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Being a self-employed person, one who works mostly alone, can be challenging.  Especially when it comes to getting praise.  It’s not going to come from your boss because you don’t have one!  It’s not going to come from co-workers for the same reason!  So, when a client praises you and your work…you can really take it to the bank.

Recently, I had the privilege of working with Jeff Blackman, a ‘Platinum” speaker from Chicago.  He had several keynotes to deliver in the Houston area over the course of a month, and he hired me to tape them.  I jumped at the chance!  Jeff is the kind of speaker that us videographers are dying to work with: he’s nationally known, he works with top companies and organizations, and he’s charming and dynamic.

About a month after our work together, Jeff sent me this email:

Life is good when you pay it forward.  Thank you, Jeff!

Sometimes it’s good to talk about success: what works and what doesn’t.  Because I work mostly with speakers, I have a certain affinity for them, for their struggle to forge their own path in a strange landscape that has no real road map.  One of the most daunting challenges for a public speaker is to find their target sweet spot.  What audience will respond the most?  Who will continue to hire them?  Where will they find the most gold?  Only then can they truly begin to market themselves.  Until a speaker has this puzzle figured out, the road is dark and uphill.

I work with a talented man by the name of Chris Loomis, and for a few years now, I have watched as he has struggled to find his target sweet spot.  He is a large, imposing man with a booming voice and a likable and aggressive demeanor.  I have worked with him over the years, capturing his talks on video, sitting with him in seminars on branding and watching him get in front of audiences to speak on Leadership, Success and Sales.  As time goes on, and as the challenges become greater, a speaker can get discouraged.  But not Chris.  His determination was attractive.  Chris was always willing to try another way.

There came a moment when Chris decided to reach back to his corporate past and focus his expertise on what he gained as the Marketing Manager for DuPont’s environmental and safety services division. Little did he know that this shift would be the key to his finding his target. The amazing part of this story is that it unfolded so quickly. Chris changed his speaking topic to Safety Education, put up a video on YouTube and on his website, and before he could take a breath, had Exxon Mobil knocking on his door. The Oil and Gas giant has hired Chris to speak to it’s teams all over the globe on Safety. Not only once or twice, but as an ongoing project to last three years.

My own part in this success story was on encouraging Chris to keep recording his presentations on video and getting them up on the web. The right key words and tags got the search engines to find Chris and bring him back to the audiences that really needed to hear his talk. Check out the video.

Last night I had the opportunity to work with Sharon Ferranti, a filmmaker I greatly respect and also one of my mentors. She asked me to run the boom microphone while she filmed short interviews with party guests at an event at the House of Blues downtown. The idea was that once the guests got comfortable, they would automatically find themselves in this little room with a statue of Budda and freely give a humorous interview to the camera about the guest of honor.

As a filmmaker/video guy, I know how important it is to control your setting: make sure you have sufficient lighting, that the sound levels are balanced, the composition makes sense. Well, Sharon and I did all that we could to make sure this little space was set up for the best possible interview.

The only problem that nobody foresaw, especially the event planner, was that the guests did not want to be on camera. They were just too self-conscious and timid to sit and give an interview, no matter how many drinks they had. (Drunken interviews were not the desired outcome the event planner was looking for, anyway.) We spent a good hour and a half sitting in that room waiting for any guest who had enough nerve to come in. Nobody did. They would poke their heads in to see what the bright lights were all about, but that was as far as they got.

The other problem was that the rest of the club (decorated to look like an Indian temple) was almost pitch dark, except for candles on the tables and very low overhead lighting. It would be impossible to “roam” around the crowded nightclub to get “man-on-the-street” style interviews.

So when the party planner came and announced to us that we were “going mobile!”, the first thing I did in my head was negate the request. “Oh, forget it!” I thought to myself. There’s just no way it’s gonna happen. The look on Sharon’s face said the same. However, I saw Sharon quickly change her expression to one of eager enthusiasm, and she grabbed her camera and headed out into the crowded club.

Although we did not get any usable footage as we “roamed” around the darkness, bumping into guests and getting tangled up in microphone wires, we did create quite a stir. It was as if we made just enough of a commotion to get some of the guests really interested in what we were doing. It also took some coaxing on Sharon’s part, as she practically begged some of the guests to give an on-camera interview, but the effect worked. Within 60 minutes, we had conducted 5 great interviews back in front of the lights in the little room with the Budda.

Sharon once again taught me something. I’m sure I had known it all along, but she really illuminated the concept for me. We have to consider that we might be wrong. Even though all our common sense, all our expertise and training, might scream out that we know best, we have to be able to consider that there might be another way to do something.

As an exercise, try admitting you are wrong about something, even if you know you are right. See what kind of doors this simple act may open up for you. A simple lesson in humility can be one of the greatest things we’ll ever learn.

My favorite bunch of babes, Houston’s very own Texas Women Speakers Who Rock, is putting on a breakfast on September 25th that focuses on how to manage money. The gals had such a success with their first event back in June that they got right to work on this second one. It should be a hoot, so sign up soon.

They approached me about creating a very simple marketing video that they could upload onto each of their blogs to promote the event. If you haven’t considered using video and YouTube to promote or market your goods or services, then you are missing out on an amazing (and free) tool that is always at your fingertips.