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Free guide: Be the speaker everyone remembers

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

book mike today

Honestly? Many speeches are like that. They're not disasters. They're not going to be turned into memes. They just had no impact.

People love calling Public Speaking the #1 fear. The implication being you’ll forget your own name or start sweating uncontrollably. Those things do happen occasionally.

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

• Weekly 90-minute group coaching call where you workshop your speech, interact with fellow group members, and ask me questions directly

• All the on-demand training videos to help you build the best speech of your life. You will have access to those trainings for life or until the internet stops being a thing

• 45-minute personal Zoom call exclusively with me, in addition to the class itself. You can cash in on that 1-1 Zoom call any time between now and the year 2026.

• A chance to be on my podcast and/or for me to connect you with other speakers + entrepreneurs. It’s a lot easier for me to promote you when I know who you are + how great you speech is.

• The Tonic Site Shop slide template. So you’re not designing from scratch. World-class. Jen has designed for big famous clients like Amy Porterfield, Jenna Kutcher, Ben Higgins, etc. Her template is fantastic.

• Bonus lesson: The Business of Speaking (pitching, charging, contracts)

• Bonus lesson: Pitching Yourself to Podcasts

• Other bonus lessons TBA depending on class need

For that you will get

And again: for the rest of your life, you’ll have all the tools to deliver an excellent speech. Well worth the investment.

sign me up

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How do I know if this is the right fit for me?

Votes are in

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 /