Speaking
Hundreds of talks, to rooms from a dozen people to several thousand.
Mike has spoken hundreds of times, to audiences ranging from executive teams and business groups to rooms numbering in the thousands. Before any of the marketing work he was a Protestant pastor, which meant speaking to a live audience every week for years. That is where the speaking came from.
He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Speech Communications and a Master of Divinity, and has taught marketing at Pepperdine University.
Topics
- Trust-First Marketing: why the trust environment has to exist before reach is scaled, and what it costs to get that order wrong.
- Adaptive Brand Management: who inside a company is responsible for noticing that conditions moved.
- The Marketing Helix: customers are already in motion, and the funnel never described them.
- Elevate or Vanish: markets do not announce the moment a business becomes outdated.
- AI visibility and changing discovery: what happens to a business when the way people find things changes again.
- Franchise marketing: national brand and local operator at the same time, which are two jobs that fail in different ways.
- Lessons from the StratusClean transformation: a rebrand as a clarity decision rather than an aesthetic one.
The talk he gives most
The one that opens with a father and a son. One of them was the best in the country at his trade and was ended by a technology shift he would not cross. The other, at the same time, was building a business on the technology that ended him. It earns the right to the thesis before the thesis is stated, and it is the reason Elevate or Vanish is a warning and not a slogan.