Steve Larsen Interview Fail — How Not To Get Stood Up For Influencer Interviews
The Steve Larsen interview that didn’t happen and my biggest lessons from being stood up by an influencer. And why it was the best thing for my business this year.
Boom. Welcome back. My name is Vince Trujillo, and this is Breakthru Entrepreneur. Today, I wanted to share the story with you about how I was able to get an interview with an influencer named Stephen Larsen, what I did in the four months before that interview was to happen, or rather didn’t do, and how getting stood up for that interview by Stephen Larsen with no call, no show, no reason why, was the best thing to happen to me and got me to ask the question, how do I become the type of person that an influencer does not stand up? My biggest mistakes and the lessons I learned, right after this.
So let’s get right into it. For those of you who don’t know who Steve Larsen is, he’s a coach and a speaker in the direct marketing and offer creation arena. He’s also has a great YouTube and a podcast channel. He has a great success story of going from zero to seven figures in just the last few years alone. And he happens to be one of my favorite coaches when it comes to marketing and tactics and strategy because of the easy way he explains things, uses storytelling, and it just makes sense to me.
So he’s speaking in a conference earlier this year called Funnel Hacking Live. It’s an amazing conference. I highly suggest you look into it, has some of the best marketing minds on the planet. So he’s dropping knowledge bombs. He’s talking about the importance of building a platform, building a customer list, and practicing content as quickly as you can. As a matter of fact, he’s saying, “Leave the conference now, start practicing in the lobby, get content, practice adding value, practice solving problems and giving solutions to your ideal audience as quickly as you can. It’s the most valuable thing you can do in your business.”
And at the time, I’m considering starting a YouTube channel or a podcast, and this is exactly what I needed to hear. And he says, “One of the best ways to start is by doing interviews. You can interview people. You can do it on a podcast. You can also do it on video, and it’s an easy way to practice content without having to memorize scripts. It’s a good way to interact with a network of people who are also trying to build lists or they’re already influencers themselves.”
And he decides that he’s going to do this great giveaway to this room of about 5,000 people. He says, “Look, I’ll help you get somebody on that some people recognize and would want to listen to. You can actually interview me. It’s something that I’ve been doing for a while.” He says, “And I’m happy to help some of you out. You go to this website address.” He gives us the address, and he says, “You can schedule an interview. You can go to the calendar there and pick a time and a slot, and I’ll be happy to do a 20 minute interview with you.”
So all of us start scrambling. I’m already on my phone looking up stuff he’s been talking about, and I’m typing in madly. In the sea of darkness, all of these phones rise, and computers start typing away. He says, “But one important caveat, if you take a spot, meaning you’re taking a place from somebody else on my calendar, make sure you’re ready the day of.” He said, “There’s a pretty decent number of people who schedule because they have FOMO, fear of missing out, and they want to make sure they get a slot. But then the time comes, and they’re not ready for the interview, or they want to reschedule.” He says, “If you go through this, please make sure that you’re ready the day of, that you’ve done the things to prepare yourself for that, and you’re ready to go.”
So about half the phones start falling, and I’m still typing away. I go scroll, scroll, scroll, one month, two months, three months, four months. He’s all booked up. Fourth month, four or five months, Tuesday, 11:00 AM. Boom. I schedule it. I get the confirmation email. I’m excited. I got a interview with Steve Larsen. So I leave the event, and as many of you who have been to these types of events knows, you’re amped up, and you’re high on energy for about a week or two, and you have all these lists of things that you’re going to implement from the conference, and you really intend to do it.
But little by little, life gets in the way or things that are going on your business take hold. I mean, I own a digital agency, so I’m running a team. I have clients that I need to do attend to. I have fires to put out, and I start to put, little by little, all of these things on the back shelf of things that I’m going to do very soon. Four months turns into two months, turns into one month, and sure enough, little by little, I’m a week out from this interview. I haven’t really prepared. I haven’t set up a studio. I don’t know the exact questions I’m going to ask, and I’m starting to sweat because what he said to us at that conference is starting to become reality. I’m thinking, “Wow, I really wish I could push this off another month or two so that I can prepare.”
So I decide what I’m going to do is I set up a little bit of a platform in my living room facing a window, so I get decent lighting. I looked up on how to do internet interviews on Skype. And supposed to get a microphone, and I didn’t want to mess with any of that. I was like, “I just got to get this going.” And I set up some boxes on a desk. I have my computer there. The lighting is the light coming in from the window facing me, and I’m just going to do my best job.
11:00 is here. I look at the email. I hit the Skype address that I’m supposed to at that time, and it starts calling, ring, ring, ring. And I’m sitting there a little bit nervous and smiling into the camera and looking at my first notes and my questions and how I’m going to introduce him. And no answer, so I get a chance to breathe, calm down a little bit. I call back again, ring, ring, ring. No answer again. I do this for about 20 minutes. So one hour turns into two hours and no response yet back. Nothing on the Skype, nothing on the Facebook or Instagram, anywhere else. But I do see on some of his social media accounts that he’s had some interviews maybe the day before, a couple of days before, and it looks like he may be at some event during this time that we’re supposed to have our interview.
And I finally get an email back from his assistant. He says, “Sorry, it was a miscalculation. He’s at this event. Love to try to figure out a way to reschedule you sometime in the future.” I’m starting to realize he’s at this event with other influencers while we were supposed to have my interview. And later on that week, he posts some other interviews and some other content. So he made sure that he didn’t miss some of these other interviews. He didn’t miss his event.
And what this proves to me is that I wasn’t somebody that Stephen Larsen couldn’t stand up. I had not done the homework. I had not put the time and effort into my craft, into my platform, into building a list so that Steve Larsen saw that date on his calendar coming up, or his assistant did, and they thought, “Wow, this is something. This is an event that we don’t want to miss. This is an influencer that we probably want to keep this date with.”
Now, I’m not saying that that’s what they did or didn’t do. It was probably just a mistake in planning. But for me, I was starting to get some valuable feedback for myself, some little bit of takeaways on what I could do next. So I want to share that with you right now my biggest takeaways on getting stood up by Steve Larsen and on the path of becoming somebody that he didn’t want to stand up in the future or that any influencer wouldn’t. And I hope these takeaways help you.
Number one, do what Stephen Larsen told you to do. Now in this case, it applies to Steve Larsen. But in other cases, whatever coach or mentor or speaker or person that you admire, that you’re learning from and they’re giving you some great breakthroughs on things that you need to do in your business or in your life, treat it with the dignity and respect for what you’re paying to learn it and for the experience that they’re bringing to it as well. So when I say what you’re paying into it, you’re paying with time, attention, focus, money. Whatever you’re doing with the podcast or video or article you’re reading or at the live event you’re at, take heed that these are people who’ve gone before you, that these are people imparting valuable knowledge that could transform your life. I didn’t treat the information that I got at that conference with the respect it deserved because I hadn’t yet started acting on any of that information.
This brings me to the second point, which is implement. Implement, implement, speed to implementation is usually discussed as one of the traits that separates high-performing and successful entrepreneurs and people from others that don’t achieve that same level. It’s taking a great idea or a vision or something that you want to do and acting on it immediately. I had not been doing things for four and five months before this interview that didn’t happen. I hadn’t been practicing. I hadn’t been doing the other things that they had already told me to do, review them, and start implementing immediately. That’s actually one of the few things they told us to do over the last year, just start, and I didn’t do that.
Number three, I didn’t put any effort or attention into who the channel was going to be focused on. Who was my ideal avatar? What problems and solutions were we going to be discussing on the channel? What were the topics going to be, how I wanted eventually to be able to provide valuable service or information to this group? So that was part of the reason why I was so nervous when I was going to get on the interview. I didn’t have an idea about who I was or putting myself forward as it applies to this new channel and much less being able to have a conversation with someone like Stephen Larsen about it.
Number four, I could have been doing practice on my channel or practice communicating for an entire four months before this interview. I could have just done it on my cell phone. I didn’t need a studio to do it. I didn’t even need video to do it. I could have done it on my phone. If you look at some of the first videos and even some of the videos now from Stephen Larsen, and now this is a coach and a speaker, he’s built a seven figure business in just the last couple of years himself, sometimes he’s just getting on his cell phone and spitting knowledge at the camera. He’s getting out there and practicing his craft, practicing ideas, telling people about it and letting it work itself out and seeing what the reaction is to his audience.
Now speaking and having a platform and being a person of influence starts with how you communicate, and the only way I was going to get better at that is having practiced for a while. So I literally did no reps before this interview. It’s the same as working out. How do I expect to get in shape if I don’t do one single exercise? The same thing applied to my content. I had done no effort, no practice whatsoever in getting in front of a camera, in talking, in trying to speak, in being articulate, in practicing my craft. I had put no effort into that either. So all of this is so important for the direction I was going to be going in. I literally had a blueprint right in front of me, and I chose to ignore it.
So I wanted to thank you. Thank you, Steve Larsen, for standing me up. Thank you for forcing me to actually go back and reassess the way I had been doing things. Most of all, thank you for the amazing content, the value, the tips, strategies, tactics that you provide all the time to other entrepreneurs and people trying to make their way in the digital marketing world. I appreciate you for all of those lessons, and I’m so thankful that I was actually able to recall those and apply them toward the direction I was going at this time myself.
And I’m so happy that it’s helped me build the Breakthru Entrepreneur channel that I have now. I literally completely did a 180 the direction I thought I was going to go in. And I decided I want to speak to digital entrepreneurs. I want to talk about marketing strategy. I want to come up with entertaining videos to talk about getting stood up by influencers, or in another video, I’m talking about some cool sunglasses that another coach and mentor of mine, Alex Charfen, wears as well. I want to talk about bio hacking. I want to talk about whatever’s going to help get an entrepreneur, whatever level that they’re at, to their next level the same way that I’m looking for my next breakthrough all of the time as well.
So thanks for listening, and I hope you got some value from the mistakes I made, and you can learn how you can start moving forward and building that platform and serving that tribe that you know you should be doing as well. Hit the like button and subscribe below. Turn on the notifications so that you can hear about some of my upcoming videos, including how I set up this studio right after that Steve Larsen stand up. I went down and started building this thing, and it turned out pretty good. So thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you soon. Take care.
