68 – Speaker Match: Tom interviews Bryan Caplovitz

Episode 068 – Bryan Caplovitz
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody it's Tom here with episode 68 of screw the commute podcast Oh we got a longtime friend and colleague on today Bryan Caplovitz He's the founder of Speaker match I've known him for a long time and I've never heard one bad thing about his service in all the years I've known him and believe me if there was something going on in the speaker world I would've heard about it. So he's a great guy we'll talk to him in a minute. Hope you did miss episode 67 which is how to refer me for money referral fees can run anywhere from thirteen dollars and fifty cents to over five thousand dollars so it's kind of a spin off. Very specific affiliate marketing we'll tell you we told you about an episode 67 then a quick announcement. Our podcast app is now in the App Store so you can do lots of cool stuff conveniently right from your mobile device and you can download it from the App Store for iPhones. Now we're still working on the Google or the Android One because Google podcast has had a little trouble. All right our sponsor for today's episode is the wake 'em up video professional speaking system the best selling ever pro speaking training. Yeah I know most of you hate public speaking but there's way more ways that you can make money running your mouth than just being on stage. And if you don't believe me listen the episode 007 where I showed you the top 10 ways to make money speaking or you can check out the system directly at antion.com/speakervideo.htm and that'll be in the show notes this is episode sixty eight.

[00:02:15] All right let's get to the main event Bryan Caplovitz is the president and CEO of SpeakerMatch.com the world's largest online speakers bureau. Speaker match helps line up thousands of speakers on all topics with meeting and event planners who need speakers from local service clubs to the biggest speaking events in America. Speaker match has been in business for nearly 20 years Bryan. Are you ready to screw The commute that is. It's been a long time and before we get into it. Yeah you're somewhat of a geek I did not know that you know about databases and I was reading some of your bio on LinkedIn. You know some stuff. But boy I'd be afraid to touch databases. Gee whiz. But. But anyway you you're a combo geek and super-duper entrepreneur. So tell him how you how you came up through the ranks.

[00:03:22] Well it's funny. Yes I am a programmer. I am a bit of a geek and I came to this from that background. I actually met you at an NSA conference and you you gave me some information about search engine optimization that kind of helped me realize that I could actually make a business out of this. Yeah I met you before I even had a real business going.

[00:03:46] Well NSA for everybody is National Speakers Association. He and I have both been members for a long time. And I guess that's where we met. So. So you didn't have a business at that time.

[00:03:59] I didn't. I didn't have a business at all I had an idea. I was brand new to the speaker world. I didn't even know that existed. But that is kind of side just that the market that I fell into.

[00:04:11] I'm really all about the backend technology stuff that goes into it more than the actual business. But since I've been doing this for so long I very much know the speaker world.

[00:04:23] Well yeah but I don't quite I don't quite believe that Bryan because I saw in your in your background you had at least a year or more worth of actual customer service work and I imagine that has something to do with the success of your business because like I said I've never heard one bad thing about your business and that truly means you've got a great customer service operation going there too.

[00:04:51] Well that is really good to hear. It's very important to me that I maintain that that high level of service.

[00:04:57] So. So tell us a little bit about the jobs you've had then and then the when did you make that. Did you like just quit one day and start a business or did you plan it out. How did you make the transition from the working world to the entrepreneurial world.

[00:05:14] I've had lots of jobs and I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur. I really never thought I'd be owning my own business or running my own business. But looking back at it now I realize that I have had the entrepreneurial spirit since my whole life when I was young I saw greeting cards door to door when I was about 10 years old. Before that I had magic shows lemonade stands. I mean I was always doing something my life I've always been doing some kind of business. But after grad school I went to work for a consulting firm and I thought that I was pretty much set there in that kind of world you know working in the corporate world in the tech time of the tech bust the late 90s. A lot of my co-workers were getting laid off and I didn't have any assignments and I was just kind of see it. We call it on the beach in the consulting world and I was waiting for the next thing to come up and I was ready to be laid off any day. And my boss told me that I could make some extra money if I would go speak at some conferences. I'm like You're gonna pay me for not working and you'll pay me extra go speak somewhere to go travel which is what I really love to do. Okay. And when I was when I started looking for places to speak I realized that it wasn't easy. There was nothing online to find opportunities.

[00:06:42] What did they want you to speak about to help promote the company or what.

[00:06:47] Yeah it was database development was my area of expertise database database development and user interface design.

[00:06:55] That's a big motivational thing there.

[00:07:01] Not at all. Jump around the stage motivational stuff I had you know a screen with my laptop on it and everybody else in the room had their laptop right up and copying code. But that's a tech conference for you. But I had other people in the same position as me at my company that were looking for places to speak to. So I had people that were looking for places to speak and I had places because I was calling around finding people and I was matching people and working with things online so I came up with the idea of making a monster.com for speakers. And like I said I didn't know there was a speaking world. I thought I was I thought I invented the speaking world.

[00:07:39] Maybe you did. I don't know. Right so so you started the speakers were you still working at the time.

[00:07:48] I was I was working at the time there was a while between the time that I started playing with this whole idea of creating a Web site and websites were new data driven websites were almost non-existent. Almost everybody had like an advertising page on the Web right. So it was a great way for me to build my skills and you know enhance the services that I could offer the skills that I had to offer the company I was working for. And it took a while before I finally did get laid off and then when I did get laid off I had a very nice severance package. GEORGE BUSH I believe extended unemployment forever. So I had a long time when I just got to keep playing with my little project and I was getting paid more not working and I was being paid working as I was getting my severance and my unemployment.

[00:08:40] And were you speaking during that time also.

[00:08:44] I went to a couple of conferences. I did a couple myself on a PowerPoint presentation. So still kind of technical but it kind of came to a point where I had to decide that I was either going to go get a real job or make this project work and I decided I'd try to make some money at it.

[00:09:08] Okay now. Now speakers bureaus from my perspective typically book speakers take a percentage of the fee. Yours doesn't operate that like that does it.

[00:09:21] That's how I started. I'll just take a fee. I never made a single penny getting a fee when I was getting started. I spent a lot of time sending materials to meeting planners. I had to collect the materials from the speaker. So I had to get the speakers to send me their demo video their DVD or video cassettes. And they sent me their package and then I had to package everything up again. You know to to the meeting planner with several of these packages speaker kits and then send that to the meeting planner.

[00:09:58] All this cost me money for everything. And then the meeting planner would say you know we decided to go with a different speaker. We're going with a different bureau. And I thought after this was only about a month that I spent doing this I thought this is stupid. I can't spend my whole life. It's like a real estate agent that drives somebody around town I can add all kinds of houses and then that the client decides to go buy from a number they you know they called on the sign when they were driving home right. So I decided that I was going to change that model and my model became a subscription model.

[00:10:33] I offer speakers the ability to create a profile to put their information up on line so that meeting planners can learn all about them and what they have to offer and the speakers can apply to any jobs that meeting planners post and I am out of the picture. I just provide the tools for them to use. I get a subscription fee whether or not the speakers get booked. It's not really my issue.

[00:10:55] They're getting value for what they're paying for because they have a platform to promote themselves and they have somewhere that they can send meeting planners when a meeting planner wants to learn more about them as their as a speaker and the speakers do get leads they find out about opportunities they wouldn't have found out about otherwise and my services are very inexpensive so it's certainly not a big investment.

[00:11:20] And it's worked for 20 years so it's certainly proven itself in the marketplace. And then another really important thing you you brought up for entrepreneurs out here is that you know you saw something you had an idea that is very viable but the methods you were using was not viable. So you switched rather than just run it into the ground and say well that idea was no good. You saw it early enough and you switched and turned it into a 20 year business. And so that's that's a good lesson for everybody don't get stuck in one rut that there's only one way this way has been way better for everybody because you know one good job a speaker gets from you could pay your subscription fee for 10 years something like that. You know it's a good deal because the regular bureau is going to take thousands of dollars from a you know a decent fee speaker and they could pay your service for a long time. Do they do they have to be exclusive with you or can they can they be with another bureau and still use your service so is your service exclusive or could they be with another bureau and still list with you. Get their own job. So how's that work.

[00:12:46] Yeah my my message is all of what. First of all I'm catering to the emerging speaker so people that are using my service typically are not. They're not out there they're not being represented by ideas for anything else. So I encourage them to be seen as much as possible. I encourage speakers to be listed on every possible source they can find. Just be out there and be seen. That's the main message that I have with my services that meeting planners can't possibly book you if they don't know you exist and you can't possibly get a job if you don't know that it's out there either but you want meeting planners to know who you are and they need to be able to find you.

[00:13:26] So if you've been around so long now that they just everybody knows about you. Do you still have the market to meeting planners to stay in front of them.

[00:13:37] It's mostly about search engine optimization because honestly meeting planners especially when it comes to emerging speakers and a meeting planner is not typically a professional meeting planner. They are often just booking one event you know they may be a volunteer for a charity or a youth group or school something like that there. They're a volunteer. They have a job of finding a speaker for the next event and then they never look for a speaker again for the rest of their lives. So what they do is they go to Google and they type in you know leadership Speaker Cincinnati. That's how they search.

[00:14:15] Yeah right. So so. So how many major cities do you target.

[00:14:23] We target the cities that our speakers are in. So when a speaker creates a file on our site everything on our site is optimized so the speaker creates a profile. It doesn't matter what city they're in that gets indexed in the search engine so that they're found.

[00:14:40] Got it. Great. Great. So. So you've got nothing to do all day except count your money is that right.

[00:14:48] It never ends. Tom there's always some new technology that's available.

[00:14:52] Yeah that's for sure. That's all we do day or night too. But we were going to get that question later but that was a good time for us. What's a typical day look like for you.

[00:15:05] So a typical day is always reviewing my goals at the beginning of the day. I'm always I have a calendar planner. I make sure that I keep track of my goals. Every week I try and outline what I'd like to get done for the year. Definitely. Well I do outline what I want done for the year. I move those goals to a monthly format and then I try to put things into a weekly format to manage how I get everything done and every day. I review my goals. First thing I do and the last thing I do. I do it before I leave for the day as I go through my day is going to look like tomorrow and the next day I just make sure that that still makes sense. It May be quick but I I want to be sure that I am doing the most important things and I try to get in some exercise every morning. I do just about every every day during the week I need to get up from my desk.

[00:16:04] So are you working out of your home.

[00:16:06] I have an office outside of the home.

[00:16:10] Okay so you get up and go to work every day. Right.

[00:16:14] I get up and go to work and then I have to make sure that I am forcing myself to get up from my desk and do something. So I exercise every day and at least once a week I make it a point to have lunch with somebody to go out for lunch and hope make. It could be social it could be to build the business a little but something. My office is about 10 minutes from my house.

[00:16:42] Oh you're commuting. You're killing me, man.

[00:16:45] I tried to free my house and the kids school so it really is the perfect place. And then my my days are generally divided up. I I am not a good multitasker. So I have main five main areas that I focus on programming marketing finance and accounting strategy planning and networking and I divide my days up to to focus on one of those things.

[00:17:16] Okay so each is not all five each day it's one thing each day.

[00:17:21] I can not do all five each day. I could not possible and I know that if I don't make a day for one of those things then it's just not going done.

[00:17:32] Typical for somebody with your kind of mind the programming you know you can't do it for a couple of minutes and then jump away. You've got to really concentrate on things and get things done and have some continuity.

[00:17:46] Right. Right. Lately I have been taken about an hour each day about half an hour in the morning and half an hour at night to be on chat. We have a support system that has chat and it helps me to kind of make make sure that I really have a feel for what's going on with the business so.

[00:18:09] So this is chat with clients or who.

[00:18:14] It's an online and so it's a support system so anybody that comes to the site can chat with support questions. I'm on the frontline.

[00:18:25] Good for you now. What kind of problems do people have. I mean you've got this pretty much down where it's programmed and they can upload their own stuff right.

[00:18:36] Yes. So the biggest problems that our members have is how to craft a good response to a job how to properly craft and profile you know the message and copywriting in their profile or in their program descriptions. They just want to make sure that they're doing the right thing so that what they're writing is appealing to a meeting planner.

[00:19:05] These are more of marketing stuff.

[00:19:08] Yeah yeah. For the members that technical stuff is pretty much pretty much gone. If we have any issues we tackle those very quickly but the services is very stable it has it's been it's been stable for years and then people that are the other side is the prospects that are that are coming in. And I guess it's both sides we have Speaker prospects and meeting planner prospects that just have questions about how to use the service or what kind of messaging they should use what it takes to become a speaker.

[00:19:37] And what. How are you marketing the speakers.

[00:19:42] It's mostly online with so we have online advertising search engine advertising we use some services like Taboola and Outbrain. Linkedin all the social networks have both the ability to post in the channels and groups and then posting through posting ads through their services. So we do a lot of that and then we use affiliate marketing also to some extent.

[00:20:11] Now I used Outbrain but when I talked to Taboola a while back they wanted some ungodly amount of money upfront. They still like that.

[00:20:19] No they're the same format Outbrain now.

[00:20:21] Okay. Because I said you know whenever you guys decide to play with in my arena let me know. But they they were trying to do enterprise stuff and charging thousands of dollars just to hook up with them and Outbrain was like pay per click as well.

[00:20:36] They're almost identical now.

[00:20:37] They straightened up a little bit now. So do you. Do you keep one of your criteria. There was accounting and finance. So yes do you keep numbers like on the percentage of your gross for advertising and a percentage for payroll and things like that.

[00:21:02] I'm very very big into tracking. I'm I am certainly a numbers guy. I hate accounting. I do like having the statistics available so I have lots of numbers that are in front of me I have my own dashboard to see how the company is running and how things are going. I use a really great service for recurring membership. I highly recommend it to anybody that's been together a recurring membership. Yeah I'd just say a recurring membership service. Recurly is the name of the service I use.

[00:21:39] We'll put everything in the show notes.

[00:21:42] Yeah it's a great service and it doesn't really good job at providing statistics. As far as the rest of the expenses go that the office expenses payroll rent to all of that is just a very it well it's a set number really for me. It doesn't change so I don't need to really worry too much about tracking that.

[00:22:05] Yeah yeah those are fixed fixed expenses but I just wondered if you varied the marketing expense compared to the growth or kept it at a max or something. So tell us about the actual service. What does it cost. What does somebody get if they hook up with you.

[00:22:23] So basic service starts at nineteen dollars and ninety five cents every four weeks and that's to create a profile on our site. So it's like I said so meeting planners get a feel for who you are. It's a very basic profile you have your picture a biography and one of your programs that you can list and then you also get access to our job board which is what meeting planners can use to post a request for speakers. As an open call so occasionally we have meeting planners that post that it's usually about two or three a day that we have coming in from meeting planners. Also in every profile any level that you're at and we have silver gold and platinum any level that you have has the ability meeting planners have the ability through your profile to request information from you directly and that's how most speakers are getting booked from our service. So a meeting planner goes in and types in etiquette speaker Los Angeles they'll go directly to your page typically they'll just fill out a form saying I'd like to invite you to my to apply to my event. And that level service the silver service. If you want to apply for any job that's an open call. It's four dollars and ninety nine cents for each application. In our Gold and Platinum packages you have unlimited applications at no additional fee and each of those levels the gold and platinum have more features in the profile section so that you have a more robust profile.

[00:23:59] The gold package has some video lets you add a blog some slide shares and then the platinum package allows an article library. A audio file library and video applications which is in my opinion one of the greatest features that we offer. In the video applications are similar to a video voicemail message. When you apply to a message it's a video that you attach to that application where you can speak directly to the meeting planner and say.

[00:24:36] Hi. Hi Tom. My name is Bryan and I think I'd be really great for your event because they get a real good sense of what you sound like how you come across. I love that. And then in our platinum package I have just added I bundled together some of the other services that I have. So I have a service called my lead guru and another one called guest match and those services are for people that are looking for media attention.

[00:25:04] Oh okay. So yes it's a pretty broad range for emerging speakers in one place and what's the range of prices for these services. It starts with 19 something a month roughly.

[00:25:15] Nine nineteen ninety five twenty nine ninety five and forty nine ninety five for the different level.

[00:25:21] Oh yeah. Very very inexpensive like that one piece of job could pay for a couple years really. I mean one decent job the fee for one decent job could pay for it for five to ten years. All right. So amazing compared to I mean I don't know what else is out there that would compete with it.

[00:25:43] Yeah. Now I should say I should say these are my holiday prices and we're talking in December right.

[00:25:49] It's a whole range because it's hard to tell people buy less than six months from now as they look back so it could range to from what there was still a bargain.

[00:25:58] Regular is not a whole lot more. Twenty nine ninety five forty nine ninety five and seventy. Yeah. Exactly.

[00:26:04] This is still chump change compared to you know one decent fee even one indecent fee. It is still enough to pay you a lot of this stuff. Now once they get that lead any follow up job. They don't have like a speakers bureau they will. They're not obligated to give you anything right.

[00:26:25] No not at all. So I need any money that you make through our service is yours to keep. I don't collect any commissions. No additional fees. It's just a fee to use the service create a profile and have something that's out there.

[00:26:38] This is great great great great great. So have you ever been screwed over in business. If so what you do about it.

[00:26:45] So Do Taxes count taxes or something. Yeah. My my mind will not really allow me to think that way being screwed so I don't hold on to it. When we went to a hotel with us with our family recently my brother in law lost a quarter in a video game machine and he complained the hotel wouldn't give him his quarter back. And so he stole a light bulb from the room. He wants to get back. I am not that way at all. I'm just different so I've certainly faced challenges. I've been wronged. I've been cheated. I've been stiffed I've been lied to but I don't dwell on it. I really just don't want to waste any time or energy getting back or getting even. I just learned from the experience and move on.

[00:27:42] So that you're more careful the next time. So how about a funny or bizarre happened with both of these people you've dealt with.

[00:27:49] So my my staff thought this was funny. I don't know if I think it's necessarily funny but there may be a good lesson in here for people after running a business so someone threatened to complain about my service on Twitter to her huge list it's like fifty thousand plus followers. If I didn't extend free service to her so she only wanted to complain and say something negative about me if I didn't give her a free service. So I said go ahead. You know she was just good. She wanted free service not because of anything other than the fact that she's important. And so I said Go ahead write whatever you want. And so she posted something that was not so kind and I wrote right back. I posted on her Twitter with the hashtag speaker match sucks and it was a message that kind of made light of it and basically said you know we we hate for you to have bad experience we're here to do whatever we can. And she she took down everything she she removed everything. So people some people. Yeah. And yeah I think sometimes you just have to. I don't know. I might in my mind I was thinking. Any exposure is good exposure. And what she is offering and what she's put out there is not so horrible.

[00:29:14] Well and so you know a good person would have come and said look I got this really big following. How about we make a deal. And yeah you know that would have been done. I certainly heard her had been totally upbeat for both parties good feelings among everybody and everybody leads with something happy rather than now. That person you know has to try to sleep with the at night knowing what they have done so terrible. So what do you like best about working for yourself and what's the worst thing.

[00:29:48] Best thing about working for myself is freedom. Yeah. Absolutely freedom to work on my own time on my own terms. Freedom and freedom to make more money. You know when you have a real job you have your salary and you got to go beg for a raise but I guess unless you're on commission I bet you know I have the freedom to make more money than you did. Freedom to do the things the way that I want to. I don't have to get approval from someone higher up freedom to be creative freedom to travel or spend time with the family exercising when I want to.

[00:30:24] Is your family involved in the business at all.

[00:30:28] Only during occasional campaigns when I have my kids do a video of us both.

[00:30:37] So what's the worst part.

[00:30:41] I'm accountable to me. Well it means that deadlines often aren't real right. I can just decide to change the deadline and I I don't. I don't really consider myself to be a procrastinator but I can be. And if if you're if anybody listening is a procrastinator and you're thinking of going into business for themselves they need to have a partner that's going to hold them accountable.

[00:31:12] Is that why you have those other people. I know that Paul was one correspondent with me and I guess he he made you get on at the right time right.

[00:31:22] There is absolutely some of that where there are things that I do not like to do and it's great to be able to hand them off to others.

[00:31:28] When did you start bringing on people.

[00:31:35] It was pretty pretty soon after I started. So I started the business from my home. In 2001 I got an office a little bit later maybe four or five months later I actually got an office because I wanted to bring in some help. I started to feel like I couldn't do everything myself so it didn't take too long before I turned it around and was able to make a little bit of money and it was enough to cover the rent and I figured to pay a little something to somebody else so I started with a with a student intern from UT just a few hours a week but I knew that I could start growing this. I saw potential. University of Texas. Yeah I'm in Austin Texas yes. Yeah. And that was actually a really good move for me. It was very scary to go out and get an office outside the home. And it wasn't a terrible expense. It was a if I recall correctly it was something like seven hundred dollars a month or so.

[00:32:44] Yeah. And it was great that I had that because it really gave me the motivation to keep it up because I couldn't possibly be late on my rent or anything.

[00:32:52] Right. Exactly. You can't procrastinate on the rent. All right. So we got to take a little break for our sponsor message and when we come back I want to ask you how you stay motivated. So let me ask everybody out there do you think it sounds like B.S. If I tell you you could earn a hundred thousand dollars of one speech I admit on face value it sounds like B.S. to me too. All right. But here's the reality. When there's at least two hundred people in the crowd I haven't pulled in less than that. In any speech I've made in the past 16 years sometimes as much as 250,000. And I know many of you listening to this would be happy with a hundred times less than that and I wouldn't be too when I first started it. If you have the right topic and the right thing for the audience members to buy and the right training that isn't B.S. This can be your reality. So check out the wake 'em up video professional speaking system where along with this course I include one on one consultations to customize the program to you check out all the details at antion.com/speakervideo.htm and we'll have that in the show notes.

[00:34:14] All right. Let's get back to today's super guess Bryan Caplovitz is the founder of Speaker match a great service for putting together speakers and clients. So Bryan how do you stay motivated working for yourself.

[00:34:30] Unquestionably the way that I do it is by setting goals writing down my goals and looking at those goals very regularly. That is by far the best advice that I have for anybody because if you really if you don't know where you're going. There's no way to get there.

[00:34:48] Yeah. Yeah and most most people I've ever read or heard about this that writing them down is the critical piece of it.

[00:34:54] Right yeah right writing them down and looking at them regularly. Yeah. That's important.

[00:35:01] So you do it twice a day and then you scratch them off like a to do list. Or what. See I have my mind games that I play on myself is that I have never reached the goal in my entire life. Because as soon as I get anywhere near it something appears past it. And so that's my goal to keep scratching and clawing forward even when I don't have to anymore. So. So what do you do. How do you. You scratch them off or what. How do you do it. What if you achieve one and then you have a party or what.

[00:35:35] I like to see things getting done so I will put down as many steps as I realistically need to to get something done so that I can check something off at least every day I want to be sure that I'm making progress. So if I have a really big project or a big task that I need to tackle I'll break it down into smaller chunks so that I have things that I can check off my list.

[00:35:58] All right now you just do you do that seven days a week or do you say OK Friday weekend is family time or how do you get in a lot of entrepreneurs are 24/7.

[00:36:10] Yeah that's a great question. I did not want to be like that I absolutely have never been like that. That's one of the best tips that I have another one of the best tips that I have and that is leave work at work. You have to be able to compartmentalize and spend time on specific things that are important to you exercise family mindfulness identify what's important to you.

[00:36:34] But family is very important to me. I cut off work you know when I when I leave the office which is typically about five thirty or so every night. I'm. I leave the office and work is at work and I'm home with the family and I do not work weekends okay.

[00:36:51] And what. But you know when you are the bottom line for a company you what kind of emergency things do you have in place. If the site goes down you get automatic notice or who's who who does something about.

[00:37:04] Yeah I have everything automated so that I'll get pinged right away. There is some kind of emergency. I've got Justin and Paul here to kind of back things up and they have different different minds have different calls so they may be available you know on a different schedule. Justin is actually in another country right now is in Scotland where he's in grad school and he's happy to do things whenever something pops through on his radar.

[00:37:36] So everybody gets a notice if there's a technical glitch.

[00:37:41] Yes. Which is really almost never now. Yeah. And just technology has improved so much. It used to be that you know recovering from a database crash could be a multi day event. And lots of money and it's not anymore. A couple of clicks to just kind of go back to where it was.

[00:38:03] I learned a hard lesson back in the early days that I started when the commercial Internet started in 94 and this hosting company said Yeah we have a battery backup for 10 days then your site backed up to tape and they were buried under ground for hurricanes and stuff and so yeah. They went down and I thought OK we're good. They got a backup. Yeah. Ten days later they found that out of the very website I was down for 10 days because of it. So yeah you got to keep local backups and be able to restore stuff when necessary because ten days without income you know use like you've disappeared off the face of the earth especially if you've got members.

[00:38:51] I've read lots of stories about people that have lost their businesses because of backup issues.

[00:38:55] Exactly yeah. Everybody makes it is the last thing. But that's one of the most important things that you have to do. So what parting thoughts do you have for any we call them screwballs that listen to this. The thing about the overall business if they're sitting in that cubicle wishing man I'd love to have a life like that guy what would you tell him.

[00:39:17] So if you're interested in starting your own business. Set goals be organized. Track your progress regularly and remember it is definitely about the money you have to keep your eye on that bottom line. If you're starting a business if you're thinking of starting a business you need to know what it will take to give up on that that specific goal or give up on that idea. You have to be able to walk away and not try to continue driving forward when all the signs are saying it makes sense to walk away.

[00:39:51] Yeah. And yes so many people say Just do what you like and the money will come no it won't. Oh it will not. If that money doesn't come in or nobody else wants what you are so thrilled about. You are not in business anymore you're just you have an expensive hobby.

[00:40:08] I'll say it's a part of it. I all say that you can probably find a way to do what you like and make money.

[00:40:15] Well I did it. You know I had a practical joke company after I got out of the nightclub business where I had bikers trying to kill me. I thought you know yeah. I was in over 100 violent encounters to gunfights and knife fights and all that stuff. And I thought when I get out of this I'm going to do something that's fun for me and fun for everybody else. And I started a practical joke company long before punk'd you know I got the idea for candid camera. I did 4,000 jobs. So it was a lot of fun. And I could make money with it but not everything is like that. You need to get some good advice although don't take advice from people that never done anything you know don't ask your friends because they're all working in a cubicle not going to kind of take a chance and do something like this. So ask other entrepreneurs.

[00:41:09] It's like the people who give parenting advice that I've never had kids.

[00:41:12] Yeah. Yeah. And I'm guilty of that but I acted at one time as a reporter. I said Hey I'm not a parent. I don't know what you're going through but I know these people you're sending me to get jobs are worthless slugs and it's your fault. I got away with that. But but yeah you got to get people that are entrepreneurs that talk to you and help you evaluate the ideas and things like that. But whatever it is if you want to be an entrepreneur this is the best time on earth with the powerful tools we have and they're inventing new stuff every day. We didn't have social media when we started you know when you started your business there was not even a blog. They didn't come around until 2004.

[00:41:56] So I didn't even realize that when you're. Yeah.

[00:41:58] You were long before blogs came right around 2004 maybe a little bit before that but not in 2001.

[00:42:05] No we didn't have any of the social media stuff any anything. So this is the best time on Earth. So. So check out the show notes because if you have any inkling of being a speaker this service is just unbelievably a good deal because I can teach you a million ways to blow thousands and thousands of dollars and never see one stage ever. OK. I'd be happy to. But no I really wouldn't. I'd rather send you to Bryan and at least you have a great chance and you're surrounded by others. You're getting it the speaking world and you're not breaking the bank to do it with a lot of these people that will take you for a ride. So. So Bryan thanks so much for coming on man. I can't I'm thrilled about all your successes all these years and and hope a lot of people hear this and come over and use your service.

[00:43:03] Well thank you Tom.

[00:43:04] All right. So everybody this has been episode sixty eight with Bryan Caplovitz of Speaker Match. You'll see all these details in the show notes. And if you haven't subscribed please subscribe leave us to review over at iTunes. And if you don't know how to do that you can visit screwthecommute.com. And we Teach you how to do it. So there you go and I'll see you all on the next episode. Catch ya later.

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