The Secret to Landing TEDx and the Biggest Stages on Earth - Even if You are Just Starting Out with Taylor Conroy

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Business Made Simple. Today, we'll be breaking down the secret to landing TEDx in the biggest stages on earth, even if you are just starting out. To drop these value bombs, I brought Taylor Conroy into EO Fire Studios. Taylor has spoken at TEDx, Harvard Princeton, and the United Nations, Google, Lululemon, KPMG, and to 100 ,000 people globally. He is the expert at landing 10x talks in huge stages around the world.

0:39And we'll talk about how much money somebody can make as a speaker, a clear path to making over 30K a month as a speaker, aspiring speakers make a lot of mistakes, what's the biggest mistake, and so much more, Fire Nation. And we actually have a live webinar that you can go to with me and Taylor, and it's free, thought-leaders.com slash fire. thought-leaders.com slash fire. Come and join us on this live webinar. If you miss it, go to the same URL because there's going to be a recording of that webinar, which will have so much value. And as soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors, we will dive right in.

1:22The Hustle Daily Show, hosted by Juliet Bennett-Ryla, Rob Litturse, Ben Berkley, and Mark Dent, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. The Hustle Daily Show brings you a healthy dose of irreverent, offbeat, informative takes on business and tech news, like a recent episode on hackers versus casinos, where the hosts talk about MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment and the devastating potential of cyber attacks. Listen to The Hustle Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Shopify is the global commerce platform that powers 10 % of all e-commerce in the US.

1:56Sign up for a$1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash onfire, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash onfire now to take your business to new heights, no matter what stage you're in. Taylor, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Ooh, consistency is sexy, period. Oh, Fire Nation. Taylor's to the point. He is dropping value bombs on the secret to landing TEDx in the biggest stages on earth, even if you are just starting out. And we're going to be talking a lot about you, Fire Nation, having a clear path to making dollar dollar bills, y 'all, when you're speaking.

2:44But Taylor, I want to put you in the shoes of many of my listeners today here. If you were starting at zero and wanted to be a highly paid speaker, what the heck would you do? First thing is something I would not do. And I would not think that speaking is this ambiguous, mysterious enigma of an industry that maybe sometimes you land a gig and sometimes it's three grand, five grand, 300 bucks and 2000 bucks or whatever it might be and realize it's a business. It is a process. I've been speaking all over the world for, I don't know, 12 years. I've spoken in front of 100 ,000 people on six continents.

3:24And the one thing I've learned is that none of it is mysterious. Everything is repeatable. Everything is predictable when you have the right roadmap. So what would you want Fire Nation to do starting off if they've just consumed what you just shared and they're on board with that? If enough people know that you speak, if enough people know that you're on a mission to do something great in the world, let's say, If enough people know, then you're going to get asked to speak. There's nothing crazy or mysterious about it. So the mission becomes very, very clear. Get really specific. This is what I'm doing in the world.

3:59This is what I speak on. This is the problem I want to solve or the impact that I want to make, let's say. And have that mission, that problem-solving capacity put in front of enough people that actually have the budgets to pay you to speak. And then you'll start to get paid to speak. And I'll give you a really quick example. when I started my speaking career, I was like, gung, I was first, I was terrified of public speaking. Like literally every morning, if I had a gig coming up, I would wake up, which is like this pit, not as pit in my stomach thinking, Oh my God, I got to go on stage. I like on the verge of throwing up before speaking gigs, no lie.

4:33But I had this, like this mission. It was really, really important to me to build schools all over the world. I wanted to speak in front of audience. So it would get people raising money to build schools in Kenya, Nicaragua, Ghana, Sierra Leone, you name it. And because of building, because of all the paid speaker, all the speaking I did, we ended up building like 300 schools all over the world. And what, what happened was that all the people that would get me to speak at their event, and maybe they'd pay me five grand or 10 grand or 2 ,500 bucks, whatever it was, all of them, none of them were hiring me to quote unquote, be a speaker.

5:04They're hiring me because they wanted to help me on my mission. So the first thing that we, that we do with people that are, you know, that we're helping to get paid speaking gigs is you get them out of the mindset of like trying to go and get as many nickels and dimes from a stage as possible and think of what is the mission you're on because when you have a mission you're like on fire for it pun intended and you're so passionate about it people want to help you and therefore they put you on their stage to get you in front of a whole bunch of people because they become passionate about your mission so when you combine those two things you're really clear on what's your mission this is what i stand for this is what i'm passionate about this is the problem i'm solving this is the thing that i'm going to end in the world or the thing that i'm going to begin or expand, whatever it might be.

5:43If you get that in front of the right people, the more tangible, we have a list of 6 ,200 speaking events happening all over the world. So you getting a bunch of speaking events, we get clear on what he's talking about, package you in the right way, just get you in front of the right events. And then you shift from this hoping energy around speaking into knowing because it's a process and it's predictable. I'm big on transparency. I'm big on sharing the real numbers. For 120 months in a row, Taylor, I've been publishing a monthly income report of every dollar that I've made. So I want to get real with my audience with you.

6:20How much money can someone make as a speaker? Well, I'm going to be very transparent with that and give some context. Most people think that the The only way to make money from speaking is keynoting, getting a$5 ,000 to go out there and speak for half an hour, an hour. Nothing's further from the truth, especially from today. Think about, think back like three and a half years ago, three and a half years ago, all the keynoters around, they're just tooting around the world, doing their thing. They go to speak at this event. They go to speak at that event. Six months later, 2020 slaps them like a ton of bricks in the face and keynote speakers are out of business.

6:57Like gone. Their careers are done because they depended on in-person live events, which collapsed, like evaporated overnight. I don't know if anybody remembers three years ago, but stuff got weird, right? And that means that was a very one-dimensional speaker. And all the one-dimensional speakers lost all of the revenue completely done over for a year, a year and a half. The events have not even come back full tilt yet. So we need to realize there's a whole bunch of different ways to make money from speaking. You can make a bunch of money on a podcast, you know, speaking on a podcast. You can make a bunch of money.

7:31It was on a virtual summit. You can make a bunch of money on a stage that you paid to be on, right? Like I flew to Orlando a few months ago, knowing that we were paying$20 ,000. My company was going to pay$20 ,000 to the speaking, uh, to the event for me to be able to speak, knowing that we would make at least a hundred to$150 ,000 from that stage. Right? So when you start implementing platform speaking, which is what that is, or sponsored speaking, where you're getting sponsored by a corporation to do a couple different activations within their company, plus keynoting, plus all your virtual summits and webinars, when you do those four different things together, you become a holistic, highly paid speaker.

8:11And so realistic, if I told you how much we make from speaking nowadays, we make pretty much all of our money from speaking. from me speaking on a podcast or at an event or on a webinar. All of it comes from speaking. And so the company that I have right now, we do one to one and a half million dollars a month, and it all comes from speaking. And it started with speaking for 500 bucks. And it started from speaking for 1 ,500 bucks and$5 ,000 and then realizing which stages were the highest leverage. Every Tuesday, I speak on a quote-unquote virtual stage, and we do at least 50 to$75 ,000 every Tuesday because I speak on this virtual stage in front of an audience.

8:48So I want to be really transparent. If you're just starting out from scratch, you've never been a speaker before, you never made a dime from speaking, it is very realistic to get your first paid speaking gig within 90 days. Very realistic. And that could be$2 ,500,$5 ,000. I could name 12 of our speakers that all made at least$3 ,000 within the first 90 days. From there, it's simply a matter of scaling what's actually working, whether it be keynotes or your sponsored speaking. If you're into platform speaking and you've got something like a book or a coaching offer, like one-on-one or group coaching or something like that, you are set up to make exorbitant amounts of money because there's a whole bunch of audiences out there that would love to have you speak in front of them.

9:26You're going to provide them a whole bunch of value and then they can enroll in your program afterwards. So the most candid, transparent answer I can give you is at least three to five grand within the first 30 to 90 days if you haven't been a speaker before. And after that, the sky's the limit. We've got clients that have made over a million dollars from speaking because they just found out what worked and scaled it. Fire Nation, we have a lot to talk about on this topic. Full transparency when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Can you believe we're already in Q4? This year has flown by, but Q4 is an exciting time and not just because the holidays are right around the corner.

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11:56That's policygenius.com. In 2012, I launched EO Fire. And by 2016, I was selling my first physical product online to hundreds of thousands of people. Thanks to Shopify, selling online was so easy. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. From launching an online store all the way to your 1 ,000 orders milestone, Shopify is there to help. Whether you're selling hardcover journals or handmade jewelry, Shopify helps you sell wherever and whatever. Plus, Shopify gives you the internet's best converting checkout. 15 % better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms.

12:32And now you can sell even more with less effort thanks to Shopify magic, your AI powered all-star Shopify powers 10 % of all e-commerce in the U S and with their award winning 24 seven support, they've always got your back. Sign up for a$1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash on fire, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash on fire. Now to take your business to new heights, no matter what stage you're in, shopify.com slash on fire. So we're back and let's be honest with Fire Nation as we've been thus far. Aspiring speakers make a lot of mistakes, but what's the biggest? If I was to try to narrow it down to like the one mistake that aspiring speakers make is they get so honed in and focused and crazy and maniacal about what quote unquote makes sense to be in the talk, right?

13:23And they lose perspective. They lose the sight of what is actually important in a talk. And that is the experience of the audience. And I want to give you like the number one contributor to the experience of the audience being exactly what it wanted to be is in a word, it's contrast. And that contrast means high highs, low lows, punch you in the face, great information, anecdotes, stories, all of the things so that you can live out that quote by Maya Angelou that says people will forget what you did. They'll forget what you said, but they'll never forget the way you made them feel yet over and over and over again.

14:00People are focused totally on here's what I did or here and what they're saying in their speech. They're not real, not realizing their job up there. And I get really passionate about this because I hate seeing people forget it because they blow these opportunities. Their job up there is not to say all the right things. Their job up there is to create feelings in the audience. The audience wasn't feeling before. I want that audience freaking crying their faces off in that talk. I want them laughing. I want them euphoric. I want them mad at something and passionate about something. And only after they've felt all the things, then and only then do you dive into like your main point of the talk.

14:36Like the way that we teach all of our clients, like we've got a program, it's called highly paid speaker. And we, you know, sure help them book paid gigs, but we help them write a talk that's worth over$10 ,000 And a talk that's worth over$10 ,000 has incredible emotion. I've got a slide that I put in all my talks, and I highly recommend people copy this approach for your own talks, whether we work together or not. Copy this approach, this works. There's a slide in my talk that even just thinking about it right now, John, just thinking about that slide is bringing me to tears because I've done so much work around anchoring in this deep, sad, profound emotion.

15:15every time I see that slide so that when I get on stage, I'm a professional speaker. So when I go on stage, a professional knows what he's going to say and how he's going to feel every time he says it. So I can get on stage, I can put that slide on, look at it, bang. I'm in tears because I'm reliving the emotions that I felt in Uganda when I looked in these young girls' eyes when I was on that trip. And it brings me to tears every single time. And what most speakers do is they make the mistake of getting up there trying to sound perfect. I would much rather someone feel so vulnerable on stage, so soft, so raw that the audience feels it.

15:48Experiences gets tingles all over their body. They start crying. We start crying. All the things happen. And then we contrast that with some of the funniest stuff that you're going to say in your talk or some sort of like letting the air out of the balloon punchline. So it gets people like, holy cow, having all of these ups and downs, just like you would in a Hollywood movie, right? If you watch any romantic comedies, you get all these ups and downs. Are they going to get back together? I don't know. And people love feeling. So if you don't know how your audience is feeling, literally based on every word or every sentence in your talk, then you're going out there winging and potentially making the biggest mistake that most speakers make.

16:26You landed Harvard, Google, I mean the United Nations as speaking gigs. How the heck did you do that? To be honest with you, Google, straight up real story here. I was in New York. I had a meeting with, I don't know, someone. And I was going down the subway station and I see this person. I genuinely felt I should probably talk to that person for some reason. And so I struck up a conversation with the person. They happened to work at Google and they said, what do you do? And I said, I'm a speaker. What do you speak on? And I knew what to say because I'd packaged myself. I'd presented myself a hundred times as a speaker.

17:02I had my little 30 second blurb, bang, let her know what I, what I did. She goes, you should come and speak at Google. I said, okay, that sounds cool. She had me come and speak at Google in San Francisco and at New York, the talks reached tens of thousands of people from a subway. But in reality, it's not what I said on the subway. It's what I packaged and prepared way before the subway meeting, which is all the same things that landed me to the United Nations. Same thing at Disney, same thing at KPMG and Morgan Stanley, Lululemon, Pfizer, and all these different places that I've spoken is I know exactly what I stand for as a speaker.

17:33I know the experience that I want the audience to have because they watched my talk. And because I know that experience, you could put me in front of anyone on earth and I could tell them, you know, 10 seconds, how long I've got to talk, 10 seconds, 30 seconds. And if anyone could possibly land a speaking gig with them, I'm going to land it because I know exactly what I'm going to say. And that's what we teach our clients, right? Like you need to know what to say to the people that have the opportunity to pay you to speak. And when you take that, basically, you know, you say the right thing in front of the right people, you get the gigs.

18:04So that's how, you know, Google came from a subway. Harvard came from an email to someone that I sent saying, Hey, this is what I stand for. And here's my TEDx talk. What do you think? The United Nations came from after speaking gig, this woman came up, she says, Hey, I think I want to have you come and speak to the United Nations. What would you talk about? And I went, blap this. And she goes, Oh my God, you got to be there. She had me speak there four times. You know, So when you know exactly what to say and position yourself in the right way, which, by the way, is extremely easy to do. I shouldn't say it's very simple to do.

18:34Like if I did, you and I, I mean, you've already done this exercise a million times. Give me any one of your listeners. Give them to me for three minutes. I'll get them clear on this stuff so that they can leverage every opportunity that comes across their plate and not think about what they should say, but know exactly what to say to land as many gigs as possible. Give us a real world example of somebody just starting out that achieved something big in the speaking space. okay so picture you know southwest airlines yeah they're funny right they have the flight attendants that come on and they say some anecdotes or funny stories the funniest airline by far and picture a flight attendants male flight attendants at the front of the plane speaking in the into the intercom guy named mike uh 40 years old telling some jokes and anecdotes and thinking man i kind of like this part of my job i like speaking into this microphone and having this audience of 300 people that can't leave because they're on a plane with me.

19:31And I like when people laugh at my jokes. Mike came to us being like, Hey, I'm a flight attendant. I've never really done anything like that monumental in my life. Can you make me a speaker? And we're like, yeah, no problem. So we helped Mike get a big talk. Mike is now the flight attendant who still works like two days a month so he can keep all his flight benefits, which I think is a really good idea. Mike has now made over$100 ,000 since starting out because we got really clear on the niche that he's in. He does workshops. He does little speaking gigs. He does appointments or talks and speeches for educational boards all over the country.

20:10He is someone who literally was just starting out on a microphone at the front of a Southwest plane and had all those fears and doubts of like, I don't know enough. And that person probably knows more than me, which I've felt a million times. I barely graduated high school. I've got no post-secondary. Again, I'm just terrified of public speaking. That's where everybody starts. What the difference is, is that Mike and chances are a bunch of people that are listening to this have this little nagging feeling inside of like, I think I could do that. I think I could be a speaker. I think I could maybe make some people laugh or tell some stories or give an emotional experience.

20:45And that, That, in my mind, that little instinct, that impulse inside is like the yearning for expansion that is only going to take place via sharing your message. So that's one example of many that I've got. Mike, again, he's done over$100 ,000 in workshops and speeches. And his only experience speaking was at the front of a Southwest plane cracking some jokes. I mean, that is straight fire, Fire Nation. I hope you're getting excited. And if you don't know it already, thought leaders and entrepreneurs on fire, We have done a lot of business together in the past couple of years. So much so, Fire Nation, that Thought Leaders is now an annual sponsor of this podcast, which I know a lot of you know from hearing the sponsorships and the calls to action.

21:28Because you, Fire Nation, are a fantastic avatar, potential client for what Thought Leader has going on. So there's a live webinar on October 10th. And if you listen to this after October 10th, Fire Nation, don't worry about it. There's going to be a replay posted there. Still go consume the fantastic content. Let's talk about this live webinar on October 10th, Taylor. Fire Nation needs to get excited. It's thought-leader.com slash fire, thought-leader.com slash fire to secure your spots. What does Fire Nation need to know about this? I think what they need to know is what they'll know at the end of it.

22:09The goal of the presentation is to share unequivocally point blank, everything that you need to be a highly paid holistic speaker within the next 90 days. Like holistic as in regardless of the world shuts down again, regardless of flights get canceled, regardless of you don't want to leave home because you got like, like myself, I've got an almost two year old that I'm so in love with. I never want to leave. And I also live 2000 miles into the Pacific ocean on the island of Oahu and Hawaii. I never, I don't like leaving. Why would I leave paradise and my son? And so I want to be a speaker still.

22:44So for people that want to be a speaker and that fits into your life, whether you got a family or whatever you're doing in your life, or if you want to go and do the keynotes all over the world, or if you want to do the platform speaking, my goal in the presentation is to share with you exactly how to do that within the next 90 days. Even if you want to do it all by yourself for free, all the things, my goal is to equip them with all of that within whatever, I think it's like a 60 minute presentation. Thought-leader.com slash fire. Taylor, give us the final call to action, the final takeaway you want to make sure our listeners get from our conversation today.

23:18I actually think the takeaway is what part of this, I guess my question to your listeners is what part of this podcast made you feel something inside like, oof, I think I could do that. or man, it'd be really nice to not be working nine to five and be in control of my schedule and to travel a bit and maybe go to Morocco and do a speaking gig and maybe go to Costa Rica and do a speaking gig or maybe to fly to Spain and do a gig and get to see the world while sharing the message that I have inside me. Because I remember hearing this quote one time by Benjamin Disraeli said something to the extent of the most biggest tragedy is people dying with their music still inside them.

23:59And for a lot of us, our music is our message. It's our story. And if you've gone through a whole bunch of stuff in your life, you went through it for a reason. You went through it so that you could help other people go through it faster to live more comfortable, happier, freer, more euphoric lives, whatever it might be. And so I think it's the biggest tragedy to see people die with that inside them, which is why I love being the vehicle for getting people's messages out to a whole bunch of people and them getting remunerated very, very handsomely for it. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

24:34You've been hanging out with TC and JLD today, so keep up the heat. For links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Type Taylor in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up. Join us live October 10th, thought-leader.com slash fire. Taylor, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, brother, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side.