Taylorr Payne

What most folks don’t know about me is that I went to Arizona State University to study electrochemistry. I found success there, started teaching my freshman year, and worked in a prestigious lab developing a fuel cell that could be mass-produced. 

What in the world does that have to do with SpeakerFlow? It taught me to work hard, how to think critically (of everything), and showed me the power of data and analysis.

After spending a few years there, I realized being a lab-rat really isn’t my cup of tea and knew that I wanted to eventually run my own business. However, my skillset was lacking tremendously. I knew I need to first, learn how to sell, and then learn how to market.

So, speed up aways and I meet Austin (one of the other co-founders of SpeakerFlow) in a sales job we were working. Together, we trained hundreds of salespeople from ground zero and opened up high-performing sales offices nationwide. Our teams were responsible for generating over $10M in revenue for our clients.

After reaching our potential at that company, I branched off into an ecommerce company seeking a Director of Sales. Little did I know (and little did they know), what they needed was actually a Director of Marketing. This led me down a path mastering the craft of inbound marketing and eventually turned the company around to $1.9M/year with a 40% profit margin with a team of 3.

At this point, I realized it’s time to branch out and do what I set out to do after leaving college – start my own business. I started building websites and running marketing campaigns for local businesses. This eventually led to a digital marketing agency that I started with Austin called TrafficCrafters.

Fast forward a bit and we were asked to partner with a company in the speaking industry to run marketing for professional speakers. We learned very quickly that no matter the volume of leads we generated, nothing worked unless the speaker had a bullet-proof sales process.

This led us down a path of analyzing the speaker market and trying to get a grip on what was missing. After many conversations, we realized it’s the systems that manage sales, marketing, and operations weren’t being supported. In essence, only a few speakers had a predictable and scalable business.

After this realization, we started SpeakerFlow. Originally as a 1:1 consulting company – helping speakers directly build their business system. Eventually, this led to creating technology, and of course, SpeakerFlow University.

I’ve learned a lot over the course of my career, but the #1 thing is you never really know where life is going to take you. I’m extremely grateful for our team, for quite literally stumbling into the speaking industry, and for being able to work with world-changers like you.