Have you ever felt like your dream was not within reach?

This is the firsthand story of Jane Atkinson....

When I was 25 years old, I was lost in my career, making very little money, and had no idea what I was going to do with my life.  I was great at getting jobs, and I had talent, but I got bored easily.  I had no focus. 

On a Sunday afternoon I turned on the t.v. and saw a motivational speaker named Les Brown doing a PBS special called "Live Your Dreams".  That day, my life changed direction.  

I took what Les had said and I applied it.  I wrote out my goals.   I decided that I wanted to work for a motivational speaker.  What better way to learn more about living the life that you want?  

The universe must have supported this idea, because within 3 weeks,
I had my first job working as a speaker’s agent and business manager. 

It was a major turning point.

Those first years working for a speaker were pretty tough as I worked in a basement office on straight commission.  I had to scrape and save just to pay my bills.  But I loved it and devoured everything that I could get my hands on about the speaking industry.  I studied “the greats” like Rosita Perez, Captain Gerry Coffee, Earl Nightingale and Zig Ziglar.  I attended National Speakers Association conventions, read books and listened to tapes. 

My boss was great and really understood the industry.  With her help, I combined what I knew from previous jobs, with the industry knowledge we gathered and developed a strategy for booking speeches consistently.  I was talking on the phone to meeting planners every day and started to understand their needs. 

The results?  We doubled our business annually for 3 years, filled the calendar, and I was finally starting to earn a decent living.  At industry events, speakers started asking "how did you build that business so fast?" 

I then went to work as an agent for another speaker in Vancouver who had been in the speaking business for 10 years.  He was an outstanding speaker, he just hadn't focused enough to tap into his potential.  I used my formula and had the same excellent results.  We went from around 40 bookings per year at an average fee, to a solid 80 at a much higher fee. 

More people started to ask me how I was boosting these speakers’ careers. Some people even flew across the country to spend an hour or two “picking my brain”. 

I worked hard during those years.  My boss was a multimillionaire and owned a large company with 100 employees.  Often, I’d be in the office working alone on the weekends or at night.  I was driven.  I started earning more money than I could imagine for myself.  I didn’t really know how to handle earning so much money.  I wasn’t conditioned for wealth, or the lifestyle of flying around on private jets and helicopters.  So I did what made sense to me at the time. 

I quit that awesome job!

I went to work for a speaker in Dallas who was starting from scratch and could barely afford to pay me.  In fact, we agreed that he would pay my bills and buy me some meals for the first 3 months. 

I was nervous... would my formula still work as well?  Why did I give up that great paying job to start over again?   Was I nuts?

One of the main reasons I took the job with this speaker was that his wife ran a speaker's bureau, and we shared office space with them.  It turned out to be a good move that paid off handsomely for me.  We had to work extra hard to get other speaker's bureaus to book with us, but eventually word got out that my speaker was really terrific, and we more than doubled our business annually in those first four years.   Taking my speaker from 10 engagements per year at $2500 to 80 engagements at $12,500 was a phenomenal feeling.  And, he has since upped that fee several more times!

Using the same tried and true formula, that speaker went on to be one of the highest paid motivational speakers in the industry and I was back to making over 6 figures again. And now people were knocking my door down to find out how these speakers were making it so big.

By this time, I had worked hands on with meeting planners for over 10 years.  I had a great handle on what their needs were and I also had worked on the inside of a bureau. 

The bureau agents taught me how to (and how not to) approach them and work with them.  And, on a daily basis, I got to see the good, the bad
and the downright ugly in speakers marketing materials.

I went on to work for the bureau for a few years, which further enhanced my knowledge.  I represented some celebrities and best selling authors and continued to work hands-on with meeting planners to find them the best speakers and entertainers for their events.  The experience was invaluable and I made enough money to buy my first house.

Eventually, I moved back to Canada, and branched out on my own as a coach for speakers.  I got some formal training from the Coaches Training Institute, put a business in place called Speaker Launcher, and went to work trying out my formula with speakers one-on-one.  I placed a sign on my bulletin board that said "Success Without Struggle".

The life of a coach suited me incredibly well and business flowed in easily. 

I had finally moved out of struggle mode and I no longer
sabotaged my own success. 

In the first 4 years of my coaching business, I gave several 100 free sample coaching sessions.  People got tremendous value from the 30-minute sessions, but many of them told me that they couldn’t afford to work with me.  I wanted to help them, but I wasn’t sure how. 

I knew that someday I would write a book and it was starting to formulate.  But a book didn’t seem like enough to really change the course of someone’s career.  So after months of internal debate and talking to speakers, I decided to develop a system based on the formula that I had used over and over.  One year later, The Wealthy Speaker System was born.

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