Speaking Versus Speaking Professionally

There is a world of difference when it comes to delivering a competent public speech versus delivering a speech professionally for a fee. It’s the difference between singing Karaoke once in a while versus singing in a concert hall and charging people good money to hear your perform.

This isn’t to suggest that the typical business executive or political leader is less skilled at speaking or makes less money than the typical professional speaker/trainer. (Average pay for CEOs of big companies: $10 million per year. Average pay for professional speakers in 2005 according to the National Speakers Association: $28,000)

But once you start charging people for your speech or training session, there are several thresholds you must overcome before you can hope to become even mildly successful.

As the 2007-2008 president of the National Speakers Association-New York City, I speak to at least two people a week who ask me for advice on how to build a speaking/training business. Most of these people are highly intelligent, committed, have in-depth knowledge in certain business areas, and are highly articulate. And yet most make little or no money as professional speakers or trainers. Why is that? I find that most people fall into two common traps.

One. Would-be professional speakers try to cover too many topics. It may be entirely possible for one person to be an expert on sales skills, team building, acupuncture, wellness, and how to avoid sexual harassment lawsuits. It may even be possible for one person to speak intelligently on all of those topics. But what is NOT possible is for anyone to market him or herself successfully to the world of people who pay money to trainers and speakers in all of these areas. Newbie speakers confuse the marketplace and confused buyers never buy—at least not from you.

Two. Would-be professional speakers try to enter a mass-market field that has no corporate support. For example: life coaches. With all due respect to the approximately 7 life coaches in the world who make a decent living, 99.9999% of people trying to become a professional speaker/trainer as a life coach expert fail. It’s simply too hard a field to enter for most people because they don’t have the money or name ID to reach a mass market and most corporations don’t hire many life coaches. Peak potential experts and hypnotists also face a difficult time entering the marketplace in a meaningful way.

Here is what I consider the four most important things anyone can do if they want to enter the professional speaking/training field.

One. Pick the one thing you do best that you also have a passion for AND (and this is a very important and) is something major corporations already spend money on every year out of their corporate training department, marketing department or some other well established and entrenched division within a company. For example, my expertise is training people on speaking skills—to live audiences and the news media. This was a relatively easy market for me to crack because training departments, PR departments and sales/marketing departments hire people like me to train their executives on how to speak more effectively. Corporations have budgets for things like sales training and team building. Companies typically don’t have budgets on unleashing your inner poet or how to reach a higher spiritual consciousness through singing. If you want to speak on these last two topics, just realize that it will be 1000 times harder to make a living than if you chose the first tw o topics.

Two. Once you have identified your niche, create a website, business card, email address, and a name for your company that all reinforces the idea that you do this one thing really well. If your main website positions you as someone who is in wildly disparate areas, you are unlikely to be hired by anyone. If you have an AOL email address, then people at major corporations will be afraid to hire you because they will assume that you are so poor and unsuccessful that you can’t afford $7 a month for your own email address.

Three. Create content in your area of expertise and communicate regularly with all of your prospects and clients as often as possible. I urge would-be speakers and trainers to do what I do: write a column every single work day on your area of expertise. Then, distribute your content as widely as possible. You don’t have to send hundreds of thousands of newsletters every month and a daily video and audio and newsletter like I do, but sending out a quarterly newsletter isn’t enough any more.

Four. Think long-term. You have to plant seeds everyday, but not expect most to grow into anything for years. Some of my best clients didn’t become clients until reading my newsletter regularly for four and a half years. Yes, you want to be aggressive and persistent, but you must have patience too.

The lure of easy money and applause from crowds makes professional speaking and training attractive to many people going through transitions in their career, whether it is between jobs or after the retirement from one phase of a career. Most never create a real business. If you want to make professional speaking more than a minor hobby, I would urge you to follow the above 4 steps.