All right, thank you all for being here. So I just want to jump right into this. I want to make it fun. We're gonna have a little worksheet in a little bit, but I want to take you through a little story, some stuff I learned from some other people. But I want to go back to the beginning, right? It's 2005. I'm on my annual ski trip with my two best friends from college. Literally. I met these guys when we're 18 years old.

After college, every year, we would go skiing in Tahoe. I had moved to Texas. The other One of our other friends had moved to Wisconsin. But we'd fly into San Francisco, where Dave lived, and we would go skiing in Tahoe every single year. And in 2005, we were driving down the mountain, and I was talking about how I want to be a professional speaker. That'd be so great. And I had been talking about this for years. You see, my career had been in sales and marketing for law firms, banks, and consulting firms.

And when you're in sales and marketing, you go to a lot of conferences. And I would be sitting in a conference room chair like this, watching a speaker, and I would be sitting there thinking, she or he, they have a better job than I do. And I kept talking about this for years. So in 2005, on the ski trip, we're driving down, and you know how they have, like, little rest area pullouts when you're coming down a mountain road, just in case you have a little problem, you need to put on chains. Dave pulls his car over into one of those pullouts, and he says, I am sick of this. You have talked about this for years. What does it take for you to go from where you are right now to becoming a paid professional speaker? Well, it's great when you have this little fluffy dream going. Their life is better than mine.

I want to be like them to when you're actually being asked for an action plan on the spot, sitting on the side of a road somewhere in California. And my answer was, well, I think I need to write a book. Now, you remember we have to go back 20 years. Self publishing. Publishing was not really a thing. I had been trying to reach out to publishers, and the feedback I was getting was, we're not interested in what you have to say. And I told him, and he goes, well, couldn't you just publish it yourself? And I'm like, I wouldn't know where to begin. And I'm a good writer, but I would need an editor.

And he goes, how much Would it cost to publish a book professionally yourself? And I'd done a little research, and I told him I think it would cost about 20 or $25,000 and I would need an editor. And he said to me, I'm tired of this. And he goes, let me go home and talk to my wife and get back to you. And he said, you know what my wife does, right? She's one of my dearest friends. She's an editor for corporate communications. Three days later, he called me and said, leslie and I have decided, or leslie and I have found you a publisher. And I said, you have? And he goes, yes. And he goes, it's called New Year Publishing.

And he goes, remember those New Year's parties we threw in college? He goes, this is your. And our company, you and Sarah, Leslie and I were founding New Year Publishing. He goes, I'm going to put up all the money. We're going to get this book. And he put together legal documents. I flew to California so we could go over all the details. And he said, leslie and I are going to invest in this, but this is our company together. And I took the legal.

I took the pin. And as I went to sign it, he pulls the papers back across the table and. And he says, there's one thing I have to tell you. I know that for you, $25,000 is a lot of money. And he goes, if we lose all this money, if we don't recoup a penny, this doesn't hurt the friendship. And he pushed the papers back, and I signed it. And we created my first book, which was called Some assembly How to Make, Grow, and keep your business relationships. And we sold 30,000 copies of that book over the next 10 years.

And my second book, we sold 25,000 copies. Now I've written 10 more. But a lot of those were marketing tools, and some I wasn't as into. So the others sold a little bit. I don't know that we broke even on every book, but those first two books made enough money to pay Dave back and to let the company run itself. And since that time, we published books for other speakers. Then we started doing books for CEOs who wanted a book as a marketing tool for their company. There came a point where I left the company because I had too much other stuff going on.

Dave still does that. But the one thing I want to tell you is, if you want to be in this business, I hope to God you have a friend who would step up however they can to help you. Because the secret sauce to Being a speaker that I've found is having friends, both speaker friends, and people in business who can give you that type of feedback and support you where you are. So I share that story just because I want you to know where I started within, I was not a full time speaker. It was 2005, we released the book. A year later, Leslie went and actually took a class on how to start a publishing company. She went and took a. A course on how to do it and we created a nice little book and it started my speaking career.