Hey, Fran, Graham Baldwin here.

Hey, what if I told you that there was a single marketing asset that you could use to book tens of thousands of dollars in paid speaking gigs before you even have a website?

Well, that tool exists.

And Dan Irvin, one of the speakers on our team, used it to book over $36,000 in speaking gigs without a fancy website or any social media presence.

Even better, we're going to teach you exactly how

to create that tool for your speaking business in under an hour. For a limited time, we're going to

be offering a free live training on how to build and use this marketing asset to start booking

paid gigs in just a few weeks. If you want to hear more, go to thespeakalab.com slash marketing.

That's what you got to do is go to the speakakerlab.com slash marketing. That's all you got to do is go to the speakerlab.com slash marketing and we'll see you there.

What is that, my friend, Graham Baldwin here. Welcome back to the speaker lab podcast. We

appreciate you being here. Appreciate you tuning in here on episode 151, where you got another great guest that is joining us just to share some secrets and strategies for building and growing your speaking business.

Today we're going to be talking with Chris Mefford.

Chris, I've known for a couple years now as a great, great guy, and he is a guy that has had a lot

of experience in the speaking industry. So Chris actually used to work with Dave Ramsey.

You may be familiar with a personal finance teacher and wizard guru, all those things.

And so actually, they do a lot of events. And Chris was basically the big wig over all the events for for a while

and so he shares a lot of the things that he learned along the way. I mean, we're talking

events of handful of people to events of arena's size events. So they've worked with a lot of speakers

on a lot of events. So he talks through exactly what they were looking for in terms of when

they were working with speakers of what made speakers good to work with, why they hired some speakers over others. So a lot of great info here from someone that has hired, reviewed and hired a lot of different speakers. So great insights and info here from Chris Mefford. We're going to get to that in just a second. Before we do, let me again remind you, if you haven't already, we definitely want, would love for you to stop by and check out free speakerworkshop.com, free speakerworkshop.com, where you can get a step-by-step plan on exactly how to find and book paid speaking engagements. Again, that's free speakerworkshop.com. Make sure you check that out. what are you waiting on? I tell you about it every time. Every episode I tell you about, just about.

Don't want you to go check that out again. FreeSpeaker Workshop.com. All right. So let's get right into it. Here's my conversation with my buddy Chris Mefford. Enjoy. What's up, my friends? Hey, today I'm hanging out with my buddy Chris Mefford. And Chris has a lot of speaking experience. He's been on both sides of the coin in terms of he's been a speaker, but has also done a lot on helping to run events and hire speakers and work with speakers of all different sizes of events and different calibers of speakers. Some really big names that people will probably recognize. And then plenty of speakers that may be up in commerce as well. So I think he brings a lot of perspective to the speaking industry and looking forward to chatting with my boy today. What's up, Chris? How are you? I'm doing well, Grant. I'm glad to be here. Thank you. I'm honored to hang out with you. We live fairly close to one another, I've done lunch a few times and always enjoy getting

together with you. So let's start with this. Why don't you give us a little back story on what you've

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