Forbes Riley: Pitch Like a Pro! Sales Secrets That Get People to Say Yes | Sales | E409

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young and profiting.com/deals. 55% of how you show up for somebody else in their brain is visual. 38% is the tone of your voice and only 7% of the words that you use. Yet, everybody comes to me only cares about the words. Most founders make this mistake.

Forbes Riley, she's a queen of pitching, a best-selling author, TV host, entrepreneur, and pitch expert who has generated over $2.5 billion in product sales. There's never been an inventor of who pitched their own product. In fact, they sucked at pitching. You know why? Because they know so much about the product, they want to tell the back story

and that that's not what sells your product.

“What is something that entrepreneurs say where you immediately hear it?”

And you're like, "Ah, if you keep saying it like that, you're going to be broke forever." If you're a network marketer, I can ask you in about 30 seconds. And you don't have to say the name of your company. It's the way network marketers are told to speak. It's horrible. Hi. What do you do? I help someone so transform and do this and do that?

You missed the point. The point of the what do you do at a networking event? Is that how we care what you do? How do we go about believing more in ourselves? Like, what are some of the things that we can do to get more confidence before we go on in pitch? This is what I want for everybody out there. So...

Forbes, welcome to Young Improving Podcasts. I'm very excited to be here. I flew all the way to Austin just to talk to you and be here for your audience. I am so honored that you came out here and I'm so excited to talk to you about pitching. You are the pitch queen. I've got the crown and everything.

Yeah. And I have the new book about it. You got all the pitch secrets and us Young Improveders. We want to find those out. So my first question to you is, what is something that entrepreneurs say where you immediately hear it? And you're like, oh, if you keep saying it like that, you're going to be broke forever. As an entrepreneur, having now trained people every single week or 200,000 of them for six years,

you open your mouth and I can tell you don't know what you're doing. You say words like actually, basically like, you know, and everyone does these words. They play it. They play small. When I ask somebody, what do you do? What do you say? I'm a top 100 potcaster and I'm an entrepreneur with an eight-figure

production agency and podcast network. You know what you just did that you don't realize and it's okay if I coach you. Yeah. You saw to check your head, no. It's not funny. I did. I did set early. You made me nervous because you're the pitch queen.

Well, here's what most of you guys do. You started going, hi, what do you do? I help someone

so transform and do this and do that. I'm like, I'm sorry, you missed the point. The point of the what do you do at a networking event is I don't really care what you do. I care what you can do for me when we could do together. What the opportunity is. And if you're so busy literally throwing up words, well, I even, and here's next thing. If you say words that don't mean anything, here's what doesn't mean anything.

Hi, I'm a speaker, author entrepreneur. Yeah. Did I say anything now? You don't know what I wrote, what I speak about, or what business I built. And you have such a beautiful opportunity in those first few seconds to connect with somebody,

“but you have to be really unselfish about it. You have to go, okay, I'm looking at you,”

and I'm going to make an assumption, who are you? What do you do? And if you said, well, you know, we're a top 100 podcast, I might say, you know, as someone who's on a new book tour, I might consider being on your podcast with that work. And if you can get a yes, tell me more. And that yes thing comes from me being a magician. Yeah. That sounds crazy, but my dad was a magician. I'm going to be mad,

tricked my whole life. I didn't know that. And my daughter does them as well. So you don't walk up to somebody, go, hi, can I show you a magic trick? No, I'll be a dinner, and I'll make something magically appear in people like,

what just happened? And then they'll say something like, wow, you're amazing.

So all of a sudden, I have strangers at a dinner table telling me I'm amazing.

How do you control a conversation? How do you get what you want? And how do you be human?

“You know, in the age of AI, really listening to somebody?”

Yep. And connecting to them is the most human thing that we can do. Well, you just said a lot, and I've got a lot of follow-up questions. Of course, one of the things that you mentioned is like, you want to amaze people. You want that wow factor. If we've got a business, it's not necessarily very exciting. For me, podcasting, I think is like a really exciting space. It's easy to get excited about it,

and get people energized about that topic. But if you're a bookkeeper, or, you know, you've got some boring business, like our recruitment company, how do you make it exciting? Let's not call bookkeepers and recruitment people boring. They're able to go, what did you say? If you're doing it, it excites you on some level. So, in fact, I was a bookkeeper. Why don't you drill down? Why are you the best bookkeeper?

You don't have the biggest company, but you know what? As a bookkeeper, I come from a long line of bookkeepers. And I've discovered they are the backbone of every entrepreneur's business. Do you have a good one? Yeah. Great. And I'm glad that you do. So, I'm also very skilled. And if you got a recommendation to me, I would love that. Oh, all of a sudden they're like, "Oh, okay. You said if you're a really nice person, I'd refer you." But you had the moment

you called to action. And I do think there's something very exciting about what everybody does.

Now, it may not be a right fit for us, but you're always out there. If you're networking,

you're pitching for some reason. Ask me what I do. What do you do? I want a dog walking company. And you know what? I take puppies like yours is so busy, right? Do you, is your little baby loved on when you're not home? No, he said. Oh, guys, I've got a whole crew of a young people that I've trained. Your dogs and it, say he's going to love you because during the day, he won't be lonely anymore. All of a sudden, that sounds like the greatest job in the world.

Yeah. The other thing I do is I have a fitness company. I don't know if you know that. And so when people ask me what I do, ask me again, what do you do? I created the greatest fitness product in the planet. You want to see it? Sure. Really? Yeah. See, then I would do this. I would literally push your microphone in. Come here. I know this sounds crazy. Give me your thumbs. Okay.

“That's what I would do at a party. All of a sudden, she's like, yes, here, come here for a second.”

So you don't hit that. Okay. And I know you've never felt this before, but you can give one

thumb and two thumbs. Thumbs up. Okay. One and two, pull your belly button and hold it and make a fist. I want you to go. Ten, nine, eight, go. Seven, six, what does that feel? That kind of interest me? It's pretty cool. I know, right? So now we're to party all of a sudden, you're playing with me. Yeah. And we're having fun, and it's not boring, even though I self fitness product. So you do so many things, right? You're an author, you're a speaker. How do you decide in the moment

which one line you're going to use on someone? Because I look at the person I look at the scenario and figure out, what is it that I want? What was my intention going into this networking event? I don't need more pitching clients. I do really, really well. But I also offer free training every Sunday. So I might say, you know, as an entrepreneur, if you're looking to up level and pitching makes you nervous at all, I've got a free Sunday training. If you're interested, I'll give you a card.

Boom, that's a great thing. If I'm, when I'm on vacation, ask who would I do? What do you do? I'm a brain surgeon. It's tough work. Please don't talk to me about it. I really have to focus on enjoying myself. Because I don't want to always say what I do. Is that funny? Yeah. It's not always the right time. And if you're in a networking event with hundreds of people, what's your goal, what's your intention? And mine is to meet lots of people get lots of cards and saying,

now, there's another little phrase that I love and it's a great takeaway for you guys. Rather than say, I am or I help, say as someone who, I'm like, what did you do before this before you podcasted? I used to work in corporate and I used to work in radio. Great. Hey, you know, as someone who worked in corporate saw the burnout factor there, moved to radio and realized podcasting is even bigger. I have the ability to take your program

or your business and put it online. Oh, so all of a sudden, just as someone who thing is a really

powerful statement. So as someone who's generated over two and a half billion dollars in sales,

I now coach entrepreneurs to master their message. That's a way to like give your credibility. Right, in one sentence, because I live by your phrase. It says less words, more impact. A lot of people tuning in are really afraid of bragging about themselves. I teach a lot about personal branding and one of the things that I get from my students often is like, well, I don't want to sound like I'm bragging. I don't want to brag. How do you feel about that? I would ask

an unpack, first of all, we're not in, and we're not in fourth grade. We don't brag. Yeah, giving your credibility and obtaining certain levels of excellence is not bragging. That is a very young way of thinking about life. Because by the way, if you don't talk about yourself and say what you do, who's going to? So when I started saying 2.5 billion, which is what my information was going to be added up to, I was like, well, that was an impressive number. And I

say that like, I just like a magic trick. When I say that number, what's your reaction to that?

“It's like, wow, you must know what you're talking about. Yeah. So there's no bragging. What”

I'm doing is I'm instilling a sense of authority in you when you look at me going, wow, if she's that good, maybe she can help me. So you got to really reframe why you're saying what you're saying,

be more confident. So you mentioned like you don't want to say kind of, I don't know. I think really drill deep and tell us like, what are the words that we should avoid and how should we replace those words? What should we say? Well, you said two things are interesting. You said, what is confidence, do you think? What is confidence? I think confidence is confidence being an expert and really knowing your stuff and believing in yourself. Right. So if you go to my

book and you go to letter B because every word is a letter B is belief. And inside of belief is the word

lie. And so there's a thing, when you first start out, you are not that successful. You don't have

1,000 hours to be an expert. You have all these reasons to believe that you're an imposter. I would

“love everyone just take a breath and go look. You have to build the illusion to achieve the dream.”

And it's a funny thing about steps. Confidence comes over time. I don't think it's something that you're born with. I think we as a society like to chip away your confidence by saying, you're not pretty enough, you're not thin enough, you're not tall. And when you start to hear all those things, because I have this vision in my head, there were three voices that we have to deal with. Okay. One is the inherited voice. That is your mom, your dad, anyone who raised you a bully,

a teacher who stuck things in your head going, what you can't do that, or you can do that, depending on who they are. But it's usually the negative ones people hold on to. Then there's the other voice. This is the four-year-old voice. This is the one that's going to protect you. So they said I can't do it. So we're not going to be able to do it. And then you find evidence to prove you can't do it. And it's this voice that's protecting you, but keeps you playing small, literally playing small,

because it's safer to play small. And then there's the future voice. And this voice whispers

“going, you can do it. Go dance like no one's watching, start that business. The problem is which”

one of most people listening to, the loudest voice, the historical voice that's not serving them. And so one of the ways to get better and more confident is to take those risks, is to jump off a cliff and build a parachute on the way down. Yeah. And to firmly believe that life happens for you, not to you. They're going to be really bad times. Yeah. If you choose to live this life fully, you're going to experience massive heartbreak, pain, death, and.

Yeah. And what I've learned is that when you're down in those times, it's when you just pull yourself up by the bootstraps and go, look, it's my movie. And in every movie, doesn't the hero go through some really bad stuff? Yeah. The question, the answer. Right. The question is, do you learn from it? What do you learn and take a moment to go, wow? Don't want to experience that again. Yeah.

What did I learn?

“Yeah. Fam. I built an app in 15 minutes. And before you ask, I didn't suddenly”

become a software engineer. In fact, I've never written a line of code in my life.

But now, I'm training out apps like it's my day job. And that's because I learned how to do it through Mind Stone. It's an AI transformation company that helps close the gap between having access to AI and actually getting value from it. So, this all started when I attended their breakthrough AI weekend. I learned about their platform rebel, which basically helps to use AI in a way that completely transforms the way that you do your work. I left that weekend thinking that

I have to roll out Mind Stone to my entire team. And we did. So, we started with the four week AI competency program. You don't need code. And so, I sent 60 people on my team to take this training and with that training, you get access to this platform called rebel, where you can ingest your email, your Slack messages. And then you can basically use it as a coach, as a tool. Before I hop on a meeting, I asked rebel, "Hey, what do I need to know for this meeting?" And it will scan

Slack and even send me things that I didn't realize was going on in my company. It is amazing

what you can do with this platform. I recommend you start with their four week AI competency program. You can get access and get 10% off at experience.mindstone.com/yap. That's experience.mindstone m-i-n-d-s-t-o-n-e.com/yap for 10% off their four week AI competency program. I mean, a lot of young entrepreneurs that are like really sold on like some specific outcome. And they really want some specific business or dream to work, even though it's not necessarily working. So, for me,

for example, I wanted to be a singer and I was a great singer my whole life and I recorded albums and like really took it seriously until one day, or through my experiences, I started experiencing radio and I realized I can have a very similar outcome if I go the radio podcasting group. And it would be easier to achieve and I thought that I could achieve something big in that space rather than keep trying to do singing when nothing was really working out for me. And it worked.

I became a top 100 podcaster. I have my dream company and I kind of switched the outcome. You wanted to be an actress and you did a lot of, you did a lot of acting. You had a very successful acting career, but ultimately you sort of pivoted, right? Oh, I didn't sort of pivot. And this is really interesting. I loved acting. Acting was all that I wanted to do. In fact, you guys can see a movie. I just played the bad girl in called Black Creek. It's on Amazon Prime and Apple TV

One of the story goes that I went to an audition, uh, saw me the pen moment. And I got a very lucrative, interesting job to pitch products when that was not even a job description. And body by Jake had created this network for cable television. And I went on to sell 1,500 different

products. We sold that network for 500 million dollars in 1993. That really worked. And I hadn't

given up my acting career at the time. I was still balancing everything. And I was convinced in my naive attain that you really could ride two horses in different directions and be just fine.

“And everyone said, oh, you have to focus, but I didn't. I'm an actress in a TV host. I didn't”

want to have to choose. Well, the universe chose for me. And I don't know how you're singing career ended. My acting career ended really abruptly. I have a lead in a TV series called Fashion House. And if you go to YouTube, you can see the pilot. I was really goodness. I was the slightly bitchy cranky devil wears Prada with all of these beautiful models. And I was 65 one hour episodes. I don't think I could have been happier. In two little three year olds, I got the dream job.

We shoot the pilot. And I'm, well, now two things happen. One, we all had a big meeting with the Fox executives. And I'm not going to name names, but there was a gentleman who showed up, who was rather big and slightly slob and lean. And couldn't wait to touch all my cute little models on the knee and got very, I mean, I said something about it. I had a feeling that nobody wanted to stand up. And I did. And I could feel the energy, something shifted. A couple of days later,

I get a call going, hey, you know, we love you. And you did really well. But we're going to give

“you your role. Your name is not famous enough to bank the whole series on. We're going to give this”

role to Boderek. Oh, man. And Boderek is wonderful as she is. She's not a strong, that kind of a female character. Yeah. Well, no, no, and actress. And she didn't did a plane the role. You can see it. And I'm not quite sure of is that I stood up for myself and all the other women on the set. Or that that was, in fact, my name wasn't famous enough. And I got, it was very, I was so sad. I was shattered. Yeah. And then I went into my agent's office, a guy that I'd fought so hard to get to.

It was an A minus agent, but really powerful. And he looks at me and says, we're going to let you go.

And I'm like, go, where am I going? And then, you know, they played this cards. And I don't think it was the truth as I'm hearing it later at years. He said, oh, you know, you're already 40. You've got two kids. You know, it's kind of old and Hollywood. And my son's taking over the business. He doesn't want anyone over the age of 20. Good luck to you. Oh, my gosh. Now, I don't know if the people from the network called him and said, look, we're not going to have her around. But I walked out of the door.

And I said to myself, and I had a little conversation with the guy upstairs, and I'm like, I'm not going to act for well, aren't I? I said, okay, my marriage is falling apart at the moment, because I'd raised a little boy from South Central who was murdered. And my husband and both took it very, it was very hard. It's hard to overcome that. And he's the father, both my children. When I picked up my babies, I left Los Angeles when all the way to Florida where HSN was,

where I was beginning to grow up, it was to me it was my side hustle selling products on TV. It was never the thing I wanted. It was the thing that I did anyway. Yeah. And I got down there.

And the irony is that's when I developed my own fitness product for the first time. I'd always

sold other people's products. Yeah. You know, one of the things about pitching that you really should get good at. Most founders make this mistake. They cannot wait to have their own product. My own course, my own training. I went through trauma. I'm now a life coach. Well, back up for second, there's never been an inventor of a product of a company that I worked with who pitched their own product. In fact, they sucked at pitching. You know, why? Because they know so much about the product.

They want to tell the backstory and that this, that's not what sells your product. And so I was brought in. In fact, if you look in the book here, I hosted a hundred and ninety seven infrastructures. Some of them to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. And what these represent is, I am the original influencer. All of, it's like, yeah, you are. Right. All of those companies came to me to be the spokesperson for their product. Oh, that's such an interesting refram. I didn't

write a bunch of stuff from commercials. And I would take them on your shopping and your product

“became my livelihood. Yeah. That's what influencers do. Well, there was nobody doing that back then.”

Especially as women when I started in that industry. And so it was fascinating to think, stop pitching your own product. Learn how to pitch first. And it's easier to pitch something that you're not emotionally attached to. So I got really good at pitching because they weren't my products. I just looked at the product and I came up with a formula that I'm happy to share with you in a minute. But there was a moment when I realized that I wasn't going to get to act for a while.

I also said I love doing theater. I've done Broadway. I've done Lily Tomlin. Let me do her one woman show. I've had the most blessed. And I'm talented enough to do those things. I love this. But I thought, you know, in theater, you go to work at like six o'clock and you don't go home to 1130. I wanted my two beautiful babies. Are you mom? No, yeah, now. I'm going to tell you. The coolest thing I ever did, and I didn't have until I was 42. And I found myself making a deal with

nanny's job. If you said you wanted them this much, enjoy them to know end. And I haven't been

“back on stage in a play in 23 years. And I'm thinking, hmm, Broadway show, I could do this.”

Don't you feel fulfilled? Because you're still using very similar skills that you would have used as an actress? Yes, I know. Speaking has done that for me. I have been so blessed. I've stood on stage at the 10x convention spoken for 10,000 people. Yeah, I speak on platforms all the time. And I love speaking. And it comes really close. You get your ideas out. You get to stand up there and

speak. I'm about ready to do my third TEDx. Wow. But it's not, there's something about acting.

I got to tell you, this is not quite like singing, is it? When you get up and you perform something that's yours, I am going to look very much forward to fulfilling a little bit more of the acting bug for me. It mattered so much when I went through so many traumatic times in my life. Yeah, but I have a very fulfilled life. I wouldn't, I wouldn't trade the journey for anything. But you mentioned earlier about your entrepreneurs. Let's get real. Yeah. There is no destination. You

don't win. When my daughter came downstairs during COVID-19, she was 17 years old. She already been online. She did a dropshipping business. And she was working with my celebrity friends behind the scenes, building their YouTube channels, building their online presence. I had no idea. And she said, Mom, let's start a business. Because when COVID hit, everything slowed down for me.

“And I like start a business. Could you just get an A and English?”

No, I want it. It's like, Mom, I've been coding and I've been doing a lot of this and I already have a bank account and she showed me a six-figure bank account. I'm like, she's 17. I'm like, where did you get this money? She said, Mom, you're the only one who doesn't believe in me. I said, no, no, that's not true, baby girl. I believe in you more than anything. But I'm also the only one who's responsible for you getting an A and English and graduating high school. Yeah.

And we sat in a room for three weeks. We put together the very first webinar I ever did. Remember those days, like in the early 2020, you and I were talking about clubhouse and the world was just

kind of different, right? Yeah. And I'd always looked at my funnel account and I always had zero.

I made pretty funnels, but I never launched them. I wasn't really good on the internet. And she said, I'm going to fix all that. First not, I do my first webinar. We have 25 people on Zoom. And nobody knew what Zoom was back then. And I created a $1,000 program, four-week training with me live using my ultimate pitch formula. As a guy, as I've generated two and a half billion, I'm going to get you to add a zero to your income. Watch me do this with you. And the next morning,

I call my daughter because I looked at her account. And I had to say, what was the, what is the case stand for? So what do you mean, mommy? I said, well, it's always said zero. Now it's just 25 K.

“What's the K? It's like, Mom, you made $25,000 last night. I'm like, what, we did what?”

Then we did it for four consecutive weeks with just 25 people in each class. And all of a sudden, we had a six-figure business in four weeks. 9 months later, got our first two comma club award.

And two weeks ago, I got a notification. We just got our 10 million to comma club award. Wow.

17-year-old and a six-year-old who couldn't figure out the internet. So my, my goal in coming on here and talking to you guys is that to offer this crazy level of inspiration because we really did it. Yeah. I grew up with nothing. I've created millions in my career, billions in my career. I didn't give it to my daughter. I made her have to go out and fight for it. She did it. Now we're writing the most amazing story.

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free shipping and 365-day returns. QU-I-N-C-E.com/propheting. Quince.com/propheting. You've come so far and you've done so much in your such an inspiration to young women. And I'm just so proud of everything

I'm going to start to cry. I'm not all kidding aside. It has been such a long, slightly painful journey. A lot of nights where I just cry to sleep in the pillow and going, "What am I supposed to be doing here?" Yeah. And so, to everybody who is struggling, I would make a list of what you want. I would surround yourself with people who are positive thinkers. You've got to kick the negative people out. I don't care about your mom or your spouse, but you've got to get rid of the garbage because it just cludded

your head. Find amazing mentors. Listen to uplifting podcasts, which I do all the time.

Because you get to meet a lot of people very quickly. I'm here there stories and learn from

“their stories. Because there was a time. I remember when I first met Tony Robbins many years ago”

when he talked about modeling. I was like, "How do you model somebody if you don't know their real story?" Well, now with YouTube, you get to go into people's homes, you can see, you know, Vogue does that. They take you into people's closets. You can model anyone that you want. So you don't feel alone. And when I started, my mentors weren't real. My mentors were Jane Fonda, Barbara Walters. I just looked at their careers. But, okay, connect the dots. What did

they do? What didn't they do? But nowadays, you guys, you have an instant roadmap. Yeah, you can Google any of us and find our history, our books, our Instagram. There's so many ways to do it

that I never had access to. But to have a beautiful young woman with a hip podcast, be proud of me.

Means the word. Well, you got there also by pitching yourself. Right? You were in a freight of asking for what you wanted. A great story that I came across in your book was when you basically asked Elena Cardone if you could join the 10x stage. I'd love for you to tell us that story. Well, so that's a great story. I'll reframe that a little bit. I have a thing called elevator pitch. I would get very nervous when I would meet new people and throw up on them. Ask what I do.

I'm like, "Oh, well, I'm an actress in TV host and I'm getting very excited. I want to do that." And I would leave because I'd see their eyes go, and I'm like, "What did I just do?" Yeah. And then there's another little famous goofy story I have. George Clooney, many, many years ago, he was standing in a party when I first got to LA and I walked into this party and he was just, and I remember standing there, I don't drink. And so I walked into a party and I'm like,

"Star Trek." I'm like, "And I couldn't say anything. I couldn't move. I didn't do anything." And then I realized every girl that he dated ended up on dancing with the stars. Like, "Damn, I just should have said hello." That's a fun example of missed opportunities that I had. So I created this elevator pitch and it's a very step-by-step system to allow people who are shy or introverted or just confused about how to position themselves to say, "Hi." Yeah.

And so I had heard about Grant Cardone. He was supposed to speak on a platform with me and he didn't show up for this. And I thought, "I need to." This guy seems to be moving and grooving. There's like 2018. And I heard there's going to be in Vegas. I was there. And I tracked him down. I'm in a hallway. And I've seen it at the very end of the hallway with a whole entourage. Now I've got 20 seconds to put something together. Yeah. Before I give you my answer,

“and I think this will help everybody else. If somebody that you want to meet is in the”

elevator with you, who might that be? Who do you want to meet? I've met a lot of people that I want to meet, but like Elon Musk is somebody else. Okay, like to meet, but Elon Musk in the elevator. What can I say to him? I would invite him on my podcast. But how would you do that? So I'm staying next to him. You've got 20 seconds to go. I would let him know, "Hey, I have a top 100 podcast. I've got millions of entrepreneurs who listen to me every single month." And I'd love

to have you on the show so you could share some of your wisdom. Okay, that was good. And I would coach that just a little bit. Yeah. Because he doesn't need to share his wisdom. I would give him something he wants. So what you did that's great. Because you got met so many famous people. What most of you guys don't do is that persons in the elevator, oh my god, I love you. You're so wonderful can I? You know what? I follow you. I've been, and the next year they're gone. Yeah. And then you

could dig up. You got nothing. So it's really smart about what you're doing and why you who you are. Yeah. Is that you thought to formulate a question, an ask, and credibility. All within 10 seconds. You know what I do that to most people? You know what the reaction is? Oh, I don't know. You guys, you don't have time in life for that moment at all. And one of the reasons that we not only teach pitch, but we train, you get to practice and implement what we do. That's part of the training.

Yeah. I see grand. One, I believe in research. Second, I believe in strategy and third, I believe in leverage. Those are my three key core pillars. And so as I walked up to grant my thought was, when one woman walks up to somebody else's husband, because I knew who Elena was,

but my research. Yeah. Never met them. Don't walk up to the husband, because it's not a good

energy. And so I walked right up to her. And I said, Elena, hi, you may recognize me, Forbes Riley been on television 2.5 billion dollars in sales. I make people billionaires.

“I think through an information your husband could earn an extra billion. Would that be okay?”

What do you say to that? She's like, I've got a chance to grant. Because you need, she said this. You need to meet this woman. Chapter O is called an open door. She literally opened the door. Now for busy men, you get 20 seconds. And I know that's how his brain works. And like, hey, Grant, nice to meet you. Friends with Kevin Herrington, I dropped a name that we both

billion. I already know he's a billionaire. So that's credibility and authority and loving on him.

Yeah, doing an information. He looked at me. He said, great. I'm doing a party in two nights here. You're my special guest. It was that, it was literally. The whole thing was maybe 30 seconds. And then we, you know, pursued each other when I got to his party. He knew exactly who I was. He was big on research too. He didn't initially invite me on the 10x stage. I don't know if you know, but something really tragic happened. That night of that party. And we don't all

“talk about it very much. But it was October 1, 2018. I think it was 18. When the Las Vegas shooting”

was happening, Grant came over to me. Kevin Herrington was at that party from Shark Tank and said, hey, you want to go downstairs and play poker. And I said, I'd love to, but I want to walk out to that balcony. I've just met what I think is a love of my life. And turns out he is nine, it's nine

years ago. Wow. And I would like to take a picture on the strip. You know, we're

mainly bassine. We walk out with my iPhone. And we hear pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. And we're thinking it's the fireworks. And then we look down across the street. And some of the strange things people seem to be running or not running or what's going on. And what happened was the guy 10 floors below us is shooting and killing people at the country music concert. And it's all on my iPhone. And if you Google Las Vegas and Forbes Riley, you'll see that for 11 hours, we were locked

down in that room watching and waiting for all of that to unfold. And so now Grant, he was downstairs with Elena. And I mean, they thought they were terrorists. Everyone was very scattered and same experience. And so we recapped all of this him and I Elena got on the phone. I had a really in-depth conversation because I was a little PTSD. Yeah. And Grant said, well, I'd love to invite you

to come to my 10X convention. I thought that's great. I looked at the lineup. And it was all men.

“And I said to him, do you know, women? And he said, do you want to speak on Saturday?”

Yeah, he's like, oops. And that's truly how it happened. And I've done that a couple of times because I love being a trailblazer. Yeah, that women have not been given some smart to pull that cart, you know, like it made sense in the moment. It's what I wanted all along. And it seemed to be the leverage thing that got him to say, yes, because I didn't have a best-selling book at the time. I was just, but nine years ago. So I was just beginning to find my ground as a speaker,

as a teacher. And from that stage, I sold over $280,000 worth of pitching. Well, I feel like we just learned a lot from your storytelling. And storytelling is so important when it comes to a pitch. So walk us through what we need to know about storytelling and from an entrepreneurship mindset we're usually selling our own products and services. So how should we think about storytelling? I've eight steps in this formula. The one of the steps it's really important.

And this is your ultimate pitch. My language for me. I'm not going to get it all to you, but I'm going to tease you enough that you're going to want to come because I'll tell you what, even if I gave you each one of the steps, it's actionable and implementation that gets you good at it. One of the steps it's really important that no one is allowed to do anymore is assumptions. Are you allowed to make assumptions about people? I feel like people do, even if it's

“are you saying like, you shouldn't make assumptions about people? Oh, I was saying you should at all times.”

And here's the funny thing. We're told to be very polite in 2026. I can't assume if you're a man or a woman, if you're tall or short, but I can kind of look at you and get a couple of ideas. Right. Well, but that's an important thing to know. You don't say these assumptions out loud, but there's a lot of things I can tell about you. I can tell the fact that you were in a short skirt and high heels that you seem athletic that you work out. And I may not be real right. Yeah, that's right.

But those are things that I'm getting, the way you've done your hair, the way you have all kind of assumptions about you. Now, if I'm talking to a woman who's 90 years old, I might talk to her differently, because my assumption is she's an older woman. She is not as aggressive as interested in her future as you are. So if I've got an insurance product, I might sell a different to you than I would to her. And then if I've got a kid, I'm not going to be selling it all to the

fact, let me show you something really interesting. Yeah, because assumptions goes to avatars. You all need to, what ideal avatar? We've heard that? Yeah, yeah, like your ideal customer. Yeah, so I had an MBA student team come and say, you know what Forbes? The ideal customer for your spin gym is 45 years old, her name is Sheila. She walks a laboratory to drive the Lexus on a test that likes hot yoga. And I was like, all right, good for you. I said, you know what, guys, I'm going to outsell you. I don't believe in

avatars. I believe that everybody in front of me can be turned into an avatar. And they were like, what? And it's why I've grossed billions of dollars. So yeah, let me take a seven-year-old girl. And a seven-year-old girl, I'm going to look at her and she's in gymnastics class. And I'm going to say, you know, you need really strong shoulders, but you're too little to go to the gym. This comes in hot pink. It works your arms five minutes a day. And your mom's got your credit card. Then I'm going

to find two TikTokers who are sitting there like this and going, hey, guys, you know what? I'm watching people dance like you do. They're not like this. They've got big open chests. You want more followers, give them what they want. This will do that for you. She buys one in purple. He got one

belly in his wife's and the kid's his grandkids are playing. And I'm like, let me ask you a question. How long you want to be around? You got to get rid of this. I know you want the rest of your life to be the best of your life. Give me a couple of minutes. She's going to even find your sex here. I need to get to play with the grandkids. So now I've sold, he bought one for his wife. I've bought one too. I've sold five spin gyms and none of them were named Sheila. So I have a very different

take on how to find customers before you can get to the storytelling part. And so the assumptions are, when you walk onto a set or you walk into a meeting, look at who you're talking to, most people pitch everybody the same way. There's no such thing as a perfect pitch, but there is a really

“skilled, perfect picture. And when you're this good, you have to be able to change what you're pitching,”

but most people don't. That's the most embarrassing thing I find upon entrepreneurs. They're like, all right, I've got my pitch for you. Yeah, they say the same thing every single time and they don't think about who they're actually pitching to and what that person is, desiring. And that's how you close people. The next thing is when it comes to closing, don't wait till the end. How about you start with the closing? What do you mean? Well, begin with the end in mind. What is it that I want you to do?

Well, I'm going to look at you and say, you know what, you're very busy and you don't have a whole lot of time to go to the gym, but you look great. You want to keep that going. I'm going to tell you you can be five minutes a day. And this is going to give you sexy tone amazing arms. And so now when our whole conversation, I'll get to the stories. I'll talk about, but you're like, I want sexy arms. And so when I find this, say, hey, would you want pink or silver? You're like, all right, I'll take

one of each. I already closed you at the beginning of the conversation because I structured it that way. Yeah. So I think what my pitching training does and why we're so successful is we take the guesswork out of, out of your dream. And it gets into somebody else's hands. They become a customer,

a partner and investor. And you're always pitching. Do you know that? Yeah. I wake up in the morning,

honey, could you rub my neck and he does? That's a pitch. I win. So pitching is a win-win environment. It's not selling. When you, when my team, when you put each other to be on the show, there's we're not selling each other, but we did get a yes. So I have a little secret that I do. Yeah. If I ask you the question, you want to see something cool, what do you say? Yeah. I really want to see something cool. Great. So ask a question, you know, the answer to. I love getting

guesses. Yes, is or a game changer. Most people, especially you guys, when you pitch, you don't think about getting a yes. So like a yes, ladder you're talking about. Well, yes, ladder. Yeah. I thought about that. Yes. So basically getting them in the mindset of saying yes, so at the end, when you make the big ask, they say yes. Well, yeah. And then again, I wouldn't wait till the big ask to the end. I would set it up because that's the problem. And people

wait till the end. So if you've even pitched something lately, if you bought a high ticket item of some sort. I mean, yeah, I buy stuff all the time. So I guess I bought, I buy a lot of clothes, I bought a pink Porsche. You bought a pink Porsche. Now, did you go in and think you wanted a pink Porsche? Yeah, I wanted it. Okay. So the sales, the sales got a pretty easy. Yeah, very easy. Did you have a good sales person or a bad sales person? Well, maybe this is about example,

because I just bought it over the phone. Oh, that's so funny. And they drove it to me from Dallas. So somebody must have been very, very happy. Yeah, it was very easy sale. That's maybe a bad example. Well, I'll unpack that for you. Okay. Because you pitched yourself. And that's a very interesting

“because, you know, my, my next TEDx talk is about permission. You did you grow up with money?”

My dad was a surgeon. So I grew up with some money, but he gave a lot of his money away.

He grew up very poor. He was from Palestine and like basically grew up in poverty and became rich.

And then we gave all our money away. So I wasn't like poor, but I wasn't very spoiled. Then I love that. Yeah. So at some point, you said, hey, you know what? I've worked really hard. And this is the pitch in the permission you gave yourself. Yeah. Because nobody needs a Porsche. I have one. Nobody needs one. Nobody needs a pink car, right? At all. But you said, you know, wait, let me unpack this. Why would it be good for my business for my image for my brand?

And maybe I just want to enjoy it. And so you gave yourself permissions along the way. And you literally pitched yourself. Did you have other car options in mind? Yeah. There was other options in mind. Right. And then somehow this one said, you know, this is, and it, it checked off a box for you. And then you're like, well, what color? I was like, wait a second, I'm going to make a statement. And so now I want this.

And it's the funny thing about pitching yourself. Because all of a sudden when you do, you stop playing small. And it's the funny thing. Did anyone say, you know, you can't do that? It's not their business, not their money. Oh, I see. It took you a while. You know, you're a great role model for that. Yeah. Because I didn't grow up with money either. And it took me a long time to figure out that I could enjoy all my hard work. It was, it was a symbol of

me being like, I'm finally buying something really like out there and making money for a while. And I'm going to treat myself. It was like, it was a present. It's a birthday present to myself. And I'll tell you what, two things happen. When you pitched yourself,

“because you have to go through that whole checklist. Now, if somebody were in the store,”

if you walked into a poor dealership, and they were trying to sell you. And here's what this

most car salesman, men or women might have said, pink. Really? You want pink? And what would

you've said? Yeah. Pink represents me. I like pink. But notice how he's now not selling. He was not funny. It'd be interesting to see. I also want to do that as an exercise to walk into a dealership and define somebody who's not good at his job. Who would probably talk you out of that for all kind of reasons. I've had that happen. Yeah. I walked out going, that was such a, I'm not buying anything because they're because they don't like him. It's not important to actually like the sales person,

“right? That's what I was talking about. Yes. When it comes to like ability and being good,”

I know you don't, you don't call it selling, right? You don't even like calling it selling. I teach that selling and pitching are very different. Yeah. So selling is about having quotas and selling is the thing. There's sales trainings, there's sales objections. There's getting a transaction and it's

done. I don't do that. See, when you are pitching, when you understand the concept of the way I present

it, you realize that your product, your service or even your idea is a solution to somebody's problem. Now, that's a different way. I'm not selling you that. Yeah. What I want to do is I want to find out. I've got this product, right? Give me a give me an arbitrary product, any product or water bottle. Oh, water bottle. I stand like uptake thing. Yeah. Okay. So let's say I sell a water bottle. Now, this particular water bottle that I've decided to sell because I only sell things I like.

This one has got special insulation. It keeps cold for 24 hours. It keeps hot for 24 hours. So I love that. Now, as I'm thinking about this, what's the biggest problem somebody has to have who wants this bottle? They're dehydrated. Well, one is they're dehydrated, but that's not quite the biggest problem. That means you could just have a glass of any water. Drilled down even deeper. Why would you want a container that can be travel a lot? Oh, bingo. All right. You're

somebody who travels. You're somebody who doesn't like diluted ice cubes in your tea or your soda. Or you're somebody who wants your coffee hot the entire day. So now I've got three problems that this would be the answer to. I'm not even going to show you this. I'm going to do what I call a question flip, which is step number two. And going on, let me ask you a question. You travel a lot, right? Yeah. Do you love hot coffee? Yeah. Doesn't it really annoy you after like 20 minutes and it's

like Luke warm and you don't have a microwave? Yes, and you're getting me to say yes. RNA though. What if I told you I've got the newest Himalayan rock embedded insulation keeps cold ice cold 24 hours hot 20 you can put this in your bag. You can go out to the tennis court

“and it's like water from a freezer. That's how cold it is. I'd love that. You'd love it on a”

made a sale for product that haven't even made it. But isn't that funny? All I did, it's a very specific technique you guys. It's got nothing to do with your product or service, which is why I said in the beginning that as a founder, you're so close to this that you want to start telling stories and stuff. Mm-hmm. Stories don't come in at a pitch until a little bit down the road. Because the story would and I call it springboard stories. Yeah. I want a story that does a little bit, goes down,

gets your emotional and comes right back off of it. I'm not here to tell you why I created my product or why I'm passionate about it. I should only be caring why do you want to buy it. Yeah. So talk to us about what that question flip exactly was. So what part of that was the question flip? Okay. And then I'm going to throw in something else too. Yeah. I'm going to throw in a story into this. So now I've got this product. Okay. This is what I call the hub.

Okay. The beginning of any product, you should figure out your research. What is it? Why do you love it? Why you connected to it and do all of that? And then don't talk about that just yet. Okay. But now you look at your product or service or whatever it is that you're doing. And I know people like, well, I am a massage therapy business. It works for everything. Your massage therapy business. Yeah. Is a solution to somebody's problem? They're paying. They're back paying.

Get, but drill down. Be very intentional. What is your massage business, too? You love working on releasing my official, right? So you do something other typical massage people don't do. So you're the problem you're solving is somebody who's got to not in their neck that just won't

“go away. A lower back payment has been throbbing. They've tried medication. Okay. That's what I've”

determined. I solve. All I do is flip it. Hey, in my marketing. Are you somebody who's tried everything? You're tired of the pills. You've been to the chiropractor. They're telling you you need surgery.

Nothing's working before you make that investment come see me. I have a track record second to none.

That was a question flip. Now go back to the insulated water bottle. So now I figured out you are someone who we want some of who travels, who loves their beverage hot or cold, and likes it for a long time. Also, it doesn't want typical aluminum. Another one. They might be health constant. Yes. Guys, there's no aluminum. There's no plastics. So all of those things now I know I'm going to say to you to get you go, oh yeah, I've been thinking about that. I don't

want plastic water bottles anymore. Great. This is that. Now, once I've got you that excited and you're going, yes, I want it. Now I'm going to throw in my springboard story. I'm going to say, you know, the crazy thing about this. Why I'm so why I'm so passionate about it? It's a couple years ago. I wasn't drinking enough water. I had water bottles. They would get hot. They would break. I ended up with a kidney stone in the emergency room and almost died because I wasn't drinking

did I do? I dipped into a story. And now I'm going to say, in this bottle comes in pink,

“goes with your car. How do you get them to not feel sorry for you? And why is that important?”

Don't stay there too long. And it's okay if you do feel sorry for me. But that's not the point.

It's the way you tell a story. And guys, that is practice. Most of you have never

had any practice telling stories. I mean, as a singer, would you even if somebody really has a good voice? Would you ever expect someone to cut an album that never had any kind of coaching training at all? No. But people tell stories like they think they know what they're doing. By the way, you know that come the holidays. You sit around the table and people tell stories that have no ending or no point? Yeah. I firmly say to everyone of my students,

every story has a point and every point has a story. Some people are so bad until I always tell my sister like, what is the point of your story? Well, because they weren't trained to tell stories. Yeah. People think because they can just talk. And here's a funny thing. I give speeches all over the world. My formula applies to speech giving as well because when I'm before I'm ready to, I know what the speech is. I know what I want to be talking about. We agreed on the topic.

But here's a phenomenon who am I talking to? When I walk into an arena and I usually show up the night before, I want to know is it men or women or young or old or successful or not? All of those indicators, I'm going to go back and reframe my entire speech based on what I think that

audience wants to hear. Not always what I want to talk about. And you're thinking through like,

what problems do they have that I want to solve? So I can make them feel like this is relatable. And what stories do I have that are relatable to them? Isn't funny how pitchy now officer became storytelling and speech giving? Mm-hmm. But I think it's the same thing. I think when you learn this formula, I think life gets more fun. You're not guessing as much. Now, for a lot of founders, like, for instance, I have a podcast network and I get people

sponsorships. And the reason why I do that is because I was really good at getting myself sponsorships. So I've got this social proof and credibility. And when I'm pitching people, just me telling my story or explaining how much I make on my podcast and comparing that to what they're making, I feel like they start to trust me more because they're like, okay, she's done it herself. Right. What's the importance or how should we go about talking about what we've already

done for ourselves? And so it goes back to the whole bragging thing. Give me a sponsor, a name of a sponsor, kind of a sponsor. Shopify, indeed, LinkedIn. So Shopify, why would Shopify want a sponsor?

So the first thing I would think about is I would do my research, I learned all about Shopify.

“I have a Shopify platform and I love it. But you have to figure out, okay, what is it, why is it?”

And what is it looking for? And so when you conclude, give me one thing you think Shopify is looking for. They want audiences with new founders like people want to start businesses. I love that. So they're looking for audiences with new founders. Question is when you're doing your podcast with somebody, are you attracting those kind of people for them? And based on your age and the kind of guests that you've got and the credibility of numbers you have, I would lay all that out. And when I went

to Shopify would say, guys, you know what? Because you're only there to help them. You do want to talk about you, but not until they want you. So hey, you know, I know that it would help build your platform. If you had young founders who were starting companies that really don't quite, I haven't released, you know, begun yet. Funny thing. My audience is made up of those people. And why do they like me? Because I'm young and I'm fresh. I've had these 10 guests, so I'm we've done these numbers.

And then we have another little piece of the formula called Febett, our feature benefit. Okay. And most people just list feature feature feature. They don't list. They don't tie it to anything. So if I say this water bottle that I talked about before is pink, it insulates and it sells for 1999. You're like, okay, but now there's benefits to those things. If I just list the benefits, you're like, okay, but watch what happens if I do feature benefit. Hey, this water bottle comes

in pink. I heard you got a Porsche. It's going to look great in your car. That's yes. This keeps hot drinks hot for 24 hours. And I promise you that's going to solve the problem of you having to constantly get up and go to the coffee maker. So feature benefit equals a yes. You get three yeses. You don't have to wait till the end to sell somebody. They're already sold. Yeah. And I don't know if you've experienced this, but when you do this formula well enough,

halfway through what you think your pitch is, the other person's like, okay, I'm ready.

“I want it. No, you're ready, ready. Yeah. I usually don't have to. That's what's selling”

a selling is. Well, I wait to the very end and then I give you the big boom. I'll do that. Yeah. People want what I have long before. In fact, the crazy thing about Spinjim, I say very few words. People put it in their hands like you did. They start to feel it. And they sell me. Oh my god, I can feel this. How much is this cost? Where can I get it? Yeah. That's exactly what they say. That's the craziest thing. So I don't feel like I'm selling it all.

When you've got a solution to somebody's problem, they want it. Why wouldn't they? So when I was asking that question, I was more alluding to. So I've got a podcast network. I recruit podcasters. When I was reading your book, one of the things that really was eye-opening to me,

It does help in certain cases. Yes. It does help. So for me, I was thinking, okay, in the beginning of my pitch, I'm going to let people know how much money I make on my podcast because I feel like it should inspire them. And trust me more because I've done it myself, we're usually I don't maybe they'll find

out later on, but I don't really like tell them like, hey, I make $2 million a year in sponsorship,

sir, whatever. Well, so if you started with the as someone who talking to shop, I say, you know, as somebody who's generating $2 million a year just from my podcast alone,

“I am now blah, but you say it like it's not even a thing. You know what they just heard?”

She makes $2 million on her podcast. We should see it's like take her seriously. Yeah. So that as someone who without putting a lot of energy on it allows you to state your credibility and not sound like you're breaking. I love that. Just a fact. I love that tip. You know, as someone who's now got 22 other podcasters who are all generating x, y, and z, we're coming to you because we think that we can serve your audience that fast. Yeah. If someone, this is great for interviews too. Oh my gosh,

my son called me after he had his interview for college and he literally said he was 18 years

always like mom, I just pitched the interviewer. I'm getting into the school of my choice.

Thank you. And I'm like, wait, what did you do? He said, well, I sat there and realized when they say, tell me about you, they didn't care about me. They cared what I could do for their school. And I found myself saying as the head of the school's school newspaper and somebody who played in quarterback on the football team, I really believe in school spirit. And I became blah, blah, blah,

“blah, blah. And I think using that for your college would be an awesome use of my time and energy.”

And they were like, yeah, we did. We want you. Yeah. Nobody does this. Yeah. Because they think the question is tell me about you. And then they get in the loss. I did this last night. I had a big training at 1500 people online. I'm this woman. I would do that every week now. I mean, we're doing knock-on would pretty amazing as a company. And I asked one of my students, I said, how was your week? She just started my pitch like a pro. And I was hoping that she would

tie the conversation to her pitch challenge. She didn't. She gets on just like, well, you know, so I got lost a little bit and my kids had a little problem. She started going down this rabbit hole and I had a stopper. I'm like, I asked you about your weekend, but there's 1500 people listening who don't know you. Yeah. Do you really think they care? I mean, it would be rude and she's like, oh, well, okay. But the end of it was that I pitch so and so and I got to free something and I'm like,

that's the point of wanting to hear. Yeah. So before we go on a pitch, there's probably a lot of

“things that we need to prepare for. First of all, we need to believe in ourselves. How do we go”

about believing more in ourselves? Like, what are some of the things that we can do to get more confidence before we go on a pitch? Well, I tell you what, nothing going to pitch my book. But I know I'm going to share something with you. I put so much, by the way, this is not the ultimate pitch formula. That I only teach life. That I teach it's, this book was one it was brought out in full color and I'm very excited about that and I had to fight everybody for this.

Nobody wanted to do a book in full color. It's more expensive and I didn't care. So I make less money per book. What was the point? But I don't see life in black and white. And if you're going to have people like Kim Kardashian and Jake Signfeld and Mario Lopez in your book, it should be that color photo if you got pictures with all of them. Yeah. But then the book is literally one word per letter. Yeah. So the first one is A attitude, right? Yes. But that's not,

you know, it's funny. I can write a whole book now in different A words. Apparently between asking audience and ambition. There's a lot of an awesomeness in that A words. Yeah. But attitude is the first step in all of this. And how do you increase your attitude? It's not walking around to saying affirmations all day long. But I put it in here. I literally put an actionable thing about the PPA, the positive pitch attitude system. Oh, okay. It's a bonus. It's free. I have a lot of free bonuses in here.

I invite you to scan this. I have thousands of dollars. I created a school community. We have 2000 people. We've only been on. Oh, I mean, I love this two weeks ago, by the way. Wow. 12,000 units sold in the pre-lunch USA today best seller. And you were how did you do that? Pitch. I know that sounds like an obvious concept. But when you understand what I know about getting into other people's hands. And so attitude is the first thing. You know, when you walk into a room, you can, you're engineer. We walk into

the podcast. If he was kind of grumpy over his computer, bad attitude. Yeah. But if he perked up because you're here, better attitude when you, and you can monitor your own attitude. And there is a little bit of fake it to you make it. But I learned a long time ago from one of my first mentors, my acting professor, he said, look, he said attitude monitors talent. At the end of the day, most people don't care how good you are. They really don't. If you're not nice to be around

life's too short. Yeah. And I learned that lesson and I've always managed to carry that with me.

The word belief leads into everything else. Part of it is giving yourself permission to fail. Part of it is giving yourself permission to stop labeling yourself. I am a procrastinator. And people will say this. You know, Forbes, I'm a procrastinator. And I look at them going, I don't even know what that word means. I'm like, what do you mean? I said, there's no such word. You made that up. And they're like, well, no, I put things off. I said, well, why do you put them off? You put them off because you didn't

have a consequence. And they're like, wait, what? Okay. Let me share something with you. Did you ever

But would you do that if you're coming to do a podcast with a famous guest? No, because that would not reflect very good on you. If the house is on fire, you're not hitting the snooze alarm. So you're not a procrastinator. You just didn't have the right consequences. So I have a consequence story that I don't

“that's not in the book, but it is. I'm going to share because I think you're on it. We're going to kick out of this. I”

have been somebody who fought my weight my entire life. And not that I was big and heavy. My mom was big and heavy. She was 260 pounds my whole life. But I, let's assume, is this a fat glass of water? No, it's just, I don't think so. Right. But if you put it next to a finger, it looks fat now doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, poor glass of water. Well, that was me, my entire acting career. I was about 15, 20 pounds overweight, which is normal now. But I was working with Julianne Moore and Meg Ryan and

people who were literally tiny and I was like this. So my entire acting career people always put

me on a diet. I was on Broadway. They sent me to over eaters anonymous. It was always like your thires or two big and you're a little too chunky. Okay. I heard this my whole life at some point. I don't care anymore, right? Because now I turn 60. I built a business and my husband bless him. He is a bodybuilder. Have you seen a picture of my husband? Yeah, he's a pretty fit. Yeah. But I need

“love to be no matter what. But we had our body fat scan done at the beginning two years ago in January.”

And I was 33% body soon. And I crossed over the 60 market. I'm like, I don't really care anymore. And I do care, but I didn't. And then we were in a really bad car accident in March of that year. And luckily, I didn't become a little bi-line that you read in Facebook. It's as oh, yeah, she and her family perished. But I was living what I call a James Bond moment. We were literally snowmobiling on a glacier. My twins, my husband having the best time ever. We get in the van to go home.

And as we hit the road, we ran into a patch of ice. The bus goes flying through the air and it crashed down on my side of the bus. Oh my god. I'm right behind the driver. And I wake up. There's

glass everywhere. My face is on the street. But here's what I know to be true. I didn't lose my

cheek on my eye or my face or my life. And we all crawled out the top of the van. And by the way, it was a little harrowing. And the people who were strapped in the seat belts next to me were now dangling from the thing people got hurt. I tore my shoulder, but nobody died. And as we're leaving Iceland, my husband turned to me. And he said, you know, there's a bodybuilding competition in our hometown for the first time ever. And I need to be a part of it for to qualify for the

Arnold Classic. And I'm like, good for you. Good for them. He said, there's a category for women over 60. I'm like, good for them. Why are you telling me this? And again, I had a little PTSD. And I don't quite know what happened. I watched my husband do bodybuilding competitions for the last eight years. Nothing personal honey. I love you, but they're boring as all get out. You, I mean, literally, people parade all day long. And they only get like a couple of minutes on stage. Do you're posing

in your done to give you a year of eating only protein and training every day to get to that moment. And they wear a little bikinis. I don't know when a bikini because I was molested when I was 15

in the bikini. And I just never owned a bikini. So we're flying home and have you ever heard

of voice talk to you? Yeah. See, I thought I was crazy. You really, you guys have your heard voices. So I'm flying home and this little voice says, go for it. Go for it. Go for what? Go for it. And I'm like, oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, yes, I'm 33% body fat. The competition is in 99 days. It was June 29 that I'm thinking about this in March. And I'm like, and I've never done anything like this. And then we came home and I thought

myself, I took a picture of me in my bra and panties in the bathroom. And I looked at the image. And I thought, who's that chunky old lady? And I really was really sad. And my husband asked me to go work out with him every day. And I'm like, honey, I don't have time. I'm building a company. And he'd come back and I'm still sitting there. And I didn't have time. Well, that was an excuse. Because apparently, there's a time on the clock called 5 a.m. I'd only seen it once when I came on from college

“after night out. Because I would start work at 7 a.m. That's what I do. And something said go for it.”

And I went online when I got home that night. I had a mastermind in front of 300 people. And for some odd reason I said, hey, guys, we survived this accident. And in 99 days, I'm going to be in a bodybuilding competition. Wish me luck. And I turned off the camera and thought, oh my god, why did I do that? Yeah. So now I have a consequence. I cannot be embarrassed in front of all my students and people who believe in me. And I went to YouTube the next day. And I said,

how do you train to do this? I found a woman online on Instagram, love you Julia, who had lost weight and she didn't her late 60s, became a bodybuilder. She did exactly what I think I was going to be doing. And I reached out to her, but I did it on my own. I found this great carnivore diet. I went to the gym every day for two hours. I used my husband's training system. He's got a very intense kind of weight training thing. I'd definitely done weights before. And 99 days later,

a medal. And I made a movie about this because it was very interesting experience that I think everyone

“should everyone should go for some outrageous delusional dream at some point. The other dream I had,”

you know, when you go out and go to your store, I've seen this magazine forever, right? Yeah. And for 20 years, all my friends have been on the cover. Denise Austin and Jane Fonda and all these other actresses that I've known, I'm like, don't want to be on the cover forever in this world. And so this year, I told my story, I launched my book, I am on the cover last week, says my age. And it literally says, how I lost half my body fat in 99 days. And then they gave me a

center full. I'm literally a center full. I'll have that. I could not be happier of my story. My picture not my movies, but my weight loss story, so that it's 66. I am the fittest I've ever been in my life. That's incredible. Because I set out to have a consequence. If you don't put a consequence on a wish, it's just a dream. And you don't achieve it. That's an awesome story. Speaking of, you know, making things solid or real, you often talk about how, if you don't

write things down, they often don't come to fruition. How do we actually make sure that we execute our goal? So you mentioned one thing, which is make it real, have a consequence, announce it to the world, right? But, well, okay. So that's the first thing. Decided on something

“that you want. What's the next thing that you want? What's a real big hairy scary dream for you?”

I'm writing book. So I just started the process of I have an agent and I started writing books. I want to put out a book and it should be coming out in a couple of years. It's going to take a while. What? Publishers. My agents say usually takes a year to two years. Yeah, that was the part that I couldn't handle, which is winded up. Self-lushing? I did a self-publishing because I decided that I was going to get this out when I wanted to.

Yeah. And I think that I do have a deal to do a book and they just as seem to take that long. But I would really write down what is it that you want from the book? Yeah. For me, it's not necessarily like leads from my business or anything. It's more of like a brand building. And also to honestly get my thoughts really clear, understand my perspective, have a

original content. I go on podcast all the time and I always find like when I have written something

down, I do a better job because I have like my clear ideas and messaging that I want to say. So there's a beautiful phenomenon that happens when you take a pen and you put it or a pencil and you put it on a piece of paper and you commit words to it. Something is very magical. And I'm going to tell you that whether you believe or not, it's kind of like here, I don't believe in gravity, right? I don't believe in gravity. It works whether I believe in gravity or not.

So whether you believe that this works or not, I would do it. Through the ages it has been proven that when you write something down. So one of the things that I would recommend to everybody out there is to write down a list of what you want. And to write it to the point that your hand wants to fall off. Because it's not the three. I want to be prettier. I want to be more successful. I want more money. No, no, no, write down all of those things and spend pages writing all the things that you want

ever you want it. And you'd be surprised what comes out of that. So the first time I did this exercise was many, many years ago and what came out was I wrote, I want to inspire somebody every day.

I'd never thought about that in my life before. I was an actress. I didn't really need to inspire

anybody. But when I wrote that and I looked at it, I thought, well, what does that mean to inspire somebody?

“And then I took that one sentence and I drilled that down. It means that you have to have something”

worth talking about. You have to have life experiences. You have to have a mission. When I drilled on that one, I was like, oh, so you just did that. I want to write a book. Now I'd write down all things you want your book to do. Who do you want to have read the book? What do you want the reaction to be? I will very clearly tell you that I stated this book is a USA Today Best Seller. That is hard to get. Not Amazon Best Seller. And my goal next with my next book is a New York

Times Best Seller. That means you've got to have some really profound stories to tell, do great diligence. And when you write a book, for example, you're not writing it for you, you're writing it for the people who are reading it. And so that's even when I wanted my man. Are you involved? Yeah. And is it somebody that you wanted? Yeah. But you kind of knew that, right? Did you make a list at all? Yeah, I did make a list because I was I was really trying to find like my forever

person. And so I was very, very picky about the person I would be in the next relationship. What's I did have a list? Isn't that funny? So now she hears voices. She has a list. She's my best student ever. And I'm going to say that this is what I want for everybody out there.

So I'd always made a list. I'd always written down things. And this particular time when I

my husband and I officially split up, which was really challenging for the kids and kind of hard. I spent 10 years without anybody. I made another decision to myself that said as much as I'd selfishly like to find a partner, I really want to be mom. And so I devoted a number of years

of crazy things. Three of us because that was really important. And I will tell you, I'm in business with both my kids. Both my kids really like me. And that was time and energy and investment.

I never stopped my career. But I never stopped investing in them. And I did a couple of things

“that I think every mom should do. One, I never told my kids to go away when I was doing business.”

So I signed one of my biggest deals in New York City with my daughter playing Tik-Tek Toe in one hand and signed in the contract with the other. And I told the people in the room I said, "Look, as much as I love all the things that we're doing, we can make a lot of money together." And no matter how much money I have in the bank at the end of my life, you're not going to be my deathbed. She will. If I do this right. And if I screw it up, I can't not have them there.

And that was one of my philosophies and how to make my kids. When I wanted at one point, "Oh my gosh, we were at a dude ranch." And there were 36 cabins and all they were all couples,

except for me. My kids were playing. We had the best day ever that go to sleep. But I'm sitting there

at night in the slow rock and chair thinking, "I am so happy right now." "No, I am so unhappy." And I realized I was just really lonely. My daughter said, "We mom, don't we make you happy?"

“"My go, you guys make me happier than you'll ever know." But you are so little. You don't”

realize it is an adult. You don't want to go to bed alone anymore. I wanted that partner with me. And so I began to make this forever list. And it was very in-depth. In-depth to the point where I wrote down some of the things I wanted him to say to me. And I wrote, "I want someone who, in the morning, looks at me with mascara down my face. My hair all frizzy. My mouth smelling like Alson says, "I love you." Well, I'm going to tell you something. When Joshua did that, I got fell off the bed.

I'm lying there one day and Joshua was like, "Come here, kiss me." And I'm like, "Oh no, no, I can't. I got to go scope." And he's like, "Kiss me beautiful." And I'm like, "Oh my God, you did it. Oh, yes." That was literally one of the things I'd look for. And then the other thing that I'll share with you guys at home, if you look up Joshua's self, SELF, and yes, that's his real last name. I couldn't believe it because he's really that handsome. There's a fashion model on a chip endale.

He's got all those looks about him. Come on, you're last name himself. Mrs. Self. And I wrote, "I wrote all the things you think I wanted." And then I go talk to girlfriend of mine. He was also very big into manifesting. And she said, "She wrote that she wanted someone who looked like he walked off the cover of a romance novel." And I said, "I'm putting that on top." I said, "I know I'm 57 years old." But I want someone so beautiful that I melt into his eyes.

And that's my man. And I look at him on Instagram and I look at him in person. And it's obviously

“so much more to him than that. But that's what I wanted. Yeah. And I got it.”

So the question is, if you could write down what you wanted, did you get everything you wanted? I did. We have something similar. I have a pretty big age gap with my boyfriend right now, not that big, but six years. I'm six years older than him. And so something I wasn't expecting is that my man would be younger than me. That's age is not something I actually wrote down. But he turned out to be a great man that I want to spend my life with. And so the age thing didn't

really matter. Maybe girl let me tell you something. Mine is 17 years younger. I didn't write down the age thing either. It didn't even dawn on me that I would ever want to be graduating high school on the day that my lover was born. But he said something to me so romantic after we shortly after we met and he came out to visit me in Los Angeles and he wrote on his motorcycle and I told my daughter, don't ever date someone on a motorcycle. Screwed that one out.

Well, because my cousin lost her leg when we were kids. And he shows him on a motorcycle. I didn't put that on the list either. It shouldn't write a motorcycle. He gets off his bike, takes that helmet off and I'm like, oh my gosh, it's like the Chippendale poster came to life. Such a little girl. And then I realized, okay, Forbes, you're being silly. He's that good looking. He's a player. He only wants to, you know, whatever. He found out who you are. And I had that moment

of self doubt, which is unfortunate that I still amwired that way. But this humility, by the way, is not is very much real. And he came over and I just looked at him and I said, what are you really doing here? Because if you're here just for the weekend, that'll be okay. You're like, I'm cool for you. Right, that'll go for a week. Yeah. But he got down on one knee, grab my hand and said, look, he said, I'm not very religious, but something told me you need me.

Huh? Wow. I'm, this man is never going anywhere. He is my, and he wrote on the top of his

list and he wrote a list. He wanted his best friend and he'd never had that before. And when he found me, we're, we're like crazy buddies and lovers and then the funny thing again. By the way, here's the funny thing about a list. You don't have to include everything. You're allowed to be surprised. So I knew that he was a 3D graphic artist. He was a top body builder. He was, uh, had been a chip and they had been a model. And all of that was okay. Fine. I own a television studio,

says, I could run this place. And I'm like, excuse me, he said, oh, didn't I tell you? I used to work in movies and television. And I do gaffer and grip and lighting and video and photography. Come like, no, and then he gets so mad at me because I, I sometimes say very inappropriate things. It's kind of my persona. And I often say, you know, in today's

“day and age with all the videos that we do and all the content we need, you have to travel”

with your videographer, right? And they're really expensive. So I just thought I'd be cheaper to sleep with mine. I love that. It sounds like you guys are such a perfect match. I'm having the time in my life. Let's get back to fishing. Okay. So one thing that I liked learning about was that you've got like a

pre-hand shake, the actual hand shake, the post-hand shake, the first impressions are so important

when you're when you're pitching and networking. So what do you think that is? Well, from my own research, first impressions are like what people remember. Even time and time after they met you, your first 15 seconds is what they're going to remember down the line. There's a very interesting statistic. Do you know that there's three things people judge you on immediately? I mean, we talked about judging people in assumptions, 55% of how you show up for somebody else in

their brain is visual. It does it a line. 38% is the tone of your voice and only 7% of the words that you use. Yet everybody comes to me only cares about the words. How do I say to get them to like me? First show up and align who you are, what you're there to do, and when you go to literally shake somebody hand, understand how to do that. And what do you want from their relationship? I don't think people stop to think, yeah, why am I doing here? And you're not going to make a

sale when you shake somebody's hand. It doesn't work that way. Because that will be weird. So what do you want? For me, I want to yes. If they're interesting, I want to either do business, finding opportunity to work together, be on their podcast, have them be on mine, whatever the relationship might be. At the end of it, and I, I have this new cool ring. This ring is literally you. I touch somebody's phone and all my information pops up on your phone. I just got this two days

“ago. And I thought that makes this process easier. And then you have to follow up. So this”

pre-hange that gives you showing up. What's your intention? What do you want to do? Don't sound too sales, either. That's everything. Even though we're all, you know, I want you to know what I do. Yeah, let's be human. Hey, what do you do? I'm out in this, this, this, this, that's great.

Here's what I do, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then keep talking. When you meet me,

don't walk up to me and give me your pitch. I don't want your pitch. Not funny. It's like it's because your pitch isn't a thing. Unless somebody, maybe you're to be an eye meeting or in a toast masters and they say to you, would you stand up there for one minute and talk about what you do? That's a pitch. Okay. When you're in a pitch contest, that's a pitch. When I just meet you, how many sentences do you think you're willing to listen to before you

just stop listening? A couple? Yeah. And even then, it's like, hi, what do you do? You know, if you say your life coach, that's cool. But if you say, you know, I'm a life coach who likes to transform

“human because there's somebody who went through something really traumatic on me. It's like,”

oh my god, why are you still talking? Yeah. So I would love people to practice all the things that I teach so that you don't have to do most of them. Does that make sense? Yeah. You understand, you show a certain way. I can shake your hand, say a few words, boom, we're into it. And then, when you leave the post-hand shirt, follow up with people. I've done an interesting study recently. Do you know that about 85% of people do not follow up at all afterwards? They're intimidated,

they don't want to bother the other person. And so this beautiful moment that happened at the network of meeting or dream of handshake literally becomes nothing. Yeah, results are nothing. Why are you wasting your time? Yeah. The way that your book is, it's really read the book.

I have to tell you this can be the coolest interview I've ever done. No, great. I always read the book.

So the way that you've actually designed your book is that it's the ABC's and every letter stands for something. And you've got D Demonstrate. Yep. Now, you used to do infomercials. And obviously, like, that's a very visual thing. How can you make this more real for entrepreneurs? Like, how should we demonstrate if we're like on a Zoom call or in person at a meeting? Like, like, how should we actually demonstrate something? Well, I'm going to say the demonstrate

does not exist in an intro conversation. Nobody really wants to see you before and after immediately. In the intro conversation, it doesn't intro conversation. Usually it gets somebody very excited. That part of the handshake. When they say these magic words, this is really cool. Tell me more. Tell me more is let's book a meeting. Let's go to a conference room. Let's get on a Zoom. And that is the moment now where you're going to take your pitch to another

level because you want something. You want them to enroll. You want them to buy your product. Whatever it happens to be. And you want to organize in your world, given your business, given your solution, what makes somebody see the unseeable? So if you're selling, if you're in doing weight loss, it's kind of easy. Hey, guys, you know what? Let me show you the through a 30,000 people before and after before now. Oh my god, you got 30,000. That's

wow. In six weeks, this person went from this to this. Can you imagine great words to use

“that that happens for you? Yeah. Well, that's interesting. And I'm going to tell you what every moment”

if you can recalibrate why you're talking. And I love getting these some people. Well, I just started my business. That's great. You know what you say to somebody? As someone who just started, I did this on my own and it worked. And now I'm looking for 10 women to go through this at the, and maybe it would reduce rate. Now, if you're someone who's been in business for 20 years, you have the 30,000 examples. But what is a demonstration? A demonstration can be how fast can I sell your home?

Well, that would be maybe some statistics, guys. I had a hundred clients last year, 94 of them sold their home for exactly what they wanted. 3% higher and the other 3% fell off. Wow. I mean, this is where the realtor who can do 90%. Yeah. What I'm going to say is demonstrating is having

facts behind the myth. Most people say words like, well, it's just an incredible product. It's just

amazing. And I love it. Those three words don't say anything. In a pitch, credibility is really important. What makes somebody say yes to you? So if you can demonstrate by showing us statistics, by showing a photo, by showing a before and after of anything, you win. Yeah. In, in infrastructures, I learned this, it's like cutting my teeth in elementary school, is that if you

“could show a stain remover, all you have to do is say, look, there's a red stain, spray this new,”

padded and it's gone. You don't have to say anything else. So one of the problems is people overexplain what they do. Yeah. Less words more impact. As I'm talking to you, I'm thinking to my self, like, man, like, I need to revamp my discovery deck, right? Okay. I need to think through what are like the new problems that are that people are facing? What are some of the new case studies that I have? What are some of, like, all my different stories are running on who's

coming on the call, so that I don't say the same story about myself. And I kind of customize it for the person that's on the call. So I feel like this is a great point for everyone who's tuning in, who's an entrepreneur, to think about, like, can their sales process be revamped a little bit? Oh, my gosh, you know, I also have a mentor. I have somebody who comes in. I said this to somebody the other day, I tweak something and they were like, man, you think I would have learned this already.

I'm like, no, we never learned this. We're always the coffee in the cup. I had the great pleasure

working with Serina Williams many years ago. We were selling nothing called mission cool towels. And she's not good at pitching. So it's not going to, nobody was good at pitching that product. It was a really odd product. You get it wet. You'd snap at three times it would get cold because of the evaporation. And in that particular case, it was a demo that's sold that. Turns out you can talk about that all you wanted did nothing. Here's what I did. And it

comes from being a magician and a demonstrator. I would take a bowl of really hot water and a heat gun. And the water would be about 200 degrees. Really hot. I would, and my, I was on home shopping. So my host would go, oh, that is hot. So now we know it's real. The heat gun demonstrating it. We put this towel in there. We take it out and go, oh, that's hot hot. You'd snap at three times. The heat gun would then go from 200 to 150 to 140 to 99 to 57. This thing was now cold.

So the demo for the audience was they saw the number change. Then my co-host would go, oh my gosh, this feels so cool. Then you go into a springboard story of, can you imagine where would you use this? If your mom is out gardening and it's really hot or your kids are playing, you know, in the heat,

you don't want heat stroke. All of a sudden the phone's wet nuts. I did $55 million worth of sales

and cool towels. And nobody could figure it out before that because they didn't use any demonstrating. And then so Serena got very excited about this and invited me out on the tennis court. And I got to tell you, I can't hit a ball to say my life. And she taught me two things. One,

“you have to practice. But two, she had five coaches. She had a fitness coach, a finance coach,”

a fashion coach, a food coach, and a tennis coach. And I was very naive. This is almost 28 years ago. And I looked at her and I said, but you're the best in tennis. Why would you need a coach? I'm not a real sports person. And she's like, you're kidding me. I'm like, no, why would you need a coach? And she said this was so profound. She said, look, my coach sits in the stands. She doesn't even play tennis anymore. But she'll walk down from the stands when I'm missing my shot

and lift my elbow up because I was just getting a little tired a little lazy. I couldn't see what she could see. I was like, oh, man. So does everybody need to revamp a little bit? Yeah, here's the other thing. When you get really good in this pitching sales world, you start to work on statistics. I didn't really know how valuable this was until recently because I run a coaching company. And so if you get free clients into a webinar, what's your closing percentage? What's

your role as? What's your turn on investment? All of those numbers became very apparent and very interesting and very predictable. So now it turns out and you're not going to buy ads until you do that. But if you're spending a hundred dollars and you know that you'll get two thousand signups, yeah, but only 50% will ever show up because it's free. Yep. And then out of the thousand,

years, we can tell you what numbers we're going to do. Did you always know that? It's bottoms up sales

for casting, right? All the different actions and if you know your percentages, then you can basically calculate if I get a thousand signups, I'm going to make x amount on my webinar day. Right? Yeah. It's a very interesting phenomenon and it's so funny because I took statistics in high school and now I know why. Now yeah, back going, man, that stuff's good. The other thing when we're talking about stats that you got me thinking about is as you do business for a number of years, you start to

collect data about like, have you ever gotten any returns? How much money? Like for me, it's like how much money have I made people or how often do I sell out shows? Everybody's got different stats that represent success in their business, but you also have to think about that and write them down so that you have those data points to kind of just pull out during a sales conversation or in

“your like actually put it in your presentation. Well, that's why I love working with advanced entrepreneurs.”

Having a lot of fun work with businesses because it's predictable because there is data to look at and if you're a young entrepreneur, I'm going to tell you. This is one of the things that you want to be thinking about and if you're not good at this, I'll out myself a little bit. I am a visionary and every business has a visionary and an implementer, which one of you? Visionary. Yeah. As a visionary, I can do numbers. I did okay in math class, but I haven't done it in a while, but implementation

and that kind of organization, not my thing. I'm not even really good at managing people. I'm

great at teaching, pitching, writing, doing all the things that I do and I found it essential for me

to have that partner. Have you discovered that? Yeah. And who did Kate on my team? Okay. When you found someone in your team, you do that's even better. Yes, she started as an intern seven years ago. So you have a national business partner. There you go. Yeah. Is that a wonderful environment? I chose to give birth to mine. Oh, I love that.

“Now, but I should have had more kids. By the way, it's an interesting thing. I did not know”

that I was going to raise a daughter who was that smart, that good and implementer. And the thing for me is that she cares so much about not only you, but what we're building. And it's been six years. Amazing. I know. We built up each other. My daughter is at 22, had her first TEDx talk. 23 runs two multi-million dollar companies. So cool. It's me in check and allows me to do what I love to do. So if you're visionary, you got to find an implementer. If you want to move forward,

somebody who is looking at those numbers, looking at the bottom line, collecting data, doing KPIs.

And in my, the way I view it is, you got to put on your big-row pants. So Flurbs, I want to play a game. It's called the pitch clinic. You are the pitch queen. I'm the pitch doctor. You do magic. So I'm going to give you like a one-liner and you tell me what's wrong with it? How do you make it better to really generic? So let's just go. Okay. All right, number one, the vague founder. And that person says, you say, what do you do? And they go, I help entrepreneurs grow.

“Really? Like Pinocchio? You have to grow their nose to jump and grow like greenery?”

What's so sad? No help or help entrepreneurs go. You might want to start out as somebody who's been in business forever. I take burned out women and I help them find their truth in life. Very different than I help entrepreneurs grow. Yes. Okay. Number two, the founder that is always like feature dumping. So somebody's like, our app has dashboards and reminders and templates and AI tools. When you're a police. What they do? Yeah. Yeah. I'm that's a good for you moment. What does

it have to do with me? So as someone who's got a scheduling app, you're in business, right? Yeah. What runs your business? Is it a team of people? Is it online? I've got a team of 60 people. We've got lots of different tools and lots of different apps, lots of different systems. We have streamlined. Can you imagine taking all the apps that you probably pay a fortune for? I'll tell you what I'd love to do. Our new app is the streamlined invention of all time. Major companies are using it.

Would it be okay if I did an audit of all your apps if I can save you money? Yes. All you want to do is get a yes. That is the goal because that yes becomes a discovery call. Yeah, you don't know anything about my app. I'm not telling you about my app. I'm just looking at what you've got and seeing if I can find a problem that I can solve. A founder that doesn't have traction yet. They just have an idea. So you meet them and they say we don't have traction yet,

but everybody loves the idea. What could they do differently to sell their idea before they even have done anything with? Everybody loves what ideas. He's so funny. Pitching doesn't exist in the app strapped. So what's the idea that you come up with? I'm going to put you on the spot. Okay, so the idea that I came up with is this is somebody's a student once told me she wanted to create a horoscope app. I love that. He won't call it horoscope called astrology. Horoscope sounds like it's

all I got. It's a nostalgia. Great. Then I would ask her, what does it do? What's in the, see, this is where the formula comes in. What's already in the market that you're competing with. And here's another thing about competition. When people say me, I don't have any competition, number one, they're lying. And number two, they're naive. Yeah. One competition. Can you imagine that a company opens across the street from McDonald's the all-time hamburger milkshake in

French or I Mecca? Well, Burger King did just that. Yeah. Why do they exist on the same street corner?

going to do flame broiled, not grilled. So it's less fat. You only offer it one way. We're going to

“do hamburgers your way. So all of a sudden, the direct competition is excelling. So I would ask her going,”

what app are you close to like now? And why are you better than opening the magazine? And also, what does knowing your horoscope do for somebody? So hey, as somebody, you know, one of the things you may or may not believe in horoscopes. But there's a reality check here that if you fall into a certain thing and you become comfortable with it, like I say all the time, I'm a tourist, I'm kind of stubborn, leveraging that for your own good. And also, in the moon in the stars, do play energetic roles in

you. So again, she's got a great idea, but you can't just, I wouldn't go out there and say that until I've done more research. And guys, don't, the first of all, don't pitch ideas anyway in a networking environment. What's the value? And if you're in Hollywood, where I've spent a lot of time, if you pitch an idea, someone's going to steal it. So drill down on your idea, make it into a business, do your due diligence, find your customers, find your competitors,

and then you launch. And also, don't, how about you test drive to see if somebody wants what you have?

“Yeah. The worst thing you can do is a new founder. It's go, my idea, so revolutionary, you've never”

heard of it before. And it turns out to be something we've heard a lot of before. I would be embarrassed, wouldn't you? Yeah, totally. Now, I want to talk a bit about your story before we go. I know that you grew up, and you were a bit overweight, and you had some dental issues, some breathing issues, talked to us about what you were like as a kid, and how that allowed you to become so successful later on, because sometimes your weakness becomes really your strength. There's, I've told a lot about my mouth

and not being able to talk for trivia, but I have a thing on my mouth. I couldn't communicate at all. But there's something I haven't talked about, and it's going to come out next week for the first time, really, that my mom, when she was pregnant, way back in the 1960s, she used, you know, really used to wear curlers in their hair. She used to really bad car accident, and her head went to the windshield, but the curler saved her life, at least this is the story I was told. I survived,

but my twin brother that she was carrying didn't. I've never talked about this. It never seemed to be,

I just need to want to go there. It's for instance, I have twins. Yeah. And I was in an incubator for three months, and we often joke that my grandmother hadn't paid $3,000. I'd still be there, because my parents had no money. And my whole life, I always looked for something, if that makes sense. And it's dawning on me as I'm getting older, that that's something might have been this thing that's missing for me. And so, not being able to communicate as a kid, put me in a really odd state.

I don't know many other kids who had this. Yeah. So, because of the way I was born, my teeth went all different directions. And I was about seven years old, they figured this out, put me in braces, a lot of people have had braces, but not for eight years. Eight years of full silver, and I look at little pictures of me, and I'm not smiling in any of the pictures. And they put this thing in my mouth,

and so all of a sudden, as a chatty little girl, I could have talked her off. I never worked in

my friend. I cared for her at work for her long, and so I was very smart. I studied all the time, and when I was studying and watching TV. And there's something goofy about my generation, the television that we watched, think about this, the monsters, the Adam's family, we were watching dead people sleep in coffins. I drew Majini, a girl who's kept captive in a bottle who can, and another one is a witch who can wiggle her nose and make magic come true. I have some very

weird role models for them as a kid, right? Yeah. And I remember thinking, if they can live those kinds of lives, I could do something more extraordinary. And for me, my role model, my mythical mentor, which James Bond, when I first started watching Bond, and not a Bond girl, but this guy, who could snowsky and water ski and drive cool cars, and where awesome, awesome outfits, and being espionage, why can't I? And I will tell you through my entire life, I've done some crazy

things, a lot of which I haven't thought to tell people. I haven't because all four of you know your story, I'm like, no, you know, you know the story that I told you, but there was things

“that I hadn't talked about, about again, looking for somebody to, and I think now it's I was”

wanting to teach people. I think if you can't find the piece of you that's missing, and that's

what I guess I've always felt like, but I never really articulated. Yeah, I think this is the time

where everybody that I'm teaching, with my 200,000 plus students on my sisters and brothers, are the part of my family, and I didn't have. My mom was an only child. I didn't have any aunts and uncles and grandparents were all gone, and I'm looking for that, and I will say the other night we're talking a big training. I love him people, and I'm not quite sure who your mentors were, but a lot of the standard mentors are men. Motivational speakers were all men to a certain point.

the nurturing mom, the loving sister, the best friend, I don't need the money. I made a lot of money in my life. So what's the motivation? Because I'm not going to retire. There's no such word as retire. I don't know what that would possibly be. If you've got a mission, if you've got a reason for being here, and I would advise all of you to find that, and it could be your grandkids. It doesn't have to be some big thing, but maybe you've done something in your life that is worth

writing about, that is worth pitching about, that is worth helping other people, and doesn't have to be a motivation, but it certainly is mine. I'm excited for you to call me, which may have

me 100th birthday. Well, Forbes, I end my show with two questions I ask all of my guests. The first

one is what is one actionable thing our young and profiter can do today to become more profitable tomorrow. www.pitssecretsbook.com. And I'm not kidding. It's I don't need the book sales. You want to read the book. You read the book and you took a lot of things away from it. Yeah, I did. I'm going to tell you the reason I'm so successful is in that book. The actionable words pick a letter. Go to end and find out what NLP is all about. Go to M and do mindset and get my permission card.

Go to Z and figure out how to do a much better Zoom presentation. There's so many nuggets in here, and that is something that you can do. I cannot teach you to be a better pitcher in just one class or in one podcast. I can give you the formula. I can teach you the formula. You're going to want to practice it. And just truly understand that there is no such thing as an overnight success. Cakes take how many minutes to bake at a certain temperature with the best ingredients. If you

screw any of those up, you've got nothing. And what about those the years thing you do like weekly webinars? How does somebody get involved with that? You know, everything is pitch secret. So pitchsecretstraining.com is a free two-hour training that I do every single Sunday. I've been doing it for six years. I've over 380 episodes. Wow. And I take people from around the world. And here's a crazy thing about being in our world. You know, you can be part in today's

day and age of different communities for different things. Yeah. In our community, we love on people. Very passionate about that. That we're supportive. You need something in our world. I've a, I've a beautifully large free Facebook group that people come in and just get support.

“Get help. Get loved on. And I think that's an important thing to do. But keeping in mind that we're”

not a charity, we are business. Yeah. And I'm here because you want to have that great dress. Eat that nice meal. Have a vacation by presence. Have a roof and pay your car payments. So stop giving away your stuff for free. Come and learn that there's a level of self-esteem that we teach people. We work on clarity and confidence in your messaging. And you're going to want all of that. And I don't need to be the only mentor you have. But I promise you,

there's a level of expertise that's come with my life story. Yeah. That I just want to wash over people. And I'm finding, you know, this is a funny thing. We didn't talk about school of hard knocks. Yeah. James came to me. The kid that you see, walking, running up to people. And he did one of those. I've only joined interviews. He does the street interviews. Yeah. And I have one, one valley in my home town. He said, meet me there. And when we finished, we finished with that one interview. I said,

how did you even know who I was? He's like, I didn't really know who you were, but my parents love you.

“Oh. And they were like, how in Tampa, you need to meet this girl. And it's one interview that”

changed my life. Oh. Because TikTok has 21 million views. Instagram has 12 million. That's 32

million and very crashing of 60 seconds. The reason that I'm good at that, it's pitching. It's this conversation. It's this repetition. It's finally understanding, I know what my message is now. You were like outperforming Tom Cruiser. Like you, you had one in their most popular videos. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Yeah. Tom is about five million. I've got 21 million. Look at that. And not that I noticed. And it's because it's on about me. I'm not some mythical character in a

movie set. I'm a young girl who grew up with no money. Who's dad was in the hospital for three years when I was a kid. Who just decided that my life was going to be worth it. Yeah. I was going to make it matter. And I was going to do what I could to help other people. And it's exploded. Who knew the word pitch? When I started, people would say, ooh, that's like a used car salesman. I'm like, no, you guys, it's how you get someone else to say, yes, it's how you get someone to go to the

movie of your choice or the dinner or ask someone to marry you. You want them to say, yes, that's a pitch.

Yeah. And so I am loving that I finally got this word out to people. And now I'm just going to keep

running around the country and celebrating with people who are finally getting what they deserve and what they want. Yeah. And you are so prepared for that moment for that 60 seconds to make

“sure that you were able to get your point across. And that's what it's all about. It is it worked.”

Yeah. It really worked. And now I need to work for you, guys. Okay. So my final question to you, what is your secret to profiting in life and this can go beyond business? You know, profiting and wealth are very interchangeable. Profiting in life means that there's a little left over for you. After you've paid your taxes and your paid your bills, that's the good stuff. That's the time in your life when you get to go get a massage. When you walk on the beach and bore a bore with your

special. I do think that profiting in yourself is a bit of self care. I watch some of my friends who didn't do what I've done. I buy a hack my whole life. I've been doing sauna's and massage and red light therapy and eating crazy foods and doing peptides. I like to go down the list of all the good modalities. I lived in an Auschwem for a while. I ate vegetarian. I ate vegan. I did meditations. I've done chanting. I feel like I stepped up to the buffet of life and just kept

tasting all the different foods. And I'm reminded that my little boy when he was in the back of a car was about nine years old, his name is Riker. He turned to me. He was so sad. He's like, mommy, I'm like, what? He's like, all the good ideas have been taken. I'm about, oh, you precious, beautiful boy. I can see how you would think that. There are cars in houses and food and post it notes and computers. And then everything comes out again. Like, oh, we had Facebook

but oh, now we have Instagram. And now we have TikTok. And now we have AI. And now we have robots.

“There is no good idea that's taken, which is so important to remember. So the profit I think”

means to flourish. Yeah. To be happy, to be loved. And then for me, the last part of this is to be remembered. I love that lesson. That was one of the best answers I've heard to that question. The fact that, there's still so much more to be discovered. There's still so much more opportunity. Don't think that all the good ideas are already taken. And where can everybody learn more about

you and everything that you do? Luckily, I've got a very unusual last name or first name. So Forbes

Riley, type it into Google, type it into YouTube. But only if you have eight weeks to sit and watch all my YouTube videos. But so if you go to any of those, go to ForbesRally.com. You'll find me. And just to be very clear, as of this recording right now, I still do all my own DMs on my Instagram and why do I do that? I really like people. I want to meet people. I've been getting a lot of since James' thing launched on School of Hard knocks. I have a lot of 15-year-olds reaching out

from all around the world saying, "Hey, how do I get started in business? Is my hometown has nothing? What do you suggest?" And I'm touring around to a lot of different countries because we need, we need a voice. Yeah. We need someone going, "You look, you can do this and you can do it with no money, just ingenuity and your ability to pitch." Well, Forbes, thank you so much for joining us on Young Improving Podcast. Thank you so much for being beautiful. I appreciate it.

Yeah, gang. It was so much fun to speak with Forbes today and learn more about the art of pitching.

“And I think pitching is a skill that every entrepreneur needs to master because no matter how”

great your product is, people have to understand why it matters to them before they can say yes. Forbes told us that pitching is not about being pushy or sounding salesy. As she said, pitching is a win-win environment. It's not selling. Here's some of my favorite pieces

of wisdom that she broke down today. First, make your pitch about the person in front of you and

feel free to make assumptions. Forbes reminded us that there's no such thing as one perfect pitch, but there is such a thing as a skilled pitcher. The best communicators and pitchers pay attention. They ask questions. They understand what people care about. And they tailor their message to their situation. Before you pitch, think about who you're talking to, the challenges that they face, and how you can help. Do that pre-work. Second, stop leading with generic labels.

Saying you're a founder, coach, speaker, or consultant doesn't tell people why they should care. Instead, lead with credibility, context, and the outcome you create. Forbes loves the phrase as someone who, because it allows you to establish authority naturally, while making your experience relevant to the conversation, and it doesn't sound like you're bragging. And finally, you stories with intention. Your story should not become a rambling backstory

or a pity party. It should build trust, create emotion, and reinforce the value that you bring. So, choose stories that prove a point and bring people back to the solution that you offer. So, yeah, fam, here's your challenge. Take a few minutes to speak to rethink how you talk about yourself. You're one line pitch. Because the opportunities that change your life are business do not arrive with the warning. They often begin with a single conversation, a 60-second elevator

ride, and your ability to communicate your value quickly and clearly may determine whether that door opens or closes. The second thing I want you to do is to rethink your sales process, what presentations do you have, what is your process for calls, and how can you alter what you say in those conversations to pitch more effectively? You've got before and after case studies,

“you've got more data points. What do you need to do to improve your sales process based on”

what you learned in this episode? And hey, if you enjoyed this episode, make sure you follow and

subscribe to young and profiting so you never miss an episode. We'd also love it if you drop

this a review or rating. You can watch all of our interviews on YouTube and Spotify video. You guys can connect with me on social @yapwithhala on Instagram or on LinkedIn. I'm Hala Taha. If today's conversation inspired you, we sure to check out Forbes' new book, "Pitch Secrets A to Z." Until next time, keep learning, keep growing, and keep putting yourself out there.

A.K.A. the podcast princess signing off.