Sean Price & Steven Van Belleghem

The TPM Podcast

This week’s podcast hosted by Sean Price is with Steven Van Belleghem International Keynote Speaker, Author, founder of Nexxworks and partner of Intracto.

“It’s the friction hunting mindset”.

Steven researches the future of customer experience and researching the customer behaviour in the digital world. We begin with hearing Steven’s dream career/ position when he was a teenager, admitting that he aspired to be being the CEO of Disney to turning up to present a talk to a room with one single person in the audience. As well as playing a small part in the Dutch version of Cars 3. We hear the stories of being a keynote speaker, hearing about the demand increase of talks throughout the pandemic virtually. We go through Steven’s 10-year journey in his career with 1250+ keynote speaking presentations done, travelling all over the globe presenting to hundreds of people on stage. Starting with his professor saying he should be a keynote speaker, once speaking with his parents he decided it was the career for him. Steven recalls his first big international presentation was in New Orleans, but whilst on the plane over he stumbled into a Belgium professor who had a start-up company called “insights consulting” (A online marketing research company). They chatted and drank multiple mini bottles of wine, and by the time the plane landed, Steven secured himself a position in his company, doing research in how people were using the internet (in 2001). This began Steven travelling around the world presenting that market study and the results, gaining more skills and experience.

Years later we hear about how Steven received a call from Microsoft about doing a preshow presentation for Steven Ballmer (who at the time was CEO of Microsoft). Excited for the massive opportunity he came up and presented a talk titled “The Conversation Manager” (talking about how social media changed marketing communications). This was a massive hit with even people at the event speaking about Steven’s presentation, this later became a bestselling book in Europe written by Steven.

In today’s episode, Sean and Steven get into several topics, from scheduling to get things done but also ensuring there is time to spend with the family. We also dive into what makes a good leader. Bringing up Steve Jobs, when he was running one of the most profitable companies (Apple). But does that make him a good leader, we discuss the route through and separate facts from fiction.

We also here about how Covid-19 has affected Steven’s keynote speaking schedule. Initially expecting it was “game over” when Covid-19 put a halt to doing shows/ speaking around the world, however this was not the case… The demand actually grew for keynote speakers through webinars and online video presentations. Steven admits his first webinar he felt uneasy due to the unnatural setting of staring into a web cam presenting without any feedback/reaction from the audience. Mentioning a revelation he made was news presenters speak to a camera in front of millions without a live crowd reaction, and still do a great job, this motivated him to do his best in the first couple months of the pandemic. After his first webinar online, Steven speaks about how he did not know the reaction it would get, to his surprised the virtual webinar presentation was a success. Thus, Steven’s empty week filled up and he was as busy as ever.