Brandy M Miller - Path To Connections™

Case Study in Strategic Success: Speak 2 Be Heard

With rent prices rising faster than her substitute teaching pay could grow, Cheryl needed to find a solution to her financial challenges…and fast. She turned to Path To Connections for help.

Turning Her Problems into Profits

Brandy worked with her to find a problem she already knew how to solve that she could leverage so she could start on a shoestring without having to invest a lot of money in equipment or take a lot of extra time to build her expertise. That problem? Overcoming the fear of public speaking.

Cheryl once struggled with the fear of public speaking and joined Toastmasters in 1988. She rose through the rank to Area Governor at one point before leaving Toastmasters. She returned to her old club, Denton Toastmasters, in 2018. Her award-winning performances and talent for infusing joy into every speech provided her a perfect platform for success as a speaker and coach.

Preparing to Do Business as Speak 2 Be Heard

We walked her through what she needed to do to set her business on solid financial footing:

Registering with the City to get her business license
Establishing her business bank account
Setting up Stripe and Paypal accounts so she could accept payments on her site and at events

Getting Her M.A.P. (Marketing and PR) Ready

Stage one of getting her M.A.P. ready was to help her build her website. We spent time walking her through the process of choosing her brand colors and workshopping the initial offerings, pricing, and packages. We also worked with her to help her decide what she could offer that would help her stand out from other speaking coaches. She chose to focus on infusing every speech with joy so that audiences that listen to her clients walk away feeling uplifted as well as enlightened by the content.

Providing Guidance and Training

Connecting to the SBDC and SCORE for Mentorship

We knew from our own experiences that the SBDC and SCORE could offer her free ongoing mentorship and support beyond what we could provide, so we encouraged her to make those connections.

Attending the B.O.S.S. Workshop

To help turn her into the B.O.S.S. of her industry, we invited her to participate in the B.O.S.S. (Business of Strategic Storytelling) workshop in July of 2024. During the workshop, we helped her to put her brand story and personal narrative. It wasn’t until the workshop was nearly at an end that we discovered she’d written it all by hand instead of using the computer to take notes, making it hard for her to copy and paste the way other students did.

Taking the 5-Steps to Get Anyone to Lean In and Listen To You

As part of our gift to the students who participated in that first cohort, she received complementary access to our 5-Steps course.

Finding Success

Using what she learned, she attended a free business networking event where she received an invitation to give a speech to 40 members of a different business networking group. The speech went so well she was invited to give a paid speech before the roughly 40 men and women who are served by Denton Freedom House. That paid speech is scheduled for December 20th and represents the start of financial success for this 74-year-old expert speaker.

Get Help from Speak 2 Be Heard

Visit speak2beheard.com for basic or advanced coaching with Cheryl or to schedule her for a paid speaking engagement.

A Storytelling Roadmap

When I started my storytelling journey, I faced a common problem: I didn’t know how to begin, where to end, or what belonged in the middle. After working with writers and entrepreneurs for many years, I developed a universal storytelling roadmap. The roadmap ensured that every storyteller could feel confident about where to start, where to end, and what to put in the middle. It also allowed them to identify who might need to hear that story just by focusing on who faced that problem.

Why Build a Storytelling Roadmap?

Building a storytelling roadmap helps you ensure you’re taking your audience on a journey to a destination they want to visit. It also allows you to speak, write, or create with confidence, knowing what to include to be sure you get your audience from where they are to where they want to be. Here are 9 points to hit when you’re building your roadmap:

1. Ask a Relevant Question

Ever felt the frustration of listening to someone ramble on and on with no idea where they’re trying to take you or how long the trip is going to be? Imagine those are your readers or your listeners in the audience. You don’t want that experience for them.

Asking a relevant question, though, perks them up. It hints at where the journey’s going to take them and gets them reacting to you right away. The question should be directly related to what you’re going to talk about or it’s just a tease – and nobody likes those. Your goal: to get them to raise their hand and say “yes” to whatever you just asked them.

2. Prepare Them for the Journey

Identify the problem that you’re going to help them solve by the time you reach the end of the talk. Choose one they want to solve.

3. Reveal Your H.E.A.R.T.

You want to earn their trust right off the bat and reassure them that you get them. You understand where they are and why they want so badly to be where it is you’re going to help them go.

To do that, you’re going to need to share your humanity, your empathy, your authenticity, your reliability, and your trustworthiness – in other words, your H.E.A.R.T.!

Don’t be afraid to share your mistakes and failures. Tell them what it felt like when you first faced up to this problem. What stopped you from getting the results you can now help them get? What biases did you have to overcome or false expectations did you have to reset?

The more vulnerable you can be in sharing this, the more you encourage your audience to be vulnerable with you about their mistakes, their biases, and the things that are holding them back from accepting your solution.

4. Wow Them with the Truth!

Give them an insight, a perspective, or a way of looking at things that they never would have if you hadn’t come along. This truth either allowed you to make progress in getting past your mistakes or it stopped you from failing. That allowed you to finally find the solution. As long as you’re being genuine, this moment of truth establishes your credibility and wins them over to the idea of working with you.

5. Explain the Solution

Sharing the solution you uncovered as a result of embracing that truth helps them take another step forward in their journey. You become, at this point, a trusted advisor and mentor guiding them through the many obstacles they face in implementing that solution.

6. Present Your Obstacles

Don’t think it’s necessary for you to have your life all together in order to gain credibility and authority. The truth is that nobody has their life altogether no matter what the appearances may be. Your audience needs you to prepare them for what’s to come. What pit traps and potholes did you fall into or false roads did you take? What potholes did you hit? Let them about those so they know what to expect ahead of time.

7. Give Them Your Answers

Now that you’ve been on that journey, you know how to get past the pit traps, the potholes, and how to spot the false roads. Share the secrets you discovered that help you do this.

8. Share the Results

What amazing changes came to your life because you went on this journey? What were you able to do or where were you able to go that you never thought possible?

Did the reality match the vision you’d had? If not, was it better or worse? Be honest with these things because your audience needs to trust you. If it didn’t meet your expectations but was worse, why are you recommending they go on that journey anyway? What are they going to gain by it?

Maybe the journey makes them tougher, stronger, or wiser. Those are worthwhile goals they may not have considered.

9. Paint a Picture of the Transformation

Your life changed once you learned to solve the problem and put that solution to work for you. It changed the person you were into the person you are today. You want to give your audience hope that their life can transform just like yours did. The more vivid a picture you paint, the easier it will be for people to imagine it and – more importantly – to want to go with you on that journey.

Storytelling Isn’t Just for Writers or Speakers

There are a million ways to tell stories: with art, music, dance, games, websites, graphic design, fabric and fashion design, architecture, product design…if you create it, you can use it to tell a story. Even your business tells a story. We help you make sure the story you’re telling shows your ideal audience why you’re the B.O.S.S. of your industry so you attract the right customers or clients for you.

Want Help Crafting Your Story Roadmap?

Just reach out to brandy@pathtoconnections.com and let’s book a free discovery call for you or join our next B.O.S.S. (Business of Strategic Storytelling) workshop.

Building Relationships Versus Bartering: Creating Connections Versus Conducting Transactions

At Path To Connections™, we emphasize the importance and power of building long-term relationships with other people. Those relationships aren’t limited to connections with other business owners, either. Every relationship you build expands the number of people who know you and know what you can do, and accelerates your potential for success.

Relationship Building and Bartering Are Different

Relationship building takes time and involves multiple encounters where the two of you explore your compatibility and alignment as you work to find common ground while learning more about one another. While the goal remains finding ways to benefit one another, there’s no specified agenda for how you’ll be doing that.

While you may barter with someone you’ve formed a relationship with at some point in time, relationship building and bartering are not the same thing.

Bartering involves making a strategic exchange of goods or services for the mutual benefit of both parties. It’s a short-term connection that lasts as long as it takes to complete the transaction.

Bartering is a great way to get goods or services you need without paying out of pocket. It allows you to stretch your budget and every smart business owner does this, but it’s no substitute for relationships.

There’s nothing wrong with bartering with those people you meet if you feel you can offer something they need. However, the greater gains in terms of accelerating your success come from longer-term relationships. It’s these relationships that become the cornerstone of your support network, helping you to navigate tough times and make it past challenges.

5 Tips for Growing Your Relationship Skills

1. Connect for Success.

It’s hard to build relationships if you’re not connecting with other people. Choose one or two organizations to start. Attend meetings often enough that people know to expect to see you there.

2. Show Up, Participate, and Get Involved.

Show up regularly and participate in activities when you do. Be ready to roll up your sleeves and get involved in the work required to run things.

3. Seek to Serve, Not Be Served.

80% of people in any group are there to get something, not to give. Being part of that rare 20% seeking to serve rather than be served automatically sets you apart and makes people want to get to know you.

4. Keep In Touch

They say the fortune is in the follow-up. You don’t build strong relationships if you aren’t willing to follow up after the meeting and deepen the initial connections you’ve formed. Take it slow in the beginning. Increase the amount of contact when you see how responsive they are to the first bits of outreach.

5. Build a Relationship SOP.

We highly recommend spending some time to think through what you want to say and how you want to say it, how you plan to cultivate and build your relationships, and how you will handle the inevitable conflicts that come up in relationships. You can’t plan for every situation, but the more planning you do, the more prepared you’ll be.

Putting this down on paper in a Standard Operating Procedure document offers many advantages to you. It allows other people to communicate on your behalf when you can’t be there to do it, allowing you to send someone to network in your place. It also helps you to train people. A Communications, Relationship Building, and Conflict Resolution SOP is something we have created for our brands across the board, as well a customize them for our clients as well.

Not Sure How to Build a Relationship SOP?

Download our free sample Relationship SOP. It gives you a basic idea of what we included in ours so you can adapt it to fit your needs.

Want Help Creating a Relationship SOP?

We’d love to help! Email brandy@pathtoconnections.com with a subject line of [RELATIONSHIP SOP] to request a free consultation.

Connect for Success

When I first started a business with my husband, back in November of 2011, we thought we knew what marketing involved. He’d worked in radio and, as a DJ, often participated in the company’s promotional strategy sessions.

I’d worked for a Fortune 500 company in their marketing division. I’d been directly involved in planning their grand opening events – 20 to 30 of them per month – working with suppliers, entertainers, advertisers, security, and store managers to create strategic plans that would make the most of the $5,000 – $10,000 budgets they allocated to each event.

Discovering the Power of Connections

I soon discovered that there is a massive difference marketing to a warm audience that knows your brand and comes pre-educated about the benefits of buying from you versus marketing to a cold audience that doesn’t know anything about you or what you do.

I also faced another massive obstacle: we operated on a $0 marketing budget. None of the strategies and tactics we learned from my days spent working in marketing fit the situation we faced.

Our skills in developing relationships came to my aid. We leveraged my husband’s radio experience and technological expertise to trade advertising services with a local radio station. We leveraged my artistic talents and writing skills to form connections with the local art club and started a local writing group.

Those connections got us free office space in exchange for acting as the art club’s receptionist. Building a connection to the only local bookstore in town got our writer’s group free meeting space and helped us get a book signing to promote in the paper. All these connections eventually started bringing business our way as artists, writers, and small business owners began getting to know us and what we could do for them.

Pursuing a Dream

In 2016, I launched a writing business and connected with The And I Thought Ladies while on a podcast about an idea I conceived for putting together a reality TV show for writers. They leveraged their connections in film and media to try and help me get that show off the ground. No one wanted to pick it up. Nobody in Hollywood knew my writing abilities or why they should invest in me.

One producer called the show idea “too esoteric” to be of interest to the general public, even though surveys show that 80% of people believe they have a book in them even if fewer than 3% will ever sit down to write and finish one. Shark Tank’s on its eleventh season despite fewer than 65% of people believing they have a business in them. The interest existed – we just needed to prove it.

The Ladies encouraged me not to quit on the dream. We began working together and I became the editor for their literary magazines. That connection provided me free advertising for my books and events while helping promote other authors, agents, publishers, and editors.

In 2018, The Ladies invited me to participate as a presenter in their Experienced Writer’s Retreat in Las Vegas. That next year, they invited me back but this time, Joylynn happened to be presenting at that same retreat. The connection we formed that day led to us joining forces to start up Path To Connections ™.

Turning a Dream into a Reality

I’m happy to say that I did get my Writing Reality TV show last August. We posted the 4 preliminary episodes on YouTube, where you can still find them today. Joylynn participated in making that a reality and the And I Thought Ladies nudged me into revising my vision to a stripped-down version that made the execution possible without the $2.5 million budget I’d originally thought I’d need. It came together on a $0 budget.

They say that success in life depends less on what you know and more on who knows you, and a measure of truth can be found in that. However, in my experience, the more important thing in determining success is who knows you and who knows what you can do. Serving others shows your value and helps to nurture the connections that drive success.

I can tell you for a fact that connections are the key to making any dream a reality. The more connections you form, and the stronger the connections are, the greater your chances of making your dream happen and the sooner you can make it a reality. It may not look exactly the way you envisioned by the time it does become a reality, but that’s not a bad thing. Your vision didn’t take into account all the variables around it.

5 Steps to Forming Connections That Last

There are five basic steps to forming connections that last. Put this recipe to work for you and you’ll watch as the impossible becomes possible.

1. Show Up Strategically

Showing up in places that don’t connect to what you do or want to be known for doing doesn’t help you. It’s kind of like taking a business presentation to a pool party. It’s not only likely to be a giant waste of your time and energy – it’s equally likely to be an annoyance and a waste of time for the people attending. So choose where you show up with care and be sure you’re strategic when you get there.

2. Be Prepared to Serve Others

The root cause of most social anxiety? Thinking too much about what other people are going to think of us or worrying about offending them with what we say or do. That anxiety can be so bad that we end up creating the very problems we’re striving to avoid. It robs us of the ability to enjoy the event we’re attending.

The best way to relieve the social anxiety? Focus on serving the needs of others. Looking and listening for opportunities to serve others will put your mind to work doing something helpful and productive rather than something toxic and emotionally draining.

3. Follow Up with Your Connections

When you meet someone you think you might be able to serve at an event, or did serve at an event, be sure to follow back up with them after the event is over. That’s how I ended up landing a copywriting gig and working with Vyond and ManyChat, helping them with their Facebook advertising needs.

Service plants the seeds of your connections, but following up cultivates those seeds. It allows them to grow and to eventually bear fruit.

4. Be Strategic in Cultivating Your Relationships

The bigger your list grows, the harder it becomes to manage without assistance. Use relationship management software to support you in this area. Leverage it to keep track of important dates and milestones in their lives, as well as when you last connected to or contacted them, what the conversation covered, and any notes about your next steps with them.

5. Connect Your Connections for Greater Success

Path To Connections ™ exists because the And I Thought Ladies took their time to connect me to Joylynn M. Ross, the CEO and Founder of Path To Publishing. Sometimes all you may have to offer someone in terms of service is help with a connection – but those connections are powerful things that can open doors and change lives. Don’t be afraid to offer to bring two people who can serve one another together.

If you know someone you think might be able to help us achieve our vision of bridging the gaps between small business owners and the government, corporate, bank, and educational institution programs, initiatives, and funding that’s meant to help them succeed, we’d love to connect. Contact us with a subject line of [CONNECT FOR SUCCESS] and we’ll be in touch.

Get More Help Connecting for Success

As part of our efforts to help you gain more traction when trying to connect with others, we’re offering our “5 Steps to Get Anyone to Lean In and Listen to You” course at no cost to you.

Course Outline:

Introduction: What the course will do for you, who the instructor is, and why she’s confident she can help.

Step 1. Know Your Audience: The value of asking the right questions to tap into the needs of your audience before moving forward.

Step 2. Show Up to Serve: How the attitude you adopt when you approach your audience impacts the outcome and sets the stage for success…or failure.

Step 3. Create Your Message: Creating a message tailored to your audience that’s based on everything you’ve learned about them.

Step 4. Connect With Your Audience: How to get connected to your audience so you are in position to deliver your message.

Step 5. Deliver Exceptional Value: Why you should always go above and beyond when delivering services to your intended audience.

Conclusion: The next steps to take.

Add a digital workbook filled with exercises to help you make the most of your instruction and a copy of the slide deck to help you remember what you’ve learned, all for just $7.