I don't spend much time on a stage anymore.
Now almost all of my income comes from a short list of long-term consulting clients who pay well for one thing: the insights I picked up somewhere unusual: 15,000+ mind reading shows.
A three-year run at Universal Studios. Corporate stages for BP, United Airlines, and the US Military. America's Got Talent. Penn & Teller Fool Us. Consulting for Criss Angel & Brian Brushwood.
Nowadays my clients aren't hiring me to perform; they hire me for what all of that performing & touring taught me about understanding how people actually think, get persuaded, and buy whatever you're selling.
I'm not telling you that to impress you. I'm telling you because of what it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand: none of it came from being the most talented person in the room.
This book is about your business. Your consulting, your coaching, your practice, the service you sell as yourself. It is about making you measurably better at promoting it, selling it, and delivering it. The performing is just the proving ground; the system is built for the desk / keyboard / place where you actually work.
There was a stretch where my return bookings stopped. I was good. Better than I had ever been. And the phone went quiet anyway.
It took me far too long to see why. I had made the show about me. The moment I started making it about the audience instead, making the people in the room the heroes of the night, the bookings came back & never stopped.
That cracked a belief I had carried my whole career. You already know this one, even if you have never said it out loud: you are good at what you do, the results are real, and you can name people in your field, less capable than you, who are further ahead.
They are not better at the work. They figured out the other half of what it takes to win.
Being excellent at your work and being successful at the business of your work are two completely different skills. Nobody teaches you the second part.
Three jobs that run underneath every service business. Most experts are quietly running one of them and wondering why it isn't working.
The right clients find out you exist and recognize their own problem in your words, before they ever reach out.
The decision to hire you becomes easy, because you understand what your buyer is actually seeing.
You deliver the work so well your clients tell the story for you, and every engagement hands you the next one.
The first half takes apart the beliefs that keep you invisible. The second half is the build: how to draw the right crowd, how to shape a sale so that the right buyer says yes, and how to deliver so that the work sells the next project for you.
It's short on purpose.
This is the system my own work has proven out and it's the same one I've taught inside BP, United Airlines, State Farm, and the US Military.
It's the difference between being the best-kept secret in your field & being the only choice.
I price it there on purpose. I would rather have it in your hands than make a margin on it, because the people who read it & use it are the people I end up working with more closely. That's a trade I'm happy to make.
The stage is already set. The people who need exactly what you know are out there right now, building a relationship with someone else because they can't find you.
P.S. The only thing standing between you and the business you actually want is the half nobody taught you. It is seven dollars and one afternoon away.