Five years after joining, I sold Mr. Mailer, Inc., by that time, a flourishing direct mail processing and mailing list brokerage and I became a for-profit professional speaker which I practiced for another 17 years. I still pinch myself when I recall how many people actually paid me (and, still do) for opening my mouth.  

Toastmasters can take most of the credit for giving me the confidence I needed to stand and deliver over 1,917 paid speaking engagements during my professional speaking career. I tested much of the material for those speeches at my weekly Toastmasters meeting. If those I knew responded well to my message, I figured it was good enough to try out with paid audiences and most of the time, this was a correct assumption!  My weekly Winter Park Toastmasters meeting became my ‘learning laboratory’ and it still is after 32 years.  

It was there that I made lifetime friendships with some outstanding people from all walks of life. Preachers, poets, professors, lawyers, business professionals; actually all very positive, professionals who joined to become “Masters of the Spoken Word”, the slogan of our chapter which was founded that 1963 day JFK was assassinated.

This group made me truly appreciate the sacrifices of the generation, which came before me. Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation had many alumni in our chapter. One in particular, was my mentor. First, he repeatedly harassed me to come to my first Winter Park Toastmasters meeting in February 1978.

Like many over-worked new business owners, I was too: busy, overworked and tired. The meeting was too:  far, early and frequent. Actually, I was too chicken for fear I would have to stand and speak in front of strangers and probably embarrass myself.  My mentor, a successful insurance professional, Harold Lanigan, would not take no for an answer. True to his nature, he just kept on closing. Finally, I relented and attended, and that singular experience forever changed my life.

Harold’s signature WW2 stories galvanized our attention with his narratives of a 22-year-old pilot of a B-17 over the war-torn skies of Occupied France. In one losing encounter with an enemy plane, he and his crew parachuted out of their broken War bird at 11,000 feet. In a second two years later, piloting another plane, he was shot down and spent the rest of WW2 in a Nazi POW Camp.

Harold is gone but his stories, his character and his influence on me live on as my legacy. I am still a Winter Park Toastmaster. I still enjoy speaking and improving with each speech. Even more, I enjoy sharing my knowledge with our newer members, so they too can carry on the tradition of our great Toastmasters chapter.

This is one anniversary I have truly enjoyed celebrating. To learn more about Toastmasters International, go to www.toastmasters.org and maybe, someday you will thank me. FYI, if you visit the website soon, CLICK on “A Funny Thing Happened”…..and read my Talk about starting over! story.

So, what does this have to do with C-Suite Prospecting, the theme of this blog, for the coming months.  It takes courage and tenacity to step outside one’s comfort zone into the challenging arena of boardroom decision-makers especially if you have made a living calling on mid-level managers.  In this tight economy decisions formerly made by mid-level managers have been kicked upstairs to the COO and CFO’s desk.

I adopted this inspiring motto as my motivator to have the courage to take action when my entrepreneurial instincts whispered to me to test a new concept or analytic technique, rather than doing nothing and remaining inside my comfort zone.  

Megatrends, a 1982 best-seller, featured 10 trends most likely to change our lives. One research technique used to substantiate the author’s claims inspired me to apply it to my (then) new sales discipline of C-Suite prospecting. 

Content analysis was first used by military intelligence to collect and analyze public attitudes from printed newspapers. During WW2, military intelligence readers, conversant in Japanese, Italian and German studied newspaper editorials from combatant cities to interpret the psychological impact of bombing raids on civilian populations. The resulting increase in bombing raids was credited with shortening the length of the war and saving millions of Allied lives.

In 1983, I applied this technique to corporate annual reports to drum up business for my infant marketing consulting practice. A stockbroker provided current annual reports from multiple CEOs in the computers, communications and chemicals industries.

In one annual report, that of a Midwestern computer reseller, the CEO’s message to stockholders cited the ‘spoked-wheel concept’ repeatedly as his breakthrough initiative for his forthcoming nationwide expansion. There was absolutely no doubt who took credit for this concept!

When I solicited his business, I praised his brilliant ‘spoked-wheel concept’ in my letter and again, in my timely follow up phone call. His ego got the best of him, as he flew to Orlando a few days later, to meet with me to explore our potential to become one of his regional distribution points.

Since then content analysis techniques have enabled me to mine gems from corporate annual reports which have served me well to ethically access C-Suite deciders.  Is this a brazen misuse of content analysis?  Well, I prefer to credit intelligent risk-taking as inspired by the proud SAS motto: Who Dares…………………………Wins!

You say, you couldn’t make payroll yesterday because your clients have stretched out their payments. Or, you can’t sell products because your bank has frozen your credit line. Maybe, your Horoscope Sign was a 5? Because, because; we can always find excuses upon which to blame our troubles.

FACT: even though the stock market declined 83 points yesterday and the new Stimulus Plan will place future generations at risk, guess what didn’t happen, yesterday?

Brian Williams on the NBC Evening News didn’t broadcast any report by IMS (Immigration Services) about an alarming number of visa application cancellations. Foreigners are still lining up at the gates of our great, but temporarily troubled country, waiting patiently for their legal entry papers. Illegal aliens are still tragically dying in rickety old leaky boats on the high seas off the Florida coast. I’m sure, a few even came across our Southwestern border in the past few nights.

No matter how good or bad Friday the 13^th was for us, it was still a better day than for most foreigners.

Whatever daily calamities challenge small business owners like us, we have much more to be thankful for than when my father first set foot on US soil in 1919. Nicholas Demetrious Alagazakis (Nicholas D. Allen, the Americanized version) was a Greek Immigrant who found himself in a strange, foreign country in a time of war.

Not quite penniless, but with just the clothes on his back, and a working fluency of English; he was destined to make his family of four boys proud of his American Legacy.

Thanks to an established Greek Community in New York City, where he quickly made friends, he found employment and later became an insurance salesman for the Prudential Life Insurance Company.

At the end of WW1, he brought my English mother, Dolly Fortune, to this country where they became citizens. Hard work and good fortune empowered him to become a ship owner of the Prudential Steamship Company headquartered at Battery Place in New York City.

In WW2, he and his company prospered and he moved his growing family to Florida in the late 1940’s where he settled into a new business as owner of the Florida Yacht Basin on the Miami River.

When my brothers and I were growing up, a day never went by when Nicholas didn’t thank this great country for the opportunities it afforded he and his children. While TV and radio were daily distractions, we were constantly infused with his spirit of gratitude and reminded to fulfill our individual American goals and destinies. And, we have. My brother Homer became a ship owner; Winston, an architect; Milton, a software company executive; and me, a sales training consultant.

Our legacy was repeated millions of times in every corner of our great country. Through the Great Depression and the many peaks and valleys of historic economic trends; we have weathered harsh circumstances and still prospered individually and grown our nation.

That’s my story. That’s why I am eternally thankful to be an American. That’s why I still count Friday, the 13^th, as my Lucky Day. Every day I breathe our air is my blessing.

I’d like to hear your story.