We recently connected with Tanis Roeder and have shared our conversation below.

Tanis, appreciate you joining us today. Do you take vacations? Why or why not?

Yes! Work-life balance in my opinion is one of the most important things and it can easily get forgotten when you are working to build your own business.

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

I started competitively speaking when I was in Junior High School and knew then that I wanted to figure out how to make speaking my career. Over 2 decades later, I now run a business doing what I fell in love with before I could drive a car, speaking and training. I teach communication skills, public speaking, Emergenetics, and am now a Certified Guide for Exactly What To Say by Phil Jones. My passion is helping people own their brilliance when they speak up in front of 2 or more people. Building confidence is my specialty and I have had the opportunity to work with everyone from Doctors to Mortgage Originators and Farmers to Engineers. Elevating our communication skills can help us avoid conflict, be more effective and efficient, appear more confident, and direct a conversation in the direction we would like it to go.
I am proud to be doing what I set out so many years ago to do and can say that I love it even more than I thought I would. I have a few large clients who send me around the country to train their teams and although travel weeks sometimes get long, I wouldn’t want it any other way!

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Speaking! And no, this isn’t a shameless plug to hire me for a speaking workshop.

Every client I have is because someone heard me speak somewhere and asked me what else I could offer their team. The relationships would start with a single training and when it went well I would be brave enough to ask what else I could do for them.

I believe that speaking is an amazing marketing tool for any business, not just for a speaker/trainer. If you can be seen as an expert in your field people will be more likely to want to do business with you and a great way to be seen as an expert is to be in front of a group of people sharing your knowledge.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

I knew for years that I wanted to start my own business, but I wasn’t sure how to do it. I started speaking for free wherever I could, I got a side job with Monster.com speaking in High Schools, and I was going to Toastmasters regularly to fine tune my speaking skills. I worked hard to build up my savings before I quit my job so I would be able to spend time growing my business once I went out on my own.
The week after I quit my full time job and changed my LinkedIn profile I got a call from a large company who wanted to talk to me about an opportunity within their organization. I had met the CEO a while back and he told the Chief People Officer to reach out to me if I ever left the company I was working wtih. I was flattered, but had just started my own company so wasn’t interested in going to work for them full time. This company had a lot of respect for entrepreneurs and the CEO said if I wouldn’t come work for them full time they would be my biggest client! That’s how Elevate got a running start.

I was doing a lot of event planning and not a lot of speaking in the beginning, I would say yes to anything that helped me pay my bills. A few years in, when I decided to let go of all my event planning clients, was a big milestone for me. I knew it was time to put all of my effort into doing what it was that I set out to do – become a professional speaker and even though I loved event planning I knew it was distracting me.

I joined the National Speakers Association, made great friends in the industry that helped me learn and grow, and I have never looked back. I have added a few certifications to my toolbelt since then and each time I do it helps me expand my offerings and increase my client base. And to think, it all started with giving some free speeches about how to network!

Contact Info:

• Website: elevateyourcommunication.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tanisroeder/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TanisRoeder
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/communicationspeaker/
• Twitter: @TanisElevates
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQXqDGT_fsP4CdLwACsZ7tQ/videos