What I Talk About When Someone Hands Me a Mic

Let me save you some time before you book me: I'm not a motivational speaker. If you want somebody to get your team chanting, there are guys who do that for a living and they're better at it than me.

What I am

I'm a guy who's been building businesses since 1996 and kept the receipts. Call centers. Lead generation. Marketing software I built because the stuff I was renting kept letting me down. Some of it worked out great. Some of it taught me lessons at prices I still wince about. When I talk, that's the material. The actual record, not a highlight reel.

I figured out a long time ago that the stories people lean in for aren't the wins. They're the decisions. The Tuesday afternoon where you have two bad options and payroll on Friday. Anybody can tell you to dream big. Almost nobody will walk you through what closing your own buildings feels like, and what it frees you to do next. I tell that one a lot.

Thirty years is a long time to be wrong in public and keep going anyway, which is really all experience is. I'm not interested in pretending the road was straight. The value for a room is in the crooked parts, because that's the part their road looks like too.

The three lanes

Pretty much every talk I give runs in one of three lanes.

Building. Thirty years of starting things, and what actually separated the companies that lived from the ones that didn't. Spoiler: it was almost never the idea. The businesses I run today are at joedelfgauwbusiness.com, and they're the raw material for this lane.

The lead business. I've spent years generating, routing, and buying leads, and I built my own software to run it. It's an industry that loves to sound complicated. It isn't. I explain it the way I'd explain it to a friend at dinner, and people tell me it's the first time it ever made sense. I break a lot of it down in writing at joedelfgauwcontent.com.

The personal stuff. I've written a stack of books about growth and happiness. Not because I had it all figured out. Writing them was how I figured any of it out. When a room wants that side, I bring the frameworks and skip the fortune-cookie stuff. The books are at joedelfgauwbooks.com.

How I actually run a room

I'd rather answer a hard question than read a slide. Give me a room that pushes back and I'm in my element, because the good stuff comes out in the back-and-forth, not the script. I'll tell you what a decision actually cost, name the thing I got wrong, and say "I don't know" out loud when that's the honest answer. That last one buys more trust than any credential ever could, and it's the reason business crowds settle in fast: they can tell when someone is selling and when someone is just telling them the truth.

What you won't get

No rented jets in the background, and no numbers I can't back up. I'm not going to sell your audience a "system" from the stage either. I have businesses; they run whether or not I'm speaking. I do this because thirty years in, I've got answers I wish somebody had given me in year two.

If that's the kind of hour you want for your room, tell me about it.