A former roadie for bands like Def Leppard, South African Richard Mulholland is founder of presentation powerhouse Missing Link. He works with executives and speakers around the world, helping them deliver unforgettable presentations that activate audiences and generate income and has spoken in over 30 countries on six continents.
When COVID threatened to destroy his business he did what he’s always done: face the challenge and create productized services that make his business stronger than ever. Learn Richard’s secrets for creating powerful presentations that help you take control of your own future!
TIMESTAMPS:
0:53 A presentation isn’t actually about getting your message across. It’s about activating the audience at the end of it.
3:40 Entrepreneurs always do one of two things: they fix a problem or they fill a gap. You need to be problem hunting.
5:29 the 2 times in Rich’s entrepreneurial journey that he had the freedom to fail, and why the COVID shutdown led to the best month in his company’s history.
15:43 the primary way Rich grows his business and the mistake most entrepreneurs make when speaking
17:14 once you figure out what you want your area of authority to be, shut up about everything else
18:43 the assumptions we all suffer from
20:54 your job is to help your audience defeat their dragon. Turn general knowledge into specific knowledge to help defeat the enemy.
22:45 What Rich has discovered makes a good speaker.
27:29 Stopforth’s Law says when a topic that lacks an expert, whoever puts their hand up first becomes it because of the vacuum
33:28 Rich’s top advice for speakers on adapting from the physical stage into the virtual
36:13 Rich’s tips for finding prospective audiences
39:14 why Rich says the “new normal” is the worst term to come out of the pandemic, and how the shutdown enabled him to ramp up efficiency.
40:52 how Rich has separated the act of taking a brief from a customer from the act of building a relationship
44:40 the number one thing speakers say when they come to Missing Link, and why they’re wrong.
46:43 how Rich uses domain name extensions like getrich.af creatively to be memorable & to help weed out clients they don’t want to work with
Tweetable quotes:
“If you want to be somebody’s favorite you have to be willing to be somebody else’s worst. Polarize ruthlessly.”
“Speaking isn’t about getting your message across. It’s about activating the audience at the end of it.”
“In speaking, you have to build the brand of the problem. You don’t have to build your own brand.”
“Once you decide what you want your area of authority to be, shut up about everything else.”
LINKS:
Missing Link, Richard’s company
Richard Mulholland
Get Rich’s Storyseller book for free
TRANSCRIPT:
LISA: This week we have Rich Mulholland with us. Rich is the founder of Missing Link which is a really cool, um, well i’m just going to let Rich explain it to you because I won’t do it justice. So Rich tell us about your business first.
RICH: basically we’re a presentation company, uh, so that’s all we do. We’re a one-trick pony. We try and help people be less crap when they’re in public. We want to make sure that they get their message across and activate audiences, and just not deliver really, really bad presentations.
LISA: less crap, y’all! That’s the key words. I would say that the problem that you solve is one that almost every single person has who is in business, whether they’re an entrepreneur, or an employee or whatever, that we suck at getting our messages across and we suck at giving presentations. Right?
Rich: right, and I guess what we fail at as well is, it’s not just, because it’s not actually about getting your message across. It’s about activating the audience at the end of it. We’re really, really bad at connecting those two things. A presentation is about delivering a message to achieve a result. We spend far too much time thinking about delivering the message and not nearly enough time thinking about the result we want to achieve.
LISA: see, that’s a great point! You already, even though I know it I’m not thinking that way so you helped shift me back over. Before we start talking more about the presentations themselves, tell us about your background and how you got started in this because it’s a really cool story.
RICH: well, so I used to be, when I left school I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do and, uh, I ended up by a whole virtue of happy accidents getting involved in a road crew. A company called Gearhouse, where I became a lighting technician and lighting designer. I was lucky enough to tour with various bands like Iron Maiden and Def Leppard. And, uh, what had happened was I was part of a South African leg of a touring crew and in winter we didn’t have work because South Africans don’t like to go to concerts when it’s cold. Which is crazy because I was born in Scotland and if you didn’t want to go to concerts when there was bad weather there was no concert.
LISA: yeah, you would never go!
RICH: yeah, you just never would. You would never go. And so I realized this. But I’d gone to my boss and I saw there was two areas: uh, there was the rave market because apparently when people take drugs they didn’t, you know, worry about the cold, and there was the corporate market. So I set up a small division. I was, I just turned 21 and it was to tackle those markets. After a while I realized that it didn’t matter how good the lighting, sound, and staging was that we sold these conferences. If the presentations were terrible, it was terrible, right? You can’t fix a steak, a bad steak, with pretty garnish. And so what I’d started doing is out, like, outsourcing work to other people that I’d met to try and do these presentations and then we kind of started a little company on the side. And then, before I knew it, we had that it was six of us including me, even though I was still working at the staging company. So it was myself and five others. And then I thought, well okay, there’s obviously something to this. So just before my 23rd birthday I left and I started Missing Link.
LISA: that is so cool! And everybody out there, I want y’all to pay attention to the fact that Rich was an employee at the time but he was already thinking entrepreneurially, you know? There was, they had this time of the year that they didn’t have enough business and he started figuring out what problem is out there that we can help solve, that can help bring us revenue. So I think that’s very interesting because even a lot of entrepreneurs don’t think entrepreneurially. But you already were.
Rich: I was just going to say that, in my mind, entrepreneurs always do one of two things, they always do one of two things: they fix a problem or they fill a gap. And to me, what you have to be doing is problem hunting. You’ve got to look for problems in the world that you think are worth solving. Because if you think they’re worth solving, other
people will agree and there’s a market there. The lie we’re told is to do what you love, because if you do what you love it already works! You love it because it’s amazing and it works, so the market for that is often saturated or less. Now, obviously, there’s there’s exceptions there, but you should always try and find out what are the UPS’s for you. What is the unique problem that only you can solve? And start from there.
LISA: yeah, I think too often business owners are more business owners than entrepreneurs. We have our business, we’re already doing a thing, we’re going down that road and we’re not paying attention to everything that’s going on around us, in an imaginative way if you will.
RICH: Just totally agree with you.
LISA: One thing the other week when we talked that I thought was very interesting, there were two inflection points in your business. One was back when you were first starting it and your parents were moving, and then the second was COVID. And the fact that, the fact that you were really under the gun, that you had to do something to make things work, share that with the audience.
RICH: All right, so do you want me to do the parents one first or do you want to do the COVID one first?
LISA: yeah, yeah, because I want them to see that it’s totally different things but it requires the same skill set and thought patterns.
RICH: so there was so much lucky timing. I said I started the business at 22 and a lot of that was based on the fact that there was nothing, there was no risk. So I’ve had two times in my life that I had basically no personal risk. The first was when I started the business and the second was this year.
When I started the business I was still living at home and everything was great and I thought, well, you know what? I had a relatively good job, I think a very good job for my age, and I was risking it to go and start a company with, for all intents and purposes other than the work we’d already sold, I had one month salary. But it didn’t matter because i lived at home and nothing could be terrible.
And I quit my my job, I went and started it. And then about a month and a half later my parents came, we lived in Johannesburg in South Africa at the time, and said that they were moving down to Cape Town, which is a two-hour flight away, to be with my sisters and their grandkids. So I had to go and they said like, we got to go and you got to go find a place to live. So we went and I bought my first little house; it was tiny – 45 square meters, a really, really small little house. But, uh, basically I bought my first property at 22 and I started my first business at 22.
So all of that thing kind of set me off on on a good trajectory. But had my, had my parents moved six months earlier I always think that maybe I would have been a little bit afraid to start that business and I probably wouldn’t have left then. So that freedom to fail was was very, very empowering.
And then the second time I’ve had freedom to fail was this year because, so we work in the live event space. We basically help people, uh, present themselves in big conferences. And on the 16th of March this year my revenue went to zero. Every single current job was cancelled. And all of a sudden, I’d actually been pretty bored with my business for
a number of years. So I’ve been a public speaker, uh, since my son was born so for 17 years now, and I found that the more bored I got with the running of the business, the more I ended up doing talks and traveling and speaking. And this year I was drawn back into the company because the company could fail.
But it was so empowering because if it failed it wasn’t my fault. So I could do things in the business that I was too scared to do before because what if I was wrong? But now I could, I could basically fail in plain sight of everybody and not get blamed.
So, that’s what made this year very, very empowering. It’s that if I tried something, and something that we’ve been wanting to do for a while and we wanted to change our business completely, I had a good excuse to try it but I also had permission to fail. For the first time in my career properly, if I’d failed nobody would have blamed me. Everyone would have said “well, you know, dude, like COVID and events are cancelled. You’re okay, you’re off the hook.” So it was actually a very, very empowering time for me to be able to try things essentially risk-free.
LISA: I love that! You know, I hadn’t thought about it that way until we talked about it the other week. I was like, yeah, that’s a really good point! It does give us more of the opportunity to take risks and do things because we’re, we can be less afraid of being judged. The other thing that you had, you had permission to fail but you also had a
a critical reason that you had to make something happen. Because your parents were moving you had to have somewhere to live so you couldn’t just float along, and then, now you had to do something, you had to try something because you lost all your revenues overnight. So there’s kind of like both of those things going on that are intertwined.
RICH: right, exactly. You know failure wasn’t an option. I have a team that I really, really like and a business that solves a problem that I think is an important problem to solve. So for me, like it, what I’ve realized though is where the risk thing came into play is, it wouldn’t even have mattered even if we basically got to a point where we were completely consumed by, you know, everything that was going on. It wouldn’t have been terrible because I realized the trust that we built up over the last 23 years, uh, existed. That was still there.
And second of all, our customers still knew how to get ahold of us. So even if we lost absolutely everything and basically all that existed was a couple of us who were waiting for an email to come in with some new work, we would have started from a zero base. And I would have been able to build my company up, uh, as a lean mean machine. And to some degree we didn’t ever get that far, but we certainly managed to rebuild the business to be a fitter, better organization. And the organization we have now is a much better organization than the one we had last year. For the last four months, every month when compared to last year has been an improvement. August was our best month in 18 months and September was our best month in our company’s history.
LISA: wow! Okay, now I want you to share with us what it was that you did, the product that you created. And I want you to tell us about it but I also want you to tell us how y’all came up with the idea, if you ca
RICH: okay, so there’s a little bit of a projected uh protracted journey here. So, the first thing was that, uh, I had to realize what we weren’t up against. So everybody was worried about COVID 19 and they were on these whatsapp groups or, you know, messaging groups, and Facebook groups around COVID. But actually COVID was doing nothing to me. COVID was creating a state and what was a problem for me was with organizations canceling their events. And we figured that that wasn’t going to be sustainable.
You couldn’t cancel your events because, you could cancel the meeting but the event had a purpose and the purpose was to communicate to your teams and to your customers. Now I would argue that communicating with your teams and your customers was more important than ever before. So we kept on trying to find different ways to figure out how we could help our customers and organizations do that effectively.
And on one side there was the technical aspects of it. So they needed help getting it, uh, creating online events that were technically sound. But more than that they needed to learn how to present and engage in this new world of audience interaction that we were doing online.
In many ways, actually, I realized quite quickly that this was an upgrade. You could have interactive discussions with audiences. Your access to audiences from all over the world was easier.
I mean I didn’t talk, well, I did three talks last week, Thursday, in Austin, Houston, and Arizona. And, you know, I didn’t leave my living room. And this was all possible because of the world we live in right now.
So that was the first thing, so we actually created a Cloud Crew division of our business. And the purpose was to try and help people, uh, get their events online. But not just from a tech point of view because actually, that’s relatively easy. There are systems out there that can do it but it’s the combination of knowing what tech to use, what venue – you need to see these online platforms as venues. What venue was the right venue for the type of event I was doing? Qnd then, how can I make sure that I bring the best version of myself into this venue to present like a pro in such a way that I’d activate my audience?
So, we had to solve for that. That was the first thing and that went really, really well. That’s what saved our business. People just started coming to us because everybody needed help with this
Again, when I say about finding a problem people weren’t solving, that was that. But then there was this realization, as a speaker myself, because originally on that same day on the 16th all my speaking tours were cancelled. But they started coming back because people needed, you know, inspiration and motivation and knowledge and ideas. So the market for that was at an all-time high.
And in fact, I don’t know if you’ve seen it over there as well, but almost every business instead of throwing an event you know, every two months, they’re now throwing an event a week.
All the big companies have webinars and they all need talent to show up. So that’s when I had this realization that actually there are more stages in the world today than any other point in history. And I started thinking that the next generation of thought leaders, like the YouTubers after the financial crisis that really built their names, they’re going to be crafted and carved out of these webinar stages.
And so that’s when we started our Story To Stage program, which was actually trying, it’s a speaker mentorship program that tries to level up people who who want to be thought leaders and to use these stages to lead. So that was the next thing we turned on. And I wasn’t sure how effective it would be, but it’s like shot the lights out. We’ve got people on it from all over the world.
And I think it’s the best work I’ve done in my entire career and I’m having the best time. And the best thing is, for the first time in many many years, I haven’t felt like I’m on a plateau. I felt like we’re moving up and part of what allowed us to do that is that we were pushed right the way down.
So we had to go into a descent in order to actually get back into ascent. Sorry, that was a very long answer
LISA: no, no, it’s great! I love it and it’s, you, what you’re doing is so exciting and you’re helping so many people. But when you came up with the idea you weren’t thinking about what you do, you were thinking about what they need and, you know, what is where are the shortcomings now. How can I help people still do the things that they need to do. And so, I think that’s key, that everybody out there, again, y’all need to think that way.
Stop thinking about, “oh, no! My business, you know, everything’s going downhill!” Start thinking about what your clients and other people’s problems are and help, you how you can help them solve them.
What do you think is the, like what is one of the biggest tips that you could give to anybody? Do this right now and you’ll be a better speaker. Is there like one major thing, aside from you mentioned, you know, don’t worry about the messaging but worry about activating the audience. Let’s just talk about that, then, how can we activate the audience, I should say.
RICH: well, I don’t mean don’t worry about the messaging because the only way to activate your audience is to worry about the messaging. So the step back, the step back from this and the first thing we have to work with all speakers on is working out what you want your area of authority to be. So most speakers haven’t thought through this properly, or most leaders in, business leaders.
So I, the primary way that I grow my business is through stage marketing. So I get on the stage, I get paid a fee to be on a stage. But more importantly, I get a paid a fee from the stage.
So when I stand up there and I do my job and I speak, invariably somebody wants to do business with us afterwards. It’s great because you have a high authority position to a captive audience, to an audience that wants to listen to you. So you’re now put in this position to be on a stage, literally to put up into a pedestal position of authority. But what most entrepreneurs, where they make the mistake, is they they speak about an area of interest too high up the funnel. So if they’re in marketing they speak about 5 tips for marketing, but throw a stone and hit another marketer.
You need to work down to this point and that’s why when I said earlier about the UPS, the unique problem only you can solve or unique problem that nobody else is saying they specifically want to solve. You’ve got to go right down through your funnel and look for that point where you can say, “hey, this part of the problem, nobody owns this. I want to own this.”
And then what you have to do is, you have to build the brand of the problem. We don’t have to build your own brand. Nobody cares about you. What you have to do is build your brand of the problem. Make everybody care about this issue, and if everybody cares about the issue and you’re the only person helping people figure it out, well then you’ve got a position of authority.
The second thing I would say to you is once you figure out what you want your area of authority to be, shut up about everything else. Stop having 20 opinions. I know you care about the elections and I know you care about what’s going on in the world. But you know what? There’s enough information out there. You don’t have to add to the noise because you are becoming the noise to your own signal.
You are the biggest distraction of your own message. So you have to kind of dial back and just be, decide to be, that I’m only going to have an opinion on this. With my family, on the whatsapp groups, or on personal Facebook I’ll have opinions about stuff. But everywhere else, I’m going to have one opinion about one topic. The reason you need to do that is so the world knows who to look for when they have that problem! You got to make it easy for the world to find you.
LISA: gosh, what you just said is so powerful and I need to remember! I’m going to have to go back and cut that little clip out and post it because I need to ingrain that in my head, the two things. Because you simplified it so much! It’s still not simple because I think, I think the average person, we overthink what we do. We’re too close to what we’re doing. Kind of like, you know, in the middle of the forest, can’t see the forest for the trees, so what is so obvious to somebody else if they’re looking at us we can’t see it. I know I do that and I think a lot of people do, just totally overthink what we should be doing. What do you think about that?
RICH: yeah, I think we overthink some aspects and completely underthink other aspects. So I think we all, we also suffer from all these assumptions, that we assume that everybody knows or that what we’re doing is not that interesting because it’s not that interesting to us. Or, a lot, another big thing that we do is we assume that, because we know something, so, if something seems so obvious to us.
Like presentation, I basically, I’m 46 now and I’ve done presentations more than half my life. For me, some of the things, some of the ideas are so ingrained in who I am that I cannot comprehend the idea that not everybody knows this, and then sometimes I’ll say something and I think, “this is so pedestrian and normal” and then I’ll see my audience and they’ll be like nodding or they’ll take a photo of a slide. And I’ll be like what? what? That’s insane!
But you forget your own curse of knowledge. You need to get out of your own head and realize what it is. And then, and just kind of look for that and say, well which parts of this like, surprised and delighted me when I first heard them? And how widely known is this? And then start exploring that. You could find your area of authority just in that.
LISA: oh, man, yeah – that’s one of my biggest problems. And I think not only do we think oh, it’s pedestrian, it’s boring, but we just forget that, like you said, we forget that other people don’t know it. Because it is so obvious, it’s such a, you know, foundational part of what we’re doing. But I know that I’m very guilty of thinking, not, I don’t take for granted so much what people know but I downplay what I know. You know, I forget how valuable it is because I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I forget how valuable my knowledge is and what the depth that I have and just kind of, well, I don’t know, just devalue it. I guess in my own head, I mean.
RICH: all right, and I think we all do that. And the only way to make it relevant again is to decide on, to start seeing your knowledge, is these tools for, you know, defeating a dragon. Uh, for us everything is about that. It’s that your audience, uh, it’s very, very important you understand when you’re presenting that you’re not the champion, right? The champion is in the chair. The sage is on the stage.
Your job is to help them defeat their dragons. And so you have all of this and all of these knowledge sets that are available to you. But if it, right now, it’s basically your version of general knowledge, you need to turn it into specific knowledge. The only way it becomes specific is when you’re up against a specific dragon, a specific enemy. And this is something that we all fail to do.
So I always say to speakers, job number two is to help your audience defeat their dragon but job number one is to make sure they see it. And probably job number ground zero is to make sure you see it. That’s what most people fail to do. They fail, they haven’t properly worked out what the dragon is. That is, potentially that problem they need to solve, that their customers need to to solve, and then figure that out. Then you can look through all of those bits of knowledge that you have and all of a sudden they don’t seem so general anymore. They feel like they’ve been put in your backpack for this one day, for this one presentation. And once you, but you’ve got to get specific.
LISA: so your new product is called Story To Stage, right?
RICH: yeah, StoryToStage.co.
LISA: okay, can you tell us maybe about one or two of your clients something, um, somebody that’s gotten really interesting results or somebody that surprised you at, um, how kind of they were able to come out of their shell with it? Or, without telling their name?
RICH: yeah, yeah, I’m worried about uh, you know, obviously people are on the program and they’re afraid when we tell them to go out there and to sell like they’ve been speakers for years.
LISA: yeah, yeah, I don’ want everybody to be able to figure out who it is.
RICH: what I will say about this, and what the one of the core lessons is, uh, that archetype that you have in your head for what makes a great speaker is wrong. That’s what I’ve discovered time and again. The ones, the dark horses, the ones who are like oh, they’ve got the passion but I’m just not sure, are the ones that come out of the gates, uh, and really, really, really are ready to go. And they’re taking in everything.
And then you get these other people that have all the raw materials and you think oh, they are going to be absolutely amazing in any
stage they get onto. But they don’t have and, if you’ll excuse me for the expression here, uh, we talk about any audience always having a gas tank. But we all have a gas tank that’s a give a s*#t tank, and you, either it’s either full or it’s not. And what I’ve discovered is that, what makes a good speaker, is how full their tank is about the topic and about their, their audience.
If you, it doesn’t, talent is completely and utterly overrated when it comes to speaking. It is your passion for your topic that will drive you into the best research, that will drive you into trying to hone your craft. And so I cannot tell you how surprised I am by some people, in a great way. And there’s a few people, not many, who the other way I thought with a bit more effort you could have got even more. But, uh, it really, really… I didn’t realize. I knew effort was important. I didn’t realize that it was everything and it completely, uh completely, democratizes the ability for anybody to get up onto a stage.
LISA: So the people that you do see the best results from and the effort, and this kind of goes back to… I’m curious about the “love what you do thing.” Do you think it’s usually because they’re just so interested in what they’re doing – or so interested in the topic not in what they’re doing – or just they need it, or do you see any kind of commonality there?
RICH: right, so I definitely think it’s a combination of things. It’s not enough for you just to be passionate about the topic. Because when you’re putting yourself out there, there has to be a belief that you know you want to put yourself out there. You might believe, like, I don’t really have what it takes. You might suffer from a bit of imposter syndrome, but you still gotta want it.
So even though you might think, well this isn’t really, I don’t really have what it takes to be a speaker. I’m quite nervous in front of people. But if you want it you’ll, and you’re passionate about the topic and we can help you marry those two concepts, you’ll be totally okay. It’s, it’s the people, it’s not enough just to be, uh, just to care about the message unless you want to put yourself out there. Because as a public speaker you have to be quite excited about putting yourself out there.
Any which way you play it, there’s a bit of ego required as part of your fuel that’s going to be in your gas tank. You have to get excited about the idea of people cheering for you when you get off stage. And I promise you there is almost no feeling better than that. Like the first time, like, you get a standing ovation, the first time it happens, you’re like, “what? come on!” And you try to be all, you know, you try to be all casual about it. Like you do those stupid things like, “guys…” But inside you’re like, “it’s the greatest thing ever!” And I want people to want that. Like, that’s going to excite you a little bit. Just like, even you have to admit to yourself, if you want that and you’re passionate about a topic. Those two things are the, are the raw materials you need, uh, to turn into a speaker.
And then for us it’s also about, you know, you’re gonna trust the process. Uh, there’s some exercises we make our speakers go through that are quite uncomfortable and the ones that don’t go through it, I always say the same thing to them. So, like, if you’re not comfortable sharing this post on social media and putting yourself out there like that, how are you gonna be comfortable standing on stage in front of a thousand people? So you have to embrace the discomfort a little bit.
LISA: you don’t need to tell me what it is because I don’t want to, like, give up stuff about your your service but so, is it like you said the post on social media, is it where somebody is giving, like, kind of more of an opinion, or strong opinion, than they would normally be used to? That kind of thing?
RICH: there’s some of that because there’s a lot of imposter syndrome. There’s a lot of people like, oh, did they see me? Why would they pick me as an expert? But actually every public speaker you know, you didn’t know them before they were. Like if you think of, you know, Brené Brown or who was Brené Brown before that Ted Talk. Like, we didn’t know her. And Simon Sinek, nobody knew him before the circles, you know the three, “start with why” talk.
So, like they would have struggled with all the same things that, uh, our speakers go with. So that’s one thing they struggle with, is putting themselves out there as a thought leader because like, why should they listen to me?
But I believe in this principle called Stopforth’s Law that says any area that lacks an expert and that could be an expert in your suburb, it could be an expert in your industry. But any area that lacks an expert, whoever puts their hand up first becomes it. There is a vacuum created by the fact that nobody has decided to own this and if you just put your hand up, you do. So that gets quite uncomfortable at the beginning.
And then the second thing is we make them ask uncomfortable questions. So, what do you think if I, if, one of the questions we would ask would be, uh, “if I was coming to your office to do a presentation to your team knowing what you know about me, what would you want me to talk about?” So you, I want you to understand how the world sees you and what the world sees you as an expert in because sometimes we don’t realize it. And we think like, oh, we think they see us like this or they don’t see any expertise in this. And it’s the first biggest surprise in the, like, moment because all of a sudden people get back all of these comments. All right, let me just talk about this. Nobody turns around ever and says “oh, why would you come and speak at our office?” Everyone just assumes that, “yeah, that sounds totally legit. Of course, you’d come and speak to our office.” So that’s one of the first exercises we get people to do very, very early on.
LISA: how long is your program? How many weeks or months?
RICH: 12 weeks. It’s a 12 week program, yeah.
LISA: and how do you select the people that you take on as clients for that? I’m assuming that you don’t take just everybody who comes along.
RICH: no, uh, we have an onboarding process that I’m actually, so we’re we’re tweaking and getting more and more dialed in as we go. We absolutely, unfortunately, we can’t take everybody in. There’s a certain amount of, again, I originally I thought it would be money that would be one thing, but actually that’s not it. It’s time and effort and desire and also, we have a, we have certain trajectories that we have for speakers based on what they want to do from it.
So I’ll tell you who our primary candidate is. It’s not somebody who just wants to be a full-time speaker, and you know, no “that’s it, go pay me to speak, shut up and just stop.” I think that’s not what makes a good robust presenter. It’s generally somebody who ultimately wants to be making more money from their talks, so using a stage as a marketing vehicle, than people for their talks. And I think our program is primarily designed to help with those people.
So it’s, it’s, and so we are looking for a specific avatar, a specific type of candidate, that we want to go through. We actually make them fill out an application form. We then go through what they desire, what they’re trying to get. They jump onto a call with us. We interview them a little bit about it and then, after that first half of the call, if we feel that the right, the right fit we then hand it over to them to ask questions to us about the program, uh, that they would have.
So far, I would say we’re probably at about 70%, uh, we will take if there’s a good fit. And I think some people actually push back from, by the time they get to the call. Some people we already straight off the bat from the original call we, uh, the original application were able to actually to to, uh, cut them from there. For the most part I would say we’ve got that, getting, we’re getting it more dialed in. I’d like to get it to the point that, by the time if we let them get onto the call that we’ve got it pretty close. So we’re just trying to perfect that.
LISA: and when you say making more money, for example, from speaking, you don’t necessarily mean from the speaking engagement, from being paid to speak on the stage? You mean their business and books and everything around them, right?
RICH: yeah, like, so books are, so for me a book is now, you can make money from books downstream but a book is actually upstream. So, if you imagine, and it’s not to say that you have to have a book. but a book is one of the most effective business cards you can have. So your book builds up your authority which will help you, but not required, help you land a speaking gig. That speaking gig, now you theoretically get onto a stage. You charged your, say in the US for example, for when you’re in that acceptable range of, you know, when people think of you as, okay, this is a public speaker that knows what they’re about. That’s five to ten thousand US dollars would be the expectation for a speaker that’s, you know, as seasoned. Uh, but let’s say you’re kickstarting; you’re a bit of experience, you’re ready to go. Put you at that four thousand dollar mark. That’s not what you’re earning. That is where, that is what you’re earning for showing up and for delivering that talk, but what you’re more interested in is what happens when the events audience becomes your audience? Because after you get on stage you want to, these people to now see you as an authority in a subject for a problem that you’ve not convinced them that they have.
So what will happen is, I will get off stage and people say to me, “hey, listen. We’ve got this event coming up, or I’ve got this big presentation coming up. Would your team be able to help? And, so, of course our Academy division can, you know we help train speakers in that, in that aspect as well. And so we have various, I have various downstream product sets that make it very easy for people to engage with me after I get off stage. And that’s what you have to be thinking about, is that you should always be thinking that you can make more money and solve more meaningful problems after the talk that you can with the talk.
Usually, keynotes, they can give you some cool tips but they’re not going to solve everything. They’ll generally, their job is to make you start to care about the problem and the better the job that the speaker does, the more you care about the problem that they want you to solve. And then you will seek the speaker out more or you’ll seek their business or their books out, and that’s when obviously the relationship starts to grow.
LISA: yeah, okay, very interesting. For people who are already used to speaking and have been doing it for a while and, you know, in pretty big stages, do you have any advice specifically to them? Maybe they’re struggling adapting to the virtual world or maybe they think they’re not struggling and they think they’re doing great, but what would be your biggest tips for somebody like that who, to adapt from the physical stage into the virtual?
RICH: so the one thing I would say and, it’s because this surprises me and I don’t know how universal this is, but the the handcuffs of geography have been broken. So what I’m seeing is, a lot of speakers who are doing virtual talks but they’re still doing virtual talks to the same organizations in the same geographical areas that they were doing before and this is completely nonsensical to me. It’s as easy for me to do a talk, uh, virtually for a company just down the road here in Cape Town than it is, than it was for me to do that talk in Arizona last week. Other than a little bit of timezones, uh, you know working that out, uh, it’s super easy. In fact, a speaker with an accent always has value because the assumption is if they have an accent, if they’re from some place different, they must be an expert. Which is quite weird but it’s just the way the human brain works.
I cannot believe how many speakers I’ve seen that are not venturing out and are not engaging further.That would be my number one is, uh, cast a wider net. Like have you considered speaking in South Africa? Have you considered speaking in Australia? Have you considered speaking in the UK? Or you know wherever you are, and how can you figure out how to do that more, and how can you reach out to organizations and, within your industry perhaps, or within your area of authority, that can do that? So that would be the one; the rest of it starts getting relatively technical.
I will say that I still see speakers presenting online virtually from their bums. UNACCEPTABLE.
LISA: from their what?
RICH: from their, from a seat. So they’ll be sitting. If you’re delivering a keynote talk you better be standing and delivering and presenting
LISA: okay, yeah, moving around.
RICH: bringing all your energy. Right? Because you want to try and bring that energy and people have to realize that you’re showing up for work but, more importantly, you’ve got to realize it yourself. So that’s a big deal for me.
LISA: okay, yeah, I can see why. I can’t imagine just sitting there. just sitting there talking, you know, when you’re giving a presentation. For people who do want to reach out and to find a wider audience, do you have any tips for that? For how they would go about finding prospective audiences?
RICH: well, I mean, the first relatively easy way of doing it, and this might seem like a cheat to some degree, but if you go to organizations like Upwork and you search for a list builder, there are professional list builders out there that they will take some work. It’s relatively easy and they will help you find the type of organizations in your industry in different geographical locations. So you’d say I’m interested in HVAC organizations in, uh, UK and Europe and I would like to speak in more. You know, I’m in financial services and would like to speak at, and they will find you the people. And the other thing to do is to look for, look through all your, look through your customer base.
Often one of the mistakes I think speakers don’t do enough is to look at the title of the people that have hired you to speak before. So they think that they’re being hired by, you know, this senior person because that’s who the conference owner was, but when you look at all your emails it actually came through from a, you know, a communications manager somewhere in the business. So actually that is the person you want to speak to and you want to find people in the businesses you want at that level, not necessarily the complete conference owner.
LISA: right, so gatekeepers if you will, the gatekeepers who can open the doors for you because the other people don’t have time or whatever. These are the people that are gonna take the good ideas to the person higher up.
RICH: right, absolutely.
LISA: Um, i remember back I guess it was in the early 90s, my kids were really little and we went to an IMAX movie. I don’t even remember what it was or anything, but it was about space and it was about people living out in these space stations, you know, many, many, many, way in the future. And this was before really anybody knew anything about the internet other than you know, technology people, so, and I mean I started working with the internet in 94, 95, so it had been before that. Um, anyway, I remember that there were these kids and they’re like, “I’m gonna go play with my friends” and they went in and there’s a big monitor on the wall and their friends were wherever they were in this
other space station. You know, way across space, and they played virtually. And then they were like “oh, I got to go!” and I remember at the time I thought that was so weird, and i thought it was sad because I was like oh, they don’t even get to be together. And it’s funny how, you know, these decades later, it’s such a normal part of life for me and for you. But there’s so many people who are still stuck in that same mindset that I would have had back then when it was something strange and new. That you can’t have a meeting if you’re not sitting down at the table and looking at each other. They just can’t relate to it.
RICH: yeah, I mean, I understand it and it’s amazing to me. Like, one of my worst terms that’s come out of this whole thing is this “new normal.” This idea, like why would you want “normal?” Normal is a downgrade on every level. Like nuke normal, get rid of normal, slay it from your vocabulary.
So, so many things that I’ve been pushed for. So now I refuse for work meetings are all, if you are a neighbor across the road a work meeting still happens online. Second thing is, all work meetings have been shortened to 30 minutes. The brevity has forced us to be more on point. It’s meant that I’m getting meetings in a shorter dura-, a shorter time frame. So a meeting that would have taken me three weeks to land is now taking a week because I’m only asking for 30 minutes and it’s always online.
The efficiency is so much higher because all our meetings are recorded. So I record the Zoom calls and then, instead of me to having to brief my team internally, playing telephone, I just take the recording and send it to them with a small little note for myself saying this is what I want us to do. They watch the recording, prepare the proposal. This has been a level up in every aspect of our sales process.
LISA: yeah, and the conversation isn’t filtered through you to them so you don’t have to worry about anything leaking out, if you will. You know, they can go right to it and maybe pick up on things that you wouldn’t have even picked up on
RICH: right, absolutely. That and they, yeah, they often have done that, picked up on these little nuances that, I was on a tangent and the customer had actually said one thing. They said, “Rich, you know this customer wants a bit of this. Should I include that ?” Totally, and so I love this!
And then what I do, like tomorrow I do have a lunch with a, with a person I’m working with but then it’s purely social. It’s not to take a brief. It’s not to do a job. It’s to build a relationship. So I’ve separated the act of taking a brief from the act of building a relationship. And so I’ll take them, like, like for example, I do have a call with him tomorrow afternoon. He’s part of our Story To Stage program, so we’ll cover most of the work stuff on the call but, uh, just catching up and building a bond and a better relationship, that will happen when we’re face to face.
LISA: okay, well let me ask you this, and I don’t want to keep you too long because I know that you’re very busy and I’ve had you for almost 45 minutes. But, um, I know that you’re working with people who want to be on the stage, if you will, even if it’s on the virtual stage. But it seems to me that what you’re offering would be great even just for the business owner or you know, an entrepreneur or somebody who is in sales or marketing, because you’re basically helping people learn to communicate better with with their audience whether it’s on a stage or whether it’s a prospect. Um, do you think that you might ever develop some type of product that would be for a productized service that would be more for people like that, or is that just too far off your target?
RICH: no, it’s quite funny the, my mail that went out, I’ve got an email list and it went out probably three or four hours ago. I actually discussed we’re launching our next program. So I’ve written a book called Story Seller and it’s the idea of using stories to, as part of your sales process, and how you can close more deals selling that way. And we’re developing a program that we launch in February, uh, specifically around the art of story selling, uh, using story as a primary vehicle for sales. And that’s for selling products but also for selling ideas internally. How do you frame a story in such a way that the person on the other side is like, “wow, yes! I want some of that!”
LISA: So this February, this coming February? Okay, y’all, look I totally did not know that! I totally did not set this up for Rich to go “oh, yes, we have this new product coming,” but I feel pretty smart now because I’m like “oh, you know, he’s already doing it! He’s a smart guy, he’s with it” and, I you know… So that’s really exciting and I definitely need the book and I need whatever the, whatever your service is going to be when it comes.
RICH: well, the book is super easy and you’d read it in like, wow, this one like, I mean in like half an hour. It’s a very simple, easy concept and you can get it for free at storyseller.co.za. You can download that free and then we will be sending out the notifications for people, uh, for that original beta program when the pilot launches in February. We’ll be looking for some fearless leaders who want to jump on and to be part of that original group. So, uh, that would be great and I’d love it if some of the viewers were interested and wanted to reach out to me and chat to me about that.
LISA: yeah, that sounds great. I’m excited about that. I know a lot of people that I think would want to would want to take part in it. But I also know a lot of people who need to do your Story To Stage program, including myself. But, okay, so I will share that url in the show notes but I’ll also share it separately to people who may not watch this because I think that’s really exciting and I think it’s probably the biggest thing that holds people back is that we don’t know how to tell the story to sell something that we have that could help so many people.
RICH: And most importantly, you confuse telling your story with the story. People don’t care about your story. It’s the number one thing when speakers come to us, I’ve got this great story to tell! Why should they care? Your job is to help them write a better version of their story. So it’s important that we understand that it’s their story that’s more exciting than, you know. You’ve got to, they’re the star of their own movie. You’ve gotta make it a better movie.
LISA: I love that and I have to go back and rewind after we get off. I have to go back and find those two points that you gave about… I can’t even remember them now because I’m so excited, but back near the very beginning you gave two points, um, that we need to do. I’ll go back and find it. But, anyway, I really appreciate you being here, Rich. I’m so excited!
Oh, and everybody out there, Rich is going to be in my new book with my cousin Charles Kipps. We haven’t given out very much information about it yet but it’s called Disrupt Your Now: The Successful Entrepreneur’s Guide to Reimagining Your Business & Life. And Rich obviously is helping people reimagine their businesses and he’s reimagined his own, so I’m really excited that you’re going to be in the book, Rich. Thanks for doing that.
RICH: you had me at hello with that! That was a such a cool concept and it’s so in my wheelhouse. I was very excited to be part of it.
LISA: cool! Look, y’all, if you enjoyed this show with Rich you can go to my website lisakippsbrown.com and see all of the past shows. And please do check out Rich. Give them the website link to your company site and to the book again.
RICH: so if you go to INeedMissingLink.com that will forward you to our company site. If you want to connect with me on social media, if you go to getrich.af then that will be the links to all of my, it’s like a little link farm they will have there. And on there you will find links to Story Seller, you’ll find links to my email, to my YouTube channel, to my emailing list, and to my other two books that I’ve written.
LISA: Oh, now I have to say something and then I really am gonna let you guys go… I assume the dot-af extension means Africa but my brain totally goes right to get rich as…
RICH: that’s exactly it! It actually is from Afghanistan but I took it because in South Africa we use .co.za. I use the .af because I wanted to be get rich as…
LISA: it makes it so easy to remember!
RICH: yeah, but it was funny because I was speaking in Saudi Arabia last year and afterwards a guy came up to me and said get rich.af, why Afghanistan? And I was like, oh yeah, I forgot that. So the other, we’ve got a short url we use for all the links, so for example if I’m sharing Prezi with somebody I’ll say go to msng.wtf/prezi. Like, uh, the msn.wtf I was like “you get can that?” And that’s available, and there’s so many words available with wtf that I thought it was super cool.
LISA: And the people who get it, the people who get that, are probably the people that you would enjoy working with more.
RICH: I was gonna say, if the idea of the .af or the .wtf offends you we’re not the business for you. I always say to people that, even as a speaker but in business in general, you don’t want to be the best. You want to be somebody’s favorite. And if you want to be somebody’s favorite you have to be willing to be somebody else’s worst. Polarize ruthlessly, like deciding your audience by deciding on who your “not audience”
is.
LISA: cool, all right, got it! There’s so many good nuggets in here that I’m going to be able to pull out, you know, like 30 second clips. But I really appreciate you being here, Rich. I really am going to let you go now! Thank you so much.
RICH: okay, thanks!
