Jim Knight
speaker
90 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Jim Knight’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
entertainment and i try and use that however i know exactly what they're thinking too i got to get past the the fun the the charm the the funny whatever it is they need the meat potato so to the point that you're making you really have to find the balance i got to walk the line to say How can I get them to push back from the table going, holy crap, that's exactly what I wanted. That was awesome.
Great use of my time. Oh, and by the way, we had some yuck yucks along the way versus either standing up there and do a song and dance and you're funny guy or funny girl and there's nothing of substance to it or vice versa. You're up there because of your title, because of the logo that you're associated with, maybe the amount of letters in front of your name and you're boring as all get out.
You know, you may as well have just sent me the PowerPoint or whatever the equivalent is. So I think, you know, the performance that edutainment is so key to speakers today. You can't be, like I said, one or the other. I think you got to have elements of both.
Well, I started saying yes to everything. I mean, anybody who asked me to speak, I mean, at the beginning, I probably was only known in hospitality. And again, because of the hard rock name and the fact that I traveled, probably got my foot in the door in a lot of places.
But I knew that somebody in the back of the room, like I said, was working for, I don't know, John Deere tractors, and they asked you to come out and speak. And then next, it's the Refrigeration Association. then it's the Funeral Directors Association of North America. Next thing you know, you're in all kinds of places.
And then eventually, although I was hunting and looking for engagements, a lot of them were sort of falling in my lap because the word had gotten out there in other industries. But I think it was really when I started to spend more time with Speaker Bureau. So I'm I'm exclusive with the Speaker Bureau right now. And I don't have to do a tremendous amount of work.
I'm still doing 35 to 40 engagements a year. And I get an email every week or every other week that just says, firm offer. Here's the engagement. Here's where you need to be. Here's the money. Here's the topic that they picked. And that's only because we've spent enough time together and their agents know exactly what we're looking for. And if you get to the point that you've got great ratings,
Now, when people are calling up for the Bureau saying, who do you have? Who's your new shiny toy? Who's in this price range? Who talks about these topics? They're not just going through a Rolodex of speakers. Now, you're top of mind. You're at least in the top one, two, or three. And it gives the agent an opportunity to sell your name out there a little bit more.
So now, some of these associations, it would blow your mind to, not you, because you do this. I think it would blow your audience's mind to think, wow, there's an association for that. Yeah. And they get together. And when they do, they're looking for sometimes an outside speaker. When that happens, I want to be their guy or their girl.
Yeah, my topics are probably the same three or four, and I've been looking to expand a little bit more. Certainly right now, we've got a lot of things that are going on in society here in the U.S. and actually globally. But for the most part, because people know me and I'm associated with Hard Rock, you're probably going to get more around the culture, service, employee engagement type stuff.
All mine is branded, so it follows my book, Culture That Rocks, Service That Rocks, Engagement That Rocks. Right now, the real big focus and what I'm seeing almost any group is happy if you're talking about leadership. I do have a course and a webinar, and I am working on my next book called, as you can imagine, Leadership That Rocks.
And I think that really helps me out a lot to now go back to the well, talk to some of these other clients that have already done stuff for perhaps they've already gone through the main keynotes. Now, if we get into workshop oriented stuff, and you talked about this earlier, because of my training and development background, I can help people handle guest complaints.
or do a brand new interview, or how to have tough conversations with people, or maybe coaching counsel employee, like all of these tactical, technical things. Yes, I can do that. And there's probably 10, 15 of those. But really, people now are looking for great edutaining keynote speakers.
And so for me, culture, service, engagement, leadership, a little bit around performance management, those are the key ones. But I'll tell you, I was at an event where it just had speaker authors there. And there's a couple of communities, believe it or not, we do the same thing as everybody else. We get together and talk about our world.
And there was somebody that was there from a speaker bureau that had been asked to come in as a keynote speaker for this group. And one of the brand new speakers, they were just now getting started on their own. They asked that exact same question. What is it that you think audiences are looking for more than anything else? And sure enough, he said,
I don't care how fancy or cool or whatever your title or your topic or what you look like. If you have the word leadership in your session, you're going to win. People are starting to make some selections over that more than anything else.
Now that was before, I think the things that are going on now, I think to your podcast, your fan base, people are looking, you know, how do I deal with adversity? How can I face my fears? How can I overcome whatever major obstacles are going on? How
can i get to my goals like some of that will transcend regardless of what's going on today but i think that uh leadership is always going to be a winner and so i i definitely know that that's a part of something that i could do if you came to me and said how can i increase check averages at a restaurant no that is not my wheelhouse and i don't want that to be somebody else probably does that much better than me but those four or five that tends to be my my focal points
Yeah, you know, so I really focus a lot on the people that are working for you. So when it comes to leadership, there's so many books and websites and, you know, speakers actually on this topic. So you got to pick your battles as to what you can do. But I do focus a lot on communicating. I think leaders in general think they're really good communicators when in fact they're not.
Maybe unless they've surrounded themselves with a bunch of awesome people who are. They tend to hold stuff close to the vest. They don't share as liberally as we would probably like. The more that you can get down to the front line level, whatever that employee, associate, team member, you name it, if they're in the know, all of a sudden you've created some brand ambassadors.
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