Rob Peters

A candid, motivational keynote on reinvention, resilience, and building a life you don't have to start over to keep growing. Rob Peters has spent over thirty years building things from scratch — a nationally recognized mobile entertainment business, an industry-first business guide for DJs in 2007, and a second career in nonprofit service. In this keynote, he shares the real, unfiltered story of what it took to keep all of it alive: a pandemic that cancelled his entire business in ten days, the scrappy pivots that kept the lights on, the loss of his father in the middle of it, and the unexpected second career that gave him peace of mind when he needed it most. That same resilience later led to The Small Business CEOs Playbook, written for small business owners far beyond the industry Rob had spent his career in — and, in one available version of this talk, back to a radio microphone he'd stepped away from thirty-one years earlier.

Most business owners network. Almost none do it in a way that reliably converts. They attend events, collect cards, make small talk - and wonder why nothing turns into business. The problem isn't effort. It's the absence of a system. Rob Peters DiFazio spent 35 years building thriving businesses almost entirely through referral relationships - no large ad budget, no cold-calling machine, just a smarter approach to the rooms he was already in. In this practical, story-driven keynote, he reveals the system behind relationship-driven growth: how to walk into any networking event with a clear strategy, how to follow up in ways that actually convert, and how to build a referral network that sends qualified opportunities on a consistent basis. This isn't soft skills. It's a revenue-generating framework disguised as relationship advice.

Every industry has a "just music" problem. A service so commoditized that customers assume every provider does the same thing - so they shop on price alone. But the businesses that thrive aren't the ones with the best features. They're the ones that design a better experience at every touchpoint: before the sale, during delivery, and after the transaction closes. Drawing on 35 years in the entertainment industry - where Rob transformed a "just a DJ" business into a premium-priced, referral-driven company - this keynote reveals why features and benefits stopped winning customers, and what does instead. Using real-world examples from the Savannah Bananas' "Fan First" philosophy to everyday service businesses, Rob gives audiences a practical Before/During/After framework and specific, low-cost strategies they can implement with their very next customer interaction