Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 76 – Juliet Funt

Peter Winick

Peter Winick chats with Juliet Fun on Episode 76 of Leveraging Thought Leadership

Thought leaders need relevant business content, intellectually stimulating ideas, and great platform skills. But is that really what it takes to get noticed?

Our guest is Juliet Funt, CEO of WhiteSpace at Work and premier keynote speaker. Peter and Juliet discuss how to translate keynote speaking into a profitable (and scaleable!) business, as well as the differences between working with mid-size and fortune companies.

Juliet also gives her insight into getting noticed, and the need for practice regardless of natural talent. There’s a lot more you can do with your content beyond speaking, if you know how to

If you want to scale your content to make more profit, Peter has advice for you.

Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, this is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on our podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today’s a special day for me because I’ve got a guest that’s a friend and someone that I’ve known for quite some time, Juliet Funt. Say hi, Juliet. So let me give you Juliet’s background. For those of you who don’t know her, Juliet is the CEO of Whitespace at Work, which is a training and consulting firm that helps organizations, their leaders, and employees flips the norms of business in order to reclaim their creativity, productivity, and engagement. Juliet is an amazing keynoter. If you haven’t seen her speak or hired her to speak, you need to. She’s one of the best out there. And welcome. Hey.

Juliet Funt This is fun. It’s so nice to have you on Yeah, it’s I’m at the end of a lovely long week and it’s fun to have a call with a friend. So that’s great

Peter Winick So let’s just dive right in. So you have been at this for quite some time as a speaker and a CEO of a company that intervenes with folks in the corporate world and helps them live a better life. How’d you get here? How’d this happen?

Juliet Funt Well, of course, we work together in the early days of the company. And, you know, one of the things that I, I tend to say when I’m in a safe environment with friends is we call it, we’re a five-year-old company, but we call ourselves a three-year old company because we made so many mistakes in the first two years, we just don’t count them. No, what’s fun about that sharing is not that it’s unusual to share it. What’s fun is that every single entrepreneur in the world nods and laughs and understands that that’s this natural life cycle of building a business. End. can get to a place where you’re forgiving about that. It’s really very freeing, especially since I’ve never met anyone who didn’t identify. And so it’s been about a three to four year process of being informed and really doing this and also being appreciative of how slow it takes to build this. I’m an unusual entrepreneur is that I’ve really understood the full time work schedule. It just seems like too many hours a week to me. So I tend to work less than some other people building a business. I don’t really. do the 50, 60 hour thing. And so my company moves forward slower, but in a way that really works for my life. I love it. And kind of that’s where we are. So we’re really in still a young area, but we’re starting to blossom. And what we do is we help people reduce busy work so they can execute better. And every company in the world is too busy. So there’s lots and lots of potential. And what learning now is the art of helping people see that that’s a solvable problem and looking a little into the future of their work and becoming less casual about. being complacent about the problem.

Peter Winick So, so let’s, let’s actually go back a little bit. Let’s talk about that. So even though the company’s somewhere between three and five years, right? So we’re not the first to lie about our ages here, right. But I think that you’re missing a piece here is prior to that, you were an incredibly successful keynote speaker. Yeah. So I want to, so what I want do is talk about, cause you sort of jumped through that you hit a level at the keynote side that most people never hit. So talk for a moment about sort of your, the start is the keynote and then transforming into a content based business, cause that’s a big deal.

Juliet Funt Yes, so sorry about that. I think of it as two totally separate conversations. So I’ve been keynoting for 20 something years and I started out in youth and education and did high schools and gyms and colleges and learned the chops. And I had a really lucky combination of assets in that I was an actress in an improv comic in college, but I was really curious about human development and people in business. And so they kind of just came together really naturally. The youth and educational stuff turned into talking to the parents and the parents corporations. It’s a nice. the corporate space was much more my angle. And then for 20 years, I’ve been building the skills and the speeches and the flow and the stories. And it’s kind of like when a musician plays the same songs over and over and you just keep getting better at the art of each piece and the art of each pieces and I was on the phone with Lou Heckler a couple of days ago, who’s one of the great, great, slightly older but classic performers of this. And we were talking about how the actual art of the platform is something that is not even taught anymore in speaking conferences. It’s just all marketing and social media. But the art of platform is why I was treated well in the speaking circuit and continue to be treated well. And it’s a very particular practice-oriented skill that I have gotten real good at. And I think sadly is not really focused on almost at all in the current up schooling of platform professional.

Peter Winick No, and I love the way you put that. I can speak from firsthand experience. The first time I saw you speak, I was blown away not just by the intensity and the audience reaction, but everyone in the audience was convinced that you worked for that firm for 10 years because you did so much work to know all their little nuances and all their little rituals and all they’re different language. And, you know, to me, it’s just so offensive. when a professional keynote are getting cop dollars out there doing what I call a drive by, right? Like they get on and it’s like, hello Cleveland. No, it’s Pittsburgh. And how do you treat your customers, your clients? Like, so, I mean, you put a lot of work into that and it shows and it has been rewarded on the stage and off the stage.

Juliet Funt Yeah, I mean, it helps coming out of performance. You know, the truth is, every keener should probably go off and do a year or two of acting or improv class and just completely forget about speaking for a little while because it’s the, you know, the performance element is really, really important when the breakout session next to you decides to do a giant loud drum exercise and you have to find a way to continue to focus and look forward and not turn away and not be distracted. A lot of that is just performance chops when And so the more you focus on that, I think the better you are. And there’s a general speakers that I adore. They’re not as many of them now as they were before who focus on them. And then when you’re able to build relevant business content, truly intellectually stimulating ideas on top of the base of platform skills, then you can really get noticed in the world of speaking. Any one of those two or three without the others, I think is a little bit like a stool without all three of them. Thanks for watching!

Peter Winick So at what point, so you’re on the stage, you’re speaking professionally, you’re earning good money doing that, uh, speaking to top level organizations around the globe, at what did the light bulb go off to you that there’s something potentially more than just keynoting and there’s nothing wrong with just key noting, but where you said, wait a minute, this white space stuff that I’m putting out there, people seem to want more and what does that look like and how would I do that? What tell me about that journey a little bit.

Juliet Funt Yeah, so it was, you know, the aggregate knowledge of National Speakers Association started to move toward about 10 years ago, the idea of passive income, other products, and so you can’t be present in that universe without beginning to pick up a little bit of, hey, I should have something like that. But it didn’t really, I was building something small, but it didn’t really kick in until a specific client at a Fortune 500 company said, how do you scale this? So when that person, who happened to be Ed Gilligan of American Express who passed away in a very… A very, very sad circumstance at a very young age, but when he was around, he was the one who said, you know, let’s scale this. And at that time I didn’t have anything scalable. So I began the pursuit of building something that would work originally for that client. And then obviously realizing that that was a much broader need. And I’ve been so grateful, even though building the business part has been enormously emotionally more frustrating and difficult than building the keynote part. And you’re laughing because we had drinks over much of that. But I will tell you that having something that can earn when you’re not there is a beautiful, beautiful thing. I’m 51. I start thinking about the next 20 years of my life. I don’t think I want to be on this many planes when I’m 70. And so, you know, it’s a wonderful thing from a life perspective, but also from a scaling your content perspective. If there’s something that you really believe in, you can only give so many speeches.

Peter Winick Well, and there’s a couple of pieces of that. There’s impact, because I know that you truly believe in your work, right? That white space actually helps people have a more balanced, more manageable life, personally and professionally. So there’s that impact, that evangelical piece of it. And then there’s also the financial piece, like, you know, aren’t too many keynoters out there. Well, maybe there’s a couple in their 70s and 80s, and who wants to be doing all that? Right. So what are the flavors that white space comes in now? Right? So there is the keynote. How do you walk a client through the journey and what’s the promise of that?

Juliet Funt Sure, good question. So it’s always iterative. So we build it and then we keep tweaking it and changing it and improving it. We teach through a core of a digital micro learning platform. But unlike some micro learning or unlike some digital, it is not self paced. And that is really the key architect of our program. Is that we work with clients to do the heavy lifting of making sure that all the learners in a group are orchestrated to progress in unison through a series of topics over a nine month period. So we want them doing a lesson and then going back and playing with it in their life, and then another lesson and going back and playing it with it, in their lives. And we give them a lot of bells and whistles, accountability processes, handouts, all sorts of goodies to create this really rigorous system that can then sit around and support what is by nature sort of a soft delivery modality. So digital is very fluid and flexible and you can use it when you feel like it. So in order for it to then have bones, you have to put a lot of structure around it. So that’s what we’ve spent a lot of time building and perfecting. And then with that, we have supplemental services depending on a client’s passion and budget. So we do a lot webcast-y type stuff where I’m on, where me or now other trainers are on a web stream on email meetings or interruptions or executive presence or whatever we want to teach on. We have a developmental assessment. We have organizational assessments. We have some executive consulting work, although we try to keep that light for my own, because I’m the only one who can do that.

Peter Winick So you have a full suite of various solutions targeted at different levels of the population at different price points. So you could really transform an entire organization with those tools and not have to literally be jumping plane to plane to plan.

Juliet Funt Yeah, so when we are able to sell a digital program that I don’t kick off, which is about 50% of them now, the entire program runs and I have nothing to do with it except for when I particularly am interested in a client, I’m on that monthly hour check and call. And it is, I’ll tell you, it’s a beautiful thing coming from the keynote model. I know your listeners are people who make a lot of their money probably keynoting or maybe they some of them. Boy, when you do a deal and you realize that someone else is executing 85% of it, 90% of it, it’s a beautiful feeling. It really is.

Peter Winick Right. And then what I know a lot of keynoters do is they look at that and they go, wow, that’s the equivalent of 10 speeches, which is 24 days on the road, which is like, that’s pretty cool. Right, right. So give me a sense because you’ve been sort of on the, the sell side, right? You know, getting this embedded in clients, the similarities and differences of selling these types of solutions from speaking, cause speaking tends to be fairly transactional. Can you be in Scottsdale on January 7th? What’s your fee or you fit whatever, but you know, the world of B2B sales. not so transactional. So talk to that a bit if you could.

Juliet Funt Yeah, so that’s what all the Xanax- AH!

Peter Winick for, really.

Juliet Funt I thought that’s what they had.

Peter Winick plane ride, so it’s for the B2B sales, okay.

Juliet Funt No, no, it’s for B2B sales, because these keep…

Peter Winick Are they?

Juliet Funt Well, they should be. They should be, and I feel very kindred to your listeners, and I also tend to be very open kimono. So if you target a Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000 clientele, which we have done so far, it is important for somebody to tell you that these people will drive you out of your frigging mind. And it is one of the most difficult interpersonal processes that I’ve ever been in. What I do notice… And I’ll tell you more, I can tell you more about that, but what I do notice is that when you’re in a smaller to mid-sized company range, when there’s 500, a thousand, 5,000, 10,000 employees, it is a pleasurable, learnable, manageable cycle that you can get good at, that you feel peaceful during, and so we’re transitioning all of our paid sales and marketing focus to midsize companies. Even though. We love Fortune 500 when they come to us. I’m on the speaking circuit, a certain number of them will find us, but they are so tied in the binds and wrappings of their corporate complexity that it’s two to three years before you can sometimes make something happen. And it’s not a nice two to the three years. It’s two or three years of over-promising and complexity and unsurity and passive aggressive. So you can hear that there’s a lot for me behind that, but I’m saying it not only to vent, but with a passion for people who are getting into this to say this giant candy jar of the Fortune 500 and these amazing contracts, if and when they happen, it’s a very, very, very nice day. But in the aggregate, my experience has been that I have not found it worth it for me and that we’re moving to a different market that we enjoy much.

Peter Winick And it’s not that the people are necessarily different in the smaller companies. It’s the processes and systems and how decisions get made.

Juliet Funt Yeah, so I sat yesterday with a client, it’s got 220 people. I sat with the CEO, we laughed, we showed each other pictures of our kids. He’ll make a decision in two weeks, he’ll either tell me yes or he’ll tell me no, and that’ll be it. And that’s the beauty of a mid-size.

Peter Winick as opposed to a Fortune 100 where those conversations could take nine months to get to sort of kind of maybe after they said, we’re definitely doing this and all that. But the paydays tend to be bigger at the larger firms.

Juliet Funt No, the paydays are fantastic and we’re also in the process of getting smarter about those conversations. So I have plenty of friends from ISA, which is the Association of Learning Providers that I now participate in. They do Fortune 500 all day long. They love it. They have an estimated 18-month sales cycle, but they know during that process, they know what’s coming. They’re prepared for it. We might have just a shorter tolerance for that kind of. complexity, but we just are really happy with the new.

Peter Winick So more of the mid caps and the smaller companies, it’s easier to get to a decision maker. So the transactions might be a bit smaller, but you can increase the quantity that you’re doing in the same sales time, the same cycle time.

Juliet Funt And there’s another reason too, that’s not money oriented, which is we are trying to transform a culture from one that is reactively busy, working 24 seven, never disconnected from email, never had time to think to one where it is normative to be pausing, thoughtful, recuperative, balanced. So in a fortune 500 environment, the life cycle of moving that to a place where the dominant ancient culture is not sabotaging that work is so hard. Whereas with a small and midsize company, you can get your arms around most of the population or all of the population immediately. And they’re all in the same philosophy and mindset. And so for us, it’s much more gratifying watching a smaller company fully transform as opposed to watching a segment of a fortune company. battling the machine and maybe eventually, eventually, eventually rolling enterprise wide. We just find it more gratifying to see the holistic change that can occur in a small.

Peter Winick Well, and it’s easier to turn a rowboat around than a tanker, right, in terms of size and complexity. So that’s great to understand what it takes to really get embedded there and the fact that you’re experimenting with different markets and there’s pros and cons to each. So out there right now is probably several people that are, you know, of the mindset that you were 10, 15 years ago, 5, 10, 15 years. what would you recommend for them? And start off with the speaking piece because you brushed through that fairly quickly and I think you were one of the best in terms of the level of professionalism and the amount of energy that you put in. None of the other things would happen if you weren’t killer at that space. But start there, sort of like, hey, I wanna be a speaker because how many times do we all hear that? A little love and a little advice. Maybe not a lot of love.

Juliet Funt I was on a platform yesterday and Peyton Manning was later in the day and I listened to him and he was talking about just the practice part of it. There will be people who will outrun him and there will be people who out-talent him and nobody who will out-practice him and I really was thinking about that piece in terms of speaking and I had been the day before at an event where I was doing a speech that I’ve done a segment, a very small Ted-like segment of a speech that I’ve done a million times. I was backstage doing what I do, which is rehearsing for an hour before going over and over and over to catch nuances in language and figure out where I could lift it differently. And I sort of identify with that feeling of I love to practice and I really love what happens after you practice. And I think a lot of speakers are, when I started out, I would wing everything. And then I began really, really working on it. And when you’re good and when you are a great communicator, you can wing everything, but you don’t realize the delta between. practiced speech and winged speech. And so, over the years, one of the things that I become very appreciative of people who just put in the work who stand up with, you know, with a script in their hand or without a script, in their hand and just do the practice. And I think that that is unspeakably important in terms of content.

Peter Winick And I think most professions, you get an excuse to have an off day here and there, but not in this world. Right? You’ve got 60 minutes or whatever that is to be on stage and kill it. And you can’t have a bad day. It’s not acceptable to have, well, it’s sort of Wednesday and she was kind of tired.

Juliet Funt Yeah. Now when you start moving up, especially, I mean, if you’re a $5,000 speaker, there’s some forgiveness in there. But if you are a $30,000 speaker, that’s their annual budget they just spent on you. So no, there is no window there. So in terms of that’s the platform skills piece. And then in terms the building, the practice piece, I always tell everybody the same thing. You should join national speakers association, but you should have very, very guarded. Boundaries about what you let in and what you don’t let in in NSA It’s kind of been co-opted by a lot of people who are very into the sales piece the social media Please there’s a smarmy kind of feeling to about 50% of the organization But if you look at the other 50% there are the most glorious human beings that you’re ever gonna meet so you have to kind of separate that part and You have to do the most speeches that you can do until you get better And that was what was told to me in my first week This guy named Phil said the difference between a good speaker and a great speaker is a thousand speeches and I remember being so focused on him.

Peter Winick That’s a lot of speeches, but it’s true.

Juliet Funt Yeah, but it’s some version of that is true. Rotary, friends groups, lunch and learn, small groups, ladies group, just speak and speak and and speak and then you develop your message over time, which is usually so iterative that people are then again disappointed or surprised that they don’t have their core message in two years. That’s kind of the last thing that I’ll throw in is I think sometimes it takes two, five, seven years to figure out what’s the thing. that I talk about. And you’ll go through these phases where it blossoms into a next thing and the next thing. It took me about eight years to really be the white star.

Peter Winick And there’s also, I would just add to that, the authenticity. When somebody’s early on the speaking side, and I think we’ve all seen it, they’re taking, obviously taking elements of others, and it just doesn’t fit on them, right? If somebody else is able to be funny and you’re not a funny person, if somebody’s able to come up with a woo-woo catchphrase and that just doesn’t those aren’t words that come out of your mouth naturally. You know, you have to experiment, but finding your own voice and being authentic and, you know, being willing to be vulgar.

Juliet Funt Well, since you said the word taking, let’s just take one second to say to anyone who really is a beginner out there, that just the simple fact should probably be said out loud, that you cannot do somebody else’s material, that you cannot retell a story, you cannot tell a model without crediting it. It is shocking to me how many speakers think, oh, I heard this and I’ll just say it. And that’s not okay.

Peter Winick Yeah, no, that’s definitely not okay. And I think that goes from the comedy world to the speaking world. You will not be well-received at the next NSA event.

Juliet Funt Yeah, but you have to say it. It’s crazy that you have to say, but

Peter Winick Always a good thing to remember. Anyway, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for being transparent and sharing your journey from on the speaking side to the business side, from big business to mid-sized businesses, great, great stuff. I encourage folks to go back and listen to this again. And again, I said it before and I’ll say it again, if you haven’t seen Juliette speak or haven’t hired her to speak, you need to do so. She’s one of the best out there. And I mean that and I’ve seen many, many, many over the years. So thank you so my friend. Thanks, talk to you soon. To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter at thought leadership leverage.com and please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.