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Come Join the Paid Speaking Party

WHY NOT YOU?

How Paid Speaking Inverts the Traditional Pay-to-Play Advertising Model

Companies and brands pay to advertise their products and services—often spending millions of dollars each year to build brand awareness, brand loyalty, and brand identity. And, of course, to increase sales. Similarly, nonprofits pay to advertise to build their brand identity, raise capital, generate donations, and promote their messages. If these businesses and organizations are really lucky, they might, on occasion, get some free advertising. But the norm is that in order to grow a brand, you have to spend money to advertise.

Now imagine a world where that equation is inverted and brands not only get free advertising, but also they actually get paid to advertise their products and services. Then imagine a world where you are a brand. A brand that needs awareness, loyalty, and identity, because—just like a company selling consumer packaged goods or a nonprofit organization promoting social change—you are selling something too. That thing that you are selling might be tied to a product or a service related to a business or nonprofit you run, or it may simply be a message that you gleaned from a life experience that you’d like to share.

The paid speaking industry creates a platform to do just that. It inverts the traditional advertising model by paying individuals to advertise whatever it is that they are selling. It functions as a marketplace for individuals to become branded “products.” The paid speaking industry provides one of the best high-paying, low-risk advertising forums in the world. And this means that whoever you are—if you have a business, run an organization, or are an author, a scientist, a hobbyist, or simply an average person with a message you want to communicate—you can be a paid speaker. And smart speakers can leverage paid speaking engagements as an extremely lucrative platform to generate profit and proliferate ideas.

Take this example from an actual client I worked with:

Joan is the author of a business book. To generate book sales, Joan can opt to pay a publicist an up-front fee—out of pocket—to try to secure media placements and reviews. She’s quoted a fee of $50,000 a month from a top literary PR firm to promote her book—with no guarantee that they will generate a single placement or sell a single copy of the book.

The other option is that Joan can skip the PR firm and, with little or no out-of-pocket cost to her, she can focus her energies toward trying to get signed to a speaking agency. That agency will pitch her for paid speaking engagements where she will talk about a message tied to her book, or perhaps about the writing process, or something else she happens to be passionate about.

Joan decides to go with the second option and signs with a speakers bureau.

During her first month at the speaking agency, she accepts an offer to give a keynote address at a university for which she’ll be provided first-class travel and be paid a net fee of $20,000. On top of that, in the deal negotiated by her speaking agent, the university has agreed to purchase two thousand copies of her book—which, based on her agreement with her publisher and the standard royalty rate, adds an additional dollar value of roughly $6,000 to Joan.

The swing between these two options is enormous.

In the pay-to-play PR example, Joan is in the red for $50,000. She would have to have a bestselling book to even begin to recoup that amount of money. In fact, doing some loose math, if she netted three dollars a copy on her hardcover sales after her publisher and literary agent took their cut, Joan would have to sell roughly seventeen thousand copies of her book that month just to cover the first month’s PR bill.

And what does Joan do on day thirty when the month is up? If she’s sold seventeen thousand copies of her book, she has now paid all of her profit to the publicist and she’s at breakeven for the month. If she’s had few or no media placements and there’s no visible uptick in book sales, she is now faced with a dilemma. Does she sign up with the PR firm for month two at an additional $50,000? After all, the PR agency claims they are just getting their feet wet and expect things to start rolling soon. Joan is not only out the $50,000, but she’s facing something called sunk cost fallacy—she feels that she can’t quit now because she is already in the hole for $50K. So she reluctantly signs up for month two with the PR firm.

Joan now has $100,000 invested for just sixty days of book promotion—book promotion that quite possibly generated little or no media placements and no book sales.

In the second option—signing with a speaking agency—Joan pays nothing up front, she has agents pitching her and getting the word out about her book, and she gives a forty-five-minute keynote speech at the university followed by fifteen minutes of Q&A and a brief meet-and-greet with the students and faculty. In this scenario, Joan is guaranteed $26,000 in profit for her efforts—the $20,000 speaking fee and $6,000 in book royalties.

On top of that, she is guaranteed that she will get to promote her book and message to her target audience. She also will likely get booked for future paid events with similar payouts to this one. And to boot, Joan’s publisher is happy because they just moved two thousand copies of her book and received their portion of the profit on those sales. But here’s the kicker: Joan may also have earned media* coverage for her keynote address—media coverage the PR firm couldn’t get for her. Of course, there was no guarantee from the speaking agency either, but at least Joan didn’t go out of pocket.

Now consider a different example—also from a real client I represented. Instead of paying to advertise his venture or speaking for free at high schools, Bob, a nonprofit founder who was raising money to provide school supplies to students in impoverished regions of the world, signs with a speaking agency. That agency gets Bob a gig to give a keynote speech about his experience building a nonprofit from the ground up before an audience of three thousand people. For this speech Bob will be paid a $65,000 net fee, which goes directly into his pocket—not into the coffers of the nonprofit. Bob’s message to that targeted audience is so powerful that the audience is motivated to act. During his talk, many of the three thousand attendees reach out to their contacts and collectively raise $50,000 for Bob’s nonprofit. Bob benefits personally to the tune of $65,000 and on top of that, raises $50,000 for his nonprofit.

Read that again: Bob cleared $65,000. For less than a day’s work. And he was a kid in his twenties. His nonprofit raised substantial capital—$50,000—and built awareness. And there was no expenditure to do so or any financial risk whatsoever on Bob’s end.

Both of these stories are real-life examples of win-win inversions of the standard advertising model. And they required no out-of-pocket cost, required little work, and offered both financial and nonfinancial gains for both Joan and Bob.

But what if I don’t have a book and I don’t run a nonprofit?

A common concern that many potential speakers have is that they haven’t been published and they haven’t founded a company and therefore aren’t qualified to speak. This couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, sometimes a small speaking career can lead to a book deal—or even a new business venture—down the line. The reality is that having a book or a company is great—the bigger your platform, the better—but there are very few speaking programs that require the speaker to have written a book or founded a company. With the exception of “common reads” on college campuses and at corporations that mandate authors, most event sponsors simply want to feel comfortable that the speaker is qualified and be confident that the speaker is delivering accurate information and an impassioned, compelling message to their audience.

Case Study: The Speaker Who Got a Book Deal

In 2011, I represented the founder of a line of natural beauty products. The speaker got a few gigs here and there, in the vicinity of $10,000 apiece. He was, however, speaking to fairly large audiences, which enabled him to promote his business and core message. But we decided that a book about the growth of his company would be an additional brand-building tool. So we leveraged his growing speaking platform—publishers love it when authors have an existing speaking career—and worked with him to get a book deal, securing a $50,000 publishing advance from Amazon.

The lesson here is that the book deal likely never would have happened without his speaking platform—and if he had gotten a book deal without a speaking background and the promise of future engagements, it would have been for a lower advance. At the same time, having a book in the works—and then later, a recently released book—increased his marketability for speaking events. We began to receive additional speaking invitations, some of which we designed as exclusive book buys with no honorarium.* This made the publisher extremely happy—and those good sales numbers set the speaker up for a second book down the line. In other cases, he received invitations that included both an honorarium and a book buy—the best combination a speaker can hope for. And of course we still got speaking invitations that were strictly that—speaking invitations with no book sales involved. And these invitations were for larger fees. Paid speaking is the gift that keeps on giving.

Realistically, who can get paid to give a speech?

This is one of the most misunderstood aspects of the paid speaking industry. Absolutely anyone who is an expert in a given field—and I am using the term expert loosely here—can get paid to speak. This includes anyone who is running a for-profit or a nonprofit business, anyone who is employed at a company, anyone who is unemployed, abled or disabled, a veteran, hobbyist, parent, or educator—anyone who has a message or a story to tell. That message or story can range from your experience rescuing cats, being a Girl Scout leader, operating a small business, being an entrepreneur, an immigrant, a teacher, a survivor, and so on. In fact, the only people who cannot give a paid speech are people who have nothing to say—or who never try.

Over the course of the past decade I’ve worked with people as diverse as a toy designer, an architect, a “happiness expert,” a female pilot, a schoolteacher, a barista, and a female hockey player. And these are just a few examples of “small,” seemingly unbookable individuals who were able to generate income by giving speeches.

Why It’s Often Easier to Book an Unknown Speaker than a Celebrity

When I first started out in the speaking industry, I assumed that big-name speakers—the intellectual or entertainment celebrities of the world—would yield the most bookings and the highest dollars. As it turned out, I was completely wrong. And there are several reasons for this, the largest being that celebrities are expensive to book but, more importantly, celebrities and successful businesspeople are often only available to speak for a limited number of days each year. How this translates is that high-profile celebrities who are household names might get lots of offers, but they get few actual bookings. The odds of one of these speakers being available on the date of a given event are slim. In other words, they get lots of offers but they don’t accept them.

I’ve represented a number of very high-profile speakers who regularly received over one hundred speaking inquiries a year, but only accepted a few of the offers they received due to the obligations of their day jobs and, frankly, a lack of interest in the money. This leaves a wide-open marketplace for an agent to move an event sponsor’s interest from their “dream speaker”—who isn’t available and is often priced out of their budget anyway—to a more practical, more affordable speaker who is available.

Case Study: How I Made a Social Entrepreneur a Million Dollars

When I signed the founder of TOMS, Blake Mycoskie, as a speaker, his hope was to get paid $10,000 per speech. TOMS was a relatively unknown brand at the time, so introducing prospective event bookers to Blake’s message was a challenge. In fact, it was a challenge to convince the other agents in my office to get behind Blake’s value as a speaker. I’ll never forget receiving an email from a senior agent with two decades of experience in the speaking market asking me, “How are we ever going to book a guy who is talking about giving away shoes?”

The TOMS model is simple; for every pair of shoes that they sell, they give a pair to a child in need. Blake introduced something that, while commonplace now, was new at the time—buy one, give one. Buy an item for yourself and, in turn, yield a positive benefit for someone in need. So, rather than speaking about “giving away shoes” as that agent had incorrectly assumed, Blake was going to be talking to businesspeople about how companies can incorporate philanthropy into their for-profit business models in a new and very specific way, and to college students about how young people can make purposeful and powerful decisions about where and how they spend their money. He was also going to be speaking to college students about his life experience and how he built his company.

The shoes were secondary to the larger message.

And that’s a key point—not just about Blake’s story but also about yours. Blake wasn’t really going to be talking about giving away shoes, and there’s a good chance that by the time you get to the end of this book you’re not going to be speaking about what you think you will be speaking about either.

The first event that I booked for Blake was at the University of North Carolina for $7,500. A little less than what he had been hoping to receive. But a number of years later, I was regularly receiving six-figure offers—that often included a private jet—for Blake to give speeches. Over the course of the few years that I booked and represented him, he earned over a million dollars in speaking fees. And what about that agent who said he couldn’t be booked? He was referring to it as the “speaker signing of the decade” just a few weeks after we signed him.

But aren’t most paid speakers motivational?

Absolutely not. Over the course of my career, I’ve booked a grand total of one motivational speaker.* This said, all great speakers motivate.

If inspiration can be gleaned from a presentation, the topic doesn’t matter nearly as much as that inspired message. Is a twenty-year-old who helped build hundreds of schools in the developing world a motivational speaker? No. But does she motivate audiences because her message about hard work, giving back, and nontraditional fund-raising techniques speak to a larger, aspirational message? Most definitely, yes.

If it’s so easy, why isn’t everyone doing it?

For a variety of reasons. First, public speaking is the biggest fear of all Americans—even outranking death. So, there’s a segment of the population that is simply afraid to speak in front of audiences. That said, the biggest reason that more people aren’t pursuing paid speaking is because the general public has no idea that this industry is available to them. And the segment of the population that is aware of the paid speaking industry often doesn’t think they are qualified to participate. After all, when we think about speaking agencies and getting paid to speak, we think of big household names. Celebrities and politicians and billionaires—not nurses and teachers and everyday people. We don’t think it includes us. But it does—or at least it can.

What does success look like in the speaking industry?

Invitations and bookings!

That being said, there are many different reasons that people decide to become speakers, and many aren’t motivated by money alone. Now, while I’ve observed that money motivates most speakers, perhaps you are hoping to give back by sharing your story. Perhaps you are a research scientist who wants to invite more girls into the science field. Perhaps you are the founder of a growing company and you want to share the lessons you learned building that company from the ground up, your experience hiring millennials, overcoming challenges, or failing and starting over.

Paid speaking is a great way to accomplish all of these goals.

Now, no agency is going to want to sign a client who doesn’t want to be compensated for speeches, because the agency won’t make any money. That said, I’ve worked with many speakers who donate all of their speaking fees to charitable causes. I’ve also worked with speakers who allow their agency to charge a small fee to the event sponsor for arranging a no-fee event.

So to answer the question of what success looks like to a paid speaker, it simply depends on you and your goals. If you are the research scientist mentioned above, success likely looks like speaking engagements at conferences and universities that are interested in your experience and ideas. If you are the founder of a small but growing company, success might look like a small speaking fee of $5,000–$10,000 along with the opportunity to talk to targeted audiences of potential customers or investors. But real success comes when a speaker—and I’ve represented many—has the tools to work with his agency to build his personal brand and hone his message to become someone who has a story that resonates. He goes from generating small fees and a few bookings to generating large fees and a lot of bookings—what he does with the money is up to him.

But how do I know if I have what it takes?

You’ll never know if you don’t try, but the simple act of picking up this book probably signifies that you do indeed have what it takes. Giving a keynote speech is no different than talking in front of students if you are a teacher or giving a presentation at work if you have a corporate job—except that you will be far better compensated.

I always recommend that people start out by giving a few free speeches, ideally before even contacting an agency. Free presentation opportunities aren’t that hard to find. Your local library, an Elks Club meeting, or talking to the parents of the soccer team you coach are all good examples. And your practice speech doesn’t need to relate to the content you plan on presenting at paid events. This is simply an exercise to get you comfortable with talking to groups, particularly if that’s not something you’re used to doing.

What Does a Successful Potential Speaker Look Like?

When seeking agency representation, this speaker understands that she is a brand and that paid speaking is a lucrative option available to her. She has a clear idea as to what she is qualified to speak about, has a curated message, and knows what she wants to get out of speaking—which may or may not be strictly financial. It may be proliferation of message, generating donations, moving product, up-selling, or building brand awareness. She has an agent, is at the right agency for her, and is being marketed to the right event sponsors and under the right umbrella. Understanding her purpose—her reasons for giving speeches—is the key. It will affect everything from her speech topics to the speaking agency she chooses, to which offers she accepts and which offers she politely turns down. And all of this will have a big impact and affect how successful she is and how much she is paid.

TAKEAWAYS

Paid speaking inverts the pay-to-play advertising model

There is little or no up-front cost and no risk

You don’t need to be an author or run a company to be a paid speaker

And you don’t have to be a celebrity or a high-powered professional either

Most paid speakers aren’t motivational, but they do motivate

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that if it’s so easy, everyone would be doing it

Invitations and bookings are the definition of success in the paid speaking industry

*Earned media is free publicity attained via promotional efforts. For example, the university likely secured some media coverage for the event.

*Throughout the book I use the terms honorarium and speaking fee interchangeably to refer to the amount paid to a speaker for an event.

*A motivational speaker’s main purpose is to inspire transformation in audience members. This transformation is intended to be applied to a personal goal of each audience member, rather than be directed toward a specific cause or message the speaker offers.