Control Your Own Destiny
Bernie Swain is the co-founder of the Washington Speakers Bureau and today’s foremost authority on the lecture industry. Over the past 35 years, Swain has represented former US presidents, American and world leaders, journalists, authors, business visionaries, and sports legends. He’s got a wonderful new book out called “What Made Me Who I Am”. I highly recommend it. I’ve enjoyed every single chapter. Well, your background of coming from a family of humble beginnings definitely resonates with me. My grandfather was a coal miner and I know that that really resonates with your roots, but I always love to ask my guests to take us back to their own story of origin. Feel free to start in any way you’d like as to whether it’s your parents or your own big decisions that you had to make in your career, but how did you get to be who you are?
Well, John, my parents were like yours. They were from Virginia and West Virginia. My mother’s side, they were farmers in Virginia. My father’s side, they lived in the poorest of mining towns in West Virginia and in a two-room house with five sisters, a brother, and assorted relatives who came and went. My father spent part of his childhood, when my grandmother couldn’t always take of care of him, in an orphanage. No one in my family ever went to college before. They were good people, but there was never any conversation in my family about going to college, even when I was a junior and senior in high school.
I had a mentor, one of those first turning points in my life. He was a teacher. He was the athletic director, the football coach at the high school, and everyone looked up to him. I wanted to be just like him. In fact, I was not only inspired by him, but I started a 17-year career based on following in his footsteps. At 36 years old, I was offered the job as the athletic director at George Washington University.
About the same time, a friend of mine had sent me a copy of Fortune Magazine, and in the magazine was an article about the largest lecture agency in the world. They had just walked into the Ford White House and picked up Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger, and Alexander Hague as clients. Near the end of the article, Henry Kissinger is quoted, complaining about the high commission rate that this agency wanted to charge and saying, “Well, why simply don’t I sign with one of your competitors?” The agency president said, “Well, I have no competitors.”
I took the article home and I put it on the coffee table, thinking I would probably look at the rest of the articles in the magazine, and a couple of days later, I came home and my wife said, “Have you read the article in this magazine? He has no competition.” She sat me down and she said, “You come home two or three times a week and you complain about the bureaucracy of university life, and I don’t think you’ll ever be happy unless you can make decisions on your own.” Over a period of weeks, she pushed and she prodded me and convinced me to walk away from my dream job as an athletic director at a university.
We had no money. We certainly had no experience. We had no plan in order to start our company and to get money to live on. My wife had been making $11,000 a year and I’d only been making $33,000 as the assistant athletic director. In order to get money, we put a second mortgage on our home, and now we had $55,000 of mortgages on a $60,000 house, above 12% interest rate. As I said, we had no money, but then a friend of ours offered to rent us his stationery closet as our first office. To give you an idea what it was like to live in a stationery closet, the person whose office of the stationery closet it was was Chuck Hagel, who would later become Barack Obama’s secretary of defense.
Well, you never know who you’re talking to, do you.
No.
I want to take a moment and just dwell on what Paula said to you, which is you’ll never truly be happy until you control your own destiny. We’re going to tweet that out. It’s such a great line, and I think that’s a pivotal moment for everyone listening, is is that true for you? If it is and you choose happiness over security … because that’s the choice you were having to make, isn’t it, Bernie?
Yeah, it is. I learned later on, because of some of the people I represented, that there are turning points like my happening to find a mentor in high school. There are turning points in life where if we slow down and we pay attention to these turning points or these forks in the road, we can make good decisions to go one way or the other. The great legendary catcher of the New York Yankees Yogi Berra once said, “I get to a fork in a road, one of these turning points, and I take it.” Unfortunately, that’s what most of us do. We miss these forks in the road. We miss these turning points in life where we can go in one direction or another. I was fortunate, without giving much thought to it, to pay attention to two people in my life early, the high school teacher and my wife, who saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself.
Isn’t that great.
I think that’s the key to success in anything we do, is to listen to others who can see something that we don’t see.
What a great gift. Well, so let’s go back. You’re working out of a closet. You’re in debt up to your ears. You don’t have a lot of experience. Now we’re going, “Okay. We’ve got the Washington Speakers Bureau. Surely we’ll be getting a speaker any day now.” Pick up the story there, because it’s a doozy.
Well, as you said, we had no experience, and so we would sit in this closet and we would try to think of famous names to represent. We were trying to get a telephone number, and none of our calls were ever returned, and our letters were returned from lawyers who said, “My client, this famous person, is under a written contract with another agency. Don’t write them again or we’ll sue you.” You have to remember back in 1980, there was no internet. There was no way for us to determine whether that quote, where, “I have no competition”, was true. Because of those letters, we discovered there were actually five or six other large agencies up and down the east coast of the United States in addition to this one large agency.
We sat in that closet for 12 months, and, really, nothing had changed. We didn’t represent anyone, we had discovered there was competition we did not know existed before, and we were about out of money. Two months more passes, we had been in there for 14 months in this closet, and I get a call from a guy named Steve Bell, who was an anchorman for a news show that started in 1975 called Good Morning America. I had briefly met Steve when I was at the university, I let him use the swimming pool. Steve had been under one of those written contracts. That agency had not fulfilled their obligation to him. The contract had expired.
Steve called me on the phone and said, “I heard that you started a speakers bureau. If you want, I’ll give you a chance.” I went over to his office and I shook hands, and on the way back, I suddenly realized that I had not signed him to a written contract. When I got back to the closet, I tried to justify it to my wife, Paula, by saying, “Well, what good will it do to hold him to a piece of paper if he’s not happy?” That mistake on my part, that error in judgment at the moment, turned into be a defining moment for us because Steve then went and told other journalists, his friends, that if you don’t want to be tied up to a written contract with an agency, you can go shake hands with these new little guys in town and walk out on them any time you want.
Well, there’s the defining moment, everybody. That’s the branding. That’s what separates you from the competition. Because everybody’s always asking startups, especially when they’re trying to get funding, “What’s your secret sauce? What separates you from the competition?” And you just gave it that. The question that you need to ask yourself, listeners, is, “What’s my defining moment in my story of origin?” Because those 12, 14 months, I know you’ve said to yourself, “What have I done?” How did you keep going, Bernie? How did you and Paula keep the faith that this was going to work out?
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John Livesay is known as The Pitch Whisperer. He is a keynote sales speaker to brands and shares lessons learned from his award winning career at Conde Nast. His keynote talks shows sales teams how to be irresistible by becoming storytellers so they can instill in their customers the “Gotta Have It” feeling. When that happens the sales teams "Get To Yes" and become revenue rockstars.
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