Carrie and Daniel Himel are not only entrepreneurs, but are married.  About ten years ago, they started their first business venture together, which turned out to be a huge success.  After they worked on a few separate businesses, they decided to start an event called Middle School Match-up, which is a baseball tournament for Middle Schoolers.

You get this idea for an event, what are your first steps in putting this all together?  It wasn't giant to start, and it did start as an idea.  It started as an idea because in Texas football is super huge, but they had a baseball player.  Their son was entering middle school, which can be such a hard time anyway.  Here he was this really great athlete, but no one cared because he wasn't playing football.   So they got the idea to start showcasing baseball players to help enhance the middle school experience.  They talked about it for more than a year, hoping someone else would do it.

About a year...

Speaking can be an incredible way to build your name, brand, and business, and you can also get paid.  Joleene really defines it at three levels, entry, in the middle, and high paid keynotes.

There are three levels (by Joleene's definition).  Entry level is where you begin speaking, and you do rotary meetings, lunch and learns, etc to get your name out there.  You know you're not going to get paid.  Joleene advices not to keep doing them for free for a long time.  The next level is mid levels is where you're making between $1000 and $9000 for a keynote.  Then there is high-level speaking where you can get $10,000 to $60,000 for one speech.  To get that to that realm of high paid, you have to have clout, be well known, and be a celebrity.

Let's start at tier 1, where do you begin asking for $200, etc?  First, there's a keynote between a presentation and a keynote.  What you want to do is look for local associations in your area....

I have been blessed to have found Periscope for many reasons, but one of them is the incredible people I have met. Through that and because of a weekly entrepreneur book club I run, someone suggested the book "The Big Leap" by Gay Hendricks. What was ironic was the week before we read "The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho, and they talk about basically the same thing.

In "The Big Leap" it’s referred to as the Zone of Genius.

In "The Alchemist", it’s referred to as your Personal Legend.

What they both mean, is that thing you were put on earth to do. That thing that is your gift. That thing you absolutely know you should be doing, but you have convinced yourself that other things are more important.

It could be that you believed making money right away was more important, and that you would go back to your ‘thing’ later. Maybe it’s kids, and when they grow up, you’ll revisit it. Maybe you have become so far removed because a while back you convinced...

Live streaming is the newest rave in business, and I can speak from personal experience that it's a game changer!  There are many ways you can utilize the likes of Periscope and Meerkat to build your business, and I thought I would bring the Digital Strategist, Brian Fanzo to help break it all down.  We cover which one you should spend your time on, how often you should stream, and how to use this new incredible tool to transform your business.

What exactly is live streaming and how can you utilize it for business?  Live streaming isn't new, but what is new is the mobile aspect of live streaming.  There are two apps that have come onto the market in the last few months; Meerkat and Periscope.  What they allow you to do is by one press of one button, and simply putting out a tweet or title, you're actually able to push out a link to the global world where they can now access the camera on your phone.  What's ground breaking is that it has pulled into...

Daniele Hargenrader has an incredible story.  At 9 she was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, a diagnosis that completely rocked her family.  Then just three years later, her father died suddenly.  Daniele became depressed, and let food take over as she grew to almost 200 pounds.  Between dealing with her father's death and dealing with the 'gloom and doom' of diabetes, she let it all get the best of her.

It was when she was 19 she decided her life needed to change.  She did a lot of reading and studying on diabetes and nutrition.  She had a lot of knowledge on it, and decided to start applying it.   There were two things that really made her begin her journey to turn things around.  Daniele states: 'The person I was showing the world physically was not the person who I felt I was on the inside.  Second, it was my personal choices that I was making that were actually killing me.'

[ctt tweet=" It was my personal choices that I was making...

People see me on Facebook, and I’m constantly asked how I do it all. How I manage the business, the kids, and the dogs. I’m smiling, and I’m here and there, and I make it look like I have it all together.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret...

I don’t!

I’m just constantly doing everything I can to keep myself sane, the smiles abundant, and a dream alive.

There are days where I’m really, really freaking tired, and I wish I didn’t have to stay up til 3 am during launch time to get that one last thing done. There are days where my heart sinks because I really don’t want to leave my kids to go to a business event.

There are moments when I go through a massive inner dialogue about whether or not having someone help me raise my kids is really the best choice. That dialogue becomes more frequent when I watch my 3-year-old push every button he can with her, and I feel I should be doing it all myself.

There are days when I get...

I consider myself a pretty savvy networker, and when I saw Kisha speak a few weeks ago, she blew me out of the water with the tips she was giving.  You should easily be able to pull out several things that you can apply to your business today after this podcast.

You say there is no strategy in networking, what does that mean?  When Kisha worked for a local chamber, she worked over members.  The first thing she learned was because everyone had a magical title, but no one had substance behind it to back it.  It never really connected with anyone because it wasn't interesting to anyone.  Instead of using a title, Kisha switched to saying she was a 'servant', which opened the doors for a conversation.

One of the titles she was given was a 'strategic connector.'  People so many times go into network, but they're really not saying what they need.  From a personal stand point she began to see things as a strategic level, and it opened the doors for her.

Email marketing is your bread and butter to any business you run.  Even when I had my two local businesses, every time I would send out a newsletter people would book.  It's just that top of mind place that you really always want to be with your customers.

There are four very general questions I'm frequently asked when it comes to email marketing, and so I thought I would take the opportunity to cover them here.

1. How often should you send out an email?  This really depends on the type of business you have, and the initial expectations you set when they sign up.  If you tell them they're signing up for a daily email, then by all means you better be sending out a daily email.  However, you just have to keep up with whatever you're setting those expectations to be.  I see people do this all the time, they send out an email, and then they disappear off the face of the earth.  What ends up happening is when you finally do send another email, those...

Rose has an incredible story of leaving school in her last year, and then moving to Austin where she felt she would find her dream job in a design studio.  It took a few years to land her first job, but she was so excited when she finally landed her dream job.  It didn't pay well, but she was eager to learn.  While working three different jobs (so she could stay at her dream job), she found an ad in Craigslist for a photography assistant.

After calling the photographer, Rose discovered that they actually needed help with re-designing their branding material.  The photographer was really excited about meeting up, and so Rose sat down with her.  That launched her first re-design of branding, which started leading to other photographers help with theirs.

Her dream job was going down hill very quickly after her boss talked Rose into taking out a personal loan, and then they started bouncing checks!  Finally, after some other issues with this 'dream job',...

No, we're not talking about becoming a public speaker, and living your life from a stage.  What we are talking about is how to get in front of potential clients by speaking and using it as a tool to market and build your business.  This can be an incredible way for you to establish yourself as an expert and to find clients in places that you might not have originally considered.

Jeff Klein, owner of Speaker Co-op came by to talk about how to even begin thinking about adding speaking, the tools you're going to need, and where you can start looking to find your first audience.

Where would someone even begin for starting to speak for business?  The first place you want to start is to think about your marketing.  Start thinking about what you can talk about that's marketable.  It doesn't necessarily have to be about your core business.   There's a guy in the local market who talks about leadership, even though he's a financial planner.  In that...