Is $1,000 Worth Your Time?

Why Every Business Owner Should Join Toastmasters

If you own your own business, I personally feel like it should be law that you MUST join a Toastmasters club and participate as an active and involved member for at least one year. I believe firmly that if such a requirement was made, there would be far fewer businesses going out of business within their first three years.

Why am I so firm in this belief?

The answer is in three parts:

1. I’ve Experienced the Results of Toastmasters for Myself and How Much Money My Business Has Made Since Joining.
2. I’ve Seen the Results Toastmasters Has Had on Other Business Owners.
3. I’ve Seen How Other Business Owners in Toastmasters have Mentored Other Business Owners to Greatness!

I will cover #2 and #3 in future posts, but let’s focus on #1 for today.

The Biggest Challenge People Have with Joining a Toastmasters Club

You might have already heard of Toastmasters in the past as being the leading non-profit organization for learning and practicing your public speaking skills. If you cannot imagine what there would be to practice in the process of public speaking, you might find interest in another blog post on this site about 101 speaking tips that each require practice and skills development over time.

The challenge for most people joining Toastmasters is not in understanding how being a member might benefit them. The problem is that people worry about blocking out 90 minutes of every week to work on
their own self-improvement.

Being a Toastmasters member means an addition to your already cramped schedule, no matter what club you join, no matter what time of the day or night that club meets. You are joining a professional organization that expects you to dedicate 90 minutes of the same day at the same time every week. And, that’s tough to swallow!

Most of us would eagerly meet a friend in need for lunch every week to provide coaching or mentoring for free! But, when it comes to investing in our own long-term self-improvement, the decision to dedicate that time becomes much more challenging.

Our club meets at 11:30-1:00 p.m. every Thursday. That time slot poses the added challenge that the meeting occurs during the lunch hour. Since we do not meet at a restaurant, you would either have to bring your lunch or dedicate even more time before or after the meeting to eat something before going
back to work.

EVERY person considering joining a Toastmasters club has this time-strained dilemma. They all ask the
question, “Will this allocation of time every week REALLY be worth my time?”

For a business owner, the answer to this question is easily a big YES! Here’s how I figured out the
justification of time to attend.

How Toastmasters Has Helped Me in My Business

I started my first business in 1995. Within only a few weeks of start-up, I realized I could get a lot more business if I was visible within my community. There was only one problem. I was deathly afraid of public speaking. My fear ran deeper than just talking to groups of people from a stage, though.

My fear of public speaking greatly impacted my ability to talk to people on the phone. I would procrastinate returning phone calls from my clients and potential clients. I would even sometimes hold off having conversations by phone with my own staff! Why? Because I was afraid what I would say to questions would not be the correct reply.

I found myself allowing incoming calls to go into voicemail until I could muster enough drive to return the call. I can tell you for certain, fear of callbacks and procrastination to make those calls do not mix well!

Toastmasters changed all of that for me. Within my first month as a member, I started hearing things in my conversations on the phone that I realized needed changing if I was to increase my sales. It became a bit like tweaking a speech over time. By the fourth month, my sales (which were almost all produced by phone at the time) had doubled…every month!

My confidence grew quickly that I really was choosing the correct words in my replies. Instead of hiding from the phone, I began looking forward to those phone conversations.

As I talked to more people on the phone, closed more new deals, and increased my revenue from existing clients, I realized something very important about Toastmasters and attending my weekly Toastmasters club meetings…

Every Toastmasters Meeting is Worth AT LEAST One New Client!

In the early days of my business, every new client was worth about $1,000 to me in immediate revenue. I started adding up all of the clients I had received that were directly tied to the sudden improvement of my communication skills. Notice I did not say public speaking skills but “communication skills.”

The financial reward of improving my public speaking skills came much later.

I started looking at attending our weekly Toastmasters meetings as something different than a very hard-to-commit-to 90 minutes out of my work day. I started realizing that I would get at least one new paying client as a result from every meeting I attended.

Statistically, I was almost correct. From one meeting to the next, I was usually closing one (or more) new deals. In the rare event that I was sick or out of town and could not attend the meeting, my energy toward selling was noticeably lower for the next week. So, I could probably find cases where my sales actually reduced from one week to the next by not attending a meeting.

But, rather than being so literal, let’s just say that by averaging the number of clients I took in over a year’s time, that number easily exceeded one new client every week directly due to my weekly
participation at my Thursday Toastmasters club meetings.

Is One Client per Week (or $1,000) Worth Your Time?

How much money do you need to make from investing and dedicating 90 minutes every week for the next year to your own self improvement?

Calculate that number and bring it to our next meeting! We want to know your goal and how we can help you get there.

Come and visit. If you are a business owner, you will not find a better way to improve your speaking and overall communication skills than to join our Toastmasters club.

Again, we meet every Thursday, 11:30-1:00 p.m. at 3151 S. Vaughn Way, on the 4th floor, in Aurora,
Colorado. See our About page for more details and maps.