S. 1 Ep. 34 – The Mechanics Of A Growing Speaking Business

Taylorr: Welcome to another episode of Technically Speaking. We’re are your hosts Taylor and Austin, and in today’s episode, we’re talking about the mechanics of a growing, speaking business. And we’ve invited on the show, a dear friend of ours, a member of the NSA and someone that we’ve worked with closely Glen Guyton. Now, Glen is a leading cultural competency, speaker diversity and inclusion, and he helps organizations become more culturally competent and has been working on growing his speaking business over the last four years. We talk about what the journey has been like from starting his business in 2017, to now we talk about the trials, the tribulations, the successes of a growing speaking business. Now, if you’re listening to this, just know that you’re not alone. Growing a business is hard work, but the rewards are brilliant. As always stick around to the end for all of the resources and we really hope you like this one. All right, and we are live Glen, welcome to the show. It’s great to have you. 

Glen: Thank you. It’s great to be here. Good to see you all in person virtually. 

Austin: That’s kind of the normal today. And for those of you that are listening, you can’t see Glen’s awesome psychedelic purple and pink background.

Taylorr: It’s amazing.

Austin: It’s very Speaker Flow-esque. It makes me very happy.

Glen: Yeah.

Taylorr: We’re going to have to get that download file from you.

Austin: Seriously. 

Glen: That’s a real background. That’s an authentic background.

Taylorr: Wow. Look at that. Really? So, you just have a backdrop back there.

Glen: Yeah, I’m a professional so…

Taylorr: That’s beautiful.

Glen: I don’t make depending on…

Taylorr: You hear that folks? No virtual backgrounds in Glen’s house. None. Not okay. Cool. So, Glen, one of the ways we love to kick off the show is to learn more about your background. We often find that there are just crazy experiences in life that get us ending up in the speaking industry, the thought leadership space, what was your journey like and how did you get to where you are at today?

Glen: Yeah. Now that’s a good question because I’ve been speaking a long time and even growing up being in high school, I was always selected to speak at different events for different engagements. Of course, I didn’t get paid to do those things. And then even after I got older and kind of move to through different leadership positions and I would offer to speak and people would say, hey, can you come speak? And you may get a box of cookies or a candle or something like that to speak. And then around 2015, 2016, I was at an association meeting and I went to a seminar and it was a young woman, her name is Crystal Washington. She was there speaking and talking about her passion for speaking and I was like, wow, that’s what I want to do. And I always tell her that I stalked her, but not in a bad way, but I did.

I went to like every seminar that she had the rest of that event. She gave me her contact information, I reached out to her and talked to her about the professional speaking business and she told me to join NSA, the National Speaker Association, I joined, I think in 2016 and it just started to grow from there. 2017, I started my own LLC, GuyStar Enterprises, and worked with Crystal on a number of things. She had a course about the business of speaking, she really helped me with the business of speaking, I went to the NSA meetings and was just overwhelmed with all of these folks that were speaking and talking about the companies they worked with and I was like, man, I don’t even know if I could do this. I was just so overwhelmed, I just felt like my head was going to explode, but that was my journey. I learned the difference between a kind of just a talker and a professional speaker.

Austin: The difference between a talker and a professional speaker. That’s valid. That’s true. There are certainly different flavors here. It’s cool that you got your foray with the NSA too, we obviously love and support the NSA every [cross-talk 04:17] you’re a professional member on your site, so it’s a good community to get started with. And we love crystal too, so I can see why you were inspired by Crystal. She’s one pf our first guests on this podcast, actually.

Glen: Oh really? Okay. Yeah, she’s great. 

Taylorr: Definitely. So how did you land on your topic? It sounded like you’ve been speaking for some time in the past, you know, up until about 2015 before you’re like, wow, like this can turn into a business. What was that progression like trying to form the business, form the topic, get the ideas rolling and then kind of segue that into the actual business side of things? Tell me about that journey.

Glen: Yeah. I had a background in anti-racism training. I actually worked for religious organization, they hired me well first as a volunteer, they, brought me on to help them work with their diverse churches and things like that and I got trained in anti-racism training early on and would volunteer to do that and do presentations across Virginia at the time. Continued in that work eventually kind of got hired into a role to help organizations with intercultural competency, but again, it was just kind of my job. I didn’t really think that you could make money doing that. And also, going to NSA again, they always tell you, you have to have a niche, you have to have a niche, what’s your elevator speech? I was like, what am I going to do? What can I be an expert on? And I just started examining things in my life and looking at the different needs. I said, okay, well, I’m going to settle on diversity and inclusion. I thought about leadership, I’m going to focus on leadership. Then I’m like, it’s a thousand leadership people out here. I said, well, maybe I’ll talk about you know, goal setting. And I was thinking out even like saying that like, Oh I’m going [inaudible 06:00] achieve your goal.

Taylorr: Who even like saying that?

Glen: I know it was just so weird. I’m like, it didn’t anything for me. I said, well, I’m just going to dive into this intercultural competency thing, well at the time diversity inclusion thing and then I got qualified to be an administrator of the IDI, which is the Intercultural Development Inventory. And I started to see the potential that organizations were really seeking out qualified cultural competency speakers and it was kind of even beyond just thinking about diversity and inclusion, but it went a little bit deeper. I said, okay, I’m going to try this. And I did. I tried it. And I actually quit a couple of times. I was like, I’m not doing this, I’m not doing this. I said, if I can’t hit this target by this date, I’m not qualified to be a speaker. And I set that target, it was a low target too. I’m not going tell y’all what it was. It was a low target; it was a five-figure target. I set that target. I said, if I can’t hit this in a year, I’m not cut out to be a speaker. I hit it in like three months. 

 Taylorr: Yeah, nice.

Glen: I said, okay, maybe I can do this.

Taylorr: Absolutely

Austin: That’s awesome. Sometimes you got to have the data to get the proof of concept and if you have it, you get that momentum, it feels good. I’m hoping you can give us a little bit of an explanation from your personal perspective here, but intercultural competency is sort of the niche, it sounds like if we were to assign one. Can you help us understand what that means?

Glen: When I speak to organizations, I really want them to understand how the culture of the organization, so the way we do things around here impacts basically everything. It’s not just about what we traditionally think about as racism or getting a quota of people. Sometimes we kind of lock in on diversity and think it’s just kind of fill in these different spaces, but in intercultural competency is really how do we work together across any number of differences and then how do we leverage those differences to be more productive, to be more creative? It’s not looking at just, well, we’re going to do this kind of checkbox diversity, oh, we’re just going to focus on just one aspect of our identity, whether it’s being a woman or whether it’s gender identity, racial identity.

No, we have to be able to navigate a broad spectrum of differences. I even talk about eight different identity factors that people typically bring into a workplace. You can’t just learn how to deal with women or learn how to deal with African-Americans or learn how to deal with people from the LGBT community, you have to be able to navigate all of the complexities that make people who they are. That’s why I really focus more on the intercultural competency. And then some of it is a little less threatening. I know that’s kind of… sometimes I hesitate to say that, but it is, it’s a little less threatening than just talking about diversity and inclusion, which brings everyone’s guard up. But if we talk about cultural competency and show people how it can be applicable across a broad spectrum, then people can ease into it. And then you can get more specific about, hey, what does diversity mean? What does inclusion mean? What does equality mean? What does equity mean? Then I can get in there and really get deeper into the topics.

Austin: Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks for explaining that. I imagine, first of all, this has got to extend outside of an organization internally. The people being competent in these areas probably expands hours to all the people they connect with and communicate with. And my second point, like in the day and age of the internet, it’s never been more important for us to be able to connect with people that are not in our immediate circles. Not only are we within our organization or our city or our state or country, but we can be connected with the entire world. I think this is an important topic and I liked the way that you just explained that too so thank you.

Glen: Oh yeah. One of my clients yesterday, I dealt with a global client and they had a meeting with their leadership team, but it was people from Paris, from London, from North America, people from all over and this leadership team, they met virtually and they had some workflows where they can connect with their global team but yeah, we aren’t just kind of isolated in our bubbles anymore. If we really want to be productive, we want to grow. We really have to embrace diversity and inclusion.

Taylorr: Totally. So, you’ve been on a pretty quick journey. 2015, 2016, you had to develop business, develop the material, develop the models and then actually start positioning yourself in the market. What was it like in that building process and what are some of the ways that you were able to build your business and continue maintaining it past that point?

Glen: I really had a good team and, and you also have to understand that I’ve been in executive positions, leadership positions, I was an officer in the air force putting systems together wasn’t my challenge. Knowing what systems to put together was the challenge and translate that into the environment of today and also to the world of being a professional speaker or pretty much sales. What I did was really locked into SEO. That was really the biggest thing that has helped grow my business. I hired a web designer who I thought was just was hiring to make my website look good. She did now because my first website that I designed, I looked at it like the other day. I was like, oh man, this is horrible. No wonder nobody was paying me.

She redesigned my website and we really focused on making me an expert to the outside world. So, really focused on SEO development programs, keywords, writing blogs on my topic that were specifically focused on me being a diversity and inclusion in the workplace trainer and that really helped us start driving eyeballs to my site, the SEO, I don’t know how it works for everyone else, but it’s been like almost miraculous for me. But then in addition to that, I started putting systems in place. Using Speaker Flow with Zoho, using that to start tracking my clients, one of the things Crystal Washington helped me with was letting me know how to put my business together. So, developing templates, tracking these clients, I had a whole stack. 

This is one thing; I had a whole stack of business cards I had accumulated over the years because I was in the event planning industry before that. I met all of these meeting planners, I don’t even know even if I still have the stack, this is the old stack I have. I know some of you all listening to the on the audio, you don’t see this, but I had all these business cards. What am I going to do it all…?

Taylorr: There they are.

Glen: These business cards is it I’ve collected? And then was like, man, I need to put them in my CRM. So, I started putting them in my CRM, listening to some of the lessons from the NSA like winter conference. I was a little intimidated abide by these cold calls, I don’t want to just pick up the phone and just be randomly calling folks. That was a little intimidating for me. But after going to NSA and listening to some of the speakers talk and especially the last one in Houston, they were like, just call one person a day or two people a day. I said, well, I can do that. So, I started setting up my CRM to automate some of that. 

I started my drip campaign by mail So people would know that I’m out there, I started loading a month’s worth of posts to my Speaker Flow, to Zoho, started loading it up so that it just goes out. I don’t even have to think about it, it goes out every day. I sent out a little short post so people started finding me, actually people started calling me and good clients started calling me. And that’s just kind of what I’ve done to build my business. I still reach out and touch people, I don’t know if my prospect is similar to, to other people. It’s just really been good for me, the SEO and how that’s worked with people being able to find me in what I do.

Taylorr: Yeah, absolutely. You’re speaking my language my friend. It’s unfortunate though. A small, small, small fraction of speakers focus on SEO, but the biggest have it. If you look from like a digital perspective of the best from the rest, almost always the best has really great SEO working for them. And let’s define SEO just for our listeners who aren’t familiar with. The term SEO is search engine optimization. It’s basically optimizing your website for certain keywords, like diversity and inclusion trainer, diversity and inclusion speaker, and all of the sub categories that come along with that so you get the people who are actually searching for that when they’re looking for it. Google is amazing because like someone you’ll just they’ll have an immediate need for a diversity and inclusion speaker and then boop there comes Glen and they’re like, oh great.

It’s right in his title, going to click on that. Oh, his website is beautiful, his phone number is right there. Let me just give he a call and made it easy for me. SEO is one of the most beautiful mechanisms for generating traffic and high-quality leads to your point, Glen, but the one thing that stood out to me about what you’ve been talking about so far is even though you’ve had the SEO ball rolling, which is always great, you didn’t give up on outbound, you still do a little bit of it to maintain it. And I love that you’ve struck a balance with developing some systems that allow you to maintain good traffic to your website to generate leads but you also don’t lose the component just solely relying on that one stream of lead flow. You’ve diversified your ability to find leads and I think that’s…correct me if I’m wrong, but contributed greatly to your visibility.

Glen: Yeah, and I think so. And the other thing that I do is I call people back, like you said, you can have these websites and I see people talking about, oh, I need my website to do this and do that, and look like this and look like that. I said, no, you don’t. You need your website to be functional. You need to look like a professional, but you also need to have a way for people to reach out and contact you. And then when they reach out and contact you, you need to reach out and touch them back. It’s amazing to me, when I email prospective clients back, they’re like, oh, thank you for getting back to me so soon.

Taylorr: That’s right.

Glen: I try to get back to emails the same day, or at least within the next day, I don’t try to be cute, I don’t try to make it look like I’m so important I can’t reach out and touch people. I do have some automated options where people can use a Calendly link to find me, but I also have an assistant to schedule things for me. Sometimes I give people option depending on where our relationship is in the sales process, I’ll say, hey, just talk to my assistant, give us three days, we’ll follow up with you. If it’s something that we’ve had a number of meetings or we just need to do something really quickly. I’ll just send them a Calendly link and then they’ll reach out to me that way. But I do think that you can automate and SEO all you want, but you still have to reach out and touch people in this business.

Austin: Man, I hope everybody’s listening to what you just said because that is so true. The thing that we cannot forget is that this business really any high-ticket business is not about the transaction, it’s about the relationship. And you have to be a person working with another person and if it doesn’t feel like that on both sides, then it’s going to go a skew. I’m going to give Taylorr some credit here for a minute. And he says all the time that the lifetime value of a relationship is always greater than that of a client. And I think that what you’re saying right now speaks to that, which is that when people reach out to you, you go and talk to them and do your due diligence to have the conversation necessary for something to become of it. Because if we think that we’re going to build a website and then just sit back and money’s going to start coming through the door, it’s totally a mistake. That’s not the end of the journey. 

Taylorr: You actually got to use it, make those posts and do that optimization. 

Glen: Yeah, that CRM I’m telling you, Taylorr, I don’t know if I talked to you when I first…

Taylorr: Yeah, you did.

Glen: Got into Speaker Flow. 

Taylorr: Back in the day.

Glen: I was like, man, I don’t know if I want to spend this money, but I’m going spend this money because I’m serious. I was, at that point, I had hit my target and then the next year I hit my target again. I said okay, I’m ready to go to the next level. I said, so I’m going to get to CRM, and it’s always fun to me. Some stuff is frustrating about it like when you’re first setting it up, you all did a good job of helping me set it up though. But like kind of knowing what you want to do, but using some of the tracking features so that when you initially contact the client and then going through that little sales process, it’s so fun for me now. Even when I lose business okay, I lost this contract so I lost X amount of dollars, but I know I still have X amount of dollars in this funnel going on, so it’s just such a different place now, when you start using the tools and understanding this is a business.

And even in the rejection, so one of the things I learned from my clients, I lost almost a six-figure deal like a year ago almost, it was like a six figure deal, I just wasn’t prepared. I was like tired, I just didn’t have my systems clicking, and I lost it. I was devastated. I was like, man, this is hard. But I said, this was my ticket, this was my big contract and I lost it. I said, well, if I can lose a hundred thousand dollars, I can make a hundred thousand dollars. I worked on all the things that I knew I did wrong with that client. I developed my systems. I developed this online course, I know we’re not talking about it now, but I developed this online course because of me missing out on this opportunity. And the next year I got another contract that was equivalent to what I had lost. That was actually more than what I had lost.

Taylorr: Wow. 

Austin: Man.

Taylorr: You are just a star, my friend. So many things I want to highlight here. I think with any technology transition, it’s frustrating. You have to learn a new tool, you’ve got to figure out how it works, every tool has their isms, the way it was designed because engineers are engineers and people who use it are very different than that. And you overcome all of that, but eventually, like you said, it becomes fun because now you just have a standard way of doing things, it’s not hard, you know how to do it all and you’re maintaining that, which is giving you data to be able to continue growing your business. Bu the other thing you mentioned was about losing deals. And so even if you lost a deal, you would fix it. And like, it’s, it’s cool because like when you put it in lost, it says like, well, why you lose the deal so you can reflect on it. But most people they’ll just put in some garbage about why they lost the deal and they won’t actually reflect and make an effort to go back and fix whatever you used it as the tool to tell you what you were doing wrong, to fit it, to go back and now land more of those contracts in the future. That’s incredible, hats off to you, sir. 

Glen: It’s a thing and when we think about diversity and inclusion, a thing called imposter syndrome. Sometimes people of color or women, the marginalized people don’t feel like they are, they belong in an environment. I think I’ve dealt with some of that as a professional speaker is just man, am I really an expert? But I told some one that my clients have made me an expert in this field because each client requests different things, each client gives you feedback and you have to take that feedback and fill in the gaps that you’ve had. If a client wasn’t satisfied with this, well, how can I get better? What can I improve? One client asked me, hey, well is you have such and such of a certification. And I’m like, no, I really don’t have that. But I say, okay, well this is a potentially a big client, this is a multinational billion-dollar corporation. Maybe I need to get that certification so the next time I talk to them, I’m more competitive. That’s kind of the things that I try to learn from each client.

Austin: Yeah. And look, this process is not complicated people. You’re listening to what people have to say, you’re not taking it personally, you’re just trying to find the ways to improve and then you take action on it. Boom. That’s the formula right there. 

Glen: That’s it.

Austin:  If you feel stuck, you just need to talk to people, listen to what they say, don’t take it personally, take some action on it and your business and your life probably will improve because of it. And then what a shining example of that so nice work. I cannot highlight what you’re saying enough. It makes my heart so warm. 

Taylorr: Definitely.

Austin: So, Glen, one of the things that you mentioned to us before the episode was the ability to use partnerships, to be able to grow the business. Can you sort of to help us understand how that’s been effective for you?

Glen: Yeah, because if you want to be a solopreneur, there’s only so much you can do. There’s only so many hours a day. Last week I had a number of projects that I had to get ready for. I had to get up at 4:30 AM, and I was working till five. So, I was working basically 12-hour days to just try to fit everything in and then still pay attention to my wife and my family, I don’t want to lose them to make money. So, what I started doing was trying to think of, well, who can help me? What am I skills and then where can I bring other people in? I’ve actually, intentionally reached out to either other speakers, sometimes I may refer business to other people, but I have a number of consultants that I can call now if I have a project that’s too big for me. 

I have a recurring client right now that I’ve gotten, who’s taken two days a month from February to April and I have other stuff I have to do, it’s two days a month are gone. I had another prospective client looking for a big pitch so I called up another consultant and say, hey, you’re really good at, you know, this organizational theory, another person is curriculum specialist, this person also has their own admin assistant team. I said, hey, would you all like to partner together on this project? And then especially in my line of work, it’s a young, white woman, another millennial, white guy, another gen X African-American woman, and me. And so, we’re pitching to a company that wants to talk about diversity and inclusion and there you go, I have a diverse team of people.

Going back to my course leadership diversified. It’s me. And it’s another white guy that brings in another level of expertise but again, it’s also modeling some diversity. I think that’s important, especially if clients are looking for some diversity in the work that they do, you can tap into relationships that you have and you lay out things, however you want to lay them out. There are a number of different options for you to do that. Whether it’s on commission, or whether it’s just hey, you get your fee, I get my fee and we go our separate ways. But that partnership really extends our capacity. I’ve actually built in a specific pitch that I’m going to do. I said, Hey, we’ve, we’ve worked together on this right now, any one of you can pitch this to anyone of your clients. We already know the fee structure. If you get it, then we’ll give you a little bit of extra. If I get it, I’ll get a little bit extra, but we already have this wonderful program developed let’s just use it and all of us can grow and all of us can benefit.

Taylorr: Yeah, man, I love that. I love throughout this entire episode too, you’ve just mentioned like almost right from the get go hiring somebody like with your website. 

Glen: Oh, you got to.

Taylorr: That wasn’t your strong suit so you found somebody. You got a VA or an assistant to help you, you got that, you got people around you to help facilitate larger deals so you don’t have to bear all of that weight by yourself. I think it’s a big differentiator between some of the speakers out there who are solopreneurs and the ones that aren’t. If they’re looking for that revenue goal, that quarter million dollars, that half a million dollars, that three quarters, that full million, your team just has to become larger, more diverse, strong and you’re just on a war path to do that.

Glen: Yeah. I do have a team of people, but it’s not like I have everybody on a payroll. These all contractors, hourly people. I have an assistant, I may pay my assistant seven or eight, eight hours a month. It’s not a lot, but that’s seven or eight hours is a lot for me if I had to do the work, if I had to stop and break my flow. But now, she sends me her hours monthly and we have an agreement, hey, you know, 10 hours a month, if you can do that, that helps me a lot. What is that? That’s like two hours a week that can really make a significant difference in your business.

My SEO person, I basically contract them two hours a month. It’s kind of like a retainer. They constantly monitor things and if something happens like my host went down for some reason, my host shifted my website and it crashed my website for like a day, which was a lot for me. Because the day after my website came up, I got a full fee prospective client that I signed. So, I’m thinking like one day and I wound up paying my designer, I’ll say like 600 bucks to do all the troubleshooting, she was on the phone, calling the host people, figuring out what’s going on and telling me about mirroring and all this other stuff that I don’t care about, but she did all that stuff. And I happily paid her the 600 bucks. And I know it sounds like a lot because I was just like on this other side of this 12 months ago, when I would’ve thought, man, that’s a whole lot of money, but that $600 kept me from losing 10 times that much with another client.

That’s how I think about these things now. And I don’t know who listens to your podcast right now I probably sound like a diva, Oh, he just paid $600. But I understand because you know, 24 months ago, I wasn’t there. I wasn’t in that mentality. But if you want to shift your business, you really have to start thinking about where can I start utilizing my time to do something else. That 10 hours a month doesn’t seem like a lot, but it does because it takes me some time to write a blog, it takes me some time to think about all of the posts that I’m going to put up on social media and so if I had to spend 10 hours calling people or doing my contracts, or figuring out how to follow up with people, calling them three times to find out, set up one meeting, I wouldn’t have time to do the revenue generating things.

And some of you all, if you have families, I even pay my daughter now. My daughter actually designs all my social media posts and I pay her to because I want her to know there’s some value in it. So, my daughter does it, I tell her what I want to do and she’s creative like that, she’s 20 years old, but she designs those things for me and she lays them all out. That just saves me time. And I pay her because I want her to understand too, the value of her time that I value her for doing this work.

Taylorr: For sure. 

Austin: There’s that old adage that says, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. It seems like you’re finding that to be true. And it makes sense. You got to prioritize, if you’re the expert, then your time is valuable and you should be spending doing the thing that’s most valuable for your clients and for your business and designing social media posts doesn’t qualify for that. You can find somebody else to do that and give them the ideas and let them do it. It’s a mindset thing and…

Glen: It is.

Austin: I’m glad that you’ve illustrated the way that you look at this. I think it’s important for people to hear. 

Taylorr: Absolutely. Glen, this has been an awesome episode. Thank you so much for sharing your journey with us, sharing your insight, singing the good word about how to grow a good business. And you know, as you know, we’re all about creating value for our audience, what are some of the things that you’re working on right now that everyone can benefit from? 

Glen: Yeah. I mentioned it a couple of times, but Leadership Diversified is my new online course and I tag it as a proven method for navigating, communicating and collaborating with an increasingly diverse workforce. It’s a very affordable course Leadership Diversified, you can go to that URL, look that up, but it really gives people the tools to understand who they are. I think that’s the really the first part in this diversity inclusion work. Who are you? Where do you want to go? And then how do you start communicating with people that are different from you? How do you collaborate and build better teams? If you want to be a better leader, if you want to enhance your strengths, I think this course is really good for self-reflection. Even if you are a speaker and you’re trying to figure out how to navigate and communicate with different clients, I think this course could be of some value. So check it out, leadershipdiversified.com.

Taylorr: Awesome. I will have a link in the show notes and hey, if you found this episode valuable don’t forget to rate subscribe, and if you want more awesome resources like this, go to speakerflow.com/resources. Thank you so much for chiming in. I just wanted to take a second to thank our sponsor Auxbus. Auxbus is the all-in-one suite of tools, you need to run your podcast. And it’s actually what we run here at Speaker Flow for Technically Speaking. It makes planning podcast simple; it makes recording podcasts simple; it even makes publishing podcasts to the masses simple and quite honestly, Technically Speaking wouldn’t be up as soon as it is without Auxbus. Thank you so much Auxbus. And if you are interested in checking Auxbus out, whether you’re starting a podcast or you have one currently get our special offer auxbus.com/speakerflow, or click the link below in our show notes.