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 speak speakerlab.com slash marketing and we'll see you there.

Hey, what's up my friends? Grant Baldwin here. Welcome back to the speaker lab podcast. We've got a

great episode for you today. We got part two of all things the speaker lab history. How did we get to this point? And so if you miss last week's episode, you want to make sure you go back and check that out. We have Eric Ream, who's turning the tables on me and interviewing me. We had part one last week about kind of the how I got into speaking and then kind of what led to the speaker lab. And then today we're going to be digging into more of the speaker lab itself and the history and genesis of that. So we got a lot of just some fun behind the scenes stuff. I think you're really going to enjoy and get into. So let's not waste any time. Let's get right into it. Here's my conversation with Eric Green, talking about the history of Speaker Lab.

Enjoy it.

All right, welcome to the Speaker Lab podcast.

Again, this is Eric Ream.

I'm a booked and paid to speak alum and one of the newest Speaker Lab coaches on the team.

This is actually part two.

So we asked Grant to come back, but we're having such a great time talking about the Speaker Lab journey. And I think it's important that we spend some time on this because it's really changing lives. It changed mine. I'm an example of it. And I think we really want to unpack this for you. So Grant, can you say hi to everybody out there? What up? Good to be back for Part 2 here. And if you haven't already, definitely go back and listen to Part 1. So Eric, thanks for our hosting this. And thanks for being back for part two. Awesome. And you're in elite company because you now can be counted as a repeat guest. You are a second time. How does that make you feel? This feels really good. Two, two guest spots right out of the game. And I like this. This is nice. That's awesome. Cool. And how's it feel to just to answer questions? Is it kind of cool just to have someone else ask you the questions and you just talk about your journey? So there's pros and cons to it. One of the things we were talking about, I've been dealing with this cough. And so I've been having to mute myself a lot just to get the coughs out. So if I was asking the questions, I'd get to do a little bit less talking, but I'm okay for today. Awesome. Okay, cool. So let's recap for the listeners. We were talking about your journey and you kind of decided that you wanted to resign your position as a youth pasture, you're making about $30,000 a year at the time. This was 2005. You took a $2,500 loan, basically not alone, a gift. That was fantastic. Was it your father, you said? Yep, yep, my dad. Your father, and then you invested in a website, went to a book camp, got some business cards, which now you go back and say, well, that was probably a waste of money. You wouldn't recommend anybody get business cards, but you did do that. And then about a year and a half, you started really getting some gigs going. You started slowly transition to becoming a full-time speaker, and you got to the 2014, that, hey, you had 70 gigs going, and you had this realization that this is awesome and everything, but it's still trading time for money. And there's got to be different ways for we to make money. So you kind of got this idea that, hey, maybe I could duplicate how to turn this into a profit, basically, a profit machine. It started out really as an idea for you to make some income that wasn't just you trading time for money. It was a win-win for all of us because it turned out it also was good for people that was going through the course. And so if I remember right, it was around 2014 that you started this process, correct? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we created books and paid to speak and started promoting it. And again, at the time, like I was still doing, I was still doing around 60, 70 gigs a year and still like love speaking

and had no intention of doing anything else.

And so speaking was a big part of that.

And so literally like as the online training program has booked and paid to speak, we

continue to do some webinars.

We continue to refine the, you know, the processes and the systems for that.

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