PRECIOUS WORDS by John Branston
Don Hutson isn’t a household name, but he has probably heard more of the sweet sound of applause than anyone in Memphis.
Hutson is a professional speaker. By his estimate, the 52-year-old Memphian has given more than 5,000 speeches and seminars, mainly to business groups and conventions. He is often what comes just after the coffee kick and continental breakfast or just before the cocktail hour and the rush to the bar or golf course. For an hour or two or three, his job is to make them laugh, make them think get them focused and pumped up. But most important, what he has done very well for 30 years is make people think they can do better.
Seventy-five years ago, H.L. Mencken wrote that there were four kinds of books that seldom lost money: murder mysteries, novels in which the heroine was forcibly overcome by the hero, books on the occult and spiritualism, and books about Abraham Lincoln.
Today that list would include books about positive thinking, self-improvement, managing for success, and getting rich. Pessimism and cynicism may reign in a few outposts of movies and the media, but in the world of business and popular non-fiction, they are as obsolete as the Royal manual typewriter. Americans, for the most part, want to do better, sell better, look better, and manage better. And if they think you can tell them how to do it, they will buy your book or pay to hear you do something that most people dread- make a speech.
Don Hutson is a star of the speaker’s circuit. His average fee is about $10,000 for out-of-town engagements, about half that for the Memphis area. He makes about 120 paid appearances a year. His eminence is all the more remarkable because he is not a celebrity, former athlete, minority, handicapped, best-selling author, evangelist, radio icon, or newsmaker.
But the bookings keep coming and the applause still rings in his ears because he is good at what he does.
It is nice work if you can get it, but not without its trials.
After graduating from the University of Memphis in 1967, Hutson got a job selling enrollments in business seminars.
"My first 1,500 speeches were little 30 minutes talks like that to groups as small as five people," he says. "And it was tough. After a while I got pretty good at it. Then after about five years, people started asking me to speak for a fee. My first fee was $150 for a luncheon speech in Atlanta, and it’s questionable if they got their money’s worth."
A recent 36-hour span saw him making speeches to a computer software convention in Orlando, a group of American Express salespeople in Dallas, and the Green Tree Financial company in Louisville. Normally Hutson travels via a private jet, but a few minutes after departing Memphis for Orlando, a valve malfunctions and the jet has to return to the airport. Hutson, his business partner George Lucas, and reporter change planes to a propeller-driven King Air in which we will spend seven of the next 24 hours bucking turbulence and strong head winds. By the time we check into the hotel and eat dinner, it is nearly midnight.
Hutson is on at 9 the next morning before 600 people. He makes no mention of the late flight or lack of sleep. As a rule, he does not start late, run long, forget names, or talk about his own problems. "Seventy-five percent of people don’t care about your problems and the rest are glad to hear you have ‘em," he says.
He borrows liberally from other speakers, and carefully credits them. He honors the speakers’ code: Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow speaker. The closest he comes to criticism is a jesting reference to the late J. Douglas Edwards, a notorious proponent of the school of hard selling, famous for growling at his disciples, "Those people have got your money in their pockets. Your job is to get it back." The bogeymen in his talks are usually the "negative" media politicians.
"Politics," he tells the software salesmen, "comes from the Latin poli, meaning many, and ticks, meaning bloodsuckers." By temperament, Hutson is more serious than funny, and early in his career he struggled with humor. He practiced and practiced telling jokes, but, still discouraged, stopped using humor altogether for a while. The results were even worse than when he botched a joke. So he asked a veteran speaker if he should go back to using humor. Only if you want to get paid, came the reply.
"I used to step on my own laughter," he says. "A professional speaker can milk a laugh forever."
Laughter, however, is not enough. "You can’t ho-ho-ho your way to success" is both a line in his speeches and a personal credo. "My job is to do everything I can to make the client happy and deliver some value. I’d like to think I can go in there and give a one-hour talk and change some lives."
He speaks without lectern or notes, building his speeches from a legal sheet filled with hundreds of cryptic key words and phrases under topics such as motivation, price and value, product differentiation, and service. Each one is a cue for a well-practiced story or anecdote. Hutson is constantly revising the list, recording which ones hit home, which ones are getting stale, and which have been used previously with a particular client.
He makes no apologies for repetition. The legendary Paul Harvey himself once told him that if you have a great speech you don’t change the speech, you change the audience. Hutson’s favorite stories appear again and again in his speeches, books, and tapes, punctuated with carefully practiced punch lines. To illustrate the importance of "get in their faces" service – a Tom Petersism- he tells a story about an airport employee, Keith Bennett, who went to great lengths to return a lost pocketbook to Hutson’s wife minutes before her plane lifted off.
"Now that’s great service," he says, then, after a pause, he flips away a cardboard frame for an overhead transparency. "I don’t even have the wife anymore, and still use Keith Bennett."
The software group loves it. He winds up with a funny story about a client who talked him into giving a speech on a Saturday at the end of a long week. The client "built value’ by sending a Lear jet to Memphis to pick up Hutson- an aviation nut- and his family, arranging a helicopter ride over the bucolic Kentucky Bluegrass country side for them, and promising to whisk them all back to Memphis the same afternoon.
"By then I was ready to forget the fee!" Hutson says, then with a mock concern when the laughter dies down. "Not really, Jerry." Fifteen minutes later he is back aboard the King Air for the rough four-hour flight to Dallas. For most of the flight, he is absorbed in work. Lunch is a bag of Cheetos and a ham sandwich from a vending machine. For every client, he builds a job jacket from interviews and questionnaires with key people in the organization on everything from needs analysis to whether wine will be served at dinner. A crowd that has been drinking is a tough audience "because you lose predictability." From the job jacket, he can pull enough details to customize each speech. The most requested speaker topic at conventions and meetings is change; second most requested is customer service, a Hutson specialty.
Hutson still practices his delivery in front of other professional speakers and under the guidance of a British acting coach who helps with pauses and timing. One reason is self-preservation in an increasingly crowded field. Every year brings a new crop of celebrities, star athletes, ex-politicians (George Bush gets $80,000 per speech), and authors-turned-speakers, and war-horses like Zig Ziglar and Paul Harvey are still going strong.
"Old speakers don’t retire," says Hutson. "They either die or they stop getting invited." He frets that he will be cutting it too close in Dallas, causing his hosts to worry. Twice he calls from a plane to reassure them he is going to on time. He makes it to the Dallas Four Seasons Hotel with half an hour to spare.
American Express, whose familiar pitch men have included actors Karl Malden and Jerry Seinfield, is relaunching money orders and official checks to go with its well known line of traveler's’ checks. The danger is that the products will be seen as commodities, essentially the same as everyone else’s. That usually leads to price-cutting. "If you get business on price, you can lose it on price," says Matt Thomas, senior marketing manager for American Express, who introduces Hutson.
There are about 60 people in the small auditorium. Most of them appear to be in their twenties and thirties. It is 4 p.m., and they have been in seminars since 8 in the morning on this, the third day of their conference. A handout in front of each chair lists the evening’s social activities and dinner options.
"He’s the only thing between them and a pina colada," Lucas warily observes. Hutson wastes no time breaking the ice. "Is everybody brain dead, or just some of you?" he grins. "In that case, is it okay if we have a little fun, too? Some of you look like you have had a little too much fun."
He singles out by name a popular manager in the back of the auditorium. There are guffaws and high fives, in contrast to the polite laughter at the morning presentation in Orlando.
Again he uses the line about politics and bloodsuckers. In less skilled hands, the crack could be deadly- try telling the same joke twice and see for yourself- but the group laughs loudly.
Because of the late flight and the dash from the airport to the hotel, Hutson’s adrenaline is still running high, and he appears to be rushing his delivery a bit, which makes him sound canned. The audience, young and laid-back and attuned to the cool of Letterman, Leno, and Oprah, seems on the verge of tuning out for a moment. But Hutson has done his homework, and that is what holds them.
"If you allow your customers to commoditize, then the only thing left is price," he booms, as heads nod in agreement. "You must differentiate and build value. Write these down," he says, and ticks off a list of ways to do just that.
He winds up with the same helicopter story he told in Orlando to illustrate the relationship between value and price, and again it gets a big laugh. He finishes a few minutes early and asks for questions, but there are none. The American Express troops head for the lobby and restrooms. It is an axiom of public speaking to "get their restroom rating," so I follow them.
"He was great," says Paul Andrus of Chicago. "He gave you some real substance. Some just give you stories. The value-price discussion was right on."
Matt Thomas, who picked Hutson after reviewing 40 speakers on videotape, is also satisfied that the group got its money’s worth- about $10,000 in this case.
"We were really pleased with his style and message," says Thomas.
Within half an hour, we are back on the plane to Memphis. Dinner is a chocolate chip cookie and a Scotch. The King Air lurches through heavy turbulence, making work impossible. At the Memphis airport, a bag of greasy hamburgers awaits, along with the repaired jet. For me it is the end of the line. Hutson will pick up fresh clothes, change planes, and fly on to Louisville. At the next morning, 11 hours away, he will put down his job jacket, thank the audience for their kind applause, and attempt to change some more lives.
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