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When Dannella Burnett was nine years old, she loved watching Julia Child on television.
“I just loved the way she took ingredients and had such a love for bringing that together. She always had a vision for what she was putting on the plate,” she said.
Burnett went on to get her culinary and food service management degrees and has been in hospitality and events her entire career, but when the recession hit in 2008, her husband was working in the construction industry and lost his job. It was then that Burnett decided it was time to stop working for other people and went out on her own.
“I launched my catering company out of the kitchen of my church,” she said. “When I first started it was more personal events, weddings, and reunions, and that led to corporate events and non-profit events, fundraisers, and working with municipalities. I’ve done events as small as 10 or 15 people and as many as 250,000 people.”
In 2014, her company was doing a lot of events for experts in the coaching and consulting space and as she grew and evolved as a business owner, the kind of events she was doing grew and evolved as well.
“Most of our clients today are speakers, coaches, and authors. They’re looking to impact a group of people to help them grow their business or lose weight,” she said. “They might be health coaches or business coaches, but they have a message that they want to get out there that they want to really impact the people that they’re meant to serve. So, they’re having events to grow their business. They’re using speaking to find their prospects, to find the people that they’re meant to serve.”
On the speaker side, Burnett uses a six-step process to help her clients get out on more stages. She also provides speaking leads as well as guidelines and tips for getting more visibility – something that’s extremely important today.
“Before 2020, we talked about stages and it was the stage that you stepped up on,” Burnett said. “At an event, at someone else’s event, as a keynote, as part of a multi-speaker event. And then when 2020 happened, it really moved along the whole speaking and event industry and brought virtual into the mix. And because of that, there’s now more opportunities than ever before. Now we have podcasts, radio and TV that are stages as well as social media, like Clubhouse and Audio Social. These really are speaking or visibility opportunities. So there’s so many more opportunities, but making sure that those opportunities are in alignment with a speaker and getting them in front of the right audience, that can be a bit of a challenge.”
Over the years, Burnett’s recipe for success has helped her clients make millions. She sat down with Jessica Abo to share her six-step process and how you can participate in her upcoming three-day event called Visibility.