A speaker paid $3,000 for a post-event dinner with carefully chosen guests and landed a $300,000 annual contract from it. The strategy works because the intimate setting builds trust that leads to serious business deals. One $10,000 dinner with poor curation produced nothing, so guest selection matters more than the bill.
As you become more experienced as a speaker, you get to maximize the event. For example, I'll speak and then I'll set up a dinner in addition to the speaker dinner as well. So I'll set my own dinner. Usually I'll host the dinner, I'll just cover the bill and then I'll kind of curate the group. When I set up these dinners, like it all comes back to me later, right? Whether it's business deals, people giving me equity or someone introducing me to a hire, whatever it is exactly, it all comes back. And what's the biggest contract that you've gotten from one of these dinners? I think it was probably like $200,000 or $300,000, something like that. Per year, customer stays a few years. So half a million plus. Not bad. Dinner costs you what, $2,000? Usually around $2,000 to $3,000 or so. And then if it's like a bigger one, I remember I did a really big one, that was like 10 grand. Ouch, the 10 grand one hurts. Yeah, it does hurt. I didn't get anything from that one, by the way.
