OM4: Jen Coffel | Speak your way to over 100k

Meet Today’s Guest: Jen Coffel Jen Coffel is CEO of Engaging Speakers, a successful business coach, a best-selling author with four books, and a philanthropist. She has been featured on Inc.com, ABC News, and the Chicago Tribune. Jen has been mentored by speaking icons like Jack Canfield, Nick Vujicic, and Sandra Yancey, and has spoken on stage to over 10,000 people. With two decades of business experience, Jen built her first 4 businesses to 6 figures each, all in under a year and all in different industries. She has now helped over a thousand entrepreneurs build their businesses with many reaching 6-figure and 7-figure revenue. In her previous career, she developed the largest team in Illinois for a billion-dollar direct sales company, personally generating over $25 million in sales and raising over $1 million in donations for non-profits. But she is most proud of founding her own international non-profit “Handing Hope” which brings comfort and smiles to children battling cancer in twelve states and three countries around the world. Share with our audience a little bit about who you are. It's been a fun 20-year journey in being an entrepreneur. And I know that there's a lot to share as far as l the backstory but, I started out actually, my background is, I'm an occupational therapist, by degree. My first business was teaching people with disabilities how to drive. And so I started a private practice back in 1999. But it was a really awesome business because I got to do what I love to do, which is to give people freedom. I tried for six years to have kids. And so once we finally had kids, I really wanted to be home with them. So I sold my business. And I thought that what I sold it for would be enough money to get me through the time. While my first baby, she was adopted, and after like five months into having her we got pregnant with twins through IVF. And then the next year we got pregnant by surprise. All these children came and you know, adoption is expensive, IVF is expensive, kids are expensive. So I went through all the money that I had sold the practice for and was broke. I realized if I didn't do something, to be able to get us out of that financial situation, we were just going to be sunk because my husband was also an occupational therapist, and he didn't get any bonuses or things like that. So I had to find a way and I didn't want to go back to working at a business outside of the house. So I started a network marketing business. In that business, I really discovered my love for teaching people about business. I treated my network marketing business as a traditional business in terms of picking a target market really having marketing strategies and focusing on sharing it with friends and family and that sort of thing. I had a lot of success with that business I built it to the largest in the state of Illinois and won their Presidents Club trips multiple times and had a lot of fun with it. In that process, I discovered my love for teaching women how to build businesses and so that led me to start a coaching business and teaching business coaching. I built four businesses at six figures in less than 12 months, all in different industries. And there was a methodology that one of my coaches brought up to me like you have to be using some methodology like to do that. I was able to, with time, really take a reflected look at what am I doing. How am I doing that and then get it out in a way that I could actually teach it and so since then I've taught it to so many people and the results have been amazing. Please share your story about the first time you spoke, and then now, what you're able to do when you get in front of an audience, that is just an incredible journey. So why don't you share with the audience a little bit about how that first experience was? In my first experiences with speaking, I remember