Zero to Keynote
Turning people into storytellers and storytellers into legends
Donald Miller
Amy Porterfield
Ian Cron
Maya Elious
Scott Hamilton
Davey Jones
Ben Higgins
Chelsea Peitz
Truth is, once you’ve been on stages a few times, the real fear is you’ll deliver a speech that’s, well, forgettable. The big laugh you planned fell flat. You fumbled a few lines.
After a few minutes, the guy in the front row pulled out his phone, folks started chatting amongst themselves, and more than one person did the thing where they pretended to take a call, then never re-entered the room.
Ready to give the best speech of your life?
This. This is what I can help you achieve. The best speech of your life.
Now imagine walking up to the podium with as much confidence as you had walking to your office.
You felt a sense of calm vigor—like you were about to give a room full of people a resonant message they needed to hear, and there was no place else you’d rather be.
You deliver a knockout talk. No yammering, stammering, or nervous movements. Your stories are perfect. The audience hangs onto your words instead of skimming their email. The butterflies are nowhere to be found. Your soundbites are all over social. There’s a line of people waiting to talk to you afterwards. You check your inbox when you get back to your hotel room. It’s brimming with people who want to buy your product, sign up for your email list and bring you in to speak again.
What If?
I had no idea! Our speech was the impetus for Superfans.
I always tell people: you’re only one great speech away from changing your life. Who knows? That one speech might even lead to a best-seller.
Every time I see praise for his speeches, I grin like a proud parent.
But that’s not the end of the story.
Years later, I’m sitting by the pool at a resort in Arizona. I’m keynoting the next day and mentally walking my way through the outline. Out of the corner of my eye I see a woman reading Pat’s book Superfans. I debate whether I want to say anything, as it feels weird for Married Mike to go out of his way to chat with a bikini’d woman.
Ultimately, I stop overthinking it and decide, sure let’s go for it. I tell her I know the author. She says loves Pat’s book. She records a quick video telling him as much. I send it his way.
Shortly thereafter, he sends this text:
Eventually Pat would become a bestselling author and YouTube sensation. But when I met him, he was a guy with a podcast and a big speaking opportunity.
At the time, Pat had given one speech ever. I remember asking him about it; he’d memorized the whole thing and was completely nervous the night before.
I said to him, “we’ll be able to fix that.”
We thought BIG. How could we make Pat’s speech not just good, but the talk of the conference?
Over the next few months, we worked together to create an imaginative and entertaining audience. We used music, food, video and crowd interaction.
Said differently: we created an experience, not just a speech.
In subsequent years, Pat became the king of creating experiences from stage. Most famously, he began a keynote by riding in on a Delorean (a la his favorite movie, Back to the Future).
From Keynote to
Best-Selling Author
Case Study: Pat Flynn
CASE STUDY /
I’ll help you become the best version of yourself. But it needs to be you. It can’t be you pretending to be someone else. Your audience won’t trust you if it feels like you’re acting.
Delivery
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Once we’ve written the talk, we use visuals to help you tell the story. Often this means slides but can also be whiteboarding or using physical objects.
Visuals
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Perfecting your ideas and stories and writing them in a way that leaves the audience temporarily forgetting they could be on. Instagram right now
Storytelling
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I have nine different ways of structuring your speech. We will choose the one that best helps communicate your idea.
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Structuring
Before we begin writing the talk, we identify your strengths, your core message and what success looks like
Sharpen the Axe
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We customize your speech to your strengths. While it’s easy for me to recite by-the-book advice, I am far more interested in doing what helps you feel like this is your speech. That you are the right person to deliver it. You can’t give the best speech of your life if you feel like it’s not yours.
Usually our order of operations looks like this:
How
we do it
Hundreds of new email subscribers and followers.
Another keynote booked on the spot, full price, because someone in the back of the room loved her. No pitch necessary.
Endless adulation from the audience + and a line of people wanting to show off pictures of their own dogs
Asking all those questions worked. We nailed the stories.
Then we perfect the rest of the script…except for one transition between topics. Everything we tried was so blah. Acceptable. But blah.
One day, driving through North Dakota, the wording hit me like a sign from above. I pulled over, edited the Google Doc and let Chelsea know. Exhale. This was dialed in.
Or so I thought.
She didn’t tell me this until afterwards, but Chelsea privately worried she was making a huge mistake. She’d always received great feedback on her tactical keynote. Why was she pivoting to telling stories about dogs?
And how did the audience respond? Take a look at our text exchange to the right.
And all of that when the slides didn’t project properly. How did she keep her cool when most people would freak out? That’s only possible when you’ve put in the work to deliver your best speech.
In January 2023 I gave a speech at Neel Dhingra’s Forward Mastermind in San Diego. Afterwards, Chelsea tracked me down and said she wanted to work with me.
This is what should happen, by the way. If you deliver your Best Speech, you develop instant trust with your audience. They want to work with you, sign up for your emails and follow you on social.
Chelsea had an exciting speaking opportunity at Inman Connect, billed as the premier conference for real estate professionals. Chelsea wasn’t the headliner for this event but but she wanted to be the speaker everyone talked about.
From the get-go, I loved her topic: be relatable, not remarkable. Her idea for being relatable was to tell stories of her dogs. I knew the topic and the stories should be a win.
But I also knew we needed to perfect those stories. Chelsea probably got so annoyed with me asking a million questions about those stories. What kind of house were you living in? What time of day was it? How long did it take your husband to get from “I won’t want dogs” to “I can’t believe you bought two” to “I’m creating a special Amazon account just for Sidney and Neo.”
The Speaker Everyone was talking about
Case Study: Chelsea Peitz
CASE STUDY /
the end result
Votes are in
Early Covid, Salena Knight and I started working on her 5 Pillars of Retail Success keynote.. Originally scheduled for the 2020 Traffic and Conversion conference, it was two years before she could deliver it on a stage. Yet the work we did paid off via podcast interviews.
Her team remarked how her communication had never been more clear.
Long way to say: one of the secondary benefits of creating your Best Speech is you’ll be able to repurpose it for interviews, articles and social media clips.
Can I use this content in places besides a speech?
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Questions you might be asking:
Usually it looks like:
- A transcript of your talk. We will build a loose script for your entire speech
- The intro and the outro. The beginning of your speech and the end of your speech will be absolutely killer
- A draft of your slides. This is not full design, but you will have a draft of your slides complete with speaker notes.
- Delivery coaching that’s based on your personality. You will be at your best when you feel like yourself. Yet most coaching tries to turn you into a choreographed actor. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen presenters on stage and can almost see their brain thinking “now I shall use gestures, as I was coached to do.” No thank you. You need to be yourself, not a robot.
What will the finished product look like?
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Questions you might be asking:
Amongst speakers who booked more than one session with me? No. No one has ever bombed. One guy was mediocre because he never rehearsed.
Everyone else has been somewhere between “very good” and “immediately offered a book deal based on how great that speech was.”
Have you ever coached anyone who bombed?
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Questions you might be asking:
At minimum, you should expect this to be the best speech of your life. One that has people waiting in line to talk to you, thank you and call it the best speech of the conference.
You will love that feeling. It’s intoxicating.
Beyond that, results vary a bit based on the speaking opportunity - a graduation speech, for example, is unlikely to bring in immediate business ROI.
If you’re speaking at a business conference, you should expect to make fans, attract clients and sell products. I’ve had speakers sell $20,000+ from stage, have six-figure launches and land book deals - all from delivering their Best Speech.
What Results should I expect?
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Questions you might be asking:
My shortest Zero to Keynote was eight days. Longest was a year. Usually it’s more like 2-3 months. The length of our engagement is customized to you, the opportunity and my son's sleep schedule (kidding, kidding...mostly)
How long does it take to work with you?
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Questions you might be asking:
Let's work together to build an your Best Speech - one that's unforgettable, builds trust and is customized to your personality
Keynote Coaching
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Metaphorically speaking, a lot of us do the same when we start a speech: we make it all about ourselves. We read our resume to the audience.
Y’all. We don’t need to do that. At best that comes off as braggy; more likely it comes off as insecure.
Don't be that guy.
Win over your audience in 13 seconds
Be the Speaker Everyone Remembers
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"I hired Mike two years in a row for my biggest presentations to date. After working together, I created my most favorite (and successful) presentation, which gave me incredible confidence to continue to speak on stage.”
- amy porterfield
what people are saying
Amy gave her most successful talk.
NYT best-selling author of Two Weeks Notice
- James Clear
what people are saying
Mike helped me translate my bestselling book into a speech I could deliver repeatedly.
NYT best-selling author of Atomic Habits
I hired Mike to help perfect a talk I’d been giving for years. I had no idea the impact he’d have. We analyzed every aspect from the intro to the last line. He’s a scientist and an artist in one. I’m a better speaker because of his influence.
- donald miller
what people are saying
I had no idea the impact he'd have.
CEO, Business Made Simple
Author of Building a Storybrand, Business Made Simple and Blue Like Jazz
He's helped me fine- tune the core message and make the speech funnier. That's ranged from wordsmithing jokes to using embarrassing photos of his parents. What can I say? The man is committed.
- Josh Shipp
what people are saying
I've hired Mike to help me with three different TEDx talks.
Award-winning speaker, best-selling author
The Grown-ups Guide to Teenage Humans
what people are saying /