I do a lot of polling in my talks and so I actually get people on their phones. They grab a QR code from my slides and then they anonymously answer some questions and then I show the answers on the screen. Hi, welcome back to How Much Can I Make? I'm Marav Ozeri. Today we have Jennifer Brown, a powerhouse of a woman who is a keynote speaker. Before I met her, I didn't even know that keynote is a career or a job, that you actually build it and you could be very successful at it for a long period of time if you can talk I guess, if you can speak to an audience. But anyway, let's find out what does it take to be a good keynote speaker. So Jennifer, thanks a lot for doing it. I really appreciate it. Let's start by first of all, tell us what is a keynote speaker and what do they do? It is a real profession. They shop themselves around as someone who can be an opening speaker for an event or a gathering or a closing keynote or a lunchtime speaker. As long as people are gathering for big meetings, there's usually a need for an external expert of some kind or a motivational speaker to come in and kind of kick things off, give people an inspirational message, teach them something. So keynote speakers, they're in demand because there's a wow factor, I think, when it, you know, you can't be a profit in your own land. We often say that. So companies look outside. They look to authors, they look to professors to kind of get that wow factor and they're willing to pay for that external person to come in. So is there like an agency that's not there? There are agencies, they're called Speaker Bureau's. Bureau's will get requests for you. Like you might be listed on Bureau's websites and I am on a bunch of them and you'll be there with your expertise and your rates and then they will field inquiries and then they'll tee you up for a conversation to meet the client and you go on a call and you see if there's a fit. Okay, let's back up a little bit. First I want to know how did you get into the field? I started Jennifer Brown Consulting over 20 years ago and I was very, I think, unexperienced. I wouldn't have called myself an expert in what was then diversity, not inclusion, not equity, not DEI. It was early days. So I built the company but I was mainly marketing and selling the work and then I would bring in other people to deliver the work. So we would do trainings for all kinds of different companies, ones you would recognize. All about diversity. Yes, exactly. Okay. Yes. I was not the person that started the company because I was an expert. This just wasn't my scenario. But over time I sat in the back of the room and I took notes and I listened to other people and I really studied and apprenticed myself. Even though I owned the company and I had the clients, I would bring these other people in because they knew the field. Other speakers? Yes, other trainers. Okay. We were very much a training company. Okay. So I watched all of this and I learned and I picked it up and I studied and about 15 years in to the company, my team said, you must have a book, you must have a keynote, and you must have a podcast. Wow. And I was intimidated by the idea, but I think something in me knew it was time to move to the front of the stage. So I started writing books and I started to speak. I wouldn't say I was a keynote speaker just because I snapped my fingers and it happened overnight. I did what everybody else struggles to do, which is people wanted me to speak because they regarded my work as valuable and they said, oh, why doesn't Jennifer come in and speak? But I didn't have a talk. I did not have a written talk with slides, which is what you made. Oh, so really? So you had to build it? Yeah, I had to build it. And I was so unsure about what to include because sometimes you have 15 minutes, sometimes you have 90 minutes on stage. So now we call it a slinky speech. So you have to put something down and commit to it. And you have to say, this is my talk. So did you have long version and short version? I did. I put a bunch of, like it's almost a kitchen sink kind of thing. Like I put in a lot of different things that I thought would be interesting to the audience, things that I cared about, whether it was data or statistics or somebody's model that I really liked, all on the topic of leadership and inclusion. And then I kind of strung it together. And I said, instead of saying, no, I don't have a talk, I started to say yes. And initially it was for free and then it was for $2,000 and then it was for $5,000 you progress and you having books helped and kind of boosted up my fee. And also delivering it a bunch of times, it just gets in your body so that at some point you don't even need anything. You don't need a script. You don't even need your slides. You're just very present to it because you've done it so many times and you know the twists and turns and like the narrative that you want to take an audience on. Didn't you have a TED talk also? I did. Yeah. How did this come about? That was 10 years ago. It was before I had any books or what I'm describing. Somebody was in one of my training classrooms and I was teaching storytelling 101 and I demonstrated by telling my story, which we'll get into. And somebody said, you know, I organized the local TEDx here and that story belongs on the stage. Like we really need that story here. And I'm the curator. I know the curators. So they introduced me in and I was very intimidated and I almost said no. Oh my God. Yeah. And because I didn't have the talk because right, all these excuses that we have, imposter syndrome and everything. And I forced myself to say yes. And then I spent the next several months locked in my bedroom with post-its all around the room trying to figure out the structure of the talk, trying to rehearse it and get it in the right order. And even so I had to go on stage and I had a little iPad because I was so worried about losing my place. But it was for a thousand people. Wow. And I used something interesting when I wanted to say no and then I forced myself to say yes. Subsequently, after the whole thing was done, I asked the organizers, why were there not more women on the stage and more people of color and more diversity? And they said, you know, we reached out to a lot of female speakers, but nobody got back to us or people said no. And all the men we reached out to said yes. That's interesting. Isn't that interesting? So I remember that, that I suspected that to be true, but to hear it lit even more of a fire under me to say I must speak. Did it boost your fear after the TED talk? Yeah. So yes. And it didn't go viral. I mean, you can watch it. It's, you just do my name and TEDx. Like I don't, I don't have like hundreds of thousands of views. I think more than anything, yes, it legitimizes you. It legitimized me at an early stage when I didn't have books, which I think that's the other thing that legitimizes you is books like several books sort of establishes an expertise for you. What was the first book you wrote? First one was called Inclusion. And how long did it take you to write it? I would say six months or so. So the book helped, the TED talk helped. What else is essential for keynote speaker to do in order to boost their image? Well, it depends. So I, and this is part of my origin story, the performance, the craft of performance, like how do you handle yourself on stage? Do you, do you own the stage? Do you feel really comfortable there? That can be an area you need to invest in, you know, whether that stage fright or how you speak or just everything around the craft. And then the message is the content, which is equally hard. Sometimes people are wonderful on stage, but they don't know what to say. Or sometimes they have a really important message, but it's not, they don't come across with the keynote speakers have to have a gravitas that holds the audience. So you talk about stage and performance. Now I know you were an opera singer. Yeah, I was. So tell me a little bit about how that career worked and how does it help you now as a keynote speaker? I mean, so much. I was an opera singer, got my master's at Manhattan School of Music. So I came to New York City not knowing anybody and did the whole I have a dream thing. And I got my equity card and pivoted from classical voice to music theater. So I was kind of going hard in that direction. I dance, I'm a singer who dances. So there could have been a lot of work for me, but I injured my voice and it kept happening. Yeah. And I have to had to get vocal surgery twice. And I mean, I don't know really how common this is. Julie Andrews is the most one of the most famous Adele also had surgery. You know, you can come back from it, but after twice of going through this, I just could tell that my voice was a little bit less resilient. And I just saw the future and the writing on the wall. And so I quit. I fired my agent. I said, I'm leaving. I gave up singing and I, I was sort of free floating for a while. And then somebody said, why don't you become a trainer, a leadership trainer? And I didn't know what that field was. And they were, they were performers too. There's a lot of performers in the keynote speaking world. Oh, really? Yes. There's a lot of performers that are facilitators who spend their time like teaching adults effectively, like talking about leadership in companies, working with executive teams, which is what I've done for years and years. And it is similar. It's their stage craft. There's presence. There's the confidence to walk into a room full of strangers and lead them through a whole curriculum. And you had that from your opera days? I did. And I had the comfort on stage and the improvisational ability when I didn't know something or I had to pivot or I was in an unfamiliar scenario or someone was challenging me. I mean, I've dealt with hecklers in my corporate classrooms, doubters, naysayers. I walk in the room and somebody says, we're going to learn from this person today. You have to be pretty tough. And the toughness comes from the auditions, like over and over and over again. I had to audition. It doesn't matter if you're having a bad day, good day, you're not feeling well. The show goes on. And the stamina of that I have relied on right after George Floyd was murdered in 2020. And my keynote speaking really became like a full time job. I probably gave 200 talks in a space of two years. Wow. So there's a lot of stamina and presence and you have to be fully in the moment, I think, to respond to the audience, to make the points you need to teach, to anticipate who this audience is and what they care about. I think it just came from practice and the hours and hours of singing, auditioning, learning things quickly, responding in the moment, improvising when things don't go well. All of that is the life of a performer. You really were a fantastic singer. Sometimes I actually play myself singing with orchestra as I walk up on stage. That's a good idea. Yeah. And then I say the voice that you just heard was mine. And the audience is so kind of discombobulated, which is exactly where I want them. Because I think if I just walk on stage as me, I think we all, people's biases just, you know, they just appear. And then you spend all your time challenging those and dismantling those instead of getting to the thing that you really want to speak on. So I try to like beat the audience to it because I know, I can read their mind by this point. I just feel like I've done it so much. Wow. You get the sense of the audience, they're listening, they're not listening, they're into it. Yeah, their body language, their eye contact. Sometimes I can see their faces and sometimes I can't depending on the lighting in the stage. If it's like 800 people, I mean, there are people way in the back. And as a singer, you remember, I want to reach that person in the very back, that person that's hiding. I want to move them. I want them to feel this and feel included in this. So I think to the performer, you ask sort of what's, how are these related? The ability to project your energy a long way. And it's energetic. I don't know if like I can describe how it's done, but to enable as many people as possible in a room to feel connected to you and to trust you and be listening to you and be intrigued by you. If you can do that, then the learning can happen. So you said somebody told you you should be in leadership position. How did you pick diversity from that? How did it come from that to you becoming an expert on the AI? Yeah, so I tell this story, I say I lost my voice, right, as a singer, only to realize that I needed to use my voice in a different way. And that was very, a very profound, a redirection in my life that I think was absolutely intended by the universe. I was like, we're going to take your voice away, literally, because this isn't what you're intended to do. We get to redirections like that in our lives. I think sometimes we listen to them and sometimes we don't. You got to listen to the whispers of the universe. I always say I lost my voice, but actually being in the LGBTQ community, I had struggled with being out in the workplace, being out as a performer. So how I got into DEI as it would come to be known was originally when I first got my second master's in organizational change and leadership, my first ever gigs were helping LGBTQ people in corporations use their voice. So I would come in and do seminars on how can we not just use our voices and tell our stories, but how can we influence our employers to be better and more inclusive of us. So we would do programs and education and I would do strategy sessions for the gay employees of Merrill Lynch or Deloitte. So it sounds like you need to be really passionate about the subject you're talking about. For me, I don't think I could do anything. I'm not deeply invested in and interested in. So in your company, there were other speakers? Other trainers, yep, trainers and speakers and also designers, project managers. We became so big in 2020, I almost had 20 people on my team. My job was to increase our visibility, to go to the conferences and open the doors, to raise awareness about this amazing team that I had. When you said you had trainers, who did they train? Corporate leaders and managers. About dealing with DEI. And leadership in general. And companies used to pay quite a lot for this. How much would they pay? Over 20 years, maybe these things used to cost a company $5,000 a day or $10,000 a day. And out of that money, then you sort of back into the costs of delivering that. So a delivery person, gosh, when I first started, I was making $600 a day. And the company that was booking me, they were charging $3,000 or $4,000 a day. Wow, so they would make all the difference between, oh my God. But you know what, that's overhead. So what they have to do for that is they have to design the program. I didn't design it. They had to sell the work. They had to follow up and manage the client and sell more work. And all I had to do in the early days was show up. I was the talent. And as a performer, this is like a great fit for me. I was like, this is easy. I could do this all. I mean, I was on my feet eight hours running around a classroom. And that was tough on my body. And I was on flights at, you know, afterwards. I would deliver an eight hour program, three days in a row, and then fly that night to another city and then deliver something next day. And how do you know when you go to speak to corporate world that you were reaching the people? Companies are always trying to solve a problem. So when you do prep calls and you go into a design process, and I do this actually ahead of Keynotes too, I ask the client, OK, so tell me about the audience. What level are they? Where are they coming from in the world? Sometimes you have global audiences. So those have very different understanding of language and terminology and acronyms and cultural norms. Executive audiences are really different than middle management. And then there's individual contributors who don't manage people. I always want to know what are people not doing? What do they not know that they need to know? Where do you want them to adjust their behavior? A manager will say to me that's hiring me. I want them to be more visionary. I want them to be. I want them to sell their work. I want them to be better marketers of what they do. I want them to be more people people, you know, because they're very technical. I do a lot of polling in my talks. And so I actually get people are on their phones. They grab a QR code from my slides and then they anonymously answer some questions. And then I show the answers on the screen. Oh, so I don't know. I know it so well now that I kind of know what I'm going to get, honestly. But they're they're sharing their anonymous sharing is always incredibly moving. Really honest, really vulnerable. I'm struggling with mental health and I nobody knows. I just I just lost my partner or I lost a child to suicide and I I'm grieving. I have a chronic illness and I don't want to talk about it because people are going to underestimate what I'm capable of. I'm still in the closet. Very eyeopening for leadership at companies to say, oh, my goodness, like these people are in this room right now. These are our people and this is how they're feeling. I guess I'm tuning in trying to tune into something as deep as I can while I'm there. And it's not just what we call like, edutainment. And then I turn around and I send the data to the people who hired me and I say, what are you going to do with this? And, you know, they can hire us if they want to take it and say, you know what, we're just realizing we don't we have a real problem. Wow, like that was really eyeopening and I felt really emotional. And I realized our strategy doesn't address this, this and this, or we haven't done this in a while or we haven't invested in this. And it makes me smarter in the moment and we're able to customize, but it also gives them true data from you right from the employees. You said before that sometimes you had to memorize your speech. Did you ever bomb? Did you ever like said, oh, my God, I forgot the lines. What do I where do I go from there? What do you do? Yeah, yeah. I mean, occasionally it's finding the older you get. You're like, you lose your place. Or if you're giving a lot of talks, I'd be like, did I already say that? Or was that yesterday or was that last week? And I do have my kind of talk track and my favorite things to say, too. I mean, repetition is important, actually. And I think when you're a speaker, you develop your favorite things. So, you know, it's OK to repeat yourself. But yeah, I am. I have lost my place occasionally. I think just being real with an audience and saying, my goodness, I just lost my train of thought. I'm going to move on and come back to this. So there's ways to finesse it. When you lose your place, it's a great opportunity to be present. What advice would you give somebody who wants to become a keynote speaker? It sounds great to go and speak and get a thousand, two thousand, five thousand dollars. What advice would you give somebody who want to do that? That is a lot of the work I do now. Your personal story, working out your personal stories, really important. It's it's much better if you and most of us do have this hero's journey. It's either a moment or a phase or a total challenge or an aha, wake up, whatever it is, right, or hit rock bottom or you suffer a tremendous loss or change. Obviously, you know, coming out stories are incredible. You know, they are sort of ready made, I think, for the stage. But we all have a closet. We all have a way in which I think we can remember when we woke up and really kind of came to be passionate about something like you cannot get on a stage and not commit to the excitement of your own journey and sort of the revelations of life and adulthood and, you know, and your own resilience. Like say you're a cancer survivor, like whatever you that changed you, things change us. And those are those are beautiful on the stage. And then I'd say your expertise. So you need to have an expertise that is about something really timely, really urgent. Ideally, you have books, a book in the works as well, so that when you get hired, you can also say, well, you might only be able to pay me X, but will you buy 300 books? You know, I can sign one for everybody. Additional income. It is actually they will pay for those. And sometimes those come from a different budget too. So they may not be able to pay much for the speaker fee, but they might. You know, so that's how you kind of get around a little bit. That your expertise, ideally, you've been writing about like an advice book, like a book that is a leadership book. If you want to be a leadership keynoter and you have to leave people with some something tangible, I take folks on a journey through my my slinky speech. It's the personal stories first, the losses, the heartbreak, the aha moments, the realizations, the lessons to get them to win them over to me. Right. And then I give them some data about the problem that I'm there to talk about. And that's how you kind of wet people's appetite. And it can't be just the problem I care about. It has to be the problem your audience cares about. I try to use their language. I try to pick up on how do they describe things in their culture? I think my goal always is to have it feel seamless so that people don't say who is this person. She's clearly not from our world and I'm not going to listen to her. Did you have to go to anywhere to study how to build your story? Like everything has to have a story. Did you go somewhere to learn that? There are. I have a couple of friends and if anybody's interested in listening to this, you know, reach out to me. I have my go to folks who run programs that are specific to digging up the story you thought you never had or that your thinking is not important or it's not interesting to people or it's irrelevant. We have such interesting things in our lives that we kind of the little seedling of it, we kill it before we give it a chance to really bloom. And, you know, my opera singing story was one that I was scared to tell on stage and then coming out was scary too. And part of my sphere was nobody's going to care. Why would they care about this? Really, truly. That was why I said, almost said no. And so I almost did that to myself. And I know now that when I tell the story about losing my voice, people in the audience interpret it as a metaphor. It's not that they were opera singers. It's not that they can literally relate. It's that they are like, wow, she came back from losing her voice. Like she found it to use a different way and she made lemonade out of lemons. And then they think to themselves, where am I not using my voice? Where am I taking my voice for granted? Where am I selling myself short? Where am I not really living out loud and shining a light for others to find themselves in the darkness? Because that's what stories do. They illuminate the way for others to kind of find themselves. So part of your speaking is inspirational. I think, yes, I think it is. It has to be. It has to be. It can't just be informational. I think it has to be very personal also. But if you, in the best leadership books, for example, will have memoir kind of woven in and I think the best talks have a lot of personal stuff woven in because at every point it's like teach, share, digest and let them let them react. And so the structure that I follow is the personal story, the little bit of data ask the audience to react with a poll, build on what they react with, add a little bit more information, tell another story, let them react again. There's something called adult learning theory that I studied in my master's and it said that 90% of the knowledge you need as a facilitator of learning, 90% lives in the audience. They've got they've got what they need. It's not like teaching children and they have to relate what you're saying to their their lived experience and their knowledge. So it's this dance with audiences to bring them to a place and the craft of it is using in a variety for all kinds of learners like visual and auditory and kinesthetic learners. I mean, there's so much to play with to kind of include people, even neurodiverse people in your audience. And there's actually way more neurodiverse folks than we all realize. Yeah. Meaning folks who are maybe dyslexic or maybe on the spectrum. Oh, really? Yeah. So I identify as neurotypical. There's a spectrum of so many different identities. Traditionally, it's been the autism spectrum and it's also been around dyslexia stuttering as a neurodiversity. So any sort of processing different, that's different than the norm. And the norm we refer to as neuro typical, which means that the systems and the education and schooling was built for my kind of brain. So now with this administration, D.I. is really in the war with you in a way. What do you do in this environment? We think we're looking at a particular time now. We're in it's very vicious, but two and a half years ago, I had given a keynote for John Deere and John Deere had publicized this on Twitter, X, whatever it was. Look at our great keynote speaker, Jennifer's coming in to talk to us about inclusive workplaces and I had my picture was there. And in 2023, this guy named Robbie Starbuck, he had half a million followers and he started to come after companies. John Deere, Harley Davidson, you might remember these early days. I think what was happening now in hindsight is he was kicking the tires to see how far will we eventually be able to go in forcing companies, like literally forcing them to get rid of their programs. And he retweeted the picture of me and the John Deere were so excited to have Jennifer and did this made this horrible comment to his half a million followers of look who John Deere has brought in to speak to them. She's a groomer of children. How do we feel about that? Like asking his followers to, I don't know, docs me, come after me. I don't know. Like, what is that an invitation to do? I wasn't the only one. I think a lot of us that are really, were really prominent voices were targeted by him, but it was to me in hindsight, again, it was, it was a trial period. I knew that it would get worse. I think I knew that because I was like, where's this going? Where's it coming from? Who's funding this guy? He's like a 30 something year old who was getting John Deere and Harley Davidson to change their strategies. Like I was like, why, what is going on right now? And it's funny, my clients though, still they're, they're staying the course. If they don't receive federal funding and federal dollars, it is harder for this administration to come after them. Do you have a talk that you remember that was your most successful, most inspiring to you? Well, I know the ones that aren't, which is, you know, that they feels like just it's drudgery, right? It's like you walk in and people just, their arms are folded and it's, you know, it's, it's, you perceive that they're just not receiving anything that you're giving. I think the best audiences for me are coaches. I got a standing ovation, which is unusual for an association of coaches at Harvard. It was in Boston and they were like going through all kinds of emotions during my talk. I could see them like crying and just feeling so seen. And because think about it, they're the helping professions. They need to learn from me. They need to learn from everyone about how can I show up better for my clients who are going through all kinds of challenges. So there is a perfect fit for that audience with me, because at the end of the day, I'm, I'm coaching the coach. Like I'm, I'm a resource for them. And that they were so appreciative that I just filled their cup in that way from an expertise perspective. But, you know, then I've got senior executive audiences that are very, or in other countries where it just, I'm like, I don't even know if people are understanding what I'm talking about. You know, I've had simultaneous translation. I mean, I've had people in, you know, who speak Japanese and Chinese, like listening to my talk in a, in a headpiece and thinking to myself and trying to adjust the, the American framework, because we've, America has, has, has run the conversation on DEI globally for a long time. We were ahead of everybody. So Europe looked to us and Asia looked to us for, what are you doing? And how can we get that? And how can we build that? Now the tables have turned and Europe is sprinting ahead of us. And the people at Harvard that you gave the lecture to where you gave them the same lecture that you. It was, yeah. I relate to them. Like I, I, I am them, you know, so I think that whatever I did was very confessional, very honest and really, I get their world because I've been a coach for so long. And so the way I could speak to them, they must have recognized a kindred spirit. And I just kept it very real. I think they also appreciate the bravery of being out on stage. I take it for granted, Marav, that like this is just so comfortable for me now, but it's such a big deal for people that I get up on stage and I share and I tell a little bit about my life and I, I reflect on it openly. That always hits people and they will come up and say, thank you for being so brave. This is a very important reminder for me that this story really matters. And back to storytelling. A, we have to tell our story, encourage it, do not diminish it, let it give it sunshine and oxygen and don't assume that somebody doesn't need very much to see you and hear you that day. Like that's, that's the big takeaway. I think about this and it's, and I have to tell myself too, because I can skip over it and get on to other things. But I think that deepens the trust between me, the audience that I'm willing to bring them into my world. Wow. All right. And on that note, thank you so much. Thank you for your thoughtful questions. I have no idea that keynote speaker is an actual job in a way. Yeah. It's a fun, it's a fun work when you can get it. It's, it's highly remunerated when you get to a certain level. And it's over so fast. You literally are on stage and off and you're on a plane and you're like, what just happened? It's a little strange. It's a little disembodied. And yet that moment is exhilarating in a way that is probably a very, like rare thing to feel. And I would love more people and more diverse voices to, to know what that feels like, to get their story in lights, to move the audience. I would, and I am so invested in raising that next generation of voices up that don't look like me. They're going to rattle the cage. All right. Thank you so much for sharing your story and experience. It's just fantastic. Thank you, Mara. Thanks for doing what you're doing and being such a good friend. That's a wrap for today. 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