How to speak at conferences (and Friday Grind info)

Jun 27, 2025

No Friday Grind today, unfortunately.

Well, unfortunately for y’all, but fortunate for me as I likely won’t be working this afternoon.

Was away speaking at a conference this week (more on that in my next email) and extended our stay for a few days, so if you were banking on a Friday Grind work session today, I apologize (but have no fear as I’ll be running it again next week).

While I adore my hobbit lifestyle and generally prefer to leave the house as little as possible, it is nice to get out here and there, and especially for things like speaking at conferences, which are great for networking and building your personal brand (there’s almost nothing better for your brand than speaking at a conference, which immediately raises your “value” to those in attendance).

What’s interesting and maybe of value to those of you looking to speak at more conferences, is the string of events that led to me getting the opportunity. More specifically:

I spent years building my brand in the immigration + AI space in Canada
this eventually led to me being asked to speak on a webinar about AI for immigration lawyers
that led to me being asked to speak on an in-person panel about AI at a big immigration conference in Canada
someone in attendance saw me speak on the panel and invited me to a group discussing AI in the legal space
this led to me being invited to speak at the conference this week

As you can see, quite the string of events.

What I’ved learned the hard way is that speaking at in-person events isn’t always quick and easy, unless you have a very strong personal brand and amazing connections already, which I didn’t early on.

Almost like anything worth doing, it’s a slower build, not an overnight thing.

Agree? Have you had much success at speaking at conferences in-person?

Josh Schachnow's Substack

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