April 2, 2019 – Fireball Approves Tammy Sorrento, Speaker VA Lorianne Vaughan-Speaks and Market Update Gene Goldman

April 2, 2019 – Fireball Approves Tammy Sorrento, Speaker VA Lorianne Vaughan-Speaks and Market Update Gene Goldman

“The audio file was removed when we switched hosts. Sorry. The cost was prohibitive. If you need the file, contact us and we will send it.”

Tammy Sorrento – Founder of Fireball Approves Rental Investigation Agency

I was in contact with a scammer from Craig’s List and it opened
my eyes to how easy it is for someone to fall victim. I had this nagging
feeling I need to do something about it.

Tammy Sorrento is a Private Investigator with over 20 years of insurance adjusting and investigations. She created a business to keep consumers protected from misleading vacation rental ads. Tammy makes contact and verifies any rental ad, vacation to long-term rentals. She also provides Identity/Ownership verification. Are you wanting to rent a vacation home from Craigslist but are suspicious of scams? You will be able to confirm the name, address, phone and email of your contact. Fireball Approves will make sure you are dealing with the actual property owner.

Lorianne Vaughan-Speaks – Founder of LVS Consulting Services – Read interview highlights here

If you are spending 40% of your time do the business
development functions, or things not making any money,
its time to get a virtual assistant.

Lorianne Vaughan-Speaks has over 15 years of professional experience working with star speaker and authors. She takes care of all administrative functions. Lorianne has experience as Executive Coordinator and Office Manager for a well-known thought leader and their companies, supporting C-level management as well as creative personalities. She is THE detail person! She has been responsible for all office coordination as well as travel and company-wide meeting logistics. Lorianne also has extensive experience in recruitment and hiring in a variety of industries ranging from Administrative, Sales and C-Level hiring. Lorianne is now blogging and speaking to help small businesses survive in this new gig economy.

Gene Goldman – Chief Investment Officer and Director of Research, Cetera® Investment Management

We now have gridlock, and the general rule of thumb is that gridlock
is good for the economy. But not this time.

Gene Goldman is responsible for the strategic direction and continued growth of the firm’s research offerings. His role includes setting the vision for superior capabilities and enabling the delivery of objective investment advice. He provides day-to-day oversight of Cetera Investment Management, with a focus on providing unbiased research about the economy and financial markets, asset allocation strategies, mutual funds and other investment related topics. Mr. Goldman also helps oversee the investment committee and their commitment to delivering thought leadership on the economy, financial markets and investment strategies, as well as implementation and practice recommendations for advisors. Mr Goldman has more than 24 years of experience in the development of investment strategies, money manager research and overseeing investment analysts. Previously, he was a vice president and market strategist with LPL Financial, where he helped in the development and articulation of market and investment strategies. Before this role, Mr. Goldman served as lead strategist in the manager strategy group, where he supervised the research and analysis performed by the team’s analysts in the LPL Financial centrally managed and open architecture mutual fund and separately managed account platforms. Prior to joining LPL Financial in 1996, he spent two years at Liberty Financial, where he was a mutual fund product analyst within the Research Department.

Highlights from Lorianne’s Interview

I’ve been behind the scenes for so many years for authors and speakers. It never dawned on me to be the one to come out and speak. But when I was laid off about 16 months ago, at the ripe old age of 59, I found that corporate America didn’t want me. So I started my own company. As I grew, and wanted to have mentors help me, my mentor looked at me and went, “You need to be talking girl,” and I was thinking, “No, no, I’m the behind the scenes person. I’m the detail person.” And here I am. I’m actually out there talking, and it’s been a fun ride.

Being 59, I did have a bit of a nest egg. So I had started putting out resumes. And for the first time, after paying in for 43 years, I actually got unemployment for a whopping six months, which is not enough to pay the bills. But I have always had an entrepreneurial spirit. When I was raising my kids as a single mom, there was one point where I had four jobs. And I was always hustling something. So I have always had that entrepreneurial spirit. And I thought, “Okay, no one is responding to my resumes, because I’m old as dirt.” However, I had a whole bunch of legacy knowledge to offer, and I thought, “What’s the better way to do this?” So I started my own virtual assistants company. And I help up and coming authors and speakers now, because that’s what I did for a very well known thought leader for 15+ years.

I can do all the administrative office work kind of things. You come home from a talk, especially if it’s one of the big type of conferences, and you come home with 200 business cards, who the heck wants to type all that stuff in? Not even me, I have people on typing. That’s such a big part of keeping your CRM up to date, you need to stay on top of all this stuff. You can’t keep those cards for a month, and then finally have a day to put it in. By then they’ve forgotten who the hell you are; you want to be able to follow that up next week. These are the kind of things on the back end that we can help. But I also do a lot of social media for my people. If they’ve written an article or a blog, I will sit down and do all the tweets, create the tweets and the memes for them, depending on what their platforms are that they want to work from. What I tell all new speakers is get on every single platform, and then you focus on one or two, where your ideal clients are.

I like to direct my tweets to a more corporate level look. Again, it depends on the client, because I have clients that are very much the Coca Cola consultants, in HR leadership, employee relations, that kind of thing. And that’s a different kind of tweet that you would put out, compared to a healer type. Your verbiage needs to be correct for the site that you’re uploading to. It’s a matter of keeping your voice and making sure you’re authentic in presenting you, as opposed to doing it grammatically correctly in every single venue or platform. It’s a little bit of a tweak; I don’t like to send the same thing out to all sites. That’s just my preference. However, if it boils down to it, and my client says, “No, I want this to go on this, this, this and this,” I’ll do what they want. That’s the difference between a VA that you get online for $10 an hour, and myself, who will say, “Wait a minute, have you thought about this?”

I have clients who say, “I only want to do paid speeches,” and I sit there and go, “Babe, you’re not there yet. You need to pay your dues.” And if there’s a conference that you really want to speak at, but you don’t have that reputation yet, here’s one of the things that I tell them, volunteer to be on their committee or volunteer to work the event for them. So that you get to know that program manager, introduce yourself, and do an awesome job in volunteering. And then they’ll remember your name when you go to submit to speak the following year. You need to take a look at the fact that to speak for free is good. If you have a training package, or something that you want to sell to that audience from your speech, don’t turn down the free speeches. Talk any time and every time someone asks you, until you’ve reached that stage where you can pick and choose.

I’m not saying go Trumps all over the world and spend $50,000 of your own money to do these things you really want to pick and choose. But there will be conferences. And I say that even the thought leader that I worked with as a full time employee, who had 40 years of experience and was up there, at the very top of her field, there are conferences that do not pay. They might pay for the night at the hotel, or maybe even coach airfare, but she would do that, because she would then be in front of thousands of people. So worth it, so worth it. Because if you sit there and think, “Okay, my training package costs $1,000, and it costs me $500 to go to this conference,” all you need is one client, and you’ve already paid it and gotten twice your return.

In your social media, when you are out there are you following the people that you want to be when you grow up? That’s my little term, follow that person in your field, who is at the top of the of the chain, and comment on every post they post with an intelligent conversation. You want to be authentic in your knowledge. Don’t just post to post, but make it an interesting and articulate comment on his post, he will know you or she will notice you as well as his or her thousands of followers. And they may click on you and go, “That guy really had something awesome to say. Let me see what he’s got on his Twitter feed or on his whatever,” and they will start to follow you. This grows your reputation out there in the field. And, and it gains attention. So follow that person you want to be or who’s at the top of the chain.

When you start out, we all start out as an office of one. But doing that administrative work, if you’re spending 40% of your time doing the administrative functions, the minutia that has to be done, but it’s not making you any money, that’s time to get a VA. I know it’s scary to hire an employee. You think, “Oh my god, I’m gonna have to give them 40 hours a week, and blah, blah, blah.” Now, that’s where VAs are amazing. And if you’re spending that much time on the administration, you need to hire a VA. It doesn’t need to be me. But you need to have someone that’s in there, that’s doing all the detail work for you. I’ve found a lot of speakers and authors are very creative. So they’re not necessarily always the real detail person. They come up with a great idea. “Now go make it work, Gloria,” you know, that kind of thing. So my one piece of information is if you’re growing, and you’re finding you’re spending too much time on all the backend stuff, hire a VA. My mentor said she went from $1500 dollars a month to a six figure salary, because she hired a VA to take all the stuff that she didn’t even do well off of her plate.

The website is lvsconsultingservices.com. Again, lvsconsultingservices.com, Lorianne Vaughan-Speaks.