There are many definitions of leadership out there, but the most important form of leadership that we need right now – with all the problems we’re experiencing in the world today – is thought leadership. But what exactly is it? On today’s show, Angelique Rewers joins Alicia Couri to explain what thought leadership is all about and why it’s important in today’s business landscape. Angelique is the Founder of The Corporate Agent and has successfully navigated all sides of the corporate buying table for more than two decades. She is also a keynote speaker and top media contributor.
—
Watch the episode here:
Listen to the podcast here:
[fusebox_track_player url=”https://feeds.podetize.com/ep/AMd4P_T8F/media” title=”Thought Leadership With Angelique Rewers” social_linkedin=”true” social_pinterest=”true” social_email=”true” ]
Thought Leadership With Angelique Rewers
I am super excited and this is even another level of excitement for me because I admire this woman so much. I’ve been in her circle for years now. I love what she does. I love her as a person and I’m excited to interview Ms. Angelique Rewers. Thank you for coming on, Angelique.
I’m thrilled to be here. It is an honor.
This is going to be fun. You are going to laugh. Hopefully, you don’t cry, but we’re going to have a lot of fun. Angelique Rewers is the CEO and Founder of The Corporate Agent and has successfully navigated all sides of the corporate buying table for more than two decades. She and her team have worked with small businesses across 72 countries worldwide on how to secure 5, 6, and 7-figure corporate contracts. Her groundbreaking conferences have brought business owners together with major brands like IBM, Intel, HP, PayPal, AT&T, Marriott, Chevron, and Major League Baseball.
Her clients are landing deals with iconic brands like Facebook and McDonald’s as well as organizations in the mid-market, higher education, nonprofit, and government sectors. In addition, as if that wasn’t enough, to be named an Enterprising Woman of The Year by Enterprising Women Magazine, Angelique has been featured by Huffington Post, Forbes, Inc., Lucky, The Washington Post, Entrepreneur, CBS, and more. She also shares stages with superstars like Hollywood’s Steve Harvey, Shark Tank’s Daymond John, NFL Super Bowl champion, Jamal Lewis and marketing guru Seth Godin. I am honored that you took the time. I know your schedule is crazy because you have some awesome events coming up. Thank you for taking the time to interview with me.
It’s my pleasure. I love this topic that we’re talking about. I am pumped to talk about this.
We’re talking about leadership, leading with audacious confidence. My first question for you is, what is your leadership philosophy?
When I think about leadership, I think of it about leading the market with ideas that you are ahead of the status quo discourse that’s happening and you’re thinking about, what’s coming next? What’s around the next corner? Where do people need to be looking? What aren’t they seeing? To me, it always is thought leadership and that idea that you’re on the cutting edge, you’re thinking ahead of everyone else and you’re the north star that others follow. I know there are a lot of definitions to leadership, but for me, when I think about all the problems that are in the world now and how inertia and status quo thinking keeps us suffering from the same problems that we face time and time again, that to me is the most important form of leadership that we need.
How are you as a leader to a team? As you’re thinking thought leadership, how do you lead a team of people?
I have two teams of people to lead. I have my team which is comprised of full-time employees, part-time employees, independent contractors, and trusted vendors who’ve been with us for over a decade. I feel like I have my team of my community. We have a program called Velocity, which has hundreds and hundreds of small business owners who are mission-driven, working with large organizations. We call them speed racers. It’s a little nod to ‘80s nostalgia in there.
When I’m thinking about my team that I’m leading, I’m thinking about how am I connecting their work to the success of the other team that I’m also leading. One of the things we like to do inside our company is to share the successes that our clients are having and remind our team, “We know we’re pulling our hair out with our CRM system. We know that we’re working a lot of hours because we have this big event coming up, but here’s what’s happening in the lives of our clients because of the work we’re doing, this is what’s happening for them.”
We like to do that and I think that’s important to connect the dots between what they’re doing and how they’re serving like how is that showing up in the world. You can do some mundane tasks when you’re an employee and you might not realize that seven steps down the line that means that someone bought two horses for her daughter or someone else was able to buy a condo for her daughter or someone else was able to help their husband leave a job that he hated as examples.
Then I’ve got the team of speed racers, all of these mission-driven entrepreneurs that are out there. When I think about leading them, I think about continuing to challenge myself and put myself in vulnerable experiences, test my comfort zone, go out to razor’s edge and cut my fingers, and say, “I bled. It’s okay out here. The world needs more out here on razor’s edge. Follow me out here.” To me, it’s both sides of it.
I love that you said that and it leads me right into my next question. When I first met you, you were speaking on stage in a David Nagel conference and you talked about the triangles because you were talking about stepping out on razor’s edge. You stepped out to talk about a bold audacious leader. I don’t know if it was the story that you were doing the right thing or not. I think you were doing the right thing because according to you, you like to push the limits of what you can do, but your technique hadn’t caught up to you. Tell us about that experience because that’s one of the things that you learned a huge lesson about your own confidence through.
It was back in 2012. I started The Corporate Agent in 2010 because I saw all of these small business owners out there being fed a bill of goods, sold a bill of goods around having a big impact in the world and financial security and all of these things. A lot of what I saw being taught, didn’t match up to that possibility. I’m a big fan of helping small business owners work with large organizations, midsize organizations. It’s a great force multiplier.
There was a big gap in the market. No one in 2010 was talking about selling to corporate for mission-driven, heart-centered, conscious entrepreneurs. Here I come along and I said, “We’re going to teach you guys how to sell to corporate,” which got a ton of blowback and a lot of criticism. What I think is interesting now talking about being on the leading front, everybody wants to say they know how to sell to corporate, which is ridiculous because they’ve never sold a corporate in their lives.
That was early in 2010, this needed to be discussed. There were also no big events out there that brought together small business owners with strategies to sell to corporate and corporate decision-makers except the nonprofits that are the certifying bodies for women-owned business owners, minority-owned business owners, LGBTQ+ owned business owners, veteran business owners. You have to be in one of those buckets.
You have to be in a category and then it’s not like it’s mixed together. You would have veteran business owners over here and you’d have women business owners over here and you’d have minority business owners. You have all these disparate events and none of them focused on service providers. Most of those events are for vendors, suppliers who are selling paperclips, brake pads, reams of paper, cleaning supplies, and marketing products. We decided to do an event like that.
I had come out of the corporate world. When I think of events, I think I have a certain vision of what that looks like. I signed a huge contract with the Gaylord National, an insane contract. I was used to having my corporate budget. I did not have my corporate budget, but my brain did not catch up to that. I signed this huge contract and then I didn’t know how to sell that volume of conference registrations at that point in my life.
I had never built that muscle, that awareness was not inside of me of how to do that, short of having a big corporate budget and prior event lists and things like that. All of the techniques I knew to fill events were not the right techniques for that. About 30 days before the room block closed, I had only filled 11% of my room block and 7% was my own team and AV company. That meant I had put in about 4% of my room block of your budget. I had 30 days to fill 675 room nights and a ballroom that could hold about 450 people. I was lacking in confidence at that point that that was something that I could pull off.
I couldn’t even imagine even having the guts to sign that contract, let alone looking at it 30 days out and saying, “I have to fill this room block?”
We can save one another is by giving each other the truth and holding each other’s feet to the fire. Click To TweetIt was a moment of sheer terror. My husband had no idea that I had signed this contract. One of my favorite moments of that event came after the event. It was about six months after the event and I was telling the story for the first time and I was onstage at someone’s event. I was walking them through this story and this ballroom can hold 450 to 500 people. I had to go to the hotel 30 days before the event in order to do a walk-through of the space and meet with the hotel and things like that.
The hotel was a good 90 minutes from where I lived. I was in Baltimore and the hotel was in Washington DC and my husband worked in downtown Baltimore. I said goodbye to him in the morning and had it down to Washington DC for the meeting. When I arrived and I was meeting with the CSM, she said, “We can go and see the ballroom, but there’s another company that’s in the ballroom right now. Constellation Energy is in the ballroom.” I said, “I’m sorry, what?” That was where my husband works. They were having a meeting in that ballroom. I realized suddenly my husband was at the hotel that I was at.
What were the chances? This was a hotel far from Baltimore. He knows nothing of what’s going on. She’s like, “Let’s go up there because I think they’re on break for lunch. Nobody’s in there. Let’s go into the ballroom while it’s empty and you can see it.” We go into the ballroom to start talking about seating and as we walk into the ballroom, there’s one person left in that ballroom and it was my husband. The universe has a sixth sense of humor. I’m standing there and he’s like, “What are you doing here?”
The CSM does not know that my husband knows nothing about what problem I have, this huge $300,000 problem that I have. She’s like, “This is where Angelique’s event is going to be.” He looked at me and he said, “I thought you were having a small workshop.” We’re standing in this 500 people ballroom. I told this story on stage six months after the event and as I’m saying, “My husband said to me, ‘I thought you were having a small workshop,’” one of the women in the front row of the audience said, “At that point, you were having a small workshop.”
It was compared to what you do now with thousands of people. You were ahead of your time again in hindsight.
What she meant because I only had 25 people registered, she was like, “At that point, Angelique, that was a small workshop.” That took a lot of confidence. I’ll tell you though that going through that experience, we ended up with 435 people into that event. I did all those sales calls myself. I made 3,000 sales calls over the course of 30 days. I think that is where audacious levels of confidence come from when your back is up against the wall.
That’s such a nine quick start thing to do.
I’m a nine quick start. I did the sales calls myself and I filled the event. It’s like, “What are you going to do?” Fill the event.
That stretched that muscle for you to know that not only because you had never done something like that before, where you had to make those calls to book events, now that you do these huge events, you’re also not doing your own sales calls anymore. You know the technique and the strategy. You have trained people and you know how to fill an event.
I think that one of the things that a lot of entrepreneurs and people out there, professionals don’t understand is that how you build that financial freedom in your life, that capability in your life, confidence is by doing the things. You don’t get the confidence and then do the event. You do the event and you come off of the stage three days later, a different person than you were when you walked on the stage on the first day. I think that people don’t understand the order that things happen in life and a lot of people are waiting for someone to come along and either give them permission or to save them. You’re not going to be saved and no one’s going to be coming to save you.
Even when you call your mentor and say, “I don’t know what I did,” he’ll be like, “You’ve got to fix it.”
He said, “Pick up the phone and make the calls.” In that way, he saved me because he told me the truth. He held me to account and I think that is how we can save one another is by giving each other the truth and holding each other’s feet to the fire and also raise the bar and expect people to come up to the bar.
We need to come up here because it’s where we need to operate. People don’t know this, but I am your makeup artist for some events and some things that you do. I do your hair and makeup but for this particular time, I did not do your events. As we were talking about confidence, there was an opportunity for you to go on television and I was not your makeup artist at the time.
This was before we met. I was still in Baltimore, so this was probably the year before I met you. I think media is a great way to build your business, build your personal brand, and build your resume. You should be out there doing media. If you’re not out there doing media, you need to do that. You have to use the media to get credibility, visibility, but also the experience of doing it gives you a different level of confidence.
I came out of PR. Part of my professional career when I had a job was, I led a PR financial communication. I was used to doing media interviews, but I hadn’t done TV in quite a while and mostly I did print, Associated Press, Reuters, Dow Jones, and things like that. I hired a PR firm in Washington DC because I was in Baltimore to help get me some press. They booked me on a new station in Washington DC and it was an early morning show.
I was going to be on at 6:00. It’s a hype going to Washington from Baltimore with traffic and it was winter. It was raining cats and dogs. I’m leaving my house at 4:30 in the morning so that I’m at the studio by 5:45 so I can go on at 6:00. This is super early morning and I figured, “Let me get there. I’ll finish my makeup in the car and then I’ll go inside.” I got there and I ended up doing my makeup in the dark with it raining and I was late because I got lost of where to go and it was a nightmare.
I walk into the studio and my PR person doesn’t show up. She sends an assistant who’s not helpful at all and the producers are yelling at me because I was fifteen minutes late and they’re miking me up and trying to brush off all the water because it’s pouring outside. They’re trying to flatten my hair a little bit. I’m completely disheveled and before I even knew it, they shoved me onto the set and I’m in my chair. I do the whole segment, get back in my car, I’m driving home, and then my cell phone rings.
Thought Leadership: Thought leadership is the idea that you’re on the cutting edge and you’re thinking ahead of everyone else.
It’s my PR person who did not meet me at the studio and she’s like, “Angelique, how do you think that went?” The tone of the way she said is like there’s something wrong. It was raining. I’ve been up since 3:00 in the morning and I’m like, “I had thought it went well.” She’s like, “Who did your makeup?” I’m like, “I did my makeup.” She goes, “Where did you do it?” I’m like, “In my car.” She’s like, “I am certain, Angelique, that you put eye shadow on your cheeks instead of blush.”
I had these ridiculous purple cheeks. It’s absurd what I looked like and it’s also absurd by the way that no one said a thing. No one was like, “What’s on your face?” No one said a thing and I kept noticing the way that the newscaster was looking at me and I didn’t know that I had big purple cheeks. When you’re putting yourself out there and you’re running around all the time and you’re in the grind of building a business, you’re going to have some stuff happen. You’re going to look foolish every now and then. It’s going to happen. I think I was upset for a day but now I think it’s hilarious. Who goes on TV with eyeshadow on the cheeks? I did right here.
For everyone to know, Angelique is probably one of my only clients left because I don’t do that anymore, only for special people.
It does help to have a little bit of confidence so you can laugh.
Also, a sense of humor after.
You have to have a sense of humor.
Tell me why are corporate clients the ultimate force multiplier for small business owners and those self-employed employees?
This is my baby, teaching small business owners to win corporate clients of all sizes, mid-markets, big small enterprises, universities, etc. It is a huge force multiplier. The first way to look at it is if you had a swimming pool and you’re going to fill up that swimming pool, are you going to go soup spoon by soup spoon of water running back and forth from the kitchen sink out to the swimming pool with one teaspoon or soup spoon of water?
Are you going to get a little sand bucket and do one bucket of water at a time or are you going to call the water company that brings the big swimming pool amount of water in a tanker truck and they’re going to back it up to your pool and they’re going to fill it with all that water? That’s what a corporate client is in terms of revenue to your business, in terms of brand cache for your business. When our clients, even though they don’t only work with corporate, when they have brands like Starbucks, Facebook, Mercedes, Target, and Delta on their client list, they’re walking into a meeting.
They’re walking into a speaking engagement, a media opportunity, another client opportunity with a tremendous brand cache that they are working with those brands. It’s an instantaneous competitive advantage. Then there’s the impact piece of it. Most small business owners especially in your orbit and my orbit wants to have an impact in the world. It isn’t just about making money. I owned a franchise for two years.
I didn’t enjoy it, but I bought it to diversify the business, but it was meant to be a revenue generator. I had no passion for that franchise. It was transactional. Most business owners who are providing a service coaching, keynoting training, whatever, they’re in it for the mission as much as they’re in it for the financial freedom. When you get one yes from an organization, whether it’s a nonprofit, a government agency, a university, a mid-market company, your work now is impacting an entire ecosystem of that organization.
You’re impacting their employees, their customers, their community, their vendors. If that company is more successful, they are buying more from their vendors. You’ve got all of these force multipliers in your impact, in your brand cache, in your bank accounts, all of these things are coming together in order to accelerate your financial freedom, your impact, and your legacy in the world. For me, it doesn’t have to be the only thing, but I’m a big proponent of every business owner looking at that space going, “What am I missing out if I’m not playing in this space?”
This is why I connected with you on that front because there are opportunities that you’re not taking advantage of especially when you look at the confidence level. What do you believe is the link between audacious confidence and winning corporate clients?
There is a huge link. It’s one of the reasons that I’m excited to have you as part of our adjunct expert team that we have. We have every step of winning corporate clients requires confidence. First of all, you can’t hide in your office. You can’t build a Facebook ad campaign and think that corporate clients are going to come to you. They buy from the experts who have a line of sight with them. Whether that’s you hosting executive round tables, or you doing a webinar, or you speaking at an event or what have you, you need the confidence to be visible, to be seen by these organizations. If you’re hiding behind social media, you’re hiding behind your busy inbox every day, they’re not going to find you.
You also need confidence because you have to have conversations with them before you can work with them. There’s going to be dialogue and they don’t know how to buy your services. You have to be able to be strong in those conversations to give your opinion and to guide those conversations. When you’re working with them, you have to have confidence in your point of view and the expertise that you’re saying, “This is the best way to accomplish this.” If you don’t believe in what you’re doing, they’re not going to believe you.
It’s like having them control the conversation because they think they know, but they don’t know what you do.
They don’t know half of what you think they know. You have to be able to hold your own in those conversations and you have to be able to hold your own when you’re working with those conversations, those clients through whether you’re coaching conversations, training conversations. If you’re brought in to do a half-day workshop with a company whether it’s on Zoom in our pandemic world, you’re going to get pushback every now and then from someone who questions you, “Why is that the right answer? Why should we do it that way?” You have to have confidence and your expertise to back up those responses. I think that’s also true for all target markets. Clients are drawn to people who are confident. They’re hiring you because they don’t know what the answer is.
They hire you to supply the answer to help navigate them through and if they don’t have confidence in you because you’re not showing confidence, then the whole sale falls apart.
We did an event in the past in another state. I called a small PR firm in that state. It was a women-owned firm. I love to support women-owned business owners and I scheduled a call thinking they could do our local PR in that city for us prior to our event. I liked their website. I liked their portfolio. I was impressed by the media coverage that they had gotten for these other brands. We get on the phone and the first thing that they said as we were kicking off the conversation was, “How do you want to work this call? Do you want to tell us about your event a little bit or we could tell you about some of the things we’ve already done, given you an example of some of our packages, and then you could ask us questions? It doesn’t matter. Which way do you want to go with it?” That’s not a confident first impression. It’s like, “I don’t know. We are coming to you. I have to figure out how you should have your sales call?” That I think is an example of a lack of clarity and confidence.
What are some of the big mistakes that you see small business owners are making then? You’ve been in this space for over a decade of helping small businesses with corporate.
One is overlooking the space, making preconceived notions about what companies buy or don’t buy or because you didn’t like working inside of a company twelve years ago that you wouldn’t like having them as a client, for example, or a company like them as a client. I think one overlooking this massive force multiplier opportunity. The second is trying to apply marketing and sales strategies that were not designed to work with these kinds of organizations, even companies with 150 employees. Trying to take the online marketing space techniques and thinking that you can somehow tweak them and they’re going to work over in the corporate space.
Especially if you’re used to working with other entrepreneurs in that space and the coaches and now you’re trying to use that same technique. That was like you trying to sell seats to an event and you’d never tried before.
I was taking the corporate style of doing it. It’s like, “This is a different buying decision for the small business owner than it is for that corporate decision-maker who’s going to a conference.” I’m not saying that there isn’t a space for content marketing with corporate. I’m saying that the entire philosophy, the goals of what you’re trying to accomplish, the way that one marketing strategy locks into another marketing strategy is entirely different than when you’re working with small business owners.
A great example, for instance, is we’ll see people who get an opportunity to speak at an industry association conference in front of people from a hundred different companies. They will try to give away a free discovery session to the audience. Something that you see all the time in the small business owner space. That doesn’t work at all in the corporate space. It’s like the worst possible thing that you can do. You’re completely setting yourself up for failure. That’s an example of you can’t take that strategy and then move it over to the corporate world.
One was created for one audience and there was a good reason for it. Corporate is making decisions in a completely different way. That would be the two big mistakes. I think one is overlooking the opportunity and then the other is not getting the right strategies. My mom was a single mom and we learned to be resourceful, but sometimes it got us into trouble. When I was sixteen and I needed to change an air filter in my car and we didn’t have a lot of money. We did a lot of things ourselves and we’re outside under the hood of my car and the only tools we had in the house were a screwdriver and a hammer.
We’re out under the hood of my car, banging on this thing, trying to change an air filter with a hammer and a neighbor comes walking by and he’s like, “Ladies, what exactly are you doing with a hammer to that engine?” It’s this moment of us standing there with our hammer being resourceful. We were proud of ourselves but it was the wrong tool for the job. You have to have the right tools for the job and if you’re trying to take stuff from the infopreneur solopreneur, online marketing space, and think you’re going to be able to use those for these larger organizations, you might as well try to change air filters with a hammer. It doesn’t work.
I’ve got a lot of inbox messages on LinkedIn about B2B sales, “We can help you with your B2B sales.” Most of their strategies of B2B for small businesses, small business entrepreneurs, they don’t have the strategy for corporate like how to sell and connect to corporate.
We have a client who spends a lot of money before they worked with us, working with a company to do cold prospecting on LinkedIn. They spent a lot of money on it and I’m not saying it never works. There’re always exceptions to every rule and that’s fine. The problem is that when you approach a company from the wrong way from the get-go, you’ve immediately anchored that impression of who you are, and how you’re going to approach things. It’s difficult to recover from that. You have to be careful and make sure that you’re doing things the right way.
Wherever our mind and actions are focused, that's what we create. Click To TweetWhich is why I stick with you and Phil. I wanted to ask you because you have twin boys, what advice do you have for them on leadership even though they’re still twelve? I know you pour into them a lot.
My first piece of advice to them as they’re growing up is to understand what it is that they’re trying to achieve. It’s difficult to lead or to show up as a leader if you don’t even know what it is that you’re trying to do and taking the time to think about what you’re trying to affect, what outcome you’re trying to achieve is something that I want them to sit with. Whenever I’ve made a strategic mistake versus an execution mistake because those are two different types of mistakes that you can make.
I made an execution mistake with the event more so than a strategy mistake when I look back at that event in 2013. I knew I needed to do something to break out. I needed a catapult project, a platform that would set me apart. That strategically was right, but I made execution mistakes. I made an execution mistake in signing a contract with a hotel that was charging an outrageous amount of money for hotel rooms.
I made contract execution mistakes. I didn’t make a strategic mistake but when I think about the mistakes I ever regret, it’s always a strategic mistake. I didn’t aim for the right thing. I didn’t take time to think about what is it that I want and make sure that I’m putting my time and energy into creating the right thing. In skiing, when I first attended skiing lessons back when I was a pre-teen, the instructor said, “Wherever you look, your skis will follow.”
You learn how to snowplow. When you’re first starting to ski, they teach you to put your skis. You put your skis there and if you look to the right, your skis go to the right and if you look to the left, your skis go to the left. You think like, “How is that?” Wherever your head goes and wherever you look, your legs follow. There are many things that we can find parallels throughout our life and wherever our mind is focused, that’s what we create. Wherever our actions are focused, that’s what we create.
Wherever our attention is focused, that’s what we create. Whenever I’m focused on the wrong thing, then I don’t create what it was. I want them from a leadership perspective to be thinking about, what are we trying to accomplish? Let’s start with, “What’s trying to be accomplished here?” I think a lot of us aren’t careful about what we’re manifesting. We’re not careful in what we’re creating. We’re just going, going, and going. We’re not being thoughtful. That would be my biggest leadership lesson for them.
How do you build their confidence? They’re twins, but they’re different.
One of my sons is confident. My other son is not confident. It’s fascinating to watch but my one son cares what everyone else thinks and he’s the one who lacks confidence. My other son is in his own world. He has all the confidence in the world. It’s been like that for 5 or 6 years. I’m trying not to bring my one son’s confidence down because he has it. I don’t want ever to say or do anything that makes him question that. My other son who’s always worried about what everyone else is thinking, I am on a daily basis of trying to get him to focus on what makes him happy and what does he want and try to find that inside of him.
That’s the biggest mindset that I ever learned is that we’re looking for approval from everyone. We’re born with confidence. It’s the world that takes our confidence away but then we look to the world to give it back to us and that’s where we make the mistake. It’s an illusion. We’re born with that confidence. We have all the confidence in the world running around little naked babies everywhere. We don’t care.
We cry when we want to and we take what we want.
As we grow up the world creates that awareness back and then we start becoming self-conscious. It starts taking our confidence away. We allow others to take our confidence away, but then we wait for the world to give it back to us. We wait for some external accomplishment to give us back that confidence and it’s never coming, but they also never took it away from us. We gave it away. The other thing is it’s there all along. If we want it back, we have to go back to the source. The only place we can go back and get that confidence is from our higher selves.
This has been such a pleasure. Before we close, I do want to mention that we have this big event coming up in October 2020. Tell me about the Real Deal.
We are excited and this year 2020, in the pandemic world, dates have changed, location, we’re all virtual, super awesome soundstage up in Charlotte, North Carolina that we’ll be broadcasting. The URL for the event is RealDealEvent.com. It’s three days of strategies on how to work with organizations, major corporations, mid-markets, fast-growing small enterprises, colleges, universities, you name it, what we call the corporate space and how do you work with them.
We have some amazing corporate brands that are going to be there with us. We have one of the largest industry associations in the world. As it comes to people development, you are going to be there. We have a CEO of a firm that’s completely changing the hiring process in the corporate space. It’s going to be amazing. If you’re a coach or a consultant, a trainer, a speaker, or a service provider then this is an event that you positively want to be up.
I’ve known Angelique for the last few years. She never gives fluff. This is all real. Most people say when they listened to her is like drinking from a fire hose. She gives and gives. It’s not anything that you’ve heard anywhere else because it’s all based on her experience. Go to that website, RealDealEvent.com. Get your ticket because it’s virtual. You don’t even have to fly anywhere. You can sit down and enjoy three days of learning and building not just your confidence in getting corporate clients, but also your leadership platform. How do you lead? How are you becoming an expert and authority in the space that you’re in for people to take notice of you? I’m looking forward to seeing you at the event. I’m going to be there. I’m excited to go. Thank you, Angelique. I appreciate you taking the time to share your wisdom and your knowledge with us.
It’s my pleasure.
Take care.
Thought Leadership: It’s important to connect the dots between the clients you’re serving and how your team is serving them.
I am super excited and this is even another level of excitement for me because I admire this woman so much. I’ve been in her circle for years now. I love what she does. I love her as a person and I’m excited to interview Ms. Angelique Rewers. Thank you for coming on, Angelique.
I’m thrilled to be here. It is an honor.
This is going to be fun. You are going to laugh. Hopefully, you don’t cry, but we’re going to have a lot of fun. Angelique Rewers is the CEO and Founder of The Corporate Agent and has successfully navigated all sides of the corporate buying table for more than two decades. She and her team have worked with small businesses across 72 countries worldwide on how to secure 5, 6, and 7-figure corporate contracts. Her groundbreaking conferences have brought business owners together with major brands like IBM, Intel, HP, PayPal, AT&T, Marriott, Chevron, and Major League Baseball.
Her clients are landing deals with iconic brands like Facebook and McDonald’s as well as organizations in the mid-market, higher education, nonprofit, and government sectors. In addition, as if that wasn’t enough, to be named an Enterprising Woman of The Year by Enterprising Women Magazine, Angelique has been featured by Huffington Post, Forbes, Inc., Lucky, The Washington Post, Entrepreneur, CBS, and more. She also shares stages with superstars like Hollywood’s Steve Harvey, Shark Tank’s Daymond John, NFL Super Bowl champion, Jamal Lewis and marketing guru Seth Godin. I am honored that you took the time. I know your schedule is crazy because you have some awesome events coming up. Thank you for taking the time to interview with me.
It’s my pleasure. I love this topic that we’re talking about. I am pumped to talk about this.
We’re talking about leadership, leading with audacious confidence. My first question for you is, what is your leadership philosophy?
When I think about leadership, I think of it about leading the market with ideas that you are ahead of the status quo discourse that’s happening and you’re thinking about, what’s coming next? What’s around the next corner? Where do people need to be looking? What aren’t they seeing? To me, it always is thought leadership and that idea that you’re on the cutting edge, you’re thinking ahead of everyone else and you’re the north star that others follow. I know there are a lot of definitions to leadership, but for me, when I think about all the problems that are in the world now and how inertia and status quo thinking keeps us suffering from the same problems that we face time and time again, that to me is the most important form of leadership that we need.
How are you as a leader to a team? As you’re thinking thought leadership, how do you lead a team of people?
I have two teams of people to lead. I have my team which is comprised of full-time employees, part-time employees, independent contractors, and trusted vendors who’ve been with us for over a decade. I feel like I have my team of my community. We have a program called Velocity, which has hundreds and hundreds of small business owners who are mission-driven, working with large organizations. We call them speed racers. It’s a little nod to ‘80s nostalgia in there.
When I’m thinking about my team that I’m leading, I’m thinking about how am I connecting their work to the success of the other team that I’m also leading. One of the things we like to do inside our company is to share the successes that our clients are having and remind our team, “We know we’re pulling our hair out with our CRM system. We know that we’re working a lot of hours because we have this big event coming up, but here’s what’s happening in the lives of our clients because of the work we’re doing, this is what’s happening for them.”
We like to do that and I think that’s important to connect the dots between what they’re doing and how they’re serving like how is that showing up in the world. You can do some mundane tasks when you’re an employee and you might not realize that seven steps down the line that means that someone bought two horses for her daughter or someone else was able to buy a condo for her daughter or someone else was able to help their husband leave a job that he hated as examples.
Then I’ve got the team of speed racers, all of these mission-driven entrepreneurs that are out there. When I think about leading them, I think about continuing to challenge myself and put myself in vulnerable experiences, test my comfort zone, go out to razor’s edge and cut my fingers, and say, “I bled. It’s okay out here. The world needs more out here on razor’s edge. Follow me out here.” To me, it’s both sides of it.
I love that you said that and it leads me right into my next question. When I first met you, you were speaking on stage in a David Nagel conference and you talked about the triangles because you were talking about stepping out on razor’s edge. You stepped out to talk about a bold audacious leader. I don’t know if it was the story that you were doing the right thing or not. I think you were doing the right thing because according to you, you like to push the limits of what you can do, but your technique hadn’t caught up to you. Tell us about that experience because that’s one of the things that you learned a huge lesson about your own confidence through.
It was back in 2012. I started The Corporate Agent in 2010 because I saw all of these small business owners out there being fed a bill of goods, sold a bill of goods around having a big impact in the world and financial security and all of these things. A lot of what I saw being taught, didn’t match up to that possibility. I’m a big fan of helping small business owners work with large organizations, midsize organizations. It’s a great force multiplier.
There was a big gap in the market. No one in 2010 was talking about selling to corporate for mission-driven, heart-centered, conscious entrepreneurs. Here I come along and I said, “We’re going to teach you guys how to sell to corporate,” which got a ton of blowback and a lot of criticism. What I think is Binteresting now talking about being on the leading front, everybody wants to say they know how to sell to corporate, which is ridiculous because they’ve never sold a corporate in their lives.
That was early in 2010, this needed to be discussed. There were also no big events out there that brought together small business owners with strategies to sell to corporate and corporate decision-makers except the nonprofits that are the certifying bodies for women-owned business owners, minority-owned business owners, LGBTQ+ owned business owners, veteran business owners. You have to be in one of those buckets.
You have to be in a category and then it’s not like it’s mixed together. You would have veteran business owners over here and you’d have women business owners over here and you’d have minority business owners. You have all these disparate events and none of them focused on service providers. Most of those events are for vendors, suppliers who are selling paperclips, brake pads, reams of paper, cleaning supplies, and marketing products. We decided to do an event like that.
I had come out of the corporate world. When I think of events, I think I have a certain vision of what that looks like. I signed a huge contract with the Gaylord National, an insane contract. I was used to having my corporate budget. I did not have my corporate budget, but my brain did not catch up to that. I signed this huge contract and then I didn’t know how to sell that volume of conference registrations at that point in my life.
I had never built that muscle, that awareness was not inside of me of how to do that, short of having a big corporate budget and prior event lists and things like that. All of the techniques I knew to fill events were not the right techniques for that. About 30 days before the room block closed, I had only filled 11% of my room block and 7% was my own team and AV company. That meant I had put in about 4% of my room block of your budget. I had 30 days to fill 675 room nights and a ballroom that could hold about 450 people. I was lacking in confidence at that point that that was something that I could pull off.
I couldn’t even imagine even having the guts to sign that contract, let alone looking at it 30 days out and saying, “I have to fill this room block?”
It was a moment of sheer terror. My husband had no idea that I had signed this contract. One of my favorite moments of that event came after the event. It was about six months after the event and I was telling the story for the first time and I was onstage at someone’s event. I was walking them through this story and this ballroom can hold 450 to 500 people. I had to go to the hotel 30 days before the event in order to do a walk-through of the space and meet with the hotel and things like that.
The hotel was a good 90 minutes from where I lived. I was in Baltimore and the hotel was in Washington DC and my husband worked in downtown Baltimore. I said goodbye to him in the morning and had it down to Washington DC for the meeting. When I arrived and I was meeting with the CSM, she said, “We can go and see the ballroom, but there’s another company that’s in the ballroom right now. Constellation Energy is in the ballroom.” I said, “I’m sorry, what?” That was where my husband works. They were having a meeting in that ballroom. I realized suddenly my husband was at the hotel that I was at.
What were the chances? This was a hotel far from Baltimore. He knows nothing of what’s going on. She’s like, “Let’s go up there because I think they’re on break for lunch. Nobody’s in there. Let’s go into the ballroom while it’s empty and you can see it.” We go into the ballroom to start talking about seating and as we walk into the ballroom, there’s one person left in that ballroom and it was my husband. The universe has a sixth sense of humor. I’m standing there and he’s like, “What are you doing here?”
Every step of winning corporate clients requires confidence. Click To TweetThe CSM does not know that my husband knows nothing about what problem I have, this huge $300,000 problem that I have. She’s like, “This is where Angelique’s event is going to be.” He looked at me and he said, “I thought you were having a small workshop.” We’re standing in this 500 people ballroom. I told this story on stage six months after the event and as I’m saying, “My husband said to me, ‘I thought you were having a small workshop,’” one of the women in the front row of the audience said, “At that point, you were having a small workshop.”
It was compared to what you do now with thousands of people. You were ahead of your time again in hindsight.
What she meant because I only had 25 people registered, she was like, “At that point, Angelique, that was a small workshop.” That took a lot of confidence. I’ll tell you though that going through that experience, we ended up with 435 people into that event. I did all those sales calls myself. I made 3,000 sales calls over the course of 30 days. I think that is where audacious levels of confidence come from when your back is up against the wall.
That’s such a nine quick start thing to do.
I’m a nine quick start. I did the sales calls myself and I filled the event. It’s like, “What are you going to do?” Fill the event.
That stretched that muscle for you to know that not only because you had never done something like that before, where you had to make those calls to book events, now that you do these huge events, you’re also not doing your own sales calls anymore. You know the technique and the strategy. You have trained people and you know how to fill an event.
I think that one of the things that a lot of entrepreneurs and people out there, professionals don’t understand is that how you build that financial freedom in your life, that capability in your life, confidence is by doing the things. You don’t get the confidence and then do the event. You do the event and you come off of the stage three days later, a different person than you were when you walked on the stage on the first day. I think that people don’t understand the order that things happen in life and a lot of people are waiting for someone to come along and either give them permission or to save them. You’re not going to be saved and no one’s going to be coming to save you.
Even when you call your mentor and say, “I don’t know what I did,” he’ll be like, “You’ve got to fix it.”
He said, “Pick up the phone and make the calls.” In that way, he saved me because he told me the truth. He held me to account and I think that is how we can save one another is by giving each other the truth and holding each other’s feet to the fire and also raise the bar and expect people to come up to the bar.
We need to come up here because it’s where we need to operate. People don’t know this, but I am your makeup artist for some events and some things that you do. I do your hair and makeup but for this particular time, I did not do your events. As we were talking about confidence, there was an opportunity for you to go on television and I was not your makeup artist at the time.
This was before we met. I was still in Baltimore, so this was probably the year before I met you. I think media is a great way to build your business, build your personal brand, and build your resume. You should be out there doing media. If you’re not out there doing media, you need to do that. You have to use the media to get credibility, visibility, but also the experience of doing it gives you a different level of confidence.
I came out of PR. Part of my professional career when I had a job was, I led a PR financial communication. I was used to doing media interviews, but I hadn’t done TV in quite a while and mostly I did print, Associated Press, Reuters, Dow Jones, and things like that. I hired a PR firm in Washington DC because I was in Baltimore to help get me some press. They booked me on a new station in Washington DC and it was an early morning show.
I was going to be on at 6:00. It’s a hype going to Washington from Baltimore with traffic and it was winter. It was raining cats and dogs. I’m leaving my house at 4:30 in the morning so that I’m at the studio by 5:45 so I can go on at 6:00. This is super early morning and I figured, “Let me get there. I’ll finish my makeup in the car and then I’ll go inside.” I got there and I ended up doing my makeup in the dark with it raining and I was late because I got lost of where to go and it was a nightmare.
I walk into the studio and my PR person doesn’t show up. She sends an assistant who’s not helpful at all and the producers are yelling at me because I was fifteen minutes late and they’re miking me up and trying to brush off all the water because it’s pouring outside. They’re trying to flatten my hair a little bit. I’m completely disheveled and before I even knew it, they shoved me onto the set and I’m in my chair. I do the whole segment, get back in my car, I’m driving home, and then my cell phone rings.
It’s my PR person who did not meet me at the studio and she’s like, “Angelique, how do you think that went?” The tone of the way she said is like there’s something wrong. It was raining. I’ve been up since 3:00 in the morning and I’m like, “I had thought it went well.” She’s like, “Who did your makeup?” I’m like, “I did my makeup.” She goes, “Where did you do it?” I’m like, “In my car.” She’s like, “I am certain, Angelique, that you put eye shadow on your cheeks instead of blush.”
I had these ridiculous purple cheeks. It’s absurd what I looked like and it’s also absurd by the way that no one said a thing. No one was like, “What’s on your face?” No one said a thing and I kept noticing the way that the newscaster was looking at me and I didn’t know that I had big purple cheeks. When you’re putting yourself out there and you’re running around all the time and you’re in the grind of building a business, you’re going to have some stuff happen. You’re going to look foolish every now and then. It’s going to happen. I think I was upset for a day but now I think it’s hilarious. Who goes on TV with eyeshadow on the cheeks? I did right here.
For everyone to know, Angelique is probably one of my only clients left because I don’t do that anymore, only for special people.
Thought Leadership: You can’t build a Facebook ad campaign and think that corporate clients are going to come to you. They buy from the experts who have a line of sight with them.
It does help to have a little bit of confidence so you can laugh.
Also, a sense of humor after.
You have to have a sense of humor.
Tell me why are corporate clients the ultimate force multiplier for small business owners and those self-employed employees?
This is my baby, teaching small business owners to win corporate clients of all sizes, mid-markets, big small enterprises, universities, etc. It is a huge force multiplier. The first way to look at it is if you had a swimming pool and you’re going to fill up that swimming pool, are you going to go soup spoon by soup spoon of water running back and forth from the kitchen sink out to the swimming pool with one teaspoon or soup spoon of water?
Are you going to get a little sand bucket and do one bucket of water at a time or are you going to call the water company that brings the big swimming pool amount of water in a tanker truck and they’re going to back it up to your pool and they’re going to fill it with all that water? That’s what a corporate client is in terms of revenue to your business, in terms of brand cache for your business. When our clients, even though they don’t only work with corporate, when they have brands like Starbucks, Facebook, Mercedes, Target, and Delta on their client list, they’re walking into a meeting.
They’re walking into a speaking engagement, a media opportunity, another client opportunity with a tremendous brand cache that they are working with those brands. It’s an instantaneous competitive advantage. Then there’s the impact piece of it. Most small business owners especially in your orbit and my orbit wants to have an impact in the world. It isn’t just about making money. I owned a franchise for two years.
I didn’t enjoy it, but I bought it to diversify the business, but it was meant to be a revenue generator. I had no passion for that franchise. It was transactional. Most business owners who are providing a service coaching, keynoting training, whatever, they’re in it for the mission as much as they’re in it for the financial freedom. When you get one yes from an organization, whether it’s a nonprofit, a government agency, a university, a mid-market company, your work now is impacting an entire ecosystem of that organization.
You’re impacting their employees, their customers, their community, their vendors. If that company is more successful, they are buying more from their vendors. You’ve got all of these force multipliers in your impact, in your brand cache, in your bank accounts, all of these things are coming together in order to accelerate your financial freedom, your impact, and your legacy in the world. For me, it doesn’t have to be the only thing, but I’m a big proponent of every business owner looking at that space going, “What am I missing out if I’m not playing in this space?”
This is why I connected with you on that front because there are opportunities that you’re not taking advantage of especially when you look at the confidence level. What do you believe is the link between audacious confidence and winning corporate clients?
There is a huge link. It’s one of the reasons that I’m excited to have you as part of our adjunct expert team that we have. We have every step of winning corporate clients requires confidence. First of all, you can’t hide in your office. You can’t build a Facebook ad campaign and think that corporate clients are going to come to you. They buy from the experts who have a line of sight with them. Whether that’s you hosting executive round tables, or you doing a webinar, or you speaking at an event or what have you, you need the confidence to be visible, to be seen by these organizations. If you’re hiding behind social media, you’re hiding behind your busy inbox every day, they’re not going to find you.
You also need confidence because you have to have conversations with them before you can work with them. There’s going to be dialogue and they don’t know how to buy your services. You have to be able to be strong in those conversations to give your opinion and to guide those conversations. When you’re working with them, you have to have confidence in your point of view and the expertise that you’re saying, “This is the best way to accomplish this.” If you don’t believe in what you’re doing, they’re not going to believe you.
It’s like having them control the conversation because they think they know, but they don’t know what you do.
They don’t know half of what you think they know. You have to be able to hold your own in those conversations and you have to be able to hold your own when you’re working with those conversations, those clients through whether you’re coaching conversations, training conversations. If you’re brought in to do a half-day workshop with a company whether it’s on Zoom in our pandemic world, you’re going to get pushback every now and then from someone who questions you, “Why is that the right answer? Why should we do it that way?” You have to have confidence and your expertise to back up those responses. I think that’s also true for all target markets. Clients are drawn to people who are confident. They’re hiring you because they don’t know what the answer is.
They hire you to supply the answer to help navigate them through and if they don’t have confidence in you because you’re not showing confidence, then the whole sale falls apart.
We did an event in the past in another state. I called a small PR firm in that state. It was a women-owned firm. I love to support women-owned business owners and I scheduled a call thinking they could do our local PR in that city for us prior to our event. I liked their website. I liked their portfolio. I was impressed by the media coverage that they had gotten for these other brands. We get on the phone and the first thing that they said as we were kicking off the conversation was, “How do you want to work this call? Do you want to tell us about your event a little bit or we could tell you about some of the things we’ve already done, given you an example of some of our packages, and then you could ask us questions? It doesn’t matter. Which way do you want to go with it?” That’s not a confident first impression. It’s like, “I don’t know. We are coming to you. I have to figure out how you should have your sales call?” That I think is an example of a lack of clarity and confidence.
What are some of the big mistakes that you see small business owners are making then? You’ve been in this space for over a decade of helping small businesses with corporate.
One is overlooking the space, making preconceived notions about what companies buy or don’t buy or because you didn’t like working inside of a company twelve years ago that you wouldn’t like having them as a client, for example, or a company like them as a client. I think one overlooking this massive force multiplier opportunity. The second is trying to apply marketing and sales strategies that were not designed to work with these kinds of organizations, even companies with 150 employees. Trying to take the online marketing space techniques and thinking that you can somehow tweak them and they’re going to work over in the corporate space.
Especially if you’re used to working with other entrepreneurs in that space and the coaches and now you’re trying to use that same technique. That was like you trying to sell seats to an event and you’d never tried before.
I was taking the corporate style of doing it. It’s like, “This is a different buying decision for the small business owner than it is for that corporate decision-maker who’s going to a conference.” I’m not saying that there isn’t a space for content marketing with corporate. I’m saying that the entire philosophy, the goals of what you’re trying to accomplish, the way that one marketing strategy locks into another marketing strategy is entirely different than when you’re working with small business owners.
A great example, for instance, is we’ll see people who get an opportunity to speak at an industry association conference in front of people from a hundred different companies. They will try to give away a free discovery session to the audience. Something that you see all the time in the small business owner space. That doesn’t work at all in the corporate space. It’s like the worst possible thing that you can do. You’re completely setting yourself up for failure. That’s an example of you can’t take that strategy and then move it over to the corporate world.
One was created for one audience and there was a good reason for it. Corporate is making decisions in a completely different way. That would be the two big mistakes. I think one is overlooking the opportunity and then the other is not getting the right strategies. My mom was a single mom and we learned to be resourceful, but sometimes it got us into trouble. When I was sixteen and I needed to change an air filter in my car and we didn’t have a lot of money. We did a lot of things ourselves and we’re outside under the hood of my car and the only tools we had in the house were a screwdriver and a hammer.
We’re out under the hood of my car, banging on this thing, trying to change an air filter with a hammer and a neighbor comes walking by and he’s like, “Ladies, what exactly are you doing with a hammer to that engine?” It’s this moment of us standing there with our hammer being resourceful. We were proud of ourselves but it was the wrong tool for the job. You have to have the right tools for the job and if you’re trying to take stuff from the infopreneur solopreneur, online marketing space, and think you’re going to be able to use those for these larger organizations, you might as well try to change air filters with a hammer. It doesn’t work.
I’ve got a lot of inbox messages on LinkedIn about B2B sales, “We can help you with your B2B sales.” Most of their strategies of B2B for small businesses, small business entrepreneurs, they don’t have the strategy for corporate like how to sell and connect to corporate.
We have a client who spends a lot of money before they worked with us, working with a company to do cold prospecting on LinkedIn. They spent a lot of money on it and I’m not saying it never works. There’re always exceptions to every rule and that’s fine. The problem is that when you approach a company from the wrong way from the get-go, you’ve immediately anchored that impression of who you are, and how you’re going to approach things. It’s difficult to recover from that. You have to be careful and make sure that you’re doing things the right way.
Wherever our mind and actions are focused, that's what we create. Click To TweetWhich is why I stick with you and Phil. I wanted to ask you because you have twin boys, what advice do you have for them on leadership even though they’re still twelve? I know you pour into them a lot.
My first piece of advice to them as they’re growing up is to understand what it is that they’re trying to achieve. It’s difficult to lead or to show up as a leader if you don’t even know what it is that you’re trying to do and taking the time to think about what you’re trying to affect, what outcome you’re trying to achieve is something that I want them to sit with. Whenever I’ve made a strategic mistake versus an execution mistake because those are two different types of mistakes that you can make.
I made an execution mistake with the event more so than a strategy mistake when I look back at that event in 2013. I knew I needed to do something to break out. I needed a catapult project, a platform that would set me apart. That strategically was right, but I made execution mistakes. I made an execution mistake in signing a contract with a hotel that was charging an outrageous amount of money for hotel rooms.
I made contract execution mistakes. I didn’t make a strategic mistake but when I think about the mistakes I ever regret, it’s always a strategic mistake. I didn’t aim for the right thing. I didn’t take time to think about what is it that I want and make sure that I’m putting my time and energy into creating the right thing. In skiing, when I first attended skiing lessons back when I was a pre-teen, the instructor said, “Wherever you look, your skis will follow.”
You learn how to snowplow. When you’re first starting to ski, they teach you to put your skis. You put your skis there and if you look to the right, your skis go to the right and if you look to the left, your skis go to the left. You think like, “How is that?” Wherever your head goes and wherever you look, your legs follow. There are many things that we can find parallels throughout our life and wherever our mind is focused, that’s what we create. Wherever our actions are focused, that’s what we create.
Wherever our attention is focused, that’s what we create. Whenever I’m focused on the wrong thing, then I don’t create what it was. I want them from a leadership perspective to be thinking about, what are we trying to accomplish? Let’s start with, “What’s trying to be accomplished here?” I think a lot of us aren’t careful about what we’re manifesting. We’re not careful in what we’re creating. We’re just going, going, and going. We’re not being thoughtful. That would be my biggest leadership lesson for them.
How do you build their confidence? They’re twins, but they’re different.
One of my sons is confident. My other son is not confident. It’s fascinating to watch but my one son cares what everyone else thinks and he’s the one who lacks confidence. My other son is in his own world. He has all the confidence in the world. It’s been like that for 5 or 6 years. I’m trying not to bring my one son’s confidence down because he has it. I don’t want ever to say or do anything that makes him question that. My other son who’s always worried about what everyone else is thinking, I am on a daily basis of trying to get him to focus on what makes him happy and what does he want and try to find that inside of him.
That’s the biggest mindset that I ever learned is that we’re looking for approval from everyone. We’re born with confidence. It’s the world that takes our confidence away but then we look to the world to give it back to us and that’s where we make the mistake. It’s an illusion. We’re born with that confidence. We have all the confidence in the world running around little naked babies everywhere. We don’t care.
We cry when we want to and we take what we want.
As we grow up the world creates that awareness back and then we start becoming self-conscious. It starts taking our confidence away. We allow others to take our confidence away, but then we wait for the world to give it back to us. We wait for some external accomplishment to give us back that confidence and it’s never coming, but they also never took it away from us. We gave it away. The other thing is it’s there all along. If we want it back, we have to go back to the source. The only place we can go back and get that confidence is from our higher selves.
This has been such a pleasure. Before we close, I do want to mention that we have this big event coming up in October 2020. Tell me about the Real Deal.
We are excited and this year 2020, in the pandemic world, dates have changed, location, we’re all virtual, super awesome soundstage up in Charlotte, North Carolina that we’ll be broadcasting. The URL for the event is RealDealEvent.com. It’s three days of strategies on how to work with organizations, major corporations, mid-markets, fast-growing small enterprises, colleges, universities, you name it, what we call the corporate space and how do you work with them.
We have some amazing corporate brands that are going to be there with us. We have one of the largest industry associations in the world. As it comes to people development, you are going to be there. We have a CEO of a firm that’s completely changing the hiring process in the corporate space. It’s going to be amazing. If you’re a coach or a consultant, a trainer, a speaker, or a service provider then this is an event that you positively want to be up.
I’ve known Angelique for the last few years. She never gives fluff. This is all real. Most people say when they listened to her is like drinking from a fire hose. She gives and gives. It’s not anything that you’ve heard anywhere else because it’s all based on her experience. Go to that website, RealDealEvent.com. Get your ticket because it’s virtual. You don’t even have to fly anywhere. You can sit down and enjoy three days of learning and building not just your confidence in getting corporate clients, but also your leadership platform. How do you lead? How are you becoming an expert and authority in the space that you’re in for people to take notice of you? I’m looking forward to seeing you at the event. I’m going to be there. I’m excited to go. Thank you, Angelique. I appreciate you taking the time to share your wisdom and your knowledge with us.
It’s my pleasure.
Take care.
Important Links:
About Angelique Rewers
As CEO and founder of The Corporate Agent, Angelique Rewers is a tour de force in helping CEOs of small enterprises and self-employed professionals to land corporate clients.
Having successfully navigated all sides of the corporate buying table for more than 18 years — including hiring more than 300+ vendors and service providers as well as landing her own corporate clients — Angelique knows just what corporate decision-makers look for in their outside experts.
In just four short years of launching The Corporate Agent, Angelique went from the starting gate to being among the top 1% of women business owners nationwide and was recently named an Enterprising Woman of the Year by Enterprising Women Magazine.
Angelique has built an online community of more than 25,000 business owners worldwide, and she and her coaching team have trained and mentored more than 3,500 start-ups and self-employed professionals across 72+ countries.
Her groundbreaking INSIDE EDGE global conference has brought entrepreneurs together with major brands like IBM, Intel, HP, PayPal, AT&T, Marriott, Chevron, Major League Baseball, and many more, to help them work together more effectively.
USAID, National Geographic, and The Smithsonian have turned to Angelique as a trainer and consultant for entrepreneurs across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East who are developing innovations to save endangered species and secure water for food. And Uber selected Angelique as its brand’s first-ever official Uber Mentor.
Angelique’s expertise has been featured by major media and she is Accredited in Business Communications by IABC and Accredited in Public Relations by PRSA. She earned her degree in International Affairs from George Washington University.
A Baltimore native and die-hard Ravens fan, today she lives in Boca Raton, Fl., with her husband, and her twin boys.