The Referable Speaker: Your Guide to Building a Sustainable Speaking Career—No Fame Required

"Your speech’s referability is directly proportional to the speed at which it evolves. A referable speech is a transformational experience, a performance made up of hundreds of micro-moments. A signature bit is a piece of educational content performed with theatricality that solidifies a speaker’s brand. It supports a big idea. It’s memorable and repeatable. A signature bit transforms ordinary content into transformational and shareable content through a one-of-a-kind theatrical performance. Your signature bit can become your greatest marketing asset, increase your fame factor, and make you highly referable. Reliable delivery is one of the keys to crafting and delivering a referable speech. Spontaneity lives at the intersection of preparation and improvisation. When you’re creating an experience, the amount of audience interaction you request should be proportional to the amount of trust you’ve earned."

"Every single person we’ve profiled in this book along with the most sought-after speakers in the world have answered the One Question for themselves. Jay Acunzo answered the One Question: why don’t businesspeople trust their intuition? Jay Baer: why don’t business owners learn from their bad reviews? Ann Handley: what would inspire marketers to take bigger risks? Dr. Elliot Eisenberg: why is economics so boring? Carla Harris: why doesn’t mentoring work? Marcus Sheridan: what is stopping business owners from sharing the answers to their customers’ questions? Anthony Jack: what could schools do differently to help the doubly disadvantaged thrive? Clint Pulver: why do executives change the way they do business but not how they manage their teams? Michael Brenner: where is the customer in the corporate org chart? Carla Johnson: where do people get inspiration for their groundbreaking ideas?"

"A signature bit is a piece of educational content performed with theatricality that solidifies a speaker’s brand. It supports a big idea. It’s memorable and repeatable. An effective signature bit is: Transformational: the audience is changed in thought, words, and/or actions. Insightful: it shines a light on a hidden or new idea or thought process. Provocative: it highlights extremes or provokes the audience by challenging traditional narratives or long-held beliefs. Unique: something that only you do in a way that only you can do. Memorable: if it’s transformational, insightful, provocative, and unique, it’s highly likely that it will also be memorable. Every speaker can benefit from a memorable signature bit because it helps audiences relay the big idea of the speech to other people in an entertaining and, therefore, referable way."

"You can craft and rehearse short segments in which the setup and payoff are always the same, but the examples you use to support the point are industry-specific. It’s called a donut because there’s a hole in the middle of the short segment that must be filled with new content each and every time. When you use a donut, the transitions and flow of the speech stay intact, it’s the hole in the middle that changes. Your speech may have three donuts that total only twelve minutes of content, but that’s plenty of tailoring, and you know it can be delivered reliably."

"An experience: A referable speech is a theatrical experience. It feels less like a lecture and more like a show. Deliver a speech that changes the way the audience thinks, acts, and feels, and you’ve created a transformational experience. Craft a performance and you’ll change the way people feel about themselves, see the world, and operate in it. Instead of receiving feedback like, “Thanks, I learned some good tips and tricks,” people will say, “You’ve changed the way I see the world,” or “My mind is blown. I’ll never be the same person again.”"

"Reliable delivery: Spontaneity exists at the intersection of improvisation and preparation. That’s why it costs thousands of dollars to buy a ticket to see Hamilton, and eleven bucks (plus two drinks) to go to a local improv show. Hamilton is going to work every time, but the improv? It depends on the night. It depends on the performers. It depends on the audience. Keynote performers deliver a choreographed performance so that meeting planners can trust that the speech they bought is the speech they’ll get. Reliable"

"We suggest you work your way backwards. Start by identifying your One Question. Embark on a journey to answer the question no other expert is asking. Build and experiment with your contextual model. Address every tier on the Audience Hierarchy of Needs. Craft a signature bit. Focus on reliable delivery. Build up your fractal fame to increase your domain fame, which in turn will level up your worldly fame. Leverage your stageside leads to build a referral tree that takes advantage of compounding gigs."