We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jacqueline Nagle. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jacqueline below.

Hi Jacqueline, thanks for joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

In 2o15 I was exiting a role as CEO of a Traffic Control Company, working on all the major motorways and highways in Queensland and in the midst of a three month transition to hand over the role I realised I was in my early 40’s, no children at home, relatively financially secure, and I could actually really really choose what would come next.

In that three months I took a complete day off to attend a Pitch Competition. It was the showcase day – a well known Entrepreneur Development Program that worked with literally 100’s of business owners each year and this was the best of them – the final 10 who would be pitching the business in a conference style format. I LOVE a good pitch and I LOVE the pursuit of the deal so I was ready to have my mind blown.

Except it wasn’t. Every single pitch started with ‘Hi, my name is, and I’m from, and I’m here to talk to you about x’. I do understand why the frameworks had to be similar, but that there, that was the single greatest mistake you can make in opening a pitch. And by the third person I was disappointed because it was all so, formulaic. By the sixth my heart was literally. breaking for them.

Thousands of dollars. Almost a year. And they did not how to create a standout pitch – remember, this was supposed to the best 10 of hundreds.

And so for the next 3 months I went to every single event I could find – from the free to the $500 per ticket to hear speakers, pitches, fireside chats, and panels. Some rooms the only thing I learnt was I never wanted to be back there! But the main thing I noticed was that from the free to the nowhere near free, very few speakers could simply hold the room. Very few made it worth my time.

So I then spent months going to the lead generation events for speaking training – the one day events many trainers ran – and discovered something. Every time you put business owner or entrepreneur anywhere near ‘speaking’ it became about sell from stage.

And it made me wild. When I invested heavily in speaking 20+ years ago it was in the craft of speaking; about becoming such a compelling and magnetic speaker that you didn’t have to sell from stage or even seeding the pitch.

I had already been training people to speak and sell – in my own businesses, in teams, and through some very ad hoc workshops – and I decided in a moment of arrogance I could do it better. So I deconstructed my own success, how I had been taught, and how i had been teaching others and created my own approach.

And to be honest, I think its been in test and iterate mode ever since, until the last twelve months – and the way we do it and the results we create has now become completely predictable, and 100% repeatable.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

As the driving force behind Any Given Tuesday, Jacqueline possesses a unique combination of entrepreneurial & C-Suite experience, making her the ideal advisor, advocate (& sometimes devil’s advocate) for powerful entrepreneurs seeking to elevate their expert positioning. With demonstrated success helping founders, coaches, consultants & advisors drive success through speaking centric strategies, Jacqueline offers a holistic approach to unlocking her client’s most powerful spoken brand identity

Together with her team, Jacqueline works with her clients to strengthen their outer voice (their voice to the world) by first working with their inner voice – teaching them how to embrace their inner critic, lean into their authentic speaking identity & crystalise the boldest iteration of their core message. She walks her clients through simple yet powerful strategies & frameworks to create impactful speeches & presentations which magnetise their ideal audiences

Fiercely strategic, unapologetically commercially savvy, & holding the global designation of Certified Speaking Professional, Jacqueline shifts her clients focus from ‘simply’ speaking to creating & strengthening business & revenue growth through speaking-centric strategies; where powerful, compelling & persuasive speaking takes centre stage in creating ripples of change simultaneously with accelerating reach, impact & revenue

She has personally coached & trained 100’s of entrepreneurs in Australia & the USA to step into speaking with strength, power & grace, & helped predominantly female consultants build from a $0 start to multi-million dollar portfolios within 12 months

Jacqueline’s clients work with her in immersive 1:1 experiences, live masterclasses, intensive masterminds, & coaching programs. She is an experienced Speaker, Facilitator, Advisor & Coach,& regularly delivers Pitching Masterclasses to entrepreneurial incubators and the global phenomenan TechStars Start Up Weekends

The problems we solve:
Breaking people through the Dome of You’re So Good! to Here’s My Cheque
For the invisible experts, we stop them losing work to noisier idiots
Generating revenue at a much higher scale than previously

The work I am proudest of:

Gosh so many – the Immersions. In the last 12 months we have perfected the format and the most recent one I have just completed script / audio reviews and every single one of them could go into the market immediately. Their courage, expertise and willingness to do it differently has created breakthroughs I could not have dreamed of even a couple of years ago – let along in 2015.

Working with the Australian Institute of Sport Olympic Gold Medal Alumni program as the Story Telling Skills Mentor, working with some of our greatest athletes and coaches to draw out their stories and teach them how to tell them masterfully; I worked in this program from 2018 until just recently and to be able to work with high performers, fast adaptors. to create this skill created a tangible difference in how they showed up in all the speaking roles in their careers, and their mentoring relationships with emerging Olympians

Breaking emerging speakers out of the free zone. One client in Sydney was a recognised, awarded speaker on Modern Slavery – a nurse, humanitarian, and passionate Modern Slavery Advocate, the truth was no-one would pay for a speaker with that expertise, even though demand was high. Using the same experience and building on her story telling skills we completely repositioned her speaking to translate that experience into creating cultures of courage – and in that she had to trust me to completely reposition her branding and her digital footprint. Very quickly after launch She is now in demand, paid very well, has picked up and is negotiating six figure contracts, and speaks more and more on great stages. As a socially-driven enterprise, she is also realising her dream of being able to invest back into the organisations that are the front line of her deepest passion – those that are making a difference in Modern Slavery

Can you talk to us about your experience with selling businesses?

In the early 2000’s I took over and reimagined a Family Owned Business in recruitment in Regional Queensland. I was able to grow it to the critical mass levels required for sale – and also had succession plans and systems in place to make that possible – even though we didn’t really intend to ever sell. In 2004 my then 2IC died by suicide and it devastated all of us, including me and by early 2005 I did not want to be involved any more. I was exhuasted and grief was leaking everywhere. We put the business on the market and although we had a lot of interest it wasn’t getting offers anywhere near our expectations – and with a husband in real estate I knew that meant something wasn’t valuing up. So we took it off the market and relisted it several months later. When we did that it sold quickly to an ASX Listed Company and I oversaw the transition, their return on investment, and my exit as soon as I had been able to achieve that.

The lessons I always want to share are many, including:
* Always have your business systemised and with a succession plan that doesn’t depend on you
* Have contracts in place; one of the reasons our business didn’t value up the first time is because we didn’t have long term contracts in place – even though we had 100% spend from some clients, sometimes for years. I implemented preferred supplier contracts on a rolling annual basis with all of those clients and that added significant value
* Understand the acquisitions team is often far different – culturally – to the operations team. We were a great match to the acquisitions team, not so much the operations team. And the first time I became aware of that was the day after settlement and it was a shock which I had to navigate; it wasn’t up to my team to do that – i was their leader, now their Branch Manager, and I needed to navigate this from the front and lead them through it in a way that meant they had the best chance of success in the new cultural environment
* Your team is everything. And not just your team in. your business; you should think of your team as yes your people; and your clients and your suppliers and your industry. The ‘broader team’ and the deep relationships created the foundation on which I was able to navigate the transition to the new ‘way of doing things’

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

(Story from my keynote will need to be adapted a little)

In mid-2015 as I was exiting my then CEO role, I had the space to really think about what I wanted to do next; and it was in this space that I realised I wanted to create a movement, one where women realised it was possible to be unapologetically brave and ambitious.

And so I spent months creating The Simpatico Connection to create a world of brave and ambitious women. And whilst I had developed programs which resulted in multi-year contracts with organisations across the East Coast of Australia – including Marie Claire, VCCI, and more – I wanted to launch the entire project in a way that could not be ignored.

And so I created a launch project, known as the Simpatico Conference Series. Roadshowing 2 day conference events across Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne before shifting to a gala event in Auckland. 4 Cities, thousands of guests.

I wanted impact and I went after, and secured, a Hollywood A Lister to headline the event series in every single location, delivering her first ever keynote and Q&A experience. Simply getting to contract signature took months!
The publicity the day we announced was beyond our expectations. Our A-Lister had taken the world by surprise, and media in almost every country in the world picked up the story. We generated millions of dollars in global publicity in a matter of weeks, and launched a literal freight train. We discovered, after the initial few weeks, it was a conversation people were craving and as the focus shifted from simply our Headline A Lister to the focus of the conference, my media engagements didn’t level out – they increased. To a point where one week held 7 flights, 5 cities and 55 interviews across print, radio and television.

But behind the scenes enforcing one particular contract was proving to be difficult. An incredibly dedicated team who were committed to the complete vision – beyond the conference series – worked to levels I have never witnessed before to make sure we were constantly able to shift to absorb the impacts which were huge.

5 Weeks out from the first conference date the contractual breach reached an impasse and with one phone call I suddenly realised there was no way to see this through. And more than that, I was not ever going to be able to speak about it because a legal team more powerful than mine were moving fast to hit me with a global, California gag order – yes they exist, and yes I am bound by one.

I looked across at my team who were working beyond human limits to deliver on our promise, stood up from my desk, grabbed my car keys, mentioned I would be out for a while, walked out the door and drove 90 minutes to my favourite mountain top.

I had no idea how I was going to manage what was coming. I just knew it was coming, I knew it would be on a greater scale than I had ever experienced, and that it would be devastating.

Then in the quiet space on that mountain top, the last place I should logically have been, I suddenly realised I knew exactly what I needed to do.

Because 12 years earlier I had been in an incredible position. The General Manager of a family owned multi-million dollar recruitment business in regional Australia, I had used the departure of my mother from the business to build a team that simply made our business hum. And part of that had been bringing on Alicia, who would grow into my most trusted 2IC, and by March 2004 we were in negotiations to, together, buy the business. I mentioned alicia’s death earlier.

In May 2004 Alicia suffered a complete Bi-Polar breakdown. Her sustained ‘high’ state had existed for a number of years, and with the trigger of the loss of her closest child hood friend to cancer her breakdown was complete.

The first time I was able to see her she was catatonic.

It was like watching a mirror shatter in front of you. In the six months, and several attempts to take her life before she succeeded in doing so, it was like walking on that shattered glass every single day. We had to bring her back to work on a gazetted return to work program and it was the first time I came to believe in the soul. Where her eyes were so devoid of the warmth of her spirit, that I had to bring in psychological support for my entire team to cope with being ‘around Alicia’. Where several times I was the one who stopped her taking her own life. Where suddenly her husband, who I had grown up with, turned from keeping me involved to blaming me for the gradual, soul destroying loss of his wife.

The day she succeeded in leaving us completely my world, not just the mirror shattered. And those shards deepened as I was first asked not to attend the funeral, and then blamed for her death, publicly, vehemently and repeatedly at her wake.

And being in a small regional community when I was blamed for her death at the wake, our multi-million dollar business literally halved over night – Not because people believed it to be true but because they simply didn’t know what to do with it.

But it was the onslaught of her husbands determination to destroy me; as someone who had moved through high school with me he knew my entire back story and he was relentless in his pursuit; the media; the glare; the reignition of my history in the public arena, my constant shift between rapidly recovering a business, buffeting my team and still showing up to parent my then young children has left scars at a soul level that I still carry today.

And in the warmth of the winter sun and a gentle breeze, surrounded by the smells of rainforest, on top of a stunning mountain in the Gold Coast Hinterland, the events of 2004, and thinking back over my life, I realised I knew exactly what to do; that I in fact had a process for being resilient.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://anygiventuesday.com.au
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacqueline-nagle/