The Performer's Mindset: Filling a $26K Program Through Free Events with Michael Port

Danny [00:09] Hello, and welcome to core slab, the show that teaches creators like you how to make better online courses. I'm Danny meat the founder and CEO of mercy. And I'm here with my co host, Dave crystal, the co founder of zuku. Hey there, Danny. In each episode, of course lab, we showcase a course and creator who is doing something really interesting either with the architecture of their course, or the business model behind it, or both. Our guest today is Michael Port, once a professional actor and then the founder of Book Yourself Solid, Michael now runs a business called heroic public speaking, and hosts the most popular podcast on public speaking and performance steal the show. Welcome, Michael. Michael [00:49] Thank you so much. Danny [00:51] So Michael, you and I go way back. But for people who don't have the privilege of knowing you as well as I do, what's your story? How did you come to be doing what you're doing? Like, give us the the backstory that led to here? Michael [01:04] Oh, gosh, well, when I was an actor, I was having a lot of fun. But I was also very frustrated because I didn't feel like I had a lot of control over my future. You know, I go audition and wait and hope someone gave me a job. And it didn't fit my personality very well. So I talked my way into a job in the fitness industry for which I was completely unqualified. I told them, I was completely unqualified, but I made my pitch as to why they should consider me they did. And within six months, I was running the division of a public company for them. And I found I realized that I was pretty darn good at operations and creating systems. And designing programming was a big part of what I did. And about five years later, I decided to go out on my own as a coach, I had $30,000 in the bank, and an apartment in New York City that cost $3,500 a month. And you can see where this was going. So it was a tough first year or even two. But over time, and this was 2003 minute. But over time, I figured out how to design courses, how to write books, how to give speeches that were transformational. And I built Book Yourself Solid, I ran that business for over a decade. It's now run by Matthew, Kimberly, I'm not too involved in the business anymore. And my wife and I run her own public speaking which we started in 2014. And it is our greatest joy, other than our children actually know more than our children, but just don't tell them. Danny Iny 02:39 So tell us about heroic public speaking what what gave you the idea? How did that idea evolve into what it is today? What do you do? How does it work? Tell us all of that. 02:51 Sure, I believe that a speech has the power to change the world, and the people in it, including the speaker. Because in order to give a transformational speech, a speech that changes how people feel, think and act, it requires that the speaker go through a transformational process themselves in the development of that speech. A speech that's easy to give, generally doesn't move the audience in a significant way. And what I found when I was a professional speaker, and I was watching other speakers, is I found that there were so many people with so much potential, but, but just scratching the surface of that potential. And I was trying to figure out why, you know, why would someone go on stage and not deliver something that is as good as they possibly could deliver? And, and I realized it's because they had no training, no craft in the art of performance. And I did I have a master's in acting from NYU. My wife, Amy has a master's from acting in Yale. And as a result, I've been able to use the processes and the the craft that I learned when I was quite young, to develop speeches that really were transformational. And I thought, Well, maybe if I could teach these speakers, this process this craft of performance, well, then maybe they too, could deliver transformational speeches, they actually could be as good as they could possibly be. And that's that's how I started. I just started piloting it over about a year period of time to see if in fact, my theory was correct. And it turned out that it was so we have a big Training Center in Lambertville, New Jersey, and we run our courses out of there. People come from all over the world to do our trainings and So, in some parts of our trainings or online parts of our trainings or in person, we're very, very, we offer a very hybrid approach. Because as much as I'd love to have people come six days a week for, say, three years at a time to do the training, that's just not realistic. So So we've taken a very hybrid approach to it. Danny Iny 05:20 So I have so many questions, but let's start with you said he piloted the idea how did you pilot it? What was the minimum viable version that gave you proof of concept for something like this. 05:31 So what I did was I put together one day workshops. And I would, I would allow only 20 people to come. And there were two different price points. One price point, if you are going to get an hour's worth of coaching and direction from me at the event. And then another price point, if you're just going to be an audience member, witness the event. And and that that worked actually quite well, we found really, very quickly, I had a waiting list for that. But I didn't want to produce big events, because I was still piloting it still wanted to see if it in fact, worked. And I did that for about six months. And then I moved it into a two day workshop for the next six months. And then when when I finally committed to it, I put on a an online course. I think it was called like heroic public speaking, immersion, something like that. And I think we charge $2,000. And we had about 250 people sign up. And people loved it. And they and and then at the end, we said, Well, what do you want next? What else do you want? Because we always ask our students, what do you want and generally design based on what they want. And then they all said we want to, we want something in person. So we put on something called heroic public speaking live six months later. And that was an event that had maybe the first year about 350 people. And then when we stopped doing that, we were at about 700 people for that event. And then we said, Okay, well, what do we think the next step in the process would be for folks, because you know, a two day event is not sufficient to develop a transformational speech, you can learn a lot in two days, but you need to do the work. And the doing the work takes months if you're really going to produce something quite special. So we put together something that we called HPs. Grad. And it was intended to be similar to the experience that Amy and I had when we were grad students. And as I joked earlier, you know, I would love to take people, you know, for six days a week, three years at a time, the way that Amy and I did when we were in grad school, but of course I can't. So that first program was a four input person sessions five days each session two times in Philadelphia, and two times in LA, as the very first version of it. And that had 20 people in it. And then now we're on version 16. And we do it for as many as 72 people at a time. And it runs over seven months. And the first half is all virtual, because the first half is all ideation and script writing. And we don't need to be in person to do that. And we call that first term, and second term is all in person. And they come for three different times over the course of three months to do the performance work on their speech. And then they come a fourth time to shoot a video reel of their speech, a trailer of their speech. Because if you if you if a meeting planner can't see your speech, it's very unlikely they're gonna hire you. This is a visual art they need to see it can't just talk about it. And you know, have people assume that, that they think it'll work so. So it's a pretty rigorous program. It really is like doing a higher level degree program, rather than a coaching program. And we very specifically, don't call it a coaching program. We call it a training program. And I think the distinction is important. Because when people think about coaching, they think, Oh, this is not what coaching necessarily is. But often they think when they think of coaching, they think, Oh, I'm going to be told what to do. But what we're doing is we're training them in the processes and the craft so that they know how to do it over and over and over again for every speech they work on. Because what we're trying to do is produce self sufficient independent professionals and That's the way we have found that they that they have the most confidence in themselves by the end of the training. Danny Iny 10:08 So, to the extent that you're comfortable sharing, what are some of the economics of the program in terms of roughly what it costs to enroll in terms of what your cost structure is, for purposes for for a course creator, who's listening to this and is like, this sounds cool. I like this structure, what goes into making it work and making it work profitably, 10:30 okay. So when we there was a period of time, when we just ran that live event once a year, and we would introduce grad at that live event. And then we'd fill a grad program, you know, about 7072, people would join a grad program. But then as the business grew, we wanted to offer more than one program a year. Now, we do three programs a year. But we didn't want to have multiple live events of that size, it was just too, too much of a production to produce an event for 700 people multiple times a year and way too expensive. And so. So we started doing, we so we, so we just started doing sort of regular sales, when people would call us up, we'd say, well, we'll tell you about grad. Or they'd say, we hear we heard about grad and we talk about it. And it was a little hard, because even though we're good communicators, what we do is very, very hard to understand until you experience it. And this is really, really something that's critically important. And so we were at this turning point, trying to figure out well, what do we do about this? And we started doing these two day in person events for $2,000 for the event in person at our space, because we we now had a space. And we thought, okay, we'll fill those, and then we'll introduce grad to the people who were there. And you know, that'll work well. But it was it was a struggle, because again, often people didn't understand. They thought, well, isn't it gonna be like every other public speaking thing where they'll tell me what to do with my hands, and you know, where to look in the audience and give me some tricks and some tips. And we don't do tricks and tips. We do visionary work, we do real craft building work. And you and I were having a conversation. And, and I was like, I'm a little frustrated with this, because I've got all these salespeople who are trying to sell this $2,000 in person course. And it just feels like we've got to go through so many potential leads, we got to go through so many sales conversations, to put people into that two day initial event in order to move them into grad. And so you know, we were doing YouTube ads and some other ads. And you know, people would call up and say, What can I get for 100 bucks? We'd say nothing. So you said, Michael, you have a space. Nobody has a space, you have your own training facility. Nobody has that. That's a secret weapon. And as a What do you mean? You said, Well, just do it for free? You remember this conversation? Danny? Danny Iny 13:21 I do I it's coming to mind. Now. I didn't know it was impactful in this way. So I'm, it was 13:27 very tactful use. You said just just don't charge for it. And so I said, Okay, whatever, Danny, fine. And I was like, You know what, when someone gives you advice that, you know, is provocative, you kind of go like, whatever, that's easy for you to say. But I stood I sat down, I thought about it. And I thought, well, let's look at who our absolute best students are. And when we started looking at who our best students are, I discovered that our best students were the ones who were referred by other students. Now, I'd been in this business for almost two decades at this point, you think I'd know this by now. But it really became clear to me that the people who were just showing up randomly, generally, we're not as engaged as the people who were referred to us. And so I went to my team, and I said, Listen, I think we should make core that's the two day event free at and we should become a referral only organization. And they looked at me, like I was crazy. And that's why I knew I was on the right track. Because it was provocative for them too. And I said, trust me. I think that if we ask our alumni to refer people to us, they'll do it. Because they do But now, if we just ask some more, they'll do it some more. But we don't compensate them. And that's critically important. Because we never want anybody who's coming into HBs to think that someone referred them to us simply because they got paid to do it. Everybody who refers to us is doing it because they believe deeply in what we do. And they believe that the person who they're referring will be well served by coming to HBS. And, and Amy said, Well, can we leave, like 5% of the seats for people who don't have referrals? Because there are a lot of really great people who call up and say, Listen, I'm really interested in doing this work with you. I mean, recently, we had a pretty famous FBI agent, just call us out of the blue and say, Hey, listen, I want to come, can I come do one of your training programs, and we we, we thought, sure, you can come, you know, so we'll do just a little bit more vetting when they don't have a referral. But 95% of the people who come have a referral from an alumni or a friend of the business, and 5% of the people are people who just called us up. And we've added them when we thought they'd be great, great candidates for training at HBS. And now, what we do with these two days events, two day events is we do them for free, people have to put a $1,000 deposit down to hold their spot, if they don't show up, we keep the deposit, when they show up, we give them that $1,000 Back in the form of a check. Right when they walk in first thing we do. And we do nine of them a year. And 3833 core programs fil one grad program. And so now we're at a, we're at a we're at a level of conversion that I never even imagined we get to our average conversion rates are 67% out of that two day workshop, or that two day training that we do 67% of the people who come there, then come and do grad. 17:16 And we have people who find the experience so valuable at core, that they literally give the checks back to us. Because they say this is worth way more than $1,000, there's no way I can take this check. Because the whole thing is not a pitch, the whole thing is a rigorous training. And we spend 30 to 45 minutes on the second day, introducing them to grad and what we call it as next steps. And next steps can be for somebody who's doing it with us, or for someone who's doing it alone. And of course in that process, they get to decide which is the better path for them, doing it alone or doing it with us. And 67% of the people decide doing it with us, us is a much better path. So grad is 26 grand, we do a payment plan, of course, for people who would like that. And every you know, everybody goes through and you know that we hear over and over again. You know, sometimes after one session, let's say this one session paid for the whole tuition. Because it is incredibly rigorous. And it is incredibly deep. We are not doing any surface level work with them. Meaning even in first term, they have a right an editor who edits their speech. They have masterclasses every week, where you know, we're Ajay, who's our head writing coach is walking through exactly how to sculpt scripts. We work on their titles, their session descriptions, their big ideas, and so much more. And then, of course, when they get into grad, we're teaching them the entire rehearsal process, content, mapping, staging, blocking, signature bits, contextual models, and the whole nine yards. So when they leave, they really do feel like they just got a master's degree in public speaking. And it affects many, many different aspects of their work. Not only did they create a great speech, but they also created signature intellectual property for their business that they could then take and turn it into a course that's an online course they can turn it into a book. They can design the business model differently for their business as a result. And I'm really proud of it. I mean, I feel like I always wanted to create something that that was truly transformational at a really high level. And I think that's what we've done. Danny Iny 19:48 That's amazing. Thank you for sharing just with such a level of depth and detail and openness and congratulations on what you've built. It's fantastic. Thank you. I have like 100 questions. But do you want to? Do you want to jump in? Abe Crystal 20:04 I can't, although it's challenging in a way to ask questions, because everything has just been laid out so concisely anticipating many of my questions in advance. I guess one thing I wondered, based on what you were saying is, you have this focus on creating a program and offerings that are distinctive, they're differentiated, you describe them as being very different than other public speaking programs that are out there, that they're not about tips and tricks that they take a different and deeper approach. And I think that's what a lot of people listening as course traders aspire to is as well to create something that is uniquely their own and, and different than what other people are doing. And that is really valuable for their clients. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more to that. How did you find your unique approach? How did you get to this place of having something that is very different than the typical public speaking program that is out there? 21:04 Sure. Well, as I mentioned, I was very fortunate to have some of the best training that you can get in the performing arts, from NYU, grad and Amy, of course, from Yale. So that gave us a certain set of skills and a perspective that was unique. And then of course, I spent two decades on the circuit as a professional speaker at a high level. So when I was able to combine those two things, that that gave me a unique set of skills and a unique perspective that, you know, that a lot of people haven't been fortunate enough to get. So I was very lucky in that way. Now, from a very practical perspective, though, I think that one of the reasons, sometimes people have trouble creating IP courses, speeches, books, et cetera, that don't get traction. Or one of the reasons that they don't get traction is because they're sitting squarely in what I'd call expert Ville. So my friend and colleague, Andrew Davis, and I wrote a book that came out this past year called the referral speaker. And when we started the book, we, we decided to go on a quest, to answer one question that we didn't think had ever been answered before in the speaking industry. And the question was, what's the formula for creating a sustainable speaking career? We searched, we'd never seen anybody speak to it. We'd seen people write books about, again, tips and tricks. And some basic, you know, guess fundamentals about the business. But often, I think we're missing the, the visionary aspects of the work. And I use that word visionary intentionally. Because if you if you think of yourself as an expert, these days, I think that you are one in a million. Now, this was different when I started. You know, there weren't as many experts running around, as there are now, you know, you can turn on YouTube. And you can find an expert who will teach you almost anything about anything. But you're probably not going to remember their name. And so when something like expertise becomes commoditized, often it becomes less valuable. However, if you look at the people, and this is what we uncovered, when we were doing our research for the book, when you look at the people who are on the keynote stages at conferences, they're doing visionary work, not expert work. The experts are generally relegated to the breakout rooms. Because breakout rooms are generally how to type speeches. They're valuable. They're important, but they're not visionary. Because generally what the expert does is the expert shows you today's best practices. And that's pretty easy to learn. So it's not that hard to learn to be an expert in the field. I mean, quantum physics, not withstanding, but most of the fields that people are coaching in and and if you're only showing the audience, today's best practices, you're just holding up a mirror to the present. But what the visionary does, is the visionary challenges the status quo and offers an alternative approach that It changes the way people think. And you can change the way people think you can change what they do. So for example, I'll give you an example. There's a, there's a fella named Jay Akun, XO, and he's a marketing consultant type. And when he was first starting out, he, he wanted to get on the keynote stage at a conference called Content Marketing World. It's a big, big conference in the marketing world, then they do something very interesting. They Award, a keynote spot at the next year's conference, to the highest rated breakout speaker of this year's conference. 25:47 And he went in there saying, Oh, I'm going to get a breakout spot. And I'm going to use that breakout spot to get myself with the keynote stage. So he put together a speech, and he went in there, and he delivered it. And he did a great job. His feedback on his evaluations was excellent. His scores at a five, were 4.82. Very good. And the feedback was things like, thank you so much, I learned so many tips and tricks about marketing, those four hacks that you showed about X, Y, and Z, those are gonna be really, really helpful, great session. Thanks so much. That's the kind of feedback that was on the forum. Now, people were giving him lots and lots of praise at the conference, they were coming up to him, shaking his hand patting him on the back saying, My god, that was incredible. I loved it so much. He felt he felt pretty good. He thought, well, I bet I'm gonna get this, get this keynote spot next year. And you know, they paid $25,000 For that keynote spot. Well, the phone never rang. But je, je didn't give up. He went back the next year. But this time, he said, I'm going to do a visionary type speech, not a tips and tricks, best practices type speech. So this time, after he delivered his his, his speech, and he got the feedback on his evaluations, his ranking from a score perspective was almost the same. But the comments were totally different. The comments that people wrote were things like, Oh, my God, that completely blew my mind, I will never think about marketing in the same way. Again, I'm a changed person. That should have been the keynote. Amazing. And guess what, this time, he got the call. And he went, and he did that keynote. And he got paid for it. And then he picked up about 13 gigs, just because he did that big keynote for the many 1000s of people, and nailed it on the big stage. And so what we've discovered over time, is that, you know, marketing doesn't book you speeches. It's a nice, you know, thing that I think is easy to teach is marketing. You know, I've taught marketing, it's not hard to teach, it's not hard to learn. But the really the only thing that can that can build a sustainable speaking career is a speech that gets stateside leads, meaning when somebody sees it, they want it. So every time you do that speech, it produces like four leads, you booked two of those leads, now you got two more speeches, you, you get four more leads, each one of those, that's eight leads you booked for more speeches, and then you leverage the power of compounding gigs and you build a big, beautiful referral tree over time. And I mentioned this because that's the difference between expert work in the world of content development and visionary work in the world of content development. You Danny do visionary work. In the world of content development, you constantly challenged the status quo. And that's one of the reasons that you have been so effective over the years. Now, that doesn't mean that you're not going to teach some practical how to stuff from time to time, you know, in our programs, were teaching lots of practical how to stuff throughout our trainings. But the the core of the work challenges the status quo, and it offers an alternative approach. That does change the way people think not only about the work but about themselves. And as a result, can do much, much bigger things. Danny Iny 29:43 That was fascinating. Thank you for for walking us through that. Michael, I have a quick question about pedagogy. You mentioned earlier, the word masterclass that you do masterclasses? And I think for most people who are listening into this masterclass is one of those synonyms that you reach for when you're thinking for how will I describe my lesson in a way that will be most compelling? Will it be a masterclass or a workshop or a seminar? But I know that when you use the word masterclass, it has a very specific meaning can you tell us about that experience? 30:18 Absolutely. In fact, before I use the word master class, I'd never seen anyone in our industry use the word master class. And I used it because it's very common, it's typical, it's normal in the world of acting, or music. In the arts. Often, the way that students are taught is, through the experience of watching a master teacher, work with one, two or three other students. And so, for example, when I was in acting school, our teacher would work with two students who were doing a scene. And they would teach us the audience while they were directing those actors. And it was so fascinating, it was electrifying because you saw the transformation happened in front of your eyes, so that you knew what the teacher was teaching actually worked? Because here's the thing, Danny, if I go on stage, and I say, listen, here's what you need to do to be a great speaker, people could very easily say, oh, yeah, well, that's because you're really good at it, or you're talented, or you want to, you know, you're an actor, or they can make lots of excuses. They can say, well, you're I'm not this, I'm not like you, I couldn't do that. But if I put people like them on stage, and I give them direction, that immediately transforms what they're doing so that the audience has a physical and emotional and intellectual experience, then everyone in the audience sees, oh, wow, if it's possible for that person, well, then it's going to be possible for me to Moreover, the person who is getting the direction from me believes that they transformed because what I found is, let's say Amy and I are working with somebody, you know, just one on one. And we know we do this, sometimes I have something that I call HBS. Pro, and I'll work with somebody over the course of almost a year where I direct the entire show, we write the script directed, you know, we do all the visuals, the whole nine yards. And, and we make sure even in that, that we're putting that Speaker in front of other people on a regular basis, because if it's only in front of us, no matter how much they trust us or respect us. And we say listen, that was it. That was different. That was the change. They might go okay, all right. Okay, all right. Okay, maybe? Yeah, okay, thanks. No, okay, fine. But if there's 20 people, or 30, or 40 or 50 people or 100 people sitting there going, Oh, my God, that was so amazing. That was totally different than what you did before, then the speaker believes it. And that's what a masterclass does. 33:19 And that's why, you know, we do masterclass on a regular basis and why it's become really our signature work in the industry. And people often when they first see it, they think it's magic, actually. Do you know who Jordan Harbinger is? Sure. Yeah. Jordan Harbinger has a show called The Jordan Harbinger show, huge podcast, I think he gets 6 million downloads a month, something like that. So a few people, a few people listen to that show. Now, Jordan, Harbinger came to one of our big live events back in 2014, or 15. Right when we started doing them, and I didn't know him at the time other than Oh, I know at the time, he was the host of Art of Charm, and I think I'd listened to one or two episodes, but we weren't friends didn't know him personally. And if you know, Jordan, you know Jordan is wonderfully cynical. He does not put up with Bs. He does not suffer fools. He really wants the straight skinny. And he came and we opened with a masterclass. We always open with a masterclass. And he watched this and he watched me working with somebody on stage. And now of course, he told me this later, but he sat there thinking, Oh, my God, I can't believe this is fake. Because there's no way someone could go from being that bad. Now, that's Jordan's words. I wouldn't. I don't never nobody is ever bad. Everyone is always doing their best from my perspective. To that good. It's just not possible. They must have rehearsed this in some way. That's really fucked up. Excuse my language. And that's what he thought but now he we were in Florida and he had flown or Louis from California, so he said, Well, alright, I'll hang out for the rest of the day, see what happens and then I'll go home early. So we did another masterclass about two hours later. And he said, How much rehearsal time did it take for them to put this together? Because there's no way that this can be real. Until he saw the third one and the fourth one, and then he realized, oh my god, this is actually real. Because if you've never experienced it before, you don't you might not realize how quickly somebody can change. And so that's why we really love the masterclass because then you see it happening in real time. A you believe it, and be you see yourself in it, we do the same thing. Our handwriting coach AJ Harper, she's Mike McCalla wits, his writing partner, she writes his books with him. She does the same thing with scripts with texts. And she does it. You know, she does it virtually. But she puts the puts one of the students scripts up. And she'll actually edit the script with the student in real time in front of all the other students. And they're seeing how it's done. They're not just being told how it's done. And so as you know, in performance and speaking, it's much more effective to show rather than tell. And so in our work, we try to do as much showing as we possibly can, and then give people as much opportunity to have experiential learning, rather than just information based learning or intellectual learning. Danny Iny 36:35 Awesome, Michael, that was fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing all that. Oh, you're welcome. I know we've covered a ton. I think we're I think we're good ape. Do you want to do the readout? Abe Crystal 36:47 Yes, although it looks like it's being edited as we speak. Oh, yeah. Sorry about that. I'm just doing a little bit of tweaking here. Let me add that, okay. Okay, there you go. All right. Michael Ward is the co founder and CEO of heroic public speaking. He's a New York Times and Wall Street Journal, bestselling author of nine books. You can find more about him and his programs on his website. Heroic public speaking.com. That's heroic public. speaking.com. Danny Iny 37:27 Does that work for you, Mike? That was fantastic. That's 37:30 great. Perfect. Thank you. Do you think I think we got what will be helpful for your audience? Danny Iny 37:36 Yeah, I think this is gonna be a fantastic episode. Yeah, for sure. For sure. All right, 37:42 I will stop the recording. It's true. Any that that one conversation we had was very impactful for me. Where you were like, you've got the space, just make it free. You don't have to go rent the space or anything. I was like, okay. You know? Yeah, it was big. I tell people that a lot. When you don't when people ask like, how do you how'd you? How'd you come up with this free thing? Like who does that? You know, nine times a year. I was like, well, Danny, and he told me to do it. Danny Iny 38:12 Well, I really appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah. 38:15 You're welcome. Cool. Anything else I can do for you?