In late 2018, I quit my job to pursue Speaker Slam® full-time. I'm a brown guy. This doesn't happen. You just don't pursue your dream. That's not how it works. That's not our culture. I was supposed to be a banker. Safety in my life? A bank job was right up there with having an MBA, having children, or having hair after 30.
Instead, I was given this opportunity. My family immigrated to this country. They took risks. They made choices to get me an education, to give me an opportunity to live a life that I never knew was possible. And I took a risk and jumped into Speaker Slam®.
Riding the Momentum
In 2019, we were riding the momentum of what we were doing in Toronto. We had 200 people attending our events monthly. We were helping speakers launch their speaking careers and inspiring the community of Toronto.
During this entire experience, we had this nagging feeling: how are we going to grow this? We had capacity limits on our venues. We could only have 10 speakers on our stages even though our Emerging Speakers program was booming. We were just getting started. We had all of these problems, and then the biggest problem came.
When the Pandemic Hit
We lost everything. Our entire business model was built upon the event industry. All of a sudden the refund requests started coming in. How were we going to survive? This was my second year as an entrepreneur.
I had to come to a journey of learning, and I came away with the biggest lesson: when one door closes, a window of opportunity opens.
For a long time we thought, hey, we should do an online speaking competition. But before the pandemic it wasn't realistic. Would people really compete online? It was all about the stage, the experience. But we had no choice. It was do or die.
A Community That Kept Coming Back
We created the first iteration of the online speaking competition and 91 people signed up. People from the UK, Nigeria, USA, all coming together to share stories of inspiration.
We did competition after competition, and what we began to see was our community evolve. Even though you take away the stage, people kept coming back. The reason they kept coming back? Because we gave them permission to share their stories. We allowed real life humans to share their stories and connect with each other.
The pandemic allowed us to grow and change the way we think. We were constantly stuck in the event cycle. Launching. Constantly launching. Moving on to the next thing. But now the pandemic gave us time to slow down, and in that opportunity we made the best of it.
A New Era
We knew we were helping our speakers, but the world didn't know that. That meant we had to rebrand. New copy. New website. New marketing material. New systems and processes. New products. It was a long journey. It wasn't easy.
But now, as we return back to live events, we've opened ourselves for a new era. A new era where I'm excited. Toronto, you better watch out. Inspiration is coming.
When you run into obstacles, there is opportunity to look at it differently. It's an opportunity to reframe and change the way we think. Just look for the window.
It's time to come back stronger.