In this instructional video, professional speaker Charlotte Kemp explains how aspiring speakers can build a revenue model and position themselves for paid engagements. She begins by emphasizing the importance of starting with unpaid speaking opportunities to gain stage experience, audience interaction skills, and familiarity with content. Kemp then introduces a practical “100 % discounted invoice” exercise: speakers decide on their desired fee, generate an invoice, discount it fully for a showcase or charitable gig, and present the invoice to the client. This visualizes the speaker’s true value, reinforces confidence, and makes it easier to negotiate future paid work. She also highlights that every speaking engagement is a marketing opportunity—audience members can become future clients, and organizers should be aware of the speaker’s standard fee even when a discount is applied. Finally, Kemp recommends the book Calculating Your Speaker Quotient (co‑authored with Bruce Wade) which provides a formulaic checklist for calculating a speaker’s fee based on various career elements, helping speakers ensure their financial compensation reflects their value.
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Now we get to talk about the important part of being a professional speaker, and that is how to actually create the revenue model. One of the very first questions we are asked when new speakers join the speaking world is, how do they get paid? How do they increase their fees? How do they go from not being paid to actually receiving an income in the first place? And we could spend an entire session just exploring those questions, But let me give you a few insights that might get you started. The first thing is that almost every speaker has started by giving speeches— I want to say the word for free, but I don't want to say the words for free. We very often start our speaking careers by speaking without being paid to speak, and that's important to do because we need that experience. We need those, um, hours in front of an audience, getting to know how good are we with an audience, how can we engage, what works, what doesn't work. We need to get familiar with our topic, familiar with how our illustrations work, familiar with the timing of our humor or our storytelling, etc. So, speaking without being paid is an important part of speak— of developing your speaking career, and there are many places where you can do that. Many organizations, charities, community groups that will invite you to speak, but they're not going to any money for you. They may give you a bottle of wine or some kind of a gift basket or maybe just say thank you and give you a round of applause. But it is important to start with those. When you are ready to actually be paid for speaking, making that big jump is sometimes very difficult. As long as your positioning online is good enough, there's no reason why your next engagement can't actually be paid. But if you need that, that time to kind of bridge between them, or after you've started being paid, if you still occasionally get those, those opportunities to speak where you want to speak but you know you're not going to get paid, then this is some really good advice that I was given early in my career and we share with everyone. Work out what you think your speaking fee should be. Find something that you feel comfortable with. Draw up an invoice on your computer. Draw up the invoice for that particular client and then discount it by 100%. Print out that invoice and take it with you to your speaking engagement and give it to the client. And when they take a bit of a breath and they say, but you said you were not going to, you know, charge us for this, say, no, it's okay, please have a look at the invoice, and they will see that it's discounted. The balance is going to be zero. It's important to do that for a number of reasons. You need to start convincing yourself of what your speaking fee is actually worth. You need to be able to communicate with your client, even a client who's not paying you, what your speaking fee is worth, because then it is so much easier for you to get the next paid speaking engagement. In terms of marketing your speaking, one of the best ways to market is in every speech you do. There are people in that audience, and any one of them could be your next best client. When that person goes to the organizer and says, how much was the speaker? How much did they, they cost you? You don't want the organizer say, oh, nothing. They're a free speaker. They just did it for nothing. Rather say, this is the invoice from the speaker. This is what their speaker fee is actually worth, but they agreed to do it for us as a showcase speech, or they agreed to do it for us with this discount because we're a charity or an organization that their values are aligned with. And so they did us a favor by not charging us, but this is what their fee really is. So try that exercise. Even if in the beginning while you're starting you don't show anybody your invoice, but you just know that you have it and you know what you're worth, you really want to be able to develop that concept within yourself. If you want to explore more how to begin to calculate what are all the elements that go into defining an acceptable speaker fee for yourself, then I highly recommend our book Calculating Your Speaker Quotient, written by myself and Bruce Wade, both of us from Voices Into Africa and from the Professional Speakers Association of Southern Africa. It is a lovely formula that you can break down and use as a checklist to look at all the different elements of your speaking career that you can enhance to make sure that the value that you receive financially is really worthwhile.
