Marc's Musings

October Meat Pie: My own creation

Marc A. Pitman — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 02:16:52 +0000

This year, I’ve been making a meat pie a month.

This month I created my own: a beef, bacon, red wine, and cheese pie. (Gotta work on the name.) I’d made pies with beer but not wine so I used some of the Fish Eye Shiraz we had in the box on our counter. I took some tips from this steak and ale pie recipe.

The ingredients were:

a couple pounds of chop steak
a pound of bacon
a couple onions, chopped
mushrooms, chopped
a cup of wine (Fish Eye Shiraz)
a cup of beef broth
some Worcestershire sauce
some thyme
a dash of nutmeg
fresh ground pepper
flour to thicken the gravy
pre-made crust

I cooked the bacon. Then I carmelized the onions in the same pan. I set them aside to make room to brown the steak. Then I added the onions back in and about a 1/3 cup of flour. Then wine and broth and mushrooms all went in and it simmered for a couple hours. (I added more flour to make it thicker.)

I also cut up 4-5 strips of bacon and added it to the simmering stew.

While that was going, I made some mashed sweet potatoes. (Having just heard Paula Deen on NPR, I added a stick of butter when I mashed it.)

I put the stew in the pie crust and topped it with more bacon and a handful of cheddar cheese. It baked at 400 for 40 minutes. (I brushed egg on the crust just to be fancy. And no, not all the bacon went into the pie. Some mysteriously disappeared in the process.)

Another very tasty pie! A little dry, it probably didn’t need to simmer so long. But still very tasty!

10 down; 2 to go!

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November Meat Pie: Another Recipe with Wine

Marc A. Pitman — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 19:43:22 +0000

I enjoyed last month’s pie so much that I went looking for another pie with wine. I stumbled across this recipe for Dad’s Favorite Aussie Pie on the website for Greg Norman Estates Wine.

Ingredients
1 lb ground sirloin
1 lb ground lamb
1 medium yellow onion, diced small
2 large carrots, cleaned and diced small
2 large celery stalks, cleaned and diced small
2 cloves garlic, small diced
2 cups fresh or frozen green peas
1 cup red wine
½ cup beef broth
3 Tbsp Worcheshire Sauce
1 Tbsp tomato paste
1 Tbsp dried oregano
2-4 Tbsp all-purpose flour
Freshly made pastry dough or 2 sheets store-bought pastry dough
1 Tbsp Extra-virgin olive oil
2 Tbsp unsalted butter
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 egg

Not being into lamb, I opted for 2 pounds of ground beef.

The recipe calls for sautéing the onions, carrots, celery, and garlic until slightly soft. Then you add in the meat. Once it is fully cooked, you add the rest of the stuff.

The recipe calls for putting the pie that is ready for the oven on a cookie sheet. I sure wish I’d done that! This pie was so moist that it bubbled over and left a coating on the bottom of the oven. Whoops!

Aside from that, this was an amazing pie!

Next time, I’ll put a cookie sheet underneath it…or remember to clean up the oven when I’m done.

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Thoughts on starting a speaking business

Marc A. Pitman — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 01:59:51 +0000

As I get ready to be the guest tonight on Michele Price’s #speakchat Twitter chat, I’ve been thinking about building a speaking career. There are lots of thoughts swirling through my mind. I hope these help encourage you at whatever step you are in the process.

Reasons to Start a Speaking Business

When I was 16, I promised myself to never be at the mercy of only one stream of income. As a verbal extrovert, speaking was right up my alley! Speaking has the benefits of

When you’re speaking, you’re getting to help a lot of people at the same time.
As a speaker, you get to travel to various locations (not that you stick around long enough to see the sites!).
The very act of speaking at conferences and to teams gets your name out to other people who might want to hire you. Groups love having speakers promote their sessions. And speakers should because it lets prospects know what you do and that you like doing it!
Speaking is well suited for other types of products.
- You can record your talks and sell them as CDs and digital downloads.
- You can get videos of your talks and sell them as DVDs or downloads.
- And you can write out your talks and seminars to create blog posts or ebooks.
Speaking is incredibly fun. You get to come into a place, share helpful ideas, remind people how great they are, and then go home. Any follow up is another type of income!

Increasing Bookings Using the “Ask Without Fear!” Strategy

In my fundraising book Ask Without Fear!, I encourage people to raise money with a four step strategy: reasearch, engage, ask, love. Let’s see how this works with speaking.

Research
First you need to know what you know. What are you good at talking about? And why you? What is your unique “point of view”? Why will people hear you?

Then you need to research where people are looking for something like this. It’s really helpful to have a specific niche. You could talk about sales training, but you will have better results if you speak to a specific type of sales. Cell phone sales in retail locations? Anything.

You know if you have a good niche if there are already associations, conferences, and events supporting that same niche.

Pigeon holing yourself to a niche is probably the hardest thing for us as speakers. We know that we can help everyone with our topic. But no one hears something pitched at “everyone.” They start listening as you target them. All my goal setting and leadership expertise wasn’t worth anything to “everyone.” But as I focused on helping nonprofit boards raise lots of money, people started hiring me.

The funniest thing to me is that once you specify a niche, people from other sectors will bring you in too! The most out-of-niche gig so far was speaking at the Bowl Expo in Las Vegas. But you know what, nonprofit fundraising has a lot to do with owning a bowling center!
Engage
Get to know the people both who’ll be hiring you and who’ll you’ll be speaking to. What are they currently talking about. What has their attention? Social media? A new gadget? See if your talk can incorporate that.
Ask
Do all you can to ask to speak. As much as I hate them, I am a sort of fan of cold calls. Really. I find the more cold calls I do, the more calls I get from people actually looking for speakers like me. I’m not sure what it is, but I’m not messing with what’s working!

One form of “cold call” I do I call a my conference rescue. If you’ve ever organized a conference, you know that speakers always drop out at the last minute. So I call or email offering to help. If they’re interested, we talk about the topic (usually you have to take what they’ve already been publicizing). Then you talk about the fee–in addition to travel expenses. I tend to offer to come down on my rate for the conference rescue folks.
Love
Thank the people that hire you, the people that listen to you, and anyone else along the way. Thank them publicly on your blog and privately in notes and emails.

One way I show love to attendees is to offer something of value to them. I usually offer to email my PowerPoint slides to them after the session if they give me their business card. That allows me to follow up with them.

Knowing How Much to Charge

One of the weirdest things is figuring out how much to get paid. Most speakers I know follow a pattern something like this:

They start out speaking at conferences they were already planning on going to.
Then they get free registrations to those conferences.
Then they get some travel reimbursement and the conference registration.
And somewhere along the way, they start naming a fee in addition to travel.

I remember the first time I named a fee. I’d been speaking at one industry conference for years. I did it for free but they comp’ed my registration. And I always landed at least one paying client from the gig.

Then one year, they wanted me to speak at a conference I wasn’t planning on going to. A free registration to a conference I didn’t want to attend had no value. And I told them so. I worked up all the gumption I could and told them my fee for that session was $500. They ended up paying it, in addition to the hotel and travel. I now get more than 10 times that amount for the same talk, but that first $500 ask was one of the scariest in my life!

For some reason, when I was starting out I found it easy to say I got $1000 a day. And people went for it. I now receive around $7500 for a keynote. But I’m not impressed with myself yet since I know some speakers get $20,000 – $25,000 for a 40 minute keynote.

Pricing is an odd thing. People really feel they get what they pay for. So there is a prestige in paying more for a speaker. A really odd thing I’ve noticed is that people tend to do the things I say if they’ve paid more to hear me. I could say the same fundraising strategy at a free Rotary talk and be completely blown off. But if I say them as a $7500 keynote, people actually act on what they hear. And when they act on what they hear, they end up seeing positive results.

The most important advice on setting a fee I can offer is this: don’t be the Walmart of your sector. Being the cheapest option is a losing proposition. It’s far easier to set a boutique price and negotiate down, than it is to set a low price and try to negotiate up.

Where to Find Speaking Gigs

Every day, people are desperately seeking speakers to fill their conferences and club meetings. How do you find them? Here are some places to find your first gigs.

Conferences I was already attending
I often knew the organizers or was an organizer myself, so I started here.
Toastmasters
I have no experience with this group but people say they’re pretty amazing.
Community Colleges
When I moved back to Maine, I noticed our local community college did a lot of trainings-in-a-box things for companies. You know, curriculum like “Fish” or Ken Blanchard stuff. So I contacted them. They asked me to create something for nonprofits. Those seminars later became the foundation for my first published book.
Service Clubs
I love talking to Rotary groups. Don’t go expecting to hard sell. That’s not why they meet. Service clubs are about the club and its goals. Speakers help make the meetings interesting and informative. So be interesting and informative. The 15-20 minutes you get will force you to be on top of your game. (And be able to give your talk without PowerPoint slides! More time is wasted at these meetings by speakers trying to get the borrowed projector to work!)
Local Professional Associations
Many communities have local associations, women in leadership groups, Christian leaders groups, all sorts of leadership groups. See if they’re interested in your topic.
Chambers of Commerce
One of my biggest encouragers is Chip Morrison, the president of the Chamber of Commerce in Lewiston, Maine. He was cheering me on when I didn’t even believe in myself. I still love testing out new material for his Chamber. (And he still doesn’t pay me!)

I’d steer clear of speaking bureaus. I’ve found speaking bureaus to be more interested in me paying them for a listing than in getting me gigs. Plus, if my listing were found on their site, they’d take a huge chunk of the fee! I decided to make my website really easy to find instead.

Getting Organizers to Call You

Making calls is an important first step. Even more important than having a snazzy brochure or direct mail campaign. But in this digital age, you can do some things to make it easier for people to call you. Here are a couple tips:

Start writing
My first gig came from an article I wrote about the way I did my work. I really didn’t think it was anything special, didn’t everyone see the world like I did? But it turns out my point-of-view was unique and something people wanted to learn more about. Viola! A seminar was born.

It used to be that you had to spend lots of time submitting writing to magazines. I’d encourage you to do that, but now you can publish your writing on a blog and start building your own platform too.
Build an Email List
People that may need you may not need you when you first meet them. So start an email list that will help you stay in front of them. I like my every other week email newsletter. Every other Tuesday was a rhythm I could keep up with. Since you already have a niche, you can offer something of value to that group. I offer a free article on some aspect of fundraising in each issue. What could you offer?
Have a Professional Looking Website
I’m not a whiz at web design, but I do know that dancing cats and confusing fonts make you look like an amateur. My fundraising training site is based on a free WordPress template. I hired a web designer to tweak that template to make it mine. Now everything looks consistant and professional.

Be specific with the keywords you use for SEO (search engine optimization). Every self-proclaimed SEO guru was trying to convince me to hire them to get me in the first page of results for searches on “fundraising” or “fundraising ideas.” But I knew that was a waste of time. One search on either term showed that people searching for “fundraising ideas” were looking for popcorn and gift wrap. So I decided to target searches like “fundraising training” and “fundraising webinar.” Those were things that people expected to pay more for. And people searching on those terms were much further down the sales funnel for me.

And as you collect images for use on your site, be sure to have images of the audience listening to you speak. (Like the one on this post.) Most of us fill our site with images of ourselves on stage. But a speaking coach told me that organizers want to see that their audience will enjoy you. You have to ask people to get those shots, but they’re worth it. (Web secret: You can put your chosen keywords in the title and alt tags in these images.)

Does this work? It sure does. Less than a year ago, some conference organizers in Mexico typed “fundraising training” into Google. My page came up on the first page and looked the most professional. As a result, this guy from rural Maine was flown down to give the keynote for the World Fundraising Summit in Monterrey, Mexico.

It works.

Speaking is a Fabulous Profession

I have found speaking to be incredibly rewarding. I hope this post helps give you some ideas to get you started on a speaking journey!

Please use the comments to let me know what you would add to this post!

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Are you his father?

Marc A. Pitman — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 15:55:52 +0000

In 33 days, I’ll be 40.

Last week, visiting the place where my 39 year old cousin lives, I was asked, “Are you his father?” [Click on that link to see my Facebook update and the resulting comments.]

Really? He’s just a few months younger than I am!?

*sigh*

Perhaps it was that comment that finally spurred me on to this nostalgic “turning 40″ blog post. 4 whole decades on planet Earth. Honestly, overall, I’m really looking forward to the 40′s.

The 20′s were great

I traveled alot internationally (living in Jerusalem; extended visits to Greece and India; and a missions trip to Mexico). I moved at least ten times. And it was largely filled with the newly married emotional mix of the amazing possibilities for our future and the startling reality shocks of life. Trying to figure out employment and budgets and parenting and wanting to discover what I wanted to do with the rest of my life while honoring my wife and my role as a new dad.

The 30′s were great too

Wonderful in many ways. Our family grew to five. I completed my Masters and become a Certified Franklin Covey Coach. I even got to fulfill a life long dream of planting a church and pastoring it for almost 4 years.

Thanks to encouragement, and a kick in the pants from my wife, I started brewing my own beer. My first book was published. I did my first radio and TV interviews (and loved them!). I even started teaching a college course in internet marketing.

And in what seems nicely settling, I think we only moved 4 or 5 times. (And what was not “nicely settling,” my already slow metabolism seemed to go in reverse. *sigh*)

Is this it?

But so much of my 30′s was filled with my desk job, haunted by the nagging question, “Is this it? Is this what the rest of my life will look like?”

I felt a constant pressure to “settle for” what I was doing. I found this particularly pulling–and depressing–in my day job in Central Maine. “Settling for” did make sense. I had an great wife and three cool kids to think about. I should just grow up, give up on the dreams I’d written in my teens, and accept that life isn’t about dreams. After all, I had a great job and a wonderful family. Who was I to want more?

“Who are you to want more?” and “Just accept this as God’s best and settle for what you’ve got” haunted me during my work days.

Ok. Re-reading the stuff that happened to me in my 30′s makes the “settle for” question seem laughable. Some amazing things happened to me. Hey, I even was honored by being chosen one of Maine’s first “40 under 40″ a few months ago!

But to me, “settling for” amounts to do something that felt less than living my life’s purpose. I want to use my gifts to God’s glory and to their fullest extent, providing not just a comfortable life but one that would let my wife and kids each excel at their life callings while actively helping expand the Kingdom of God.

The 40′s will be awesome

I think I’m really looking forward to the 40′s largely because I have an amazing wife and because I serve an incredible God. My wife has been really supportive in some end-of-the-30s career choices that have opened up the world of speaking and training for me. And I’m really excited to see her re-discovering her voice. We’re a great team and will get to explore that even more in the next decade. We’ve even started doing a fun “He said. She said.” blog thing together!

In the last year, I got to speak all over the US and in New Zealand, Bermuda, and Mexico. I’ve got a couple more books ready to come out and another fundraising training DVD. My existing writing is currently being translated into Polish and I have requests for it to be translated into Russian and Spanish too.

As I approach 40, I’m far more confident in who I am and what I do well. And I’m really comfortable in what I don’t do well. (I focus on strengths but I firmly believe God has endowed us with limits to force us to rely on other people.)

Are you his father?

So as I am less then 3 dozen days away from 40, and despite having been perceived as the father of a 39 year old, I am looking forward to what lies ahead!

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December Meat Pie: The Culmination of 2011

Marc A. Pitman — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 23:14:30 +0000

It’s hard to believe that I’ve reached the last meat pie in my meat-pie-a-month journey! I’ve now made dozens of meat pies. So this this month, I chose to take a risk. I chose to make a pie without consulting any recipes.

Here’s what I made and how I made it:

2 pounds of steak (chopped into small pieces)
3 potatoes (Maine of course! Yukon Gold are amazing)
3 carrots
1 large onion
1 cup of beef broth
3-4 strips of bacon (I used premade bacon bits)
garlic salt
garlic powder
fresh pepper
2 bottles of beer

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Open a beer and take a sip. (I’m particular to porters.)
Peel the potatoes and bring them to boil. I like to sprinkle some garlic salt
into the water.
Peel and chop up the carrots and onions.
Test the potatoes with a fork. Mash them if tender.
Put some oil in the skillet and brown the meat.
Add in the carrots, onion, broth, and the other beer.
Add some garlic salt and pepper. I like large amounts of each.
Cover skillet and simmer for 20 minutes (until the carrots are soft).
Take of the cover and allow it to simmer down. I liberally added garlic powder here. Stir occasionally.
Enjoy the sound of your kids saying how amazing the house smells!
After a while, I threw in some flour to thicken it up.
Check that first beer. Sip if needed.
Take the skillet off the heat and stir in the mash potatoes.
Spoon this mixture into the pie crust. (There might be too much. Don’t feel compelled to make it all fit.)
Sprinkle the bacon over the top. I added a few pats of butter so the mixture wouldn’t be too dry.
Cover with the top crust and bake at 400 degrees for 40 minutes. (Covering the edges of the crust for all be the last 10 minutes.)

The house smelled as great as the pie tasted! A perfect end to a year of meat pies!

I’m definitely keeping this recipe. Next time, I’ll add mushrooms.

Some pictures from the process

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One year ago today…

Marc A. Pitman — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 14:01:18 +0000

Today the Pitman family is celebrating God’s goodness in our lives.

You see, after the political campaign, we decided it was a great time for me to be self-employed. I had a couple books to finish writing. I was going out to Seattle to record a couple fundraising training DVDs. And there was an online community that was getting started. All three things looked profitable in the near term.

Seemed like a good idea at the time. Five months later, neither book had been picked up by a publisher, neither DVD had been produced (despite both being filmed), and the online community was helping people but not generating any revenue.

Things weren’t going exactly as we’d planned. But we still really believed that God was calling us to this journey of self-employment. So I’d fallen into a pattern of trying to promote FundraisingCoach.com and looking for a major gifts job.

Talk about split vision! “How is your fundraising training plan for this year? Oh, you’re alset? Ok…could I apply for that a job you have open?” I never did that but I probably came across that way! I was trying to provide for my family but it was not exactly inspiring confidence in clients!

You have a year

As I remember it, on this day last year my wife and I had another teary, stressed out conversation about our life. At the conclusion, she said, “You have a year to make this work.”

What a gift! You see, she didn’t say it in the tone of, “You idiot, you have one year to get your act together!” She was giving me permission to focus 100% on Fundraising Coach. Trusting that that would provide for our family.

What a year it’s been

The books still aren’t published, the online community isn’t producing income, and only one of the fundraising training DVDs has been produced. But this year has been amazing:

But I’ve been able to speak all over the country and even internationally.
I’ve gotten a lot smarter about running a business. (I use contracts now. Hadn’t even done that before!)
My wife and I have started blogging about being a traveling spouse and staying married. (She’s an excellent writer. And we make a great team, if I do say so myself!)
I’ve received some great honors.

As my wife said recently, “This is our life now!” And it is.

So today we celebrate

We’ve worked our tails of as a family. Last week, when we were asking the kids what they’d be grateful for, our 9 year old said she thanks God that I’ve taken all the risks I have since the Peter Mills campaign because we get to do what we are doing.

And today, we’re taking a cue from Deuteronomy 14:22-26 and celebrating God’s goodness in our lives. Today is filled with family, a new Wii game we can all enjoy (Super Mario Kart), steak and garlic mash potatoes, and reveling in God.

What about you? How do you celebrate?

Update: For my wife’s take on this year, check out her post We Did It.

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Self Sabotage

Marc A. Pitman — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 17:37:13 +0000

Got a call earlier today from a joint venture partner. My first thought was:

“He’s calling it off. The project is over.”

Why do I do this? I’m pretty much an over-the-top optimist. The glass is always full: sometimes full of liquid, sometimes full of air. It’s always full.

There really is always a silver lining. There is always a seed of equal or greater benefit in even in the worst experiences.

So why do I do automatically jump to the negative?

Deeply rooted pattern

This pattern of thinking has gotten me in trouble before. I’ve had it with just about every boss over the last couple decades. When they asked to see me, I just knew they were going to fire me.

Totally irrational. They may have been wanting to say something good for all I know!

The problem is, I come to the meeting radiating defensiveness rather than collaboration. Not the best mindset to approach any meeting (other than one that you really do need to be defensive in!).

Paths

I’ve heard that with the brain, a thought pattern is like a path. The more it’s traveled, the more worn the path gets. Eventually, the path is a paved city street.

It takes a lot less energy to travel a paved street than a dirt path. So in a way, the brain is gravitating toward the path of least resistance.

Bushwhacking

I guess the only way to solve this is to force myself to think good thoughts when I see the doom-and-gloom start to raise its ugly head.

When I start thinking dark thoughts, I will have to take out my mental machete and force myself to think of a great thing that could happen.

If I get another call that leads me down the thought path I mentioned above, I could add:

…perhaps…He could be calling to call this off. OR, he could be calling to celebrate a breakthrough.

What do you do to retrain your brain?

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Jesus isn’t a misogynist; neither should we be

Marc A. Pitman — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 16:15:15 +0000

Happy International Women’s Day!

21 years ago today, I remember exhorting an audience at my prep school that the Bible advocates for treating men and women equally. That the rampant paternalistic misogyny in the world is one of the boldest proofs of the Fall talked about in Genesis. (Eve wasn’t to blame; Adam was. He stayed silent.)

As I see it, women are such a threat to the evil one, he keeps up an incessant attack on them in a vain attempt to keep them under his thumb. But they keep overcoming!

Jesus isn’t misogynistic

Jesus didn’t attack women, demean them, or try to keep them down. Despite His culture, he treated women with as much respect as men. He had a habit of lifting them up. He was a Jewish rabbi that had women disciples.

The first apostles were even women. (Matthew 28) An apostle is defined as one who has seen the risen Jesus and tells others about Him. Peter and the boys quickly took credit, but it was women who were the first “sent ones.”

Jesus still isn’t misogynistic. I want to be a man like Jesus.

Oddly, just last week I got an irate review on one of my books because I almost exclusively used “she” and “her” in talking about a donor prospect. The guy was really ticked. “Your book is way out of wack (sic) with reality…it’s poorly written with your constant referral to She (sic) as if Men (sic) don’t do this. I guess your secretary must be handling things while you promote your special skills.”

Shocking. Even with the bad grammar, we see this attitude all over. I figure we’ve used “he,” “his,” and “men” to describe all people for enough millennia, it’s now time to use “she” and “her.”

Equality is biblical; misogyny is evil

For those of us who follow Jesus, it has to go. Check out Galatians 3:25-28.

Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under the supervision of the law. So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Can’t get much clearer than that.

Raise a glass

So today, I raise a glass to all of you with the two X chromosomes. Thank you for making our world a much better place. We’ve come along way in equality. Let’s celebrate that.

But we still have a long way to go. For those of us in the USA, let’s recommit to the ideal that “all [people] are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” (modification mine).

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Chevy Volt – a review

Marc A. Pitman — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 01:53:32 +0000

This past week, I’ve been able to test drive a Chevy Volt.

I wrote a review at my travel blog, Pitman Travels.

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The Exodus Social Medie Style

Marc A. Pitman — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 16:23:08 +0000

Passover is upon us. What if it happened with the help of social media? Moses and Pharaoh skyping each other? Plagues ordered on Amazon? Google maps giving directions? It’s all here in this fun Passover video!

Thanks to Gary Stratton for pointing it out.

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