Chris “Shmiddy” Schmidt · Keynote Speaker
Build a life that gives you options.
Twenty-plus years as an attorney and executive, plus a stubborn habit of saying yes to things well outside the job description. Chris helps audiences stop panicking about the plan and start building the options that make any plan survivable.
Serious ideas. Delivered casually.
Attorney. Executive. Entrepreneur. Actor. Humorist. Husband. Dad. Grandpa.
Credentials
- Top 10 Corporate Counsel in the world 2024 OnCon Icon Awards
- Forbes Business Development Council Official member
- Forbes contributor Published author
- Licensed to practice law Texas and Virginia
The flagship keynote
You Don’t Need a Five-Year Plan.
You Need Five Options.
People get asked where they will be in five years from about age eighteen until they retire. The question sounds like planning. It is mostly pressure. Here is the better bet.
The receipts
On stage, where the argument actually gets made
Why Shmiddy
Four reasons this is not the usual booking.
01
He is an operator, not a career speaker
Twenty-plus years practicing law. Chief Legal Officer of a health and wellness company with more than $3 billion in lifetime sales. Businesses of his own. He is not describing a career he read about in a book.
02
He is funny on purpose
Chris is a humorist. He writes his own material, and the funny parts are load-bearing rather than decorative. They are how the points survive the drive home.
03
He is not selling certainty
No guru act, no five-step system he invented on a whiteboard. He names his own bad calls, which is exactly why the good advice lands.
04
He talks to students like adults
No pandering, no borrowed slang, no pretending to be twenty. Respect reads as credibility to a room that gets talked down to constantly.
What the room leaves with
Six things, and none of them are a worksheet.
Less panic
The anxiety comes from a question that was never answerable. Naming that out loud changes the temperature of a room fast.
Direction, not a cage
A compass and a cage are different things. Most people are handed the cage and told it is ambition.
A way to make luck
Options are built, usually in small unglamorous increments, and the building can start this week.
Permission to miss
Try, fail, adjust, go again. A speaker with a flawless record is not useful to anybody.
A stack, not a ladder
Ladders go one direction and somebody else owns them. A stack of options is yours.
Ambition with a sense of humor
Serious about the work, unserious about yourself. He is a lawyer everyone calls Shmiddy. The evidence is right there.
The story
A lawyer named Shmiddy walks into a keynote…
He went to law school married, with four kids, and paid his own way. Nobody recommends that. It also permanently cured him of the belief that life follows a plan.
Since then: two decades of law, a seat in the executive suite, businesses of his own, a film set, and more stages than he expected. None of it was a pivot. It was the same person collecting more options, and each one made the others better.
Who books him
Built for rooms that have heard it all before.
- Orientation and first-year programs
- Student leadership and honors
- Career services and career readiness
- Graduating seniors
- Entrepreneurship centers
- Greek life and campus programming
- Young professional networks
- Associations and annual conferences
- Corporate all-hands and offsites
Booking
Tell him about your event.
Dates, audience, what you need the room to feel on the way out. A real person reads every enquiry and replies.