Getting booked on more stages starts with the one thing almost nobody does, which is asking. Pat runs a conference, so he sits on the other side of that inbox, and today he walks through what makes him say yes to a speaker and what gets the email deleted. Point of view, the takeaway for the audience, video of you speaking, references from other organizers, and a weekly system so the asking actually happens. Then the Idea Slam mailbag on what you should have stopped doing months ago, and the AI story of the day: Claude Opus 5.5 landed, and the new Projects changed how Pat works in a single afternoon.
Businessing is the daily live show where small business owners figure out what to do next. Hosted by Pat Miller, founder of the Small Business Owners Community: owners only, nobody pitching, $9 a month.
In this episode
- 00:00 Cold open and welcome
- 02:04 Big story: how to get booked on more stages
- 03:11 Nobody is going to chase you, so ask
- 04:23 Have a point of view, not just a topic
- 05:37 Tell the organizer what the audience walks away with
- 06:34 Have video of you speaking
- 08:44 References from other event organizers
- 09:27 Systematize the ask and collect testimonials
- 12:42 Idea Slam: what you should have stopped doing months ago
- 14:28 Prune the rooms and events you go to
- 16:20 AI story: Claude Opus 5.5 lands
- 18:18 Claude Projects, live show and tell
- 25:48 What is coming next in AI
- 27:39 New members and this week in the community
- 29:27 No show next week, back October 5th
Resources mentioned
Full transcript
Pat Miller: Good morning. It’s Wednesday, September 23rd, and we are businessing. I’m Pat Miller, founder of the show. This is the show where we solve the problem that nobody ever taught you how to run a small business, so together we’re gonna figure it out. Founder of the Small Business Owners Community, happy that you’re here.
And on the show today, we have new AI models, and they’re melting my face. I have already changed the way that I’m working thanks to the new Claude Projects and Opus 5.5. I cannot wait to share that with you because now the arms race is super real. We’ve got a new ChatGPT model to talk about as well, so big stuff happening in the AI story of the day.
We have an Idea Slam question as well. What’s one thing that we’re all still doing that we shouldn’t be doing anymore? I have a very clear answer to give to you there. And we have our businessing big story of the day. When you tune in this morning, use that little chat bot and say, "Hi. Howdy. How are you?"
We want to hear who you are, the, the name of the business that you run. Drop your hyperlink in there. Let’s all get to know each other, and let’s go make some money together. Shall we? Let’s get started. Businessing big story of the day. You know you need and want to get on more stages. You go to meetings all the time, you go to conferences all the time, and you may be thinking to yourself, "Well, how did that person get up there?
How come I’m not up there? I wish I could be on more stages. I’ve got something to say. I wanna grow my audience. I wanna be a thought leader. I wanna make more money. I wanna grow the business." I, I, I, I, I, all this stuff. Well, today I wanna let you behind the scenes on what it takes from my perspective to grow a speaking business.
Barbara, good morning. Great to see you. And my point of view is I do a little speaking and I run a conference, so I’m shopping for speakers all the time, and I’ll tell you what I think and what I’m looking for. Maybe it will be helpful for you as you go about starting your speaking business. The first thing you need to know is that I don’t have time to chase you.
Meaning, when you hear someone’s got an event coming up, you need to go ask. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. That’s pretty much how it goes. So when you’re sitting there in the audience and you’re thinking, "How come I wasn’t picked to be on that stage?" If you can’t track back to your relationship with the organizer and the multiple times you talked to them about speaking on their behalf, then you aren’t doing it right.
You gotta raise your hand because I gotta tell you, booking the speakers is about two point one percent of my job when it comes to making a conference happen. In fact, speakers are good? Good. Now I can worry about everything else that I have to go do. You gotta get ’em right, and they’re essential, but they’re a fraction of a fraction of the responsibility for the event organizer.
So you need to raise your hand. You need to make yourself known. And the stats say you need to pitch twenty times to get a stage. That may be true, but it’s a stat that I found. Twenty pitches to get a stage. So there’s a good rule of thumb. You need to go ask people. Good morning, Barbara. Welcome to the show.
The first thing that I’m looking for when I’m asked, "What’s your point of view? What do you have to say?" Nobody wants to sit in on a speaker that just talks about generalities. Let’s improve your marketing. Here’s how to improve your mindset. Valuable stuff. But what is your take? Is your take that a lot of the new age mindset stuff is crap, and I’ll give you one thing that’ll change your life?
That’s a take. Now, whether or not they hire you, I don’t care, but at least it’s a point of view. We’re not just gonna talk about marketing. We’re gonna talk about how to explode your LinkedIn following. Point of view. That’s a take. Now, Barbara’s asking a great question. Is that the same venue or 20 different venues?
The stat that I found said that you need to make 20 different asks to get a stage, not the same, uh, organizer 20 times. We wouldn’t like that. But if you wanna go out and speak, that’s the velocity. Twenty asks on average would end up getting you a stage. Great question. So the first thing is have a point of view.
The second thing is know what the point of view does for the audience. When I’m booking a conference, I am casting an experience. I am thinking when someone comes to the conference, what do they get? They’re gonna learn from this person. They’re gonna learn from this person. Brooke, great to see you.
Welcome to the show. Th- they’re gonna get these takeaways from the conference. One, I wanna have well-rounded topics, but two, what does the attendee get? So you need to be able to express to the event organizer not only your point of view, but what are the actionable takeaways? I’m gonna show them how to save money on their car insurance.
I’m gonna show them how to close the month more efficiently so they don’t hate their life. What’s the takeaway for the attendee? Something you need to be able to express, which is no different than what we talk about on the show all the time, which is what’s the transformation you’re selling your client?
You need to have the same discipline when you’re pitching yourself as a speaker. What’s the transformation you’re giving someone when they give you their precious commodity of time and attention? Third thing you have to do when you’re trying to get a stage, and I say this on behalf of every event organizer on the planet with the authority of millions of event organizers.
Are you ready? Are you ready to hear it? Please, for the love of God, have video of you speaking. Please have video of you speaking. Does it need to be super polished and high fancy? No. I just need, I need to hear what it sounds like when you’re trying to talk to somebody, and it can’t be reading off of a script.
I need video of you speaking. I will tell you right now, there is a 0% chance that I will book you if I don’t talk to you first or have video of you speaking. There is no cold email that is good enough for me to book you on the stage. Physically impossible. Don’t care. If I’ve never heard you speak, you’re not getting booked.
Now, I’ve talked to some people one-on-one and know that they know their stuff, and I’ve booked them that way. But on the whole, on average, when you’re pitching people, you have to have video of you speaking. And we’ve seen that. We’ve seen people get booked, and we’ve sat in that audience, and their ums and ahs and ers and uh and right and right and right and anyway, so, so you know, so you know, so you know.
No. And you’ve also seen people go on stage, and all they do is sell the whole time. Double no. Triple, quadruple no. I need to be able to see that you know what you’re doing on stage, and you need to prove that to me by having it on video. For me, it’s a non-negotiable. The fourth thing is references and relationships.
I wanna see… Rob, welcome to the show. Great to see you. Thanks for tuning in on Instagram. I wanna see that you’ve spoken on these stages before. I wanna see that other event organizers were glad that they booked you. That should be in your email. "Hey, Pat, I’d like to speak at the SBOC. This is what I would like to speak on.
Here’s my point of view. Here’s what this other organizer said about me. Would you like to have a conversation?" Kristen, great to see you. Thanks for tuning in. And yes, this is right up your alley as someone that builds websites for speakers. I hope that you are high-fiving me while we’re doing this. So have references and referrals from other event organizers that said you know what you’re doing, and I can trust you.
Very valuable. Then the last thing that I would recommend is, well, two things really. I want you to systematize the ask. Make this something that you’re doing every couple of days, once a week. And now with AI automation, this is something you can do somewhat regularly. But don’t make asking for a stage an occasional thing.
If you wanna get to 20 asks for one stage, that means you’re gonna have to do it every week. If you wanna be in the speaking biz, make this a consistent thing. And then there’s a style point, and this is just speaker to speaker, something I really recommend. Have you heard of the software called Talkadot?
There’s a piece of software there called Talkadot, and what Talkadot does is it will give you the opportunity to survey the audience that you’re speaking in front of. When I speak sometimes, I’ll use a Talkadot slide as my last slide, and I’ll say to the audience, "I really enjoyed speaking with you today.
If you’d be so kind, would you mind scanning the QR code and help me get better? Scan the QR code. Give me your feedback." Well, what happens with that feedback, if you do a good job, is you get testimonials. "Pat changed my life. Pat is not only devastatingly handsome, he’s smart as hell," like whatever they would say.
They’d probably say that, but whatever they might say. And then you have testimonials. So when you pitch the organizers, you can say, "This is what people say about me." The other thing that Talkadot does so well is that it will say, "Do you or do you know someone that also organizes events? Would you like to know about booking me?"
And I’ve gotten leads through Talkadot that I’ve gotten stages from. It works. It’s a killer way to do that. So Talkadot’s a great piece of software. So here’s what I would recommend you do. Recommend that you review what you’re sending stage organizers. Is it clear? Does it have a point of view? Does it promise what the, uh, audience will get from you?
Does it have a referral from an event organizer that says this person spoke on stage and they’re good at it? Does it have quotes from the audience? Is there video? Review what you’re sending people and make sure it’s on point, and then systematize how you’re going about it. Every Tuesday, Claude is looking for all of the opportunities.
Every Wednesday, I’m reviewing the applications and sending them out. We do that every week. And every week we send ten, that means on average we’re gonna get two speaking gigs a month. Awesome. We need to systematize this. We need to take it seriously, and you need to be more aware of what is the event organizer looking for and what’s in it for the audience should they listen to you.
Hopefully that’s helpful. Hopefully that’ll help you get some more stages. AI story of the day is coming up. We’ve got two new models, one from ChatGPT, one from Claude, and it’s already changed the way that I’m working, and I’ll do show and tell. I’ll show you how it’s helping me work in a completely different way when we get to the AI story of the day.
But first, how about the Idea Slam mailbag? The question’s pretty simple: What’s something that we’re still doing that we should have stopped doing months ago? And I took this as an AI automation question. So what’s something that’s keeping us busy that shouldn’t be keeping us busy anymore? I think the first thing, it’s not solved, but the first thing that’s solved-ish is the gross email management.
Going into a raw email box is like, you know, going into the jungle with your M16. Like, you go in there and it’s like, "Oh, well, look at this place. Holy cow." We don’t need to do that anymore. Get your AI tools, point them at your email box, and help them make it a little bit easier for you. And if you’re just going in there raw, man, you have more courage than I do.
You can take your tools now and have it go in and take any spammy newsletters out. You can have it block and mute or unsubscribe from people that you don’t want to see and read. You can have it take requests in your emails, even if you haven’t read them yet, turn them into Todoist or to-do list actions, so that way you don’t have to remember to take the requests in the emails and put them on your to-do list.
And then you can also have it turn all of your things that you need to reply to into a heads-up display, so you can reply to everything on one page, and then it does the replying for you. You can speed up the getting of your email done. I think that’s the thing that you are probably spending too much time on and your AI tools can help you with.
I think that’s something that’s on a busy person’s plate that they should have moved off of months ago. The only other thing that comes to mind outside of AI and stuff is pruning the rooms and events that you go to. A real sober analysis of where you’re spending your time. We have a sunk cost to this.
Well, I’ve been a member of this group for twenty years. I’ve be- I’ve been going to this room for… I’ve been having breakfast with these people every week for three years. Yeah, how’s that working out for you? Is it a social hour or are you getting business? We need social hours. Don’t grow it alone. I’m Captain Social.
I get it. But are you really moving the needle by doing it, or are you just going out for pancakes with friends? I, I think that’s due for a refresh almost for everybody that I know. Are the groups you’re in accomplishing the goals you have for the groups that you’re in? And are the places that you’re going to paying off?
Because the hard cost of putting on real pants and leaving the cave is not only clogging up your morning, it’s also distracting you from the stuff you could be doing. Going to a breakfast meeting and coming back, that’s a three-hour tour every day, every time. And what can you get done at your desk in three hours?
A lot. And what can you get done in a new room full of your ideal clients that hasn’t met you yet? A lot. So the simple answer is manage your email better. Use your AI tools to do it. The more complex answer is, are you in the right rooms and when is the last time you reviewed those rooms? Both of those things are worth it and something we should be doing right now.
Okay, S Hunter, good to see you, my friend. Thanks for tuning in on Instagram. Let’s do the AI story of the day, and this one is awesome. Yesterday was Christmas come early. I always get that feeling. Anthropic released a new model for Claude. The new model that was released yesterday is called Opus 5.5, and it’s interesting because there is a family of models inside Claude.
Claude is not just one model. Paula, good morning. Great to see you. Anthropic is– Claude is not just one model. There, there are four different models cooking at the same time: Haiku, Sonnet, Opus, and then the top one is Fable. And Fable, really powerful. The model beneath it got a refresh yesterday, like okay, Opus 5.5, and they released the performance of Opus 5.5. And it’s better than the top model.
It’s cheaper than the top model. It feels faster to me. I used this thing all day yesterday afternoon and didn’t burn up the how much Claude I get meter. Whereas if I had used Fable all afternoon, I would have been cooked by six o’clock. And it holds up. Opus 5.5 crushed it for me yesterday afternoon. And what’s fun about learning these tools is that every time a new model comes out, our ability to get stuff done gets higher with us doing very few things differently.
I’m still driving Claude the same way I’ve always driven Claude, but Claude’s just like getting smarter, and it’s getting more done. In addition to Claude coming out yesterday, ChatGPT released a new model yesterday, which is also incredible. So now these two are like fighting. This arms race is happening as these models get smarter and smarter.
So no matter what platform you’re on, enjoy a smarter model today. Then there’s a new capability that came out inside Claude that I want to show you. Roshan, great to see you on Instagram. Thanks for tuning in. I want to show you projects. This is nuts. So this is show and tell straight out of my Claude.
Projects were basically file folders. You load all of the context you need into a file folder, and then whenever you wanted to do new stuff inside of a project, it knew everything it needed to know to work on your behalf. Okay, cool. That’s been there for a long time. But projects got a refresh, and the way I’m going to explain it, so we’re all on the same page because I’m not Captain Science, I’ll explain it in a way that I understand.
Projects now have this virtual kind of project manager where you’re talking with the project about what you want to have come true, and then it just starts doing stuff. So I went in yesterday and started a new project. It was something I’ve been working on for a long time, but I’m like, "This is a good thing to test."
So I went in, and I’ve been working on my SEO, AEO, and GEO, and EIEIO of smallbusinesscommunity.com. I want to be found by the robots. I want to be found by Google. Help me, Claude. You’re my only hope. So I went in and started a project on SEO, AEO, and GEO, and I said, "This is what I want. I want to be referred by the robots.
I want everyone to know what we’re doing. I want my YouTube channel to grow, and I want a cookie." Like, I just told it all the stuff that I wanted. And I hit send, and then all of the sudden, it, like, sprung to life and started s- like, sharing multiple agents that all got to work over here. So, like, in this main chat area, it was telling me, "Okay, well, if you want that, we need to do this and this and this."
And meanwhile, I’m seeing this light up over here on this side of the page like pinball. It launched, um… "Okay, well, the first thing we need to do is we need to separate Pat Miller from all the other Pat Millers on the internet. The other thing we gotta do is you have guest appearances all over the internet, but they’re not pointing back to Small Business Community, and we also have to modify the weekly podcast, and we also need to do, uh, an AI crawl of your website."
And it, like, started doing all this stuff, and it started doing all the stuff independently. And making the changes independently. Now, it didn’t materially write or delete until I approved it, but it did all this stuff at once, which made me sit back and go, "Oh."
Now I, as I’ve been doing AI, and you’ve heard me explain this on the show a million times, the way to think about your AI partner is that it’s your junior employee. This is a team member that works for you. And when Claude got smart enough to do quality work, I’m like, "This is interesting." Then we started doing scheduled tasks.
This is interesting ’cause now stuff’s getting done without me. But now that I’m just giving it a goal and letting go, that’s really interesting. If you can think about a goal that you want, let’s go back to the start of the show. I want to speak on more stages. In fact, this is a Claude project. You know what?
Let’s do it just for fun. Should we do it? Should we have fun together, just you and me? Let’s just have a good time here. Let’s do this just for kicks. What am I thinking about, Pat? We’re gonna go to Projects. Okay, here we are in Projects. We’re gonna start a new project. Start the project called Speaking.
What is the goal? And I use Wispr Flow, and you should too. Here’s the goal. I want to speak twice a month in front of my ideal audience and add speaking as a revenue-generating portion of my business. I want this to begin with stages in November of twenty twenty-six. I want to move aggressively. Give me a plan to make this a reality.
That’s my goal. I just Wispr Flowed it. In it goes. Create the project. Now watch what happens. Okay, here we go. Awesome. Set up this project from my recent work. Yep. Help me work out a plan for speaking. Love it. All good. So now Claude is working. Okay, it’s looking through all this stuff.
And it’s gonna get started. So once I give it a little bit of context, it’s going to now launch into all of the stuff that it needs to do for me. And it’s funny ’cause it’s gonna probably come back and recommend a bunch of the stuff that I recommended at the beginning of the show. But once it decides what it wants to do, then it gets going.
So here’s a question: What are you trying to accomplish with your speaking? For example, paid keynote fees. I want to generate money from paid speaking, and I want to grow the Small Business Owners Community and the AI Installation Group. So some of it is brand awareness, some of it is straight revenue.
Cool. So now I’ve told it that, and now we’ll see where it goes. Got it. Here it goes. Stagehunt, say go. Yes, go. Let’s build it. Okay, so now it’s got its priorities, signature talk and speaker kit, Stagehunt November onward, pitch outreach, spe- uh, revenue tracking. And now here it goes, down here down the side.
It’s gonna start spawning all of this work. It’s starting with the signature talk and speaker kit. And it’s gonna go on, and it’s gonna go on, and I’m gonna sit here as a bag of meat and just approve what it’s doing and what it’s doing for me. This is significant because we moved on, as I explained in a recent talk that I gave, we’ve moved on from a genius in a phone booth where you have to go to it, get its answer, paste it, and move it to other places.
We’re now in a situation where we talk to it and it can drive our tools. That’s Claude Cowork. But we’re getting to just give it the goal and get out of the way. Literally manage it like a person. "How’s this, boss?" "That’s great. Keep doing it." "Okay, I came back with these results, boss. Am I on the right track?"
"Yes, you are. I’d like more of that." We’re just, we’re just orchestrating at this point. And yesterday, this morning, there’s a project that Abby wants. So my lovely wife Abby has a project that she wants done. She asked me to manage the project. She woke up this morning at 6:00 AM and says, "I can’t sleep. We need to start this today."
And by 7:00, it was already done, from concept to draft that’s good enough to put in front of her partners in an hour. This is, it, it feels like this is a shift. We’ve had shifts. This is a shift. And I’m really excited about it. So if you’re a Claude user, get in there, update your Claude to get to Opus 5.5, ’cause it’s a brilliant model and it’s way cheaper than Fable.
And get into projects and give it your toughest outcomes. What do you want to have happen? And let Claude figure it out. I’m sure you can do this with Astra in ChatGPT. I’m sure you can do it in Grok, whatever, equal opportunity, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m a Claude guy. Get in your Claude and start playing with it because it is something.
Also in the Claude news, uh, the lower-priced models are also getting a refresh. There’s a rumor coming, two rumors. Should we sh– Uh, let’s spread some rumors. Should we do that? Let’s spread some rumors. Haiku and Sonnet are gonna get upgraded to 5.5 in the next week. And then the other rumor is that Anthropic’s version of a personal agent is gonna be coming out in the next soon, week, two weeks?
Which means you not only have your work buddy, you now have a personal assistant. Make me a tea time, order me a pizza, uh, whatever it might be, like personal actions. And I think that’s gonna get accelerated real quick now that Meta has put out Muse. It’s sick what’s happening. And when we zoom back out, this is why I’ve felt like Paul Revere riding through the small business village.
Friends, we need to get on this because imagine you’re competing for a stage that I want. Well, uh, I’ve, I’ve got an ally that’s already pitched on it, that’s already customized pr- my proposal for them, that’s modified my talk specifically for their audience, that’s put into the outreach to the organizer about how my core talk fits for real estate agents instead of CPAs.
And I didn’t do any of it, and I’m doing this at scale, and all of this is automated. Those are the people you’re gonna be competing with, no matter what it is that you’re competing with. We need to get on this. You need to get on this, and this projects thing, it’s the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time.
Very excited about it. So get on it, upgrade your Claude, and share with me what you’re building because it’s getting awesome. SBOC continues to get awesome, by the way. So many cool new members. Amy joined this morning, uh, Robin from Burlington, Jesse from Oconomowoc, Ray from New Berlin, Amanda from Salem, and Sebastian from Minneapolis all have joined in the last week.
So we’re adding seven awesome new people to the community in the last week. If you’re not yet a member of the Small Business Owners Community, now would be an awesome time to join. We’ve got three events happening this week. This afternoon, we have our weekly co-working session where we’re gonna get together for two hours and GSD.
Bring your topic. We do Pomodoro flops, twenty-five minutes of work, take a five-minute break, twenty-five minutes of work, five-minute break. You’ll get more done in the next, uh, two hours than you know what to do with. Scan the QR code to join. Then on Thursday, we’re gonna do the Idea Slam, where we’re gonna get together, share what we’re working on, talk about what we’ve got done in the last week, and if you run into roadblocks, we’re going to brainstorm with one another because no one ever taught you how to run a business.
So if you come to a room full of owners, they can show you how they solve the problems that you’re facing. We do that every Thursday. Then on Friday, we have our Friday Finish Line, where we celebrate our wins of the week because nobody in your life understands what you’re going through other than small business owners.
So you can say, "I got the deal. I got the stage. I made the partnership. I built the thing," and everyone understands how important that is ’cause they’re trying to do it too. It’s a room of your peers celebrating together, happens every Friday afternoon at 4:00. Smallbusinesscommunity.com is where you get it or scan the QR code.
We would love to have you be a member of the group. I am going on vacation. We do this show every day, and doing the show every day is really great, and I was doing it all the way through the conference, and now it’s time to go on vacation. Take my brain out of the charger, put it on the charger in Las Vegas, go have a beverage, and not think for a couple of days.
Going there this weekend, which means no show tomorrow, no show for the next week. I’m not gonna be there for a wake- week and a half. I’d be in the hospital. But I will be off the air for a week and a half. So the next edition of "Businessing with Pat Miller," that is happening Monday, October 5th. So thanks for tuning in.
Thanks for being a part of what we’re building here and in the Small Business Owners Community. And make sure to join us Monday the 5th of October, and I look forward to seeing you then. I’m Pat Miller, founder of the Small Business Owners Community, host of the show. Go play with your Claude. Go sell something.
I’ll see you on October 5th. Take care.