The small business landscape has drastically transformed due to COVID-19. In response, here at Grow Disrupt, we have designed an online conference, the Small Business Supercharge, specifically to support the small business community and we are giving away access for free!
We spent weeks recruiting an amazing list of speakers from globally renowned entrepreneurs, including the founder of Priceline, who are showing up not just to give small business owners ideas, but to also provide the training on the application necessary to evolve their business to the next level. Our goal is to help small businesses evolve in the aftermath of the pandemic so they can thrive. (As per usual, this is a no-pitch zone for our speakers.)
Leading up to the Small Business Supercharge, I (Stephanie) wanted to give you a little taste of who we are talking to and why. I had a chance to sit down with one of our speakers, Li Hayes, to discuss what makes her process, as the leading event integration agent, different. (And in the words of Mike Michalowicz, different is better!)
Now, I speak with a lot of agents and I speak with a lot of speakers, and I can truly say that Li’s process is incredibly unique. Her approach makes both the events and the speaker wildly successful. For business owners, speaking is a path to business growth and personal success. If you own a service or product-based business, speaking opens up new doors, creates brand recognition, and generate sales. So after years of working with speakers and event planners, Li created a program for emerging speakers, so they can build the same kind of success big-name speakers with landings.
Here is our discussion:
Tell us a little bit about you. You have been working with speakers for quite a while now. Right?
I have been working with speakers for many years. Very quickly, I realized that I did not want to be a speaker “agent.” I always yell at people when they call me an agent! When event planners go to bureaus or agencies, the agent asks, “What is your budget?” Then, they just find a speaker at the top of your budget, because that maximizes their commission. That is it. But that speaker may not necessarily be the right fit for your event, and sometimes the event is not right for the speaker.
So what I do is, look at what the event planner is trying to do, look at their strategy and how they are growing this event, and how they are going to be successful next year with the next event. I then look at what speakers are going to help make them successful. It is not just, “What is the possible highest rate I can get for every speaker?”
As for speakers, speaking is not just about, “Here is my fee!” Right? What is the speaker's road to success? So when there is an event and there is a speaker, we look at both of their goals and see if they are similar so that they add value for each other. It is important to not only get value from the speaker standing on the stage but maybe they promote it for you, and they send videos, content, product, books or other things that are going to help you fill the seats, right? Conversely, we also look at whether the event has the right target audience for them where they are going to grow and/or get customers.
Put all of those together, and you make magic! That is when we have event planners, like you, who every year come back and go, “Li, we had a great year last year, what can we do this year?” My speakers are the same way! They are like, “We love Stephanie Scheller’s event! It was the right event!” Now, I have not introduced you to all my speakers, because some of them are not the right fit.
I think a lot of small business owners are starting to realize that this is a really cool marketing tool. But people buy a lot easier when they have had the chance to hear you speak. So now everyone is saying, “I should get on stage.” But what I have learned is that so many speakers that are just dry. I think we did two major events without you and you have been part of every major event we have done since because I realized that so many speakers come in just trying to get on a stage and get their fee. Nobody wins in those situations.
So how did you figure out that this magic was what was important?
I figured out that every business needs to play the long game. I do not like dealing with people who are in it for the short game or who are in it for the moment. I do not like to work with event planners who say,
“Who can we get cheaply because I am trying to make a lot of money. I want to cash in on this event!... Can you just get somebody free up on stage just like just to stand there and talk or something? I do not want to waste any of these ticket sales on speakers!”
That is not the long game. The audience will just think,
“Whoa, this is pretty bad!..