Last breakout session of GSS 2026. Cairns, Australia. The room was full.
I opened with a puzzle. Parking lot. Six spaces. One car. Numbers on the pavement: 16, 06, 68, 88, [car], 98. What is the number of the occupied spot?
Most people look at the numbers they can see. They get stuck.
The answer is 87. Flip the whole thing upside down. Now you see 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91. The car is in spot 87.
Sometimes we need a different perspective.
That was the warmup. The actual question was simpler: how do you use your genius to get booked?
The answer is four words.
Identity. Intelligence. Iteration. Impact.
That's the formula. That's the whole workshop.
Identity is your genius. Your proprietary asset. What sets you apart in the marketplace.
Not just what you do: how you do it. That's your IP. Books, courses, video series, service credit.
Most speakers already have it. The question is whether you've packaged it as something measurable.
Intelligence is your tooling. Yes, there are AI prompts. You don't have to use them.
But if you're building a custom assessment, something an audience takes and gets personalized results from, you need infrastructure.
Something that runs on software you own. Not a subscription you're renting.
Iteration is the multiplier.
This is the one I care most about. And I can't illustrate it with client work. Too many NDAs.
So I used a family story instead.
25 years ago my mom asked me to help get my grandfather's book published. Whatever that meant. I said sure.
That was book one. Published 2000.
Then he wrote a second. Then a third. Then he passed before it was done.
My mom kept going. Published it anyway in 2005.
20 years later I came back to it. We wanted international distribution, proper ISBNs, paperback and hardcover. Second edition.
Then we realized it needed a foreword, photos, Library of Congress registration. Third edition.
My mom passed and we found a fourth book on her computer: 200 pages of unpublished stories.
My daughter stepped in as editor and drove the whole thing.
All four books are now in the Library of Congress.
We didn't get it right the first time. We didn't get it right the second time. We kept going.
Every edition was better because of what we learned in the previous one.
Stop focusing on perfection. Perfect the process.
That is the object lesson for your speaking business. Your custom tool, your assessment, your course.
You're not going to launch it perfect. Good enough and shipping beats perfect and waiting.
Every time.
The Backstage Form Builder is the tool I built and gave away in the room. It runs on Google Forms and Google Sheets.
Zero SaaS fees. Your data lives on your own Google Drive. No vendor holds it hostage.
The concept: organize your genius into four or five categories (facets). Write 20 questions that measure where someone stands (assertions). Plug it in.
You now have a custom quiz that speaks in your voice, scores your audience, and sends a personalized email with results.
One speaker put a QR code on her first slide before she went on stage. Her audience took the survey. She showed the live chart during her talk. Same day.
That's the move. Not the tech. The application of it.
Everything from the workshop is at erikcto.com/gss2026. Slides, prompts, the tool, the docs. Free.
The fourth I is Impact. But it's not something you design in advance.
It's what you get when you stop waiting to start.
Delivered at the Global Speakers Summit 2026 · Cairns, Australia · March 16, 2026.
Erik Larson is a CTO and strategic advisor who builds scalable systems that drive measurable business value. Seven-time CTO. Eight years in private equity. He also runs Coroin LLC, a publishing imprint with four titles in the Library of Congress. The free tool from this workshop is at erikcto.com/gss2026.