Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host Roberta.

If you are looking to improve your communication and leadership skills, this is the podcast for you.

Today, I am joined by the mighty Kevin T.

Robertson, also known as KTR.

He's in the building and he's got so much to share with us.

He is a celebrity insider and a professional leadership speaker.

He's the CEO of Speaker Focus, where he gives training on how to become a paid professional speaker, as he has been doing this for over three decades.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome Kevin T.

Robertson.

Hi, Kevin.

Hey, how are you, Roberta?

Thanks so much for having me.

Thank you for being here.

I'm really excited about our conversation.

You have so much to share with our audience, but first off, give us a bit of your background.

I have been a professional speaker for 36 years.

I've delivered over 2,700 page speaking engagements, serviced over 78 different nationalities in over 37 plus different countries.

I have had a wonderful career.

I've always been a natural born leader, and I started very early in my career as an entertainer.

I was a professional musician by the time I was 16 years old.

I also participated in athletics, like cross country.

I went to the state championship my first year, but I kept getting hurt, so music was always there.

I'm naturally gifted in arts, music.

I'm a fine art painter, and I'm a natural born writer as well.

That's my number one skill that I use even to this day.

So I knew that I was onto something really early, and I just had this dream inside, and I knew I was very fortunate.

I knew when I was in elementary school that I was gonna be in the entertainment industry.

I knew that I was going to be a speaker.

I knew I was gonna be in front of the camera and in the spotlight.

I knew that, and I put all my energies and efforts into practice, repetitions, performing.

I love band practice.

When I was in the R&B band, I loved going to band practice.

When I was in the school orchestra, I loved going to band practice.

I was in the choir.

We had rehearsal.

I love rehearsal.

I love the preparation.

Even with practice before I would go run cross country, I'm obsessed with that.

I don't have OCD, but I'm OCD light with the preparation because that's what makes it look very, I call it the three P's to success.

Polished, Poisoned, Professional.

And that's how I got to the point of my keynote range being a $50,000 speaker.

I'm in the top five to 10% of speakers globally who specialize in transferring knowledge at an extremely high level, holding your attention for elongated periods of time while being entertaining.

This is a skill of professional speaking and I've learned how to monetize.

It took me a lot of years to learn how to do it, but I'm so proud to be in this industry.

And I educate people every day about how they too can have success in this industry as well, because there are so many misnomers about it.

That's a very key point, the one about practicing, because I think we usually look at the end goal when you've reached the destination, oh, okay, now I'm perfect in this.

And we actually don't really take the time.

Nobody actually talks about how much time it takes to become perfect in anything.

So how is it that you became obsessed with the actual practice?

That's usually not the fun part.

You're right, but it's the work ethic.

And I learned that from my mom.

And my mom grew up dirt poor on a farm and I used to always ask her, why do you work so hard?

And she wasn't college educated, but she said she didn't ever wanna go back to that farm.

They were exchanging fruit for Christmas gifts.

They had to make their clothes out of burlap sacks.

If they didn't grow it or kill it, they didn't eat it.

I learned that from my mom.

Before I could see the sink, I was washing dishes.

She had us always learning how to keep the house clean, staying organized, doing yard work.

That was instilled in me since as far as back as I could remember.

And I never forgot that.

So I realized I was never looking for it to be easy because I saw my mother working hard.

And I said, that's the way you get the result.

The way you get your yard to look really beautiful.

My mother was out there pulling weeds.

She was out there cutting the grass.

My dad was out there manicuring the lawn.

So I learned work ethic and pride from looking at my parents.

They instilled a strong work ethic in me and my brother.

So all the way through school, I realized when I had to go to rehearsal, the play that we were in maybe only lasted an hour, but I spent countless hours learning my lines in order to go out there and perform.

When I went to school the first day in kindergarten, I realized I could draw the outline and shade the coloring better than anybody else in my class.

We had to fill in the colors for this picture.

It was George Washington sitting on a horse.

You shade the horse in brown.

He had a little blue uniform on with the gold buttons and everything, the black buckle boots.

Mine was, I was shading inside the lines and it was shaded very, she was like, Kevin, you did this?

Yeah, I did this.

She said, wow, look at Kevin's.

So my work was always the example.

And I knew I had confidence in myself from day one in school.

And I always wanted to make the teacher happy.

I always wanted to make my parents happy.

And I knew the only way that was gonna happen if I worked hard.

Something clicked in my mind that if you don't work hard and get these practice repetitions in, you're not gonna get this specific result.

I saw my friends, they didn't have the work ethic.

With the non-work ethic people, they will all hang together.

So I wouldn't hang with them.

I will isolate myself.

I will stay over here.

I was drawing, I was painting, I was writing, I was playing my trumpet, I was going to band practice.

That mattered to me.

And that one thing and that one work ethic, that quality lasts with me even to this day.

That's why I get up at 5 a.m.

every single day.

How do you encourage work ethic in this Instagram age?

And secondly, how do you encourage people to surround themselves with people who will help them be better at whatever they're trying to achieve?

Or if they don't find a tribe, be alone just like you were.

So let's break them down.

So the first thing is work ethic in a microwave society, during social media.

I call it social proof.

If you wanna find out what your fingerprint DNA is, your digital fingerprint, all you have to do is pull up somebody's Instagram or Facebook or something, and it'll tell you a lot about that person.

It'll tell you whether or not you're a serious minded business professional.

It'll tell you whether or not you like to play games or hang out with your friends, whatever the case is.

You can tell a lot because we are known for our characteristics.

The great Maya Angelou said, when people show you who they are, you need to believe them.

And people show you exactly who they are through their social media.

So that's the one narrative where you can control what you want everybody to know about you.

Yet so many people don't even put the best qualities about themselves up there because they're too busy clout chasing.

So I believe what they see, when they see someone having success, especially the younger people, and they see the upper crest of society putting their material wealth online, and everybody thinks that they can just go right to driving that particular car or living in that particular house, they don't understand how success really works.

Anybody who has success, and I've been studying the top 3% of the most successful people in the history of our world for the better part of 30 plus years, and not one of them have ever risen to the top without some hard work and some sacrifice.

That's just all comes with it.

And anybody who does have money and anybody who does have success, they understand that.

The part where our society is, that's being pushed on us right now.

We have a lot of shiny objects on social media.

It's hard to choose what's right and what's wrong.

So what happens is when you don't know who you are, the wrong starts looking right and the right starts looking wrong.

Now you can't decipher anymore, so you just go for anything.

So I would say the work ethic, you need to understand that if you're gonna have any amount of success and experience that, it goes back to what I was saying before.

It's sacrifice, resilience, overcoming obstacles.

You're going to feel pain.

It's gonna be some blood, sweat and tears.

You're gonna have to go through something.

You're gonna have to push your football through a garden hose.

It's gonna be a struggle, but it's worth it when you get on the other side.

It's a sad thing if you don't have someone to look up to.

And mentorship is really, really important.

I learned my work ethic from my mom.

I learned how to be savvy with communication from my dad.

That's what I saw in the house.

But one thing I saw is they work together and they always work hard and they took pride in what they had.

You got to work hard and then you got to take pride in your appearance.

I remember my mom used to lay our clothes out for me and my brother.

I have an older brother and she used to make it match perfectly.

The brown boots with the green pants, with the red and the red and gold stripes with the little gold turtleneck.

I remember that to this day.

And that's why I matched from head to toe.

No matter what I wear, I learned that from my mom.

Take pride in who you are and make sure that you're not afraid of the hard work.

They say, if you find something you love to do, you'll never work another day in your life, right?

Everybody's-

Yes, I've heard that.

Everybody's heard that before.

What I say is, you have to love what you do so much.

You have to understand your purpose and when you're walking in it and you understand what your assignment is, you're going to do it whether or not you're getting paid or not.

And when it gets hard, the only way that you're gonna go through those sacrifices, tunnel under them, go around them, hurdle over top of your barricade, the only way you're gonna do it, you gotta be walking in your purpose and you have to live a life of fulfillment.

See, my gifts make me fulfilled.

It's better than sex.

It's better than any drug that you could possibly take.

When I get a chance to help people, I serve people at a high level.

That's my assignment on this earth.

I'm doing my part to make the world a better place.

Now, let's talk about tribe because this is one I struggle with a lot.

I always shied away from tribes.

I always shied away from groups because I had to deal with a lot of jealousy and bullying as I was growing up.

They talked about my skin color, my hair being extremely curly.

So they always picked on me.

So what I did was I realized people judge you based upon what they think you are.

So I always would push my talent upfront because I was extremely talented.

And then that would make them stop bothering me and they will respect me.

They would be like, oh, that's Kevin.

Oh, he dresses nice.

His art won first in the competition.

He's in a play.

They're all sitting out in the audience.

I'm on stage.

So eventually that stuff went away.

Then they start talking about me behind my back.

It made me shy away from groups.

I said, I'm a leader.

They need to be following me.

I knew that at a young age that I was a leader.

And I saw that they weren't leaders.

My mom and dad used to call it, oh, they're good people.

When they say they're good people, that means you have character, it's quality.

Whatever you say you're gonna do, you do it.

So I understand why everybody is clout chasing right now.

Everybody wants to be a celebrity.

Everybody wants to go viral.

It's the environment that the internet facilitates and perpetuates when you don't know yourself, you're gonna go for that.

You're gonna think that, oh, let me just go in and hang around some celebrities and I'm gonna get this picture.

When I take a picture with a celebrity, I have an earned position standing next to them with that microphone.

I am there working that red carpet.

I put in an official media request.

I use my contacts to leverage my way in that door.

I got permission granted from the management, from the PR staff.

I got permission to work that red carpet.

So that's not cloud chasing.

The picture comes at the end, that's the reward that I can use to market myself afterwards, because the fastest way to build your brand is to be seen with other high profile brands.

That's how I was able to get my fees up and speaking and that's how I was able to make my television show popular to close out that point.

I would say, you got to know yourself so much and be so confident in who you are and understand what your assignment is that you have to be prepared to walk along.

Now, do you need strategic partnerships and do you need mentorship?

Absolutely.

Hang around people that are doing what you want to do and people that have the willingness to give because not everybody is like that.

Mentorship is not easy to come by.

So some of us have to find our own way and you're going to have it hard, but pioneers trailblazers or mavericks don't complain.

I knew I had to blaze the trail for somebody else to make it easier and I had to take it on the chin.

Wow.

For you at such a young age to actually tell yourself and know that you're a leader is amazing because we still have grownups who struggle with that.

Yes.

And secondly, being a leader, you're a professional leadership speaker.

Talk to us about that.

Well, I've always been fascinated with leadership development.

At an early age, you know, I had to look at the examples that I had around me.

I had a couple of good teachers, my English teacher in the 10th grade, Ms.

Prompt, stellar example of what a teacher should be.

She was impeccably dressed every single day, super professional.

She gave me confidence in my ability to write and she always supported me and encouraged me.

Ms.

Henderson was my art teacher.

Ms.

Waters, when I was at elementary school, she was another great teacher.

She knew that I had it.

To a teacher knows the special students, where they would always pull me over to the side.

It took me a little while to understand what was going on.

I know that talent has got to be developed and it takes a teacher, a mentor, some supervisor, somebody in your family.

Life doesn't come with a manual.

You've got to learn developmental skills from somebody and somebody's got to be there to help you.

Thank God I had parents that were there.

I'm not going to lie to you, it was a lot of friction, but my mom and dad were dedicated to each other up until my dad passed away in 2011.

You are not a real leader unless you are looking to develop other leaders.

Let me say this very clear.

You've got to possess the willingness to help someone else and give back.

That's called succession planning.

And I have always been a person who wanted to reach back and I've always wanted to serve other people.

I had the poorest white friend in my neighborhood when I was growing up and the poorest black friend in my neighborhood.

And my mother always taught me to treat everybody equally.

And I never forgot that either.

I don't care what your social economic status is, I'm fair to everyone.

People have a uncontrollable desire to be right all the time and people want to neutralize your success if they don't have the level of skill.

So they are going to try to suppress you.

And this is why you must choose your relationships wisely.

If you're gonna have someone to develop your talent, you gotta say, why are they helping you develop the talent?

Sometimes you have to buy your way in for somebody to develop your talent.

You have to pay for a level of skill.

It's no problem.

And then a beautiful relationship comes out of it on the other side because you had enough respect for the professional's time.

That being said, when I got into the corporate marketplace, I really found my footing.

And I've worked all seven of the different target markets.

These are the seven different target markets you can work as a speaker.

The youth market, speaking to kids, the faith-based market, speaking to churches, the government contracting market, the college market, the university market, and then the corporate and then the association market.

Working with kids, they require obviously a different kind of knowledge transfer.

I used to use music to make a connection with kids.

I learned that the faith-based market wasn't really paying me a lot of money.

They wanted me to come speak for free a lot.

Then the government contracting market, they don't really want the best speaker.

They want the speaker who's gonna do it for the least amount of money.

And my skillset started to become very high and I was like, wait a minute, I want five to 10,000.

They're talking about paying me one to 6,000.

There's a problem here.

And then the college and university market, I learned that I could develop young leaders.

If I had a program for the college market that would enhance campus life and develop a strong leadership program for people that are getting ready to enter the workforce, I could work in there as well.

So I did, but then I really hit my stride around 27 years old.

I got my first high fee speaking gig.

Tyco hired me for $5,000 to do a full day training.

And Tyco used to be real big in electronics back in the day and toy company.

Now they're biggest in the security market.

When they paid me that amount of money, I wasn't even expecting it.

Like when she asked me what my fee was, I answered her back like it was a question.

She said, Kevin, what's your fee to come do a full day training?

I said, 5,000?

Because I didn't know how to have the proper pricing conversation.

So what I saw was when I broke into the corporate market is that people are looking for something of what I call the slight edge advantage.

You just know one or two more things more than your competition that you're gonna have the slight edge advantage.

And that's what I realized people were looking for.

People are looking to be developed.

People are looking for educational resources so they can grow.

No matter what market you're in, we are all looking to get better.

And what I see is the top people who are successful in our world, they have a desire to get better more than the average person.

And that's why their income is higher.

And that's why their resume looks more robust because they're obsessed with it.

They're fanatical about it.

They take pride in their level of skill.

Right.

Speaking of the college and university markets, you said you developed programs, leadership programs for them.

A lot of the time when I interview guests on the show and when you talk about that, they say people are trained on the actual job, but not on the day-to-day interactions with their colleagues, with customers, with the soft skills are lacking.

Why do you think colleges don't focus on that so much?

College market is a system.

And what they wanna do is teach you how to be a better employee.

Now you do have some schools like the Wharton Business School and some of the Ivy League schools, they do teach business.

Dr.

Carol D.

Henley from the Howard University School of Business, I've spoken there several times.

And they do have some schools have a school of business where they will teach you business principles.

But the problem with a lot of the business schools and even the problem with a lot of the curriculum that they teach is they're really preparing you for a degree that you can't use or is gonna restrict you.

They are really grooming you to be an employee.

Now, that's cool if you wanna be an employee.

But what if you have ideas in your head about wanna start a business and you wanna empower yourself, you've gotta be willing to get information that the college is not going to teach you.

So if you wanna be a robot and just go to school, you wanna earn a nice $100,000 a year salary, there are jobs out there that will do that.

When I was in high school, the college recruiter came there and they had us take this test.

And the test said, because I like yard work and I like nature and all of this stuff, they said I was gonna be a forester.

Based upon the information that the computer, they said I was gonna be a forester.

What are they talking about?

I like outside, but something's going on here.

My mom had the Air Force recruiter, the band recruiter actually sitting in my dining room one time I come home from band practice and I told him to his face.

I said, listen, sir, with all due respect, I am not gonna be going to the military because I know what I wanna do.

I'm gonna be in the entertainment industry.

I'm gonna work for myself.

I knew that back then.

How did your parents feel about that?

You said it in front of them.

They were upset.

My mother was pissed.

I can imagine.

But see, a lot of times what we do is we go to college to please our parents.

College is not for everybody, but some people do need to go to college because not everybody has the skillset or the IQ to be an entrepreneur.

So what are you gonna do?

You gonna starve to death?

Just because you set up a LLC and you have a business card does not make you a business professional.

Does that make sense?

That is very true, 100%.

I want you to repeat the statement about college not being for everybody, but some people need to.

Well, the reason why I say that college is not for everybody, college was not for me.

I don't knock college, you know, besides the fact that you can rack up a lot of student debt and then the degree that you have for your job doesn't allow you to pay for that student debt.

But it's an individual choice.

You should not be forced to do it, just like you shouldn't be forced in the military.

You know, like the Cleveland area, Youngstown, Ohio, they have like a 56% dropout rate for African-American males.

They also have one of the highest signup rates for the military in the world.

You know why?

Because the young men don't have anything else to do.

They know they basically are in a war zone right now, so they're gonna go to the military.

But they really don't understand why they're going to the military.

They're just doing that so they can stay out of trouble.

Now, in some cases, it does save a lot of their lives, but you need to understand what your gifts and your talents are at a very, very young age.

I was fortunate.

I always had crayons and coloring books and art pads and notepads to draw.

I always had some type of music around me.

But college is not for everybody.

Give you a good example.

There are many people that stopped going to college.

Bill Gates, Elon Musk, my business partner, Austin Troyer.

Austin went to school for engineering.

He used to work at John Deere.

He was sitting in there one day and was like, yo, this is just not for me.

I need to leave.

See, this is that rumbling in your gut.

It's that voice telling you that this is what you need to do.

Entrepreneurs make the world a better place for everybody else.

They create jobs and they create products and services.

So I knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur.

They pay you the salary so you can forget about your dream.

I never wanted this out.

My mother was like, boy, you crazy?

You need to go take the civil service test.

Why?

So I can be stressed out like you every single day?

You saying that you hate your supervisor.

You don't like this.

You don't like that.

Like I've really paid attention to this.

Listen, it's okay to say no.

It's okay to disagree.

It's not their responsibility to agree with everything.

You got to find your own way.

Have enough guts to say, this is who I am and this is what I know I need to do and suffer the losses like a man or woman and don't get too down when you suffer the losses.

When it's going good, don't get too high because neither one of them lasts forever.

That's right.

I think the biggest challenge is for any parent because every parent wants what's best for their children.

It's for any parent who thinks, I want what's best for my child.

College is going to be secure.

They get secure jobs.

So if they rebel against that, it's really tough because they think your life is going to be tough.

There's no security in that.

Speaking about being a celebrity insider, everybody knows the entertainment world is very insecure, so to speak.

You don't know what's going to happen.

You don't know if you're going to get paid.

How did you get started on that?

Well, I was a professional musician by the time I was 16 and I played in an R&B band.

And we used to go back and forth to Jack the Rapper.

It was the largest music conference in the world back in the late 80s and the early 90s before it ended with a big fight that Def Ro and Luke Records had at the Marriott Marquee in Atlanta.

So I became a celebrity insider by offering my organizational skills to celebrities.

One of my dear friends that passed away, Lamont Wanzer, we call him Monty.

Monty used to manage Biz Marquee, the late great rapper that just passed away.

Monty was Biz Marquee's manager for years.

I used to be going the road with him.

I used to be the road manager.

And Monty used to manage multiple DJs.

Before then, we had a rap group.

So we were meeting everybody.

And that was in Landover, Maryland, in the DC area.

Salt and Pepper, Heavy D, Eric B and Rakim, Run DMC, all the biggest rappers.

I mean, this was the golden age of hip hop.

Now they would have a local band, a DC band.

We play a local music called Go Go Music.

So EU, Rare Essence, any other band.

Chuck Brown was a legend.

I interviewed Chuck Brown as well before he passed away.

I knew a lot of guys from the bands who were playing at the big arena for the Capital Center.

Now in DC, you can't have a rap show without putting somebody, some Go Go band on there because they're gonna draw the crowd.

That's just how popular Go Go is.

It's legendary in the DC area.

So I knew the guys from the Go Go band because I played in the Go Go band before and I used to carry equipment.

So they would just give me some piece of equipment.

No ticket, no backstage pass, no nothing.

And I would walk down the ramp and I would go inside.

I would hang out backstage.

I just start meeting one person after another person after another person.

And that's how I was able to start going on the road with people because I kept my mouth shut.

I was very loyal and I was super organized.

And what I learned about celebrities, they're not the most organized people in the world.

They have so much going on, I can imagine.

And they need people around them.

So I was able to learn the entertainment industry by traveling with so many celebrities.

I was on tour because of DJ J Nice, a celebrity DJ out of Las Vegas.

And J Nice took me on tour with Notorious BIG and Bad Boy, it was probably nine months to a year before Notorious BIG passed away.

And as a matter of fact, when I came back off the East Coast leg of the tour, me and J came home, they went to Los Angeles and Notorious BIG got killed.

I was always in the circle of his entourage, so to speak.

I mean, he was a nice guy.

He didn't deserve to die like that.

I've seen a lot of stuff in the entertainment industry.

My only recollection of Tupac Shakur, the great rapper Tupac, we were at the BRE music convention in Washington, DC and Tupac had a jug of gin in his hand and a little cup of orange juice.

I'm talking to somebody and I turn around and Tupac runs into me and the orange juice and the gin spills all over my arm.

He was drunk.

He said, oh brother, I'm so sorry, man, I'm so sorry.

I said, it's okay, Pac, don't worry about it.

And the guy with me said, if Pac bumped into me, I would have knocked him out.

I said, man, he made a mistake.

I just went to the bathroom, got some napkins, dabbed it off and dried it out as much as I could.

That's my only experience.

I never met Tupac other than that.

Two legends, eh?

Yeah, I was able to meet them because I was a recording artist.

So we went out to LA and recorded with KO.

Productions.

He got a deal with Maverick Recordings.

Madonna's record label, Maverick, was Warner Brothers.

So they flew out there and KO.

Productions, they used to make some real great hits back in the 80s and the 90s.

So we all flew out there.

And my longtime attorney, even to this day, close friend Ward White, he's lead counsel to four-time Grammy Award winner, Erykah Badu.

All of us were getting ready to get record deals.

We were at the LA recording studio.

This is the best studio I've ever been in in my life.

They order you food.

They had a pool table, a jacuzzi.

Janet Jackson was recording on the top floor.

Shontay Moore was recording on the bottom floor.

Cause you could see the artist's name.

I was like, oh, Janet Jackson on the top floor.

What I learned is it's not that hard to be a celebrity insider.

You just gotta know somebody who can trust you, who brings you in.

And then all of a sudden the whole world starts opening up to you.

And you start learning how the business works.

So I learned the business by being a recording artist and a role manager.

Trust is very big because a lot of them don't even know if people come to them in good faith for the right reasons.

So the fact that they can trust you says a lot about your character.

Cause that's when it opens up to everybody else.

Now with Speaker Focus, what kind of services do you provide?

Oh, wow.

Well, we've developed the number one platform for speaker marketing, and I'm proud to be the CEO of speakerfocus.com.

What we do is teach speakers how to grow their speaker business.

Before you can get paid, we take you through a six week training program, six modules, number one, to teach you how to build the proper messaging.

Most speakers have a difficult time connecting their messaging to the meeting planner.

So you need at least four signature programs that describe your hour long keynote speeches, two hour long educational keynotes, half day programs, two to four hours, or full day programs, four to eight hours.

You're going to need that messaging.

Speaking is not your number one skill, but copywriting is.

So we teach you world class copywriting skills right off the break in module one.

Then on the back end of module one, we teach you the three P's to delivering a very, very solid message.

And that's being polished, poised and professional.

Module two, we get into the sales tools.

Another trap that speakers fall into, especially motivational or inspirational speakers is that they talk too much.

We help you promote yourself.

Isn't that the point of the business case?

Yeah, well guess what?

It is the point, but not when you're talking to the meeting planner.

The meeting planner doesn't give a damn about your fake ass story or motivational inspiration.

They don't.

What they want is value.

And how do you substantiate your value through the messaging, through the sales tools.

So we teach you how to put together the right kind of website, speaker video demo, speaker info kit.

I'm not talking about a speaker one sheet, a full blown speaker info kit, 16 to 20 pages long.

It describes everything about you and your professional speaking deliverables.

And it also answers every question that they may have, whether or not they should hire you or not, without you saying one word.

Now that's gonna substantiate and justify your value and then give you leverage.

Once you have leverage, now you can move on to module three of setting up the business entity, being in compliance with the local secretary of state, getting your tax ID.

And then once you can do that, you can go open up your bank account to facilitate transactions and then get your Stripe account so you can take credit cards as well.

Module four is setting up your social media properly.

This is the one area where you can literally control the narrative about what you want the meeting planner to know about your professional speaking business, yet so many speakers don't understand how to manage their social media properly.

Social media should be called social proof.

We're in the information marketing era.

What you should be doing is sharing information, dropping new videos, sharing free information, giving it away more than anybody else in your space because that builds relationships.

So when the meeting planner clicks on your videos or your short form copy, your long form copy, your LinkedIn article, you are being consistent with your messaging.

Remember, leadership is the number one bookable and most requested topic at conferences, corporate meetings and events worldwide.

Number one.

So you should be creating leadership topics that the markets already buying.

So these misunderstandings about the speaking industry, we help you understand.

A lot of speaker coaches don't even know this.

And I wouldn't know it had I not been through the pain and suffering that I had to go through, especially for the first seven years of my career, I was just looking like a clown.

I didn't know that this other stuff existed.

There's so much overload of information.

And it comes to a point where one speaker coach will say something, the next speaker coach will advertise saying the opposite of that, but they claim to help you be a paid speaker.

So then you, who's right and who's wrong?

What's going on?

Well, if they've had over 2,700 page speaking engagements and you're probably gonna have to search high and low to find any speaker on planet earth with that many repetitions.

And if they've had the tens of thousands of practice repetitions and they've had these interactions with these meeting planners and they've made the horrific mistakes the way I have, these are pages out of my personal playbook.

I just didn't do 30 or a hundred speaking engagements and think that I've mastered the game and then downloaded some BS from the internet, repackaged it and sold it to you for $5,000.

That's not what this is.

This is pain and we get results.

I know what I'm talking about because I've just about seen the good, the bad and a whole lot of ugly.

Another thing too is I remember old school thinking used to keep me in a bad position because I didn't understand digital marketing.

Well, module five, we talk about setting up sales funnel, attracting qualified prospects.

You got to understand what a lead magnet is.

You got to start filling up your pipeline.

A lot of speakers are like, okay, KTR, once I get the business set up, where am I going to find somebody to book me at the $5,000 plus level?

They're horrible at lead generation.

They don't know how to market themselves.

So we have seven different marketing vehicles that will help you get your brand in front of meeting planners and get the meeting planner on your calendar very similar to how people get on my calendar for a free 30 minute strategy session.

And then we teach you how to manage the sales cycle.

We give you all the templates in module six.

It's not even a video.

We just give you all the downloadable templates like a speaker engagement agreement, speaker negotiating menu, pre-program questionnaire.

These are all documents that you need to build out the infrastructure to your speaker business.

Yet you'd be surprised that 90% of the speakers that come on board with us, even the ones with 10, 20, 30 plus years experience, 90% of them are horrible copywriters and they have never heard of anything that I'm telling them about.

And we're the only coaching program in this market space who is dead set against motivational or inspirational speaking because it's very restrictive to your income.

Typically you earn zero to $1,000 or you're speaking for free a lot.

This is how the marketplace has changed.

It doesn't mean anything to be a motivational speaker anymore, that fluffy era of speaker is over.

I had a guest who said, there's a company that said, we don't want you to motivate, you need to bring us training that will add value and actually change employees to doing things differently to be more productive, actual tangible results, no more motivation and hey, hey, hey, I'm feeling great and tomorrow back to the same thing.

Exactly, exactly.

So what I'm saying is, I know what my competitors are doing as we all should.

We know exactly what their curriculum looks like.

We know what the sales team does.

We understand that they try to get your credit card information very early on in the call.

When you use deplorable tactics like this, that means that your program is trash.

There's a typical chargeback rate in the coaching industry of 20%.

That means if your coaching program is doing 100K a month, you're okay with giving back $20,000 a month in chargebacks or refunds.

That's ridiculous.

You know what our chargeback rate is?

Zero, because I give you-

That means 20% of your customers have buyers from us?

Yes, they want their money back.

Oh.

You know why?

Because you didn't walk them through the process properly.

You probably pushed them into it.

And when you use those kinds of deplorable tactics, it means that your coaching program, the curriculum is not strong, your sales process, you might've been good at attracting them, like click bait.

Which happens a lot.

It's the internet.

Retention is another thing.

Retention and actually getting the results is a whole nother thing.

This is the reason why I give away so much information for free.

I want people feeling comfortable before they do business with speakerfocus.com.

And we just have the mechanism, the system, all the templates, and we walk you through the entire process.

Again, had I not been through the pain that I've been through, and had I not stayed active and current with what's going on in the market.

You know, I'm in a very blessed and privileged position as CEO of speakerfocus.com, because when I tell you I talk to everybody, I talk to everybody.

We get millions of branding impressions every single month because we're skilled at new media and digital marketing.

We've absolutely mastered Facebook advertising, YouTube pre-roll ads, Google AdWords, Snapchat, TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, the free organic outreach through email so your entire campaign doesn't wind up in a spam folder.

This is all a level of skill that most speakers don't have.

They're afraid of it.

So we've removed the fear from the technology.

All of them come to us.

We got dozens of TEDx speakers I talk to on a week to week basis, legions of coaches and consultants from soccer moms to Super Bowl champions.

I talk to them all.

I talk to the banquet, the catering department.

I talk to people negotiating deals.

I talk to meeting planners on all levels who book low fee speakers and who book these $250,000 speakers.

I talk to all the movers and shakers every single day.

I know what's going on because I keep my ear to the ground and I'm getting it in real time.

And I'm always updating the information on our platform as well, giving you the very best strategies to succeed and run a sustainable speaker business.

You've got to build it first.

Then you can convert prospects into bookings and revenue and add that on the books for yourself so you can have a successful speaker business.

Definitely need it if you want to enter the speaking arena.

Robertson, also known as KTR.

Thank you so much for your time.

You have shared so much with us.

I don't even know how to summarize.

From chasing fulfillment instead of the shiny objects, your work ethic, being able to be a leader, even if it means to stand alone instead of chasing crowds because you don't know who you are.

And most importantly, knowing how to become the world-class speaker that you can be through Speaker Focus.

Is there anything else I left out?

Well, Roberta, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for the opportunity to be on your platform and be able to share the little bit of knowledge that I have about my life and my world and what we do at speakerfocus.com.

Here's to your continued success.

I love you so much and everything you're doing.

I'm super impressed by your show.

Thank you.

Thank you for being here and I love you too.

Obviously we want to know everything.

So please tell us, so speakerfocus.com, where else can people find you in social media?

If anybody's interested in the world of becoming a high fee speaker and you really want to understand how to build a business properly, if you're willing to commit the time and you have a budget, you can go to speakerfocus.com and you can just click on the link to get on my calendar.

You can also go to kevinterobertson.com.

If anyone wants to book me to speak, you can talk to my people on my team and we can start the conversation.

I'm the only Kevin T.

Robertson on the internet so you can Google K-E-V-I-N-T-R-O-B-E-R-T-S-O-N and you'll see KTR pop up in all my social medias there.

Follow me, get in contact.

Let's have a conversation.

I'd love to be of service to you at the highest level possible whenever I can.

Excellent.

Kevin T.

Robertson, KTR on the internet.

He is the only one.

Thank you so much for being here.

You're very welcome.

Thanks Roberta.