her, she tells me how busy she is. I believe her, but our busies aren't the same. It's not even close, right? And so what does it actually mean?
Dan: And so I think the other component of the impetus of it is that saying that and believing that and then talking about that is safe. We can talk about how busy we are and then we feel good about the fact that no one's going to criticize this full calendar of things that I have going on. And we get confused that activity is outcomes, right? We're just in it. We're just doing the things to make us feel like we're actually making movement. And I just got tired of that rat race. I got tired of that wheel and wanted to have a more intentional, focused outlook. And I think the reason the book really came about and the reason it's the thing that I speak on stages all over the country about is that we were designed to be more than that. Austin, I always make the joke where nowadays when people ask me how I'm doing, I actually tell them, which has resulted in less people asking me how I'm doing.
Dan: Which is okay. Right? And just before we started recording here, we were talking about life and what's going on. And you told me about you talking with your wife this morning. I was talking about me going on a walk last night with my wife. Right. And it's like, that's what people want to know about. That's what people want to hear. You and I could have easily been like, yeah, it's been super busy, we've just been after things. But we actually had a real conversation, real connection. Right. And so where can we then take that feeling, that idea, that thought into other parts of our lives? And the payout is just, if nothing else, internally, it's just so much greater.
Austin: Dude, I so agree with this. I think in some ways it's almost an extension of this culture that we're in right now that is super me oriented. Everything is about us and we're very caught up in our own stuff and our own drama and so on. And so in some ways I think our ability to connect with others well has withered. And "I'm busy" or "I'm good," or any of these generic placeholder responses in conversation are just an easy escape hatch to get out of being vulnerable and intimate with people. And what's so interesting though is that even though that's how I think some people, myself included, I'm not on a high horse here, I fall into it too sometimes. We're wired that way. But when you're willing to push and prod with people and go a step deeper, or you say something really unexpected, hey, how's it been? You're like, I'm struggling. And they're like, what?
Austin: It shocks people sometimes and I think breaks them out of the mold of, my gosh, I'm talking to a human right now. And oftentimes I find that people are very willing to be vulnerable and have a real conversation if we can just get out of the autopilot mode. And when we're all so caught up in our stuff, it's just really easy to stay on autopilot. And busy is just such a good one. You touched on this. Last thing, I promise, I'm gonna shut up so you can answer, but it pats ourselves on the back, right? To say I'm busy. It's enough of a statement to make the person feel like you're not just wasting away in life, but it says absolutely nothing about the quality of life. And so it's the perfect balance of lack of vulnerability and lack of intimacy while still making ourselves feel good enough to not have to defend ourselves. Dangerous territory.
Dan: Super dangerous, but also very comfortable, right? We get comfortable, we get stuck in that. And one of the things you mentioned there that I wanted to bring back up is just this idea. Well, let me first talk about this idea of being stuck. We get stuck in these unconscious routines, right? At one point in time, it actually served us to be in that routine. And we got stuck in it and we got comfortable in it.
Dan: There's one of these activities that I do with different workshops and different talks where I actually have them get up and they have to connect with somebody not at their table. And it's one-on-one, okay? This goes to what you were saying earlier. And I give them very specific instructions and I give them 60 or 90 seconds and I give them a question that they have to answer. And then I have fun with it and I say, okay, Partner A, you're gonna answer this question. Partner B, you have to stand there and shut up and not say a word. And I say it that way because I want it to stick. And I even say, okay, Partner A is gonna talk, what's Partner B gonna do? And everyone's like, shut up, right? And what's wild is that I prompt them with a question, maybe a little bit of an uncomfortable question. One of the questions I might prompt them with is something that I'm incredibly proud of but I don't talk about a lot. Right?
Austin: Ooh, that's a cool angle.
Dan: And so for 60 or 90 seconds, they just have to talk. And I also prompt, Partner B, if your partner gets stuck, the only thing you're allowed to say is "tell me more." Right? And then after that 60 or 90 seconds, I have them swap. And so the other person answers the same question. And to your point, what you said earlier, I'll do that a couple rounds with a couple different questions. And it's literally 60 seconds or 90 seconds. And I'm like, hey, how many of you all learned something new about this person? And everyone's like, of course. And related to this idea, some of you all just learned something about this person that you've been working with for decades, that you had no idea about. And all I did was give you 60 seconds to listen. Right? And I prompted it. It wasn't like, tell me all your deep dark secrets. It was a very simple question that when we ask and then we actually answer, how much more connected do we feel? And I asked that question too, how much more connected do you feel to that person?
Dan: And by the way, when they were answering the question, I told you to shut up, but how many of you all were standing there like, I got a story about that too, or I want to jump in, or I can relate to you as well? But you had to fight that urge because we get pulled and sucked into that.
Dan: Let me tell you about me. And it goes back to, Austin, what you were saying. Let me tell you about me. But I forced you to not talk about you and forced you to listen. And we don't do that enough. And not only do we not listen enough, but we don't even ask questions and then wait for the answer enough. Right. And when we do, it can be incredibly rewarding. And then I think finally, one of the things that I mention in that talk is that we are far more connected than we are different. And so we don't have to be busy. We can actually be real people going through real things.
Austin: You never know when you're gonna find the person that can meaningfully contribute to whatever situation you're in, too. And if we're so stuck on the surface, we're missing opportunities for us to be able to improve. And that's the selfish way of looking at it. On the other side, we never know when there's an opportunity for us to be able to serve. But if we don't ask good questions and genuinely listen and invite people to tell us more, like your magic follow-up question there, we're gonna miss opportunities to learn something and we're gonna miss opportunities to serve well. And I think all of us, if we wake up in the morning and look at ourselves in the mirror and are honest with ourselves, I think we can all agree those are the two really important qualities of life: to serve well and to improve ourselves whenever we can.
Austin: And it's not always even about the outcome. I'm hearing myself say that, and the conversation doesn't even need to become one of those two things. There's value just in connecting with each other. The relationships are valuable for the sake of themselves. You don't even need to get anywhere with it. And it's really easy, especially for an entrepreneurial type like myself, to constantly be optimizing for some future thing that I'm driving towards, which isn't inherently bad. But also I think we're missing the point that part of being a human is being in relation to each other, is connecting with each other, is showing up for each other. And with the hurriedness of life and the busyness of life, that's one of the first things that's gonna go straight out the window. It's always gonna be about getting somewhere. And I just don't think that's where happiness comes from. At least not long term happiness. We might get bursts of joy, we achieve something and that feels really good, or we get knocked on our butts and we feel really bad about that. So we're gonna experience the roller coaster of life. But man, that's not really the thing that creates meaning in our lives.
Dan: Isn't it interesting too that we're feeling that more, I think, now than ever because of advancements in technology and AI? We can do more than we've ever been able to do. Right. And that's also isolated us a lot more because we need fewer people to do more things now. Right. Before, we had this group of people, we had these think tanks. We have this project and now I don't need a group of people. I can just go say, hey, AI, I'm working on this project. Give me five different perspectives, from a project manager to a salesperson to a customer. Give me all those perspectives. Right. And I don't need to go ask the questions. And that's just one example of many.
Dan: But what I have found is that the more and more that we lean into the technology, which isn't bad, I think that's a good thing, we have to figure out how to balance that on the other side. Balance that with the people side, balance that with the relationships, even if it's not for gain, to your point. It's just a balancing component, right? And so I'm constantly trying to balance that in my own life. How am I developing relationships outside of this monitor? Which is tough, especially when we're trying to keep things going and trying to stay on top of things. But I personally believe that if we're not intentional about that aspect of it, we're compounding challenges that are only going to create unknown issues down the road. I hate to speculate on that. But I think the balancing act is important. It's critical.
Austin: Yeah, I completely agree. The State of the Industry report that we released this year had this interesting stat show up in it. We asked about how people are using AI. What are the primary use cases for you? And then where are you seeing the biggest benefit show up in your business? And we found that there's a pretty clear black and white line between two groups of people. One group of people is using it to create more content. That could be email copy for doing cold outreach. It could be LinkedIn posts or newsletters or blah blah blah. But it's just putting stuff out there. That's one group. The other group is using it for operational reasons.
Austin: To run the business. We were talking about Claude and this new magic thing called Victor that I have now just heard of. So there's a little nugget for everybody to go and explore, but using tools like that to help run the business, right? Different use case than just creating, I would say, noise, right? The AI slop of the internet, as it's being called. And so there's those two camps. People that use it for operational purposes out-earn those that use it for content creation purposes by $70,000 a year on average. So there's just a gap right away with how people's psychology is about these different tools.
Austin: Now, here's my interpretive layer. People that are using AI for operational reasons inherently are spending less time on the muck, the admin, the tedium of things. I can just speak for myself with SpeakerFlow, right? We use AI to generate our proposals. We've trained Claude on our methodologies. I've had it go through hundreds and hundreds of hours of my client calls and distill down lessons about how we think about different things. We've had it go through all of our sales conversations, so it has the messaging and the language that we use that we know works because it closes deals. And then we have our sales calls that we're running, so it has all the context about the person's business. We have our design guides. All the pieces required to build proposals are very standardized now.
Austin: And so when I need to create a proposal, I just give it the transcript from the meeting. I give it any notes that came to mind while I was thinking about it. And Claude will build me a beautiful proposal in about five minutes that I can send over that is better than anything I could come up with on my own. And it used to be that I would spend four hours on that. It would take me forever. And I would almost always be spending most of the time tinkering with container sizes and fonts and color and stupid stuff, not even the stuff that was making the difference.
Austin: So where has that time gone? What do I do with those four hours? I'm spending it on people.
Dan: Yeah, that's right.
Austin: I'm having conversations. I'm giving people love in my email. I'm spending time with my two beautiful children. I'm spending it with people. And I think that's more about where we see the increase in revenue coming from. Beyond just the technology and getting more done. It's not about getting more done. It's that it's allowed us to reprioritize our efforts towards relationships with people. And this is the gap. There are people that are using AI to try to automate a meaningful relationship, that they're gonna scrape leads and send cold emails out with AI. It's soulless. And look, there's a place for all this. I'm not saying that anything is inherently bad, but I think that if the idea here is that we're using AI to free ourselves up from the mundane so that we can focus on serving people better, we're going to win. It's just logical to me, because this is a relationship-oriented business model. We're problem solvers. To be a thought leader is to be a problem solver, to be a professional thinker. And we solve problems for people. So the more we spend time on people, genuinely loving on and supporting people, the more successful we're gonna be.
Austin: And so this is the divide, right? As we're looking at these technologies, it's a call to action for everybody that's listening to this, myself included. How can we use AI to support our ability to have genuine, meaningful, deep relationships with other people and then have it handle all the other crap that would prevent us from doing that? Those that do that are gonna win over these next five or ten years.
Dan: It's such a key and so good. And just to add something onto that, when you were talking about it, what I was thinking through is such a good distinction. I hadn't thought about it this way until you said it, but if AI in your brain is just, okay, it's going to allow me to do more of the work, I think you missed an opportunity, to your point. It frees you up to do better work, not more work.
Austin: Yes.
Dan: Right? And better work, by the way, could be categorized by a ton of things. To your point, spending time with those little ones in your house. And like me, the most important person in my life, my wife, spending time with her, and for you, your wife. But also building the relationships, not only with your team, but the people that are important to you. And also ourselves. I'd be remiss if I didn't say this, because I'm a firm believer that we've got to prioritize us first to be the best version of us for everything else that we're doing in life. We may have talked about this before, but I'm constantly training for something. And so I sign up for triathlons because I am insane, but also I like to do hard things, right?
Dan: This is a totally different topic, but I'm constantly trying to live my life in this crossroads of things that scare me, but also things that I am passionate about, that I'm excited about, right? And so triathlons is one of those things. That's a swim, bike, run, and it is hard. It is hard. But anyways, I'm constantly training for something. And so I'm typically working out twice a day, morning and evening, right? And for me, it's like this morning I ran five miles. Right. And that is the time, by the way, when I'm running the five miles, the brain's thinking through how I can connect better with this team member, or what do we have going on? That thinking time. I'm literally sending messages to myself on the treadmill of, we have that idea and that idea. But making that time, because I can do that. Right. I can do two workouts a day and I can train twice a day because of the AI. I'm not using that time to do more work. I'm using that time to do better work. So again, it coincides with the title of my book, and shameless plug here, but Stop Being Busy.
Austin: Do it.
Dan: Stop being busy. Be more. Right. And so, anyway. When you said that, it just connected with me. I hadn't thought about it from that perspective, but yeah, what are you utilizing that for? And if it's just to do more of the same thing, I think you've missed an opportunity.
Austin: Yeah, so true. And look, I think this actually has a weird tie in to what I think the intention of our conversation today is meant to be around. And it might be even worth taking a quick second, for the listeners on the show that don't know Dan and The Speaker Lab, which you are now the CEO of. I think it'd be worth doing just a very quick introduction about what you guys are all about. But I have a feeling that what we're talking about right now, how we are using technology and thinking differently about how we spend our time to meaningfully connect with people, there's no way that those elements don't directly tie into the mission of The Speaker Lab, and to SpeakerFlow to some degree, which is to help speakers, thought leaders, have a great business, help lots of people, probably make lots of money as a part of that. These worlds are interconnected, right? So I'm leaving it to you now, Dan. Help us tie these pieces together.
Dan: Yeah, so I am a full-time keynote speaker on leadership and topics like that, but I'm also the CEO of The Speaker Lab, as you mentioned. But I think the story really for me is that I was a student of The Speaker Lab before I owned The Speaker Lab. In fact, I was a student of SpeakerFlow before I was a student of The Speaker Lab.
Austin: Hey, I could've waved the banner for that one, man.
Dan: To be totally fair, I found you guys, Taylorr and Austin, I found y'all late 2019, I wanna say. And I joined The Speaker Lab as a student of their program in March of 2020. And so if you remember, by the way, this is a side note, if you remember what happened in March of 2020, just this little thing that changed the whole world.
Austin: Something.
Dan: And I don't know what I was thinking at the time. I had this thought that I'm going to go build a speaking business in the era of nobody meeting. Perfect time.
Austin: The perfect time to do it.
Dan: And so anyways, over the years, I've worked in a couple different aspects with The Speaker Lab, coming out of the program as a student. I built my speaking business with the process, having the tools, using the techniques, everything that we still coach and train on today. Obviously they've been upgraded and updated over the years, but the core of what we do today is the exact same process I went through six and a half years ago, right? To build my business. And it's about systems, it's about processes, and also, to your point in bringing this all together, it's about having a life. My whole idea that I wanted to build a speaking business is because I wanted more of three things. I wanted more flexibility. I wanted more freedom. And I wanted to have a heck of a lot more fun. Right. And I knew that that was possible.
Dan: Just to take it back a little bit, Austin, if it's OK. I'm in the middle to fall of 2019. A couple of months later, I found you guys. But right before that, I got laid off of my C-suite position. I won't give you the whole story, but the owner of the company came in to me. I was the COO of this organization, been there for multiple years. The owner comes in and said, hey, Dan, you've done everything we've asked you to do. You've crushed it. You've met all the expectations, but we don't need you anymore. And it was one of those moments, I'll never forget. It was actually a couple of days later. It was right around Halloween. It was in October, and my son, who's now 12, then he was in kindergarten, and we were, I'll never forget this, we were at the pumpkin patch, you know, kindergarten class going to the pumpkin patch, and we were on the hayride and I took a selfie of he and I. And I have that photo to this day. And every time I see that photo, I remember what I was thinking in that moment. Never again am I gonna build something for somebody else without building something for me. And I just didn't know how to do it. I didn't know where to go.
Dan: And so, I knew that I loved speaking. I knew that I loved connecting with people. I knew that I loved interacting with individuals. Totally side note, Austin, I'm a natural introvert. And so the idea of being on a stage in front of hundreds or thousands of people was like, I don't know.
Austin: That does seem opposite to what somebody who's an introvert goes for.
Dan: Yeah. But I do love it. Again, I think it aligns with that crossroads of things that scare me, but things that I love doing. Anyways, I knew that I needed a process. I found you guys. I was like, okay, this is right up my alley. I was a COO, operations guy, my brain thinks in systems and processes, give me. And so I knew I needed that. And then it was like, okay, well now I actually need to build the business. I have the backbone. I have some structural components here, but I remember early on having conversations with you guys like, all right, Dan, you got to go do the leads and get it all going. And I was like, where does that come from? Not that y'all didn't help me a little bit on that, but I was like, I need a full-on process. And so that's how I found The Speaker Lab. So anyways, long story short, signed up and been on that path ever since. And again, going back to the whole reason of bringing it all together is this: I wanted to have more of that flexibility, freedom and fun. I knew it existed. I just needed to put all the pieces together to build it. And that's what The Speaker Lab ultimately helped me do six and a half years ago.
Austin: Yeah. Okay. So good. Such good history. Everybody listening, just acknowledge it with me for a second. Dan is not out here on some abstract high horse. Okay. This is a dude who is in the trenches with us. And there's something so valuable about that. And he's put everything that we're talking about today to the test, which is amazing. And I want to talk more about how The Speaker Lab thinks about getting speaking engagements. A good portion of people, well, according to our data, 65% of people's number one objective for their business in the next year is to sell more stuff, to increase their revenue. And so it's on everybody's mind. Okay. It's also a very slippery slope to be able to achieve that while simultaneously not finding ourselves in the camp of saying, I'm busy. Okay. Cause there's the Alex Hormozis of the world, right? They're like, you want to make more money? Fantastic. You're going to put your headband on, you're going to sit at your desk and you're going to work until you pass out from exhaustion. And then once you wake up from that little nap, you're going to drink a protein shake and you're going to go freaking do it again. And then maybe in three years' time, you will have all the success that you've been looking for.
Austin: And I'm being hyperbolic there, obviously. But not that much. And I don't buy into that camp. I love Alex. Clearly, he's a very successful dude. I think that if you do nothing but work all the time forever, you probably will be successful, just because probability starts to work in your favor at some point. But also, it does not acknowledge our humanity.
Dan: You might die early. That's right.
Austin: So yeah, there's a knife ridge that we're walking here, right? Between, we gotta grow, there's definitely gonna be some sacrifice, there's definitely gonna be some discomfort, but do we have to do it at the expense of our humanity? I would say no. And I think you're probably gonna say no too.
Dan: Yeah, it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, this idea of busy feeling safe, right? And from a speaker's perspective, what we talk about a lot at The Speaker Lab, cause I see it all the time: speakers, they want to rebuild their website. They want to update their one sheet. I've got to redo the deck. I've got to redo this thing. Anything except the ask. Anything other than moving the business forward. Again, I've watched a ton of people chase this idea of being busy. And I think one of the things that really sticks with me is that nobody misses because they weren't good enough. I've seen really talented speakers miss because they just stayed busy.
Dan: Last year, I spoke 42 times, 42 paid gigs. And here's the surprising thing, I think, for some people. The work that actually produced those bookings was maybe three hours a week.
Austin: Wow. That's wild.
Dan: The rest of the week was everything a business needs. And hear me when I say that's the trap. It feels like it's the same kind of work, but it's not. It's not. And so, are you going to allow yourself to fall into that trap and want to just stay busy? Or do you actually have a firm grasp on what it means to sell more things? If two thirds of people want to sell more things, I would guess more than two thirds of their time is spent not producing things that are going to sell more things. In fact, I bet it's in the 90%. Because we get stuck in this idea of being busy.
Dan: I think one of the ways I have to combat this myself, and this is not something that I've mastered by any stretch of the imagination, I have to constantly be thinking about this, constantly be focused on it. In fact, when I start drifting into thinking about, I need to go update this thing or that thing or this thing, now I've gotten really trained at it. The flag goes up in my brain and I'm like, wait, wait, wait, what am I trying to avoid? That's the thing that smacks me back. And by the way, that's the thing that I'm constantly talking with our students in The Speaker Lab about. You don't need to redo that thing. What are you actually avoiding? What are you not wanting to do? Right. And so one of the ways I do that is that flag goes up for me.
Dan: Another practical way, cause I like to put things in my path, by the way, I like to force myself to stumble into things that way so I remember. So I put things on my calendar, or if you saw my studio here, I have things on my wall that I have to see all the time that remind me, and I move things on the wall so that I don't get complacent that that thing's always there, right? And so one of the things that I do practically is that I have this protected hour every day. And by the way, I think I started by doing it once a week, but this protected hour a day. I just labeled it protected hour, cause I know what it means now. And it's an opportunity for me to say, what am I avoiding? I'm going to use this time to actually move the business forward in some way. And sometimes it's very practical things, tactical things. Sometimes it's just, I'm going to think through something, like we were talking about earlier, right? But again, 42 times last year wasn't on the backs of 30, 40, 50 hour weeks, right? It was having a system, having a process, knowing how to operate within those, and not getting the busyness confused with the actual outcomes.
Austin: I don't think there's any more encouraging words for people that are trying to grow their business than that. You don't have to clear your calendar of everything that you love and do nothing but just send emails and make cold calls. I'm like, my gosh, dude. Three hours a week. Is that what you just said? Just to make sure I quoted that right. It's not three hours a day, three hours a week on average. I'm sure there are highs and lows.
Dan: Yeah, it comes out to about 20 to 30 minutes a day. I do it six days a week. So let's just top end at 30 minutes. So three hours.
Austin: Yeah. Dude. Okay. So I'm obsessed with practicals. So what does that look like for you? And especially, people who want to go deep on this need support beyond what you're gonna get in the next twenty minutes of this podcast episode. Okay, so please, if anybody out there is genuinely uncertain how to build a sales process, The Speaker Lab is where we send everybody. It's the best place, especially if you have no box for how this is supposed to work. So please, if you need help, go talk to The Speaker Lab. So I'm gonna get that out of the way real quick. But inside of that, right, I'm sure there are some habits, some routines, some processes that you follow that paint the picture for what it looks like to be in those three hours a week that leads to your 40 plus engagements per year. Can you help us understand what it looks like?
Dan: Yeah, totally happy to do it. But first, a lot of times I like to just ground all of this in a mindset, conceptually, right? So one of the ways that I'm constantly thinking through and trying to consider for the speakers that we work with, and we work with a ton of them. I think now, over a decade at The Speaker Lab, over 17,000 speakers, right? It's a lot. And so I've seen everything. I've seen a lot. And when it comes to tech, people can buy tech, what I have found, to avoid process, then build the process to avoid the people conversation.
Dan: And when it comes to automation, we were talking about this a little bit earlier, I automate anything that doesn't need me, that has no judgment calls in it, right? So what I don't automate is the pitch, obviously the discovery call and building the relationship, right? Those aren't automatable things for me. And the reason I want to point that out is that, like we were talking about earlier, put aside the importance of building the relationship, but I hear this all the time, especially in the last six, 12 months, which is, I'll just have AI run my business for me. And it's like, good luck. Because you can't, it's not the way it works. And by the way, I have hundreds of calls every year with event planners. And I'll tell you what they want. They want real connection. But on top of that, they want to know that you can solve the problem of their audience, right? And so that's not going to be automated, right? And so that's the mindset that I utilize when coming into this.
Dan: So to go to your question and the very practical, applicable tools. So I said earlier, 20 to 30 minutes a day. Again, let's just call it 30 minutes a day. And to be fair, Austin, what we coach and train at The Speaker Lab is that there is a place and time to do your outreach. It's not until you have the foundational pieces in place. So what we coach, and I won't go into all the details, is a five step framework, right? And so the first three steps are the foundational pieces, which by the way, most people skip past way too fast. And I get it, it's because they want to get to the fourth step in our process, which is actually doing the outreach and the prospecting. And we oftentimes think my passion, my conviction, my work ethic will outshine the foundational pieces. I can just get in there and do it and connect with it.
Dan: This is the other thing that bothers me. I'll step on the soapbox and I'll step off pretty quickly. But what I'm seeing a lot in this space right now on social media is organizations that are just promising leads, right? And so it's feeding into this idea that that's all you need. And then at The Speaker Lab, we get people that come to us and say, hey, I tried out these different programs that gave me leads, but nothing happened. And my response is, very nicely, I believe you.
Austin: That's the most polite way to respond to that.
Dan: I believe you, right? Because it's not the answer. We think leads is the answer. We think AI is the answer. We think social media is the answer, right? But when it comes right down to it, it's having a process, having a framework and then getting to the actual prospecting piece. So there's my disclaimer. I will share with you, but know that I can get it to 20 to 30 minutes a day because I have all those other pieces done right. They're not done 80% or 90% or 95% of the way there. They're all done 100% of the way there. So when I'm actually doing the prospecting piece, it's actually landing, things are actually moving the needle, right? And so what we find at The Speaker Lab is that most people that come to us are having inconsistencies with their outcomes, and it's usually because they don't have these foundational pieces in place.
Dan: Okay, 30 minutes a day, six days a week. By the way, I do it six days a week not because I'm unwilling to do it on the seventh day. I just don't send prospecting emails out on Sunday, not because I'm unwilling to, but because I might come across an event planner that it upsets. And I'm in the business of not upsetting event planners. Right. And so I can skip a day. It's fine. And so six days a week, 30 minutes a day. And what I'm doing in my process, and by the way, we build this and it's nuanced based on your topic, your audience, your expertise and all these other components. But for me and where I'm at, I'm looking for five leads a day. Five new prospects a day. And we have proprietary tools at The Speaker Lab. We have other ways to find leads. In fact, we even go out and find leads for our students in The Speaker Lab. But beside the point, five a day. Five a day, not 10 a day, Austin, not 20 a day, not 50 a day. And here's the reason for that: because I do five today, I also do a five week contact strategy. Stop me if this is getting too in the weeds here, by the way. Okay.
Austin: I'm so excited. We're having a blast.
Dan: Okay, cool. So five a day, and I send out those five today. I also do a five week contact strategy, right? So I'm going to send the five today. So today, the day of this recording, it's a Friday. So this morning, I've already sent my five. I do my prospecting every morning. And so today, I've sent the first email to those five people. Well, next Friday, I'm going to send those same five people email number two. And then the Friday after that, they're gonna get email number three, and the Friday after that, they're gonna get email number four. The only caveat to that is if they respond to me in any part of that, they come out of that cadence. But here's the tricky part. Last Friday I did five, and the Friday before that I did five. And so today, not only am I sending five new ones, I'm also sending email twos, and email threes, and email fours, and email fives. And so if I did 50 today, I've got 50 to do next Friday. It's unsustainable.
Austin: That compounds very quickly. Totally.
Dan: And this is what we see a lot in this step of the process in The Speaker Lab, is that people think that you've got to do this massive, I'm going to go all in, I'm going to do five hours today. And then they do nothing for the next four days. One of the things that we're constantly talking about is, hey, I'd rather you do an hour a day for five, six days a week. And then after your hour, go do something else. But tomorrow do your hour again. And the next day, do your hour again, because that's going to serve you long-term. My speaking business is not built on me bulk working one day a week, right? It's consistency across the long term, right?
Dan: Also, you might be like, well, Dan, you could just send a lot more and automate it. Maybe. But also, how many of y'all have ever gotten an email from an automation that says, hey, first name, literally not your name, right? And you're like, well, this isn't for me. And as speakers, we get one shot at this, right? That's the way I look at it. And so today, I already did it. Last Friday, I sent email one. Today I'm sending email two off the backs of email one. Right. And so by the time I get to email five, all of the other emails, one through four, are below it. Right. And then here's the other thing about that: the consistency of it is so critical. Cause occasionally after email ones or twos, I'll get people that are like, hey Dan, we don't hire speakers. Or I actually had one recently that was like, hey, we use this very specific speaker bureau, which I don't ever hear. I actually responded back and I was like, hey, would you be willing to share a little bit about that with me? Because I actually find that most event planners don't use that. And so I got some interesting intel there. But with most event planners, my biggest return on emails is email number three.
Austin: Really?
Dan: But that's after three weeks. It's not email one, it's email three. I literally had a discovery call two days ago with a woman that was in this process, and she responded to email three a week and a half ago. And was like, hey Dan, thanks so much for following up with me. Yep, I'm ready to schedule a call. And we scheduled a call, and they've already booked this year. They're actually looking at booking me for their big summit in the fall of 2027. So we're gonna talk about that. I sent her a signed copy of my book. That's a whole other process.
Austin: Yeah, let's go.
Dan: Yeah, all those things, right? And I also sent her the USPS tracking just so she can constantly get updated on when the book's going to show up. So it's a constant reminder: Dan's book's coming. Dan's book. Okay. Anyways, a whole other thing.
Austin: Ingenious, dude. It's so smart. I love that.
Dan: And so anyways, so five weeks, five emails. Now we have speakers that we work with that do a six week or seven week or an eight week, or they go heavier in different seasons and they're pulling out specific types of leads. And so we actually have a process where we source very custom leads for our speakers, and then we fine tune beyond that. But the day to day is that 30 minutes. And by the way, it's 30 minutes because I can automate some of that with templates and whatnot. So that speeds things up. But if I'm doing five new ones and also doing emails two, three, four, and five, if no one responded to those two, three, four, and five, that means there's five in each one of those as well. So it's 25 max a day. Alright, I'll pause there for a breath.
Austin: That's so good. Yeah. That's actually good math, right? Because 25 is still a lot. And especially if you're gonna do it one by one, personal style. If I'm gonna think about the human and try to tie in something personal, even if you're doing it fast, we're talking about three to five minutes. Let's say we'll use five minutes, so five times twenty five. You're talking a couple of hours if you're gonna really take your time and personalize everything.
Dan: To be fair though, I personalize the first one. So that's more personalized, and then emails two through five are more generic, but it's building off of that, right? So it's not a new email. So it still has that personalized component to it. So that's what speeds things up beyond the first five.
Austin: Yeah, makes perfect sense for sure. And then you're averaging it out. But I think even if you were gonna send out a highly personalized email every time for five emails, you're talking about a couple of hours a day to stay on top of that. And it's more than what you were saying earlier about 30 minutes. But I think especially somebody who's not getting consistent revenue yet, if they're really trying to get booked and build a business and build a reputation, a couple of hours seems like a pretty reasonable amount of time to work. I spend two hours a day on outreach to get my business off the ground. Yeah, you should be okay doing that, probably. I did way more than that when I started SpeakerFlow. And I actually don't think I walked that tightrope well, of not losing my humanity. I think I really burned myself out by not being intentional enough about that in those first year or two. But regardless, it seems like a very reasonable amount of work to have somebody get done.
Dan: Can I add a little bit to that? A little bit more nuance. So I know my numbers. This is the other part of it that I think people get confused on. So at a very high level, let's just call it five a day. So that's six days a week. That's 30 leads a week, right? So over an average month, we're talking about 120 leads, right? On average, of those 120 leads, I'm probably gonna see somewhere between five to seven, maybe five to 8% response rate. So put that in perspective.
Austin: Pretty good. It's better than I think some people think it might be.
Dan: Yeah, so 120 leads. I'm going to probably get somewhere around, let's just call it, four to seven responses. Positive responses, by the way. That's what I mean by that. I'll get more responses of, who are you? Stop emailing me, take me off your list, all those things. That's okay, right? That's normal. And I could go really deep into those numbers, and then how many of those positive responses turned into discovery calls and how many discovery calls turned into bookings. By the way, the discovery call, once I get them, the whole goal of everything that I'm doing on the prospecting side of things is to get them to that discovery call. And what we coach and train on at The Speaker Lab is that once you get them to the discovery call, you treat that discovery call as if you're going on stage and performing. You do your prep, you show up, it's video. I dress and everything like I'm gonna go on stage. But anyways, that's a whole other process.
Dan: But if you put that into perspective for a second, let's just for easy numbers say I had a good month, and of the 120, I had 10 people actually give me positive responses, right? That means 110 people didn't move forward, didn't do anything. Maybe it was negative, but a vast majority of them aren't responding to me, but I'm still sending that out to them, right? And so this idea, I think sometimes I have to dispel it inside of The Speaker Lab with the speakers that we work with. No, you're gonna see way more nos or nothing. And then oftentimes that emptiness, or those nos, or not hearing back, is like, well, I'm going to blow it all up. Ugh, this doesn't work. No, it works. I've been doing these five emails a day, Austin, for six years, and being consistent with it.
Dan: And it's funny, I'm usually in some kind of one-on-one or group coaching or something every day with our students at The Speaker Lab, and as soon as I start hearing, Dan, it's not working, or I'm having this difficulty, or I'm not getting the response, I peel back the first layer, which is, tell me about your prospecting process. Let's just talk about that. And immediately, a lot of the time, 90% maybe plus, that might be an exaggeration, but whatever, it's, well, I missed this day, or I missed that day. And it's like, okay, I realize life happens, I get it. But the consistency is what hurts most people, right? And knowing that you're gonna hear more nos, way more nos, that's just part of the process. And I'm going through 120 to find the 10. That's the mindset, right? I gotta get through 120 to find the 10, or the seven or the eight or whatever the number is, right? And so the discovery call that I had a couple days ago, she was one of the 5 to 8% of people that I had to go through dozens and dozens and dozens of nos and no responses to find. And I'm so excited. It's a great fit for me, right? And so we're going to be having that discussion, but that's the process that it took.
Dan: And I think oftentimes we get stuck in this idea like, that's not working. So then it goes back to what we were talking about earlier. I'm going to go focus on, it's probably my website, I'm going to go change that, or it's probably the one sheet, I'm going to go change that. And then we get out of the loop that actually builds the business.
Austin: Yeah, man, I think that's just absolutely brilliant. The consistency. And look, that's something that I'm always thinking about when I have a conversation like this, is that zero of the things that you've described so far are talent dependent. You don't have to have spent 30 years in corporate sales to be consistent. You could have never done sales before in your life. And you know what? Your five a day might suck for a while, okay?
Dan: That's right.
Austin: But just suck for a while. That's okay. Just do it badly until you become good at it. And there's a lot of people, I think, that just sit around waiting for some perfect formula or a perfect type of lead or some skill or asset that they think that they need. And it all comes back to, what are you avoiding? So I think what you were saying earlier really ties in here. But yeah, anybody can do this.
Dan: Yeah, anyone could do it. And there's also this, sorry to cut you off, I talk about this often, what I call these false positives in speaking. I have so much information because I speak to so many speakers all the time, and I constantly hear this thing about, I went and did this one gig and it paid me 10 grand or 15 grand or whatever, and I'm not able to repeat that. I can't find more of those gigs or I can't find more of those opportunities. And it's like, well, you didn't have a process when you found that gig. That came to you from a referral. Cause I'll peel back the onion on that, right? Tell me how you found it. And they didn't have a process. It was just this thing that happened because they were connected to the right person and the timing aligned and all these things. And ultimately a lot of people come to us because they have these experiences and they're like, I've tried to duplicate them, but I don't have a system. I don't have a process. And so we help them with that.
Dan: But these false positives of, well, it's probably because of what I was doing that landed that gig. And usually they're not doing much of anything, or they may be doing some social media things or whatever. And they thought that was the reason. And that was a one-off. That wasn't the staple. Any speaker that's getting booked and paid consistently, it's not because they have viral reels, right? It's not because they have this incredibly impressive website and demo reel. It's not any of those. It's because they're consistently following the process. You guys coach and train on having a system, having the backend, having the tasks, having all those pieces, which I use, but following that piece of it. I always make this a joke a little bit. I'm like, has anyone ever been to a conference before where you've seen a speaker on stage and you thought to yourself, I could do that? And maybe if you're like me, you've had the thought of, I could do that better. Right.
Austin: Audacious.
Dan: And I always tell them, the biggest difference between that speaker and you, it's not talent. It's that they have a system and a process to get on that stage. That's it. In fact, I've seen really, to your point, Austin, I've seen really talented speakers never get seen, because they don't have a process. I've also seen really average speakers, and that's not a knock, it's just the case. Really average speakers get booked and paid like crazy because they have a system, they have a process. Here's the unique thing, what we try to do at The Speaker Lab: we try to combine the two of those. Really great speaker, really great process. That's how you have consistency and longevity in this business, in my opinion.
Austin: Yeah. Man, Dan, I think you have just really opened my eyes to the simplicity of this in some ways. It's so easy to go down rabbit holes and get distracted by stuff. And these days, more than ever, right? With AI being a thing. It's like everybody's just constantly trying to reinvent the wheel. But so much of what you're saying is just the same thing that people have been saying since How to Win Friends and Influence People. It's just business. Business is business is business. And the more we try to overcomplicate it and find the magic wand or the silver bullet, the more we're just not doing the time tested things that just always work. So I thank you for all of this. And there's so many people that really need to hear this. And look, if somebody is sitting back going like, my gosh, Dan's the guy, where do they find you and The Speaker Lab? Where would you point somebody to get started?
Dan: Yeah. Well, danirvin.com for speaking and the book and all those fun things about me and my speaking business. So that's separate from The Speaker Lab. Obviously I have a speaking business, and we mentioned this earlier, but I'm a full-time speaker. I think it's important that the CEO of The Speaker Lab is a full-time speaker. And so this year I'm going to do about 40-ish gigs. I say that because I just signed two more for this fall. So it's a fluctuating number, right? But danirvin.com for all my speaking stuff. And then you can go to thespeakerlab.com. We actually have what we call a Speaker Business Assessment that you can take that just helps us get an idea of where you're at. If you want to connect with us, that is thespeakerlab.com/sba. SBA, Speaker Business Assessment. You don't have to type all that out, just the SBA. So thespeakerlab.com/sba, if you're looking to have more consistency in getting booked and paid to speak.
Austin: You're the best, man. Thanks for coming on.
Dan: Thanks so much.
