#207: Grant Baldwin on How to Use Public Speaking to Generate High-Quality Client Leads and Creat...

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.

Hey there.

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host, Ed Gandia, and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. Just a quick reminder that you can find detailed show notes for this episode@b2b launcher.com Episode 207 those notes always include a summary of our discussion here, as well as any links to resources we mentioned during the show. There are a number of key skills that I've developed over the years. It took a lot of time and effort to develop and to hone. They certainly weren't things that I was born with, and near the top of that list is the ability to speak effectively to a group of people, to deliver a talk to a group of people. Now, I'm nowhere near the best at this. In fact, I just consider myself competent, you know, maybe a little bit beyond that, but really kind of at the middle level. But that's been good enough to help me grow my business and my income and boost my self confidence in the process. The great thing about public speaking is that it's a learnable skill. Good speakers aren't born that way. I certainly wasn't born that way at all. And they just trained for years to get to that level and they practice a lot. And if you're willing to put in that time and that practice, it can be a great way to drum up high quality leads for your freelance business. In fact, in some cases, it can even become an income stream of its own. Today you're going to hear from my friend and colleague, Grant Baldwin. And Grant is the author of the brand new book, the Successful five Steps to Booking Gigs, Getting Paid and Building your Platform. He's also the founder of the Speaker Lab, which is a training company that helps public speakers learn how to find and book speaking gigs. Grant really knows his stuff. He's been doing this for years. He's a keynote speaker and he's delivered nearly 1,000 presentations to over 500,000 people in 47 states and has even keynoted events for audiences as large as 13,000 people. In this interview, you're going to learn why speaking is such a valuable skill to have, why you do not need to be extroverted to do this. Well, in fact, why even being introverted can be an advantage, how you can use speaking as a tool for generating high quality Client leads where and how to find the best speaking opportunities for you and how you can even turn speaking into a separate income stream if you wanted to go that route. Look, even if you're not sure about public speaking, if you're not sure if it's for you, I urge you to give this interview a listen. I think you're going to change your mind possibly by the end of our conversation. I hope you enjoy it. Grant, welcome man. Great to have you here, Ed.

So good to catch up with you, my friend.

Yes, it is indeed. This is exciting and I'm so happy to be discussing this topic with you. I want to dive in here in a second, but I want to make sure folks get an idea of what it is you do and who you are. So, Grant Baldwin, give me the story, what you do now and then take us back. So how did you get to this place right now?

Yeah. So if we go back in time for a second. I was a full time speaker for several years and I was doing 60, 70 gigs a year. Loved it. It's a lot of fun speaking and being in front of an audience. It's hard to compete with in other ways, which I'm sure we'll dig into. And so I got to a point where I really enjoyed it. But speaking, I remember a speaker friend telling me early on in my career speaking is a high paying manual labor job and that we got paid really, really well to stand on stage and run our mouths, but had to leave the family, had to get on the plane, had to go somewhere. That's part of the trade off to it. So at the time I started having a lot of people who are asking me, granted, I see what you've done with your speaking career. I see how you built it up from nothing. I want to be a speaker. How do I do that? So we started doing some teaching, some coaching, some training around that and that part of the business really started to take off. So today that's the bulk of what we do. We run a company called the Speaker Lab where we teach speakers how to find and book speaking gigs. And so again, I know we'll dig into it more, but there are some speakers who say, hey Grant, I want to be, I want to do what you did. I want to be a full time speaker. I want to do 50, 60, 70 gigs a year and some that say I don't want to do that. That doesn't sound appealing at all. Maybe I've got to full time gig already, but I'd love to do five gigs or 10 gigs here and there, for whatever reason, for authority or an extreme revenue or legion or whatever it may be. So speaking is one of those things that there's no right or wrong way to do it. There's no right or wrong amount to do it. So basically, what we do today is help speakers understand the mysterious world of the speaking industry.

Yeah, I think when we first connected about six years ago, we were hot and heavy on this stuff. You had a ton of speaking gigs, and I believe you're speaking in a lot of high school. Is that right?

Yeah, so I definitely did a lot in the education space. So I was doing a lot with high school students, a lot with colleges, and then started doing more with associations and corporations. Did a lot of work with entrepreneurs. So, yeah, that's one of the fun things about speaking in general is there's just. There's a wide number of audiences that exist that are looking for and hire speakers. And so it's not like if you're going to speak, you can only speak on this topic or to this audience. There's a lot of different opportunities that exist for speakers at all levels.

All right, so let's dig into this, and what I was thinking we could do is maybe address public speaking in a few different ways. And you've kind of alluded to this already, but first thing I'd like to hear you talk about is why you feel this is a valuable business skill to develop, even if you don't aspire to become a professional speaker. So speaking in general, why is this one of these things that most people should learn how to do, at least at a competent level?

Yeah, that's a great question. So I think oftentimes we think about speaking and public speaking in the form of kind of what we're talking about. You are live, in person, standing on stage in front of an audience. But the skill of public speaking can come into play in a lot of different ways. So what we are both doing right now in this moment is a form of public speaking. Interacting with one another, but doing it in a way that we know that there's going to be an audience that's listening and engaging with that. So public speaking can help with podcasting. It can help with. I know for us, we do a lot of webinars. And so webinars is a form of kind of a digital public speaking or doing a Facebook Live or doing some type of YouTube video. So public speaking can be one of those things to be able to take an idea, take a concept, and be able to Articulate it to make it interesting, to make it engaging to think through, you know, pauses and speed and pacing. And all of the different elements that go into making a public speaker great are things that you can use in a variety of different areas in your business. The other thing I would say is, especially for a lot of your audience that may be doing a lot of proposals and pitches to potential clients, that the better you are as a public speaker and a presenter, the more confident, the more comfortable you are. That oftentimes the potential clients can associate your confidence with authority. And so, wow, this person seems to have their act together and they just seem very polished. They know what they're talking about, they're what well spoken. It creates a level of authority that this person knows what they're doing. And this is the type of person that I want to work with. So having a solid skill set of public speaking doesn't necessarily always mean that you have to stand on stage to speak. It can translate to a lot of different ways in business that can help move the needle for you.

I never thought about it that way, but you're absolutely right. When you feel more confident there, I think that confidence permeates several different aspects of your business and your life, which of course has a really positive feedback loop effect.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Because one of the unique things about being a speaker, especially like in the live context of what we're talking about, is that whenever you write a blog post, whenever you do a podcast interview, whenever you do a video, any type of content that you may put out, you don't necessarily ever get to see the audience interact with that piece of content. So right now, you and I are having this conversation. There's potentially thousands of people that are listening, and you and I never get to see any of their reactions to it, right? And like, in live, real time versus whenever you are standing on stage speaking, you immediately get to see, like, what works, what doesn't work, what clicks, what resonates. You see that aha moment. You see when they laugh, you see when they cry. You see when they have this epiphany. You see all of these moments in real time, which ultimately makes your content and the delivery better. Because you're seeing like, oh, that worked, or that didn't work, or this resonated or this clicked, or I need to tweak that or I need to change that or I need to cut that, or whatever. But you don't get that same experience when someone is reading your book or reading your blog or listening to a podcast or Watching your video or reading your content, you may miss out on some of that real time feedback that you can get from speaking. So yeah, speaking is just a very powerful medium that can help in a lot of different ways.

Let's talk a little bit about public speaking and the ability of this skill to help you generate business when you're a creative professional, such as a writer or copywriter. So let's address that angle because I know for a lot of people that's going to be an area of interest where you can speak to get people to know you, give them information, build trust, and hopefully turn some of those audience members into clients.

Yeah, so one way to think about this is, my guess is for a lot of people that are listening right now, they already know who their ideal client is and who they typically work with. I work with who would be a typical client for most of the copyright.

Yeah. So I would say like a marketing director in a corporation, for instance.

Okay, perfect. So let's say you largely work with marketing directors. So one thing to think about is where do those marketing directors gather? Like if you are in a certain industry, if you're in tech or in medicine or in education or whatever it may be, where do those marketing directors gather? What are the events, the associations, the trade shows, the groups that they are a part of? If you are able to be a part of one of those events and you were able to speak, even if you're not necessarily doing like a big scale keynote or anything, you're just doing a small workshop for 20, 30, 40 people. When you're on stage and you're presenting your content, there is an immediate sense of like that person is an authority on that. You know, like whenever you, as an attendee, if you go to a conference or an event, whether it's for your market or whatever, you're at a conference and you see someone on stage, there's an immediate just sense of like that person knows what they're talking about. The reason that they're on stage is that they are an authority. So there's a lot of speakers who use that as a business model for some other part of the business on the back end, meaning that they go speak and maybe you talk about, you know, like here's the five hot strategies that are working for content marketing in 2020, and you're able to share that. And what oftentimes can happen is that someone may come up to you, a director of marketing who comes up to you and says, hey, that was amazing, I would love to talk to you. About how this applies specifically to our business or everything that you just described there is awesome. I have the rest of my marketing team that really needs to hear this. Do you do any type of consulting or coaching or could you come in and do everything you just talked about? I need you. Can you make a house call and come over and help us implement that in our business? So that's a model that I've seen a lot of speakers do, especially in the corporate association space, is that speaking becomes kind of a front end lead gen for other parts of their business. So I'll give you kind of a related example. There's a speaker I know who went through one of our programs and he speaks around 50 times a year for free. And so on paper you're like, wait a minute, why does he do that? What's the point of that? But he does basically life coaching and has a $300,000 business doing life coaching. But the whole thing is built on lead gen from free public speaking. So you could certainly do that for whatever your service may be, whether it's writing or coaching or consulting or whatever it may be, where you may go speak somewhere and your ideal person is in the audience, you know, you're able to talk to them to build that relationship, to build that connection to the point that I want to continue working with you, I want to hire you to do this for our company. Everything you just talked about, can you come and implement for us? So yeah, speaking can be a great way for Legion and growing the back end part of your business, whether that's a product or service in other ways.

Man, I've found the same to be true. It's crazy how if you look at a scale from 0 to 100, speaking to the right audience can get so many of those attendees, those audience members, to go from zero to like 70 or 80 in 20 minutes. And I don't know of a lot of other ways you can get people like that, that many people to the 70 to 80 level that quickly.

Well, and I think a big part of it is because of the in person nature of speaking, right? Because a lot of like we live in the digital world, you know, I both work from our homes and so we use a lot of emails, you make phone calls, you're interacting with people on social media. And so it's just a lot of us behind screens that are interacting with people. But you know, to date, right before we started recording, you know, we were just kind of catching up on life and part of the fun of catching up with each Other was because we've hung out in person. And so it changes the dynamic of the relationship. You know, I can still remember we had lunch in DFW airport, a conference and you know, we hung out for a little bit. And so that one little lunch, that one little interaction, like it changes the dynamic of the relationship that you and I have versus I think I've heard of Ed. And we exchanged emails one time and we have some mutual friends and that's kind of the extent of it versus like no, no, like we've hung out in person and so it changes everything.

Right?

And so the same thing is true in any type of service based business is that at the end of the day, like nothing changes about people do business with people they know like and trust. And you can build that know like and trust rapport much quicker in person than you can via email or can via a social post or whatever Facebook ad or whatever it may be. So when people see you speak and then they're able to interact with you or ask you questions or talk with you or have lunch with you or hang out with you or whatever, like they're a lot more likely for to be able to generate business that way because people have had that personal interaction. I know, I like, I trust this person, I want to work with this person, I want to hire this person. I want this person to, you know, create content or create copy for us because I've interacted with them and I know like and trust them as a person. So doing that from stage and then doing that off stage, when you interact with people at an event, it really can change the dynamic of that relationship and especially for people who are potential customers.

So I'm curious about, for someone interested in kind of looking more into this, this can be a whole workshop, okay, in and of itself, but maybe some quick ideas or starting places for thinking through organizations or conferences that might be looking for speakers. It may be the best way to pitch them. You already mentioned then, hey, think about where your prospects typically hang out, associations, conferences, shows, et cetera. So maybe let's, you know, figure on that. What's a good way to pitch the organizers or the association?

Yeah, and one thing you can do to kind of reverse engineer that is for those that are listening that already you already have a bunch of clients that you work with on a regular basis. Just email them and ask them, hey, I'm just curious, what conferences are you attending this year? You know, you get, what events are you a part? Are there any associations that you're a part of what are the things that, like, if you needed a, you know, some type of service to add to your business, like, where would you go to learn more about that? You know, what are the groups that you're a part of? And so just asking them, where are those? Because my guess is the clients that you have, they hang out with other similar clients. And so I'd be curious, what are the things that they're a part of? So once you figure some of those things out, the best way to get your foot in the door with some of those conferences and events especially, ideally if it's something that you're already involved in, it's a conference you've attended before as just an attendee. And so you have some sense of, you know, who the speakers are or who the decision makers are. But in some cases where you don't, you know, you email a client and they say, hey, you got to attend, you know, XYZ conference. It would be perfect for you. But you have zero context of who the decision maker is. They are just an attendee. They don't know who the decision maker is. Real context of who the decision maker is. They are just an attendee. They don't know who the decision maker is. The simplest thing to do is just start with Google and look that up and like, all right, here's XYZ conference. Who's in charge of it? When is it? There may be someplace there of requests for speakers or call for proposals or call for speakers, something like that, where you can just apply to be a speaker. Or you may be able to find a contact about who that decision maker is and just directly reach out to them via email or via a phone call. And Ed, you do a great job of this of, you know, pitching people via email and knowing how to do that and how to go about doing that so it doesn't feel like this, you know, copy and paste, spray and pray type model, but like really a customized, like I want to get to know who this person is and I want to figure out, you know, what it is that they're looking for and reach out to them accordingly. But if you look at it this way, if you say again, let's use the example of, you know, you speak on, you know, marketing trends in 2020 and there's a conference that has a whole bunch of directors of marketing or CMOs that are coming to it or people in the marketing space that are coming to the event, then you speaking on something marketing related is a natural fit. You are providing a solution to a need that they already have. So for the example I always use is, let's say randomly, you spoke about knitting. You're really into knitting, and you happen to speak on knitting.

Right.

If you do a quick search, you can find all types of events around the topic of knitting. And so those events are going to have attendees that are really interested in knitting. And so if you speak on the topic of knitting, then it's not a far stretch for you to reach out to them and talk to them about why you might be a good fit to speak at their event, because you, again, are providing a solution to a need that they already have. And so the same thing is true, whether it's. It's marketing or whatever, copy or content or whatever it may be, that you are providing a solution to the need that they already have. As an event planner, they are already looking for speakers to come in and talk about this. You don't have to convince them to hire a speaker. You're just showing them why you're a good fit for their event.

Makes perfect sense. I'm wondering if somebody's listening to this and this is resonating with them right now. But their biggest fear is, oh, my gosh, but I've never really spoken in front of people. What is a good way to just kind of learn the skill, get to good enough state knowing and understanding that it's going to take some practice to get to a better state than that. Where would you have them start?

Yeah, and for one, I would take some of the pressure off yourself because we think that, well, I've seen some other speakers, and I'm never going to be as good as them or I'm not as good as them as today. And the reality is, okay, that's true, but also, it's not fair to compare yourself to them. So if I compared myself to you in terms of writing content or writing copy, Ed's way better than me. Why? Because Ed's done it a lot more than I have. Right. So I would say probably this is no different than writing copy as it is for speaking. But the way that you become better is that you do it. The way you become a better speaker is you speak. The way you become a better writer is you write. The way that you become better at playing an instrument is you practice. And so the ways that you can speak can come in a lot of different forms. So it could come in some of the digital forms we talked about earlier, whether that is, you know, doing a podcast interview or doing a webinar or doing a Facebook Live or doing a YouTube video and somebody's like, I'm just trying to practice putting together a couple thoughts and kind of, you know, expressing them in a cohesive, clear manner. It could also be, you know, you do something locally like a Toastmasters. Toastmasters is a chance for you to just to kind of practice to get some at bats may also be looking, you know, depending on the nature of your work, it could be something where you're speaking for something for your company, you know, maybe just leading a team meeting or giving some type of little informal presentation. Or, you know, it could be something at your church, it could be a Rotary Club or a chamber of commerce, or there could be any number of things. But you're consistently and regularly looking for at bats. You're looking for opportunities. And so again, going back to the example of how do you get better as a writer or writing content or writing copy is you don't just sit and stare at a screen and hope that all of a sudden you magically have a skill that you don't currently possess. Like, you practice at it and you get better at it. And so my guess is, Ed, if you were to look back at the content and copy that you wrote 10 years ago, you'd be like, that was horrible. I can't believe anyone, yeah, anyone ever paid for that. But it's not fair to look at 10 year ago and today, Ed, and assume that it's going to be the same skill set. It's not. But the reason that you've become significantly better over time is because you've just been doing it. And so for any speaker, the reason that I'm a decent speaker today, I don't think I'm the world's best speaker. But it's just because I've had a lot of reps and some of the reps go really well and some of the reps are a complete disaster, but you're sticking with it and continually developing that muscle.

I'm just going to throw this out there and I'm curious if you agree, but a lot of my listeners are consider themselves introverted and I'm somewhere in the middle. And I have found that has nothing to do with your ability to become a great speaker or not become a great speaker. In fact, some of the best speakers I know are introverted. When you're on stage, it doesn't really matter. That's a totally different dynamic. So if anyone's listening to this and they like the idea, but they think, oh, but I am so introverted, like that would just destroy me. You would be surprised. I don't think that's the case. Any comments on that, Grant?

I 100% agree with that. I am myself, I'm pretty introverted. I like being with people. But I also, I am completely comfortable being home, being in my office, and hiding behind a microphone or screen. I enjoy being around people. It's a lot of fun. And so I think sometimes we assume that being on stage, like, if you see a really charismatic, dynamic speaker, that you just assume, man, they are just this crazy extrovert. They're the life of the party. And that's just generally not the case. Like, to your point, Ed, a lot of the speakers that I know that I'm good friends with, I've hung out with off stage are very quiet, shy, boring, introverted people. And so it doesn't mean that you are necessarily, like, you're one person on stage and you're just not off stage. A lot of times, introvert and extrovert is oftentimes, like, where you draw your energy from. So there's people that, you know, they walk into a room of a hundred strangers and they're like, this is the best. I am so excited to be here. And for introverts who are hearing that, like, you know, myself and maybe yourself, Ed, like, I don't want to, want to walk into a room with 100 people that I don't know and, like, hang out. Like, that just sounds immediately exhausting. So, like, when you're on stage, you know, being on stage and speaking, it can be a very, like, physically, mentally, you know, emotionally, just kind of draining thing. So I know for me, like, when I finish speaking, like, when I've really given my all in a talk, like, I just feel mentally fried. And so I want to, like, I want to talk to people, but I'm also like, boy, I could just go, like, sit in my room in silence for a minute here just to, like, decompress and come down from it. So, yeah, I don't think, like, you being like some type of extrovert or introvert, like, it's not at all a prerequisite. And the other thing I would say is, you know, I think we see, you know, let's say like a Tony Robbins who's a very charismatic, big personality, larger than life type of guy and speaker. We assume that we have to be like that. But there's a lot of speakers. You take someone like Renee Brown who's very soft spoken, who's very quiet, and yet at the same time, Both are.

Very powerful and both are very, she's amazing.

But both are very, very different. But they both work and so don't feel like there's this cookie cutter that you have to speak this way or you have to look this way or you have to be this way off stage in order to be a speaker. Because that's just not the case. There's going to be people that resonate with one type of speaker that don't resonate with another type of speaker. It's not that one speaker is better, worse than the other, it's just kind of who resonates with any given audience.

So let's switch gears a bit and talk about public speaking as an income stream. So the first thing I'm curious about is what would you say is the opportunity at a high level and maybe you can give us some idea in terms of what you can make when you're starting out and how that could grow as you get more practice and build outside of your business.

Yeah, definitely. There are a lot of different variables that go into it. It's kind of like how much does a copywriter charge? It's like, well, it depends. There's a lot of variables there. Now I'll give you some big picture things. One specifically is we put together a free calculator if people want to check out it's speaker fee calculator. You can find it over@myspeakerfee.com, myspeakerfee.com, it's totally free. You answer a couple questions and it tells you what you should be charging as a speaker. So that if you want to know like okay, beyond the generalities, specifically for me, what should I charge? Go check out myspeakerfee.com that's awesome.

Check out that resource. That's great.

Yeah, it's a fun little tool and it helped us because I got tired of when people would ask of me just having to say well it depends because that's a horrible cop out answer. And so that's again free tool. That's for any speaker can play with different variables there. But to get into the some specifics there, most like newer speakers usually charge anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 speakers. They're kind of like up and coming in the corporate World association space. Usually 5 to 10,000 speakers that have maybe a little bit of notoriety usually in the 10 to 20 to 25,000. And then you know, some like B list celebrities, some big, big best selling authors and big names can be, you know, 25 to $100,000 and way up from there at that point it's a lot more about them putting butts in seats and having their name on the marquee so to speak is going to sell tickets and is going to move tickets. And so on one hand you think about like man, why would they pay a hundred thousand? Some like B list celebrities, some big, big best selling authors and big names and dollars for a speaker, that seems crazy. But if it's an event where by having that speaker on the billing that they sell $200,000 worth of tickets, that may be totally worth it to them. Seems can be, you know, 25 to $100,000 and way up from there at that point it's a lot more about. So yeah, so that's just kind of a broad range there. The other thing that I would think about, especially for your audience and a lot of service providers is again going back to what we touched on earlier about using speaking for Lead gen for other parts of your business. So I think there's kind of this misconception that speaking for free is a bad thing or it's a negative thing or it's a, you know, like if you speak for free then it doesn't count, you know, almost. And it's just like eh, I disagree with that. So I'll give an example. So I remember a conference I spoke at a couple years ago and I knew it was a good conference for me to be at for a lot of the work that we do. So I did a workshop there. They waived my registration fee but I paid all my own travel. I was there for a couple days. So like I was in the hole on paper. I lost money on that. They didn't pay me a dime to be there. So I was, you know, it cost me something to be there. But because of being at that event we picked up multiple coaching clients, we picked up multiple people who bought our programs and in fact the talk went so well that the event planner said, hey, I heard you did awesome. I have heard nothing but great feedback. We want to hire you next year to be the keynote. So even though which was a paid position the following year as the keynote. So even though that year I spoke on paper, I made nothing and it actually I lost money. I can trace tens of thousands of dollars in business back to that one free engagement. So that's where I don't like the, you know, the black and white of oh, you spoke for free. So you know, you didn't make any money. It's like Actually generated significant money from that that I can directly point to as a result of that event. What I would caution people on is if you're going to speak for free, know why you're doing it and don't just do it out of the goodness of your heart. You're an entrepreneur, you're running a business. So you can't just, well, I just kind of willy nilly, just whoever you know, wants me to speak for free, I speak for free. You do it when it makes sense. And if there's some type of, you know, business reason for you to do it, another reason maybe just for you to get better, you know, we talked about earlier, the early on in your copywriting career, you may take some lower paying opportunities or even some free opportunities just to kind of like get some reps and prove your worth. It's over time though, you might get a little more selective, but you may still do that occasionally if you knew like, okay, there's a real significant business reason why this makes sense. So it can generate revenue in a lot of different ways beyond just whether or not you got a check at that event.

Yeah. And helpful to know what your typical lifetime customer value is. Right. So typical client, the way you work, your business is worth 10 to $20,000. Then that helps you. Because then you know, well, based on that, this is going to be very prospect heavy quality prospects there. It's going to cost me about $2,000 to pay my own way or whatever. Then you can decide if it's going to be worth it. Cases like that, that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, it's just a math equation. So I'll give an example. Early in my speaking career, I had a speaker friend of mine who was kind of switching markets. He was doing speaking, but just kind of to a different industry. And he said, hey Grant, based on the speaking you're doing, you really need to attend this one particular conference and just do an exhibit at it. See if you can do some free workshops. So I look into it. It was real expensive for a booth. It was real expensive to attend the conference. It was just out of pocket, thousands of dollars. And I was just like, man, I'm early in my career, that's a big investment. And so I was pretty iffy on it, but ended up he was talking it up so much that I trusted him. I was like, all right, let's give it a shot. So went there, did a couple workshops, paid for all this out of pocket stuff, all these different marketing materials. And we had one client that said hey, can we hire you to do, like, 20 speaking gigs? And we also want to buy. I think they bought, like, 3,000 copies of our book at the time. So it ended up being, like, a $40,000 client or something, that one client. And I remember thinking, like, okay, this was completely worth it. So, again, even though on paper you may have lost money initially, the point of it was legion. That generated far more revenue than what the expense was, so it was absolutely worth it because of what we earned on the back end of it.

Gotcha. Yeah, I love that, and I'm glad you said all this, because I want people thinking beyond just what you could get if you're charging for speaking. So free makes sense, as long as you know exactly why you're doing it and you do some math in terms of speaking for money. And I'm curious, for a lot of my listeners, I guess maybe the first thing that comes to mind is, well, what I know, writing, copywriting, content marketing and that sort of thing, but it doesn't necessarily need to be around that area. Right? I mean, if they have another skill set or interest or hobby or a passion outside of kind of their core work. Do you know, people, are there opportunities like that where you can just develop your speaking career for pay on something completely different from your main line of work?

You could. I don't know that I necessarily recommend it. So one of the things that we tell our students all the time is that you want to be the steakhouse and not the buffet. Be the steakhouse and not the buffet. And what we mean by that is that if you and I were going to go to lunch and we were like, man, I could really go for a good steak. Like, you have a choice. We could go to a buffet where steak is one of a hundred things that they offer, or we could go to a steakhouse where that's all they do. Like, they don't do tacos, they don't do burgers, they don't do lasagna. They do steak. They do one thing. They do it really, really well, and that's what you really want to be positioned as a speaker. So one of the things we talk about is one of the first things you want to figure out and get clear on is who you speak to and what's the problem that you solve for that specific audience. The mistake that a lot of speakers make, new speakers make is when someone asks, you know, who do you speak to? And they say, well, I. You know, I speak to humans. I speak to people. I speak to everyone. You Know, my message is for all, all of the people. It's like eh, it doesn't work in the same way that if someone says, you know, okay, what do you speak about? And they say well you know, what do you want me to speak about? I can speak about anything. Like that's a buffet. Like what kind of food do you want? We can cook any food. It's like eh, you probably can't and it's all going to be mediocre if you could. So the same thing is true with being a copywriter. If you say well I can write copy about anything versus if you said I'm the best on the planet at writing copy for car manufacturers. Like you know, whatever the niche or industry is.

Yeah, yeah.

Because the other thing too, I'll give you another analogy, is let's imagine God forbid that you needed brain surgery. At that point you've got a choice. You can go to your local family doctor who they deal with all types of stuff. They're a doctor, they went to medical school, they got the fancy letters before and after their name that qualifies them to be a doctor, or you can go to the brain surgeon. And that's all they do. Day in and day out. All they do is brain surgery. If you have a cough, I'm not your guy. If you break your arm, I'm not your guy. If you, I need an X ray, I'm probably not your guy. But if you need brain surgery, I am the best in the world. That's the person that I want to go to and that's the person that's going to be able to charge a premium. And so that's how you want to be positioning yourself. So if you want to like, if you say, hey, I've got some like, you know, kind of ancillary side passion topics I'm interested in talking about, that's fine. But also just kind of recognize you're also trying to chase two different things. I speak on this topic, but then I write or I deliver services on that topic. So it creates some disconnect of like, wait a minute, what do they do? And.