Create Contracts that Reflect Your Values and Close Deals Faster with Sarah Fox - 327

If just hearing the word contract makes your eyes glaze over and your imposter syndrome flare up, then I've got a treat for you. Because this week's guest is a lady called Sarah Fox. She's on a mission to simplify contracts, not just for lawyers, but also for business owners, speakers like us, normal people who want to protect their business, uh, without relying on overly complicated legalese that That we probably got from the internet or from our friendly neighbourhood AI, and we're not 100% sure we believe in anyway. Whether you're a speaker, coach, or consultant, if you've ever had an event cancelled and you've been caught off guard, wondered if a proposal email counts as an agreement, or felt icky using a speaker contract that sounds nothing like you, then grab a cuppa or a contract that you've been ignoring because Sarah is gonna change how you think about agreements forever. Without further ado, let's shift over to my interview with Sarah Fox. Welcome to The Speaking Club, Sarah Fox.

Thank you.

Hi. It's lovely to have you here. Just for the context to everyone, so I attended a session that you did at a speaking summit, and I was so impressed by the sort of practical approach and tips and everything that you gave that I wanted to get you on the show to share. Your stuff with other speakers. Before we shift into talking about some tips and so on, I was really interested in a little bit of your background. So, you know, you went into law. What was the initial attraction for you of going into law?

Well, that's a really good question because when I was 14 and looking at careers, law was one of the things that was on the list. And the person who was a lawyer who came to talk to the school that I was at put me off. Massively. So I went, um, I had a bit of a tricky sixth form in the sense that I got glandular fever or, um, mononucleosis, I think it's called nowadays, and only did 2 terms of sixth form. Um, but I was a maths whiz and I was the only person sitting Further Maths, so I managed to do the syllabus for both the maths and the Further Maths A-levels in 2 terms.

Wow.

So, um, my teachers were actually quite concerned that they didn't know what they were gonna teach me for the rest of the time, but, um, I was poorly so that That solved that problem. So, I went off and did a maths degree, but I went to Warwick University and they had a really flexible maths course where you could do sort of half maths and half anything else. So, I went around playing with what other things might be interesting. So, I learned some Russian, I did some economics, I tried some psychology, didn't get on with that. And I did a law course and that drew me in and I ended up going into the law slightly more convoluted way than if I'd gone direct. But, you know, having the background of having done a maths degree, which I was good at and I enjoyed, and went into law that way.

Interesting. I'm trying to imagine the crossover between law and maths. What are the obvious— are there any connection points?

Not really, except that I did read a book by Lord Denning, who was Master of the Rolls many years ago, and he said actually mathematicians make good lawyers because they're very logical. They take a step-by-step approach of building up their understanding of a matter or a case or an issue. So, you know, I was, hey, that's me. I'm a mathematician. I'll become a lawyer. And then my mum said, but you're not very good with words. It's like, thanks, mum. But yeah, so I just thought it was intellectually fascinating and it involved, you know, a lot of people, a lot of projects, a lot of, you know, tangible things. I was doing a pure maths degree. We were talking about, you know, how to measure the area of a triangle on the side of a sphere, or imaginary numbers. So, things that didn't really— were quite esoteric, interesting. And yes, pure mathematics has changed the world because a whole of Google searches and all that kind of stuff is based on pure maths, but I couldn't see a future in that. So, law, I could see a future in, so that's why I ended up in law.

Oh, brilliant. That's really interesting. And so, the next question I'm going to ask, I feel Like in some ways might well have put a number of your legal colleagues' noses out of joint because you talk about, and you're sort of known for the 500-word contract. And this feels like the antithesis of what a number of lawyers may be advocating. And I wondered if you could share what was the trigger for this? idea or approach?

That's it. Well, the trigger was a conversation I had in a coffee shop near Euston. The coffee was terrible, but the conversation was good. But I'd become a trainer, so I'd qualified as a trainer. I was training lawyers on, and I was training people who use contracts on contracts. And I realized that almost none of them, including the lawyers, could tell me what those contracts actually said, what they meant, and what it meant for the parties. So They'd become this sort of Bible in another language that nobody really understood. And I thought, what a massive waste of everyone's time and energy and resources and all that kind of stuff. Why don't I try and do something different? And at the time, I was running an internal training for a large law firm that I worked for, and I got the lawyers to try and write a contract in 1,000 words. And I was like, yeah, 1,000, that's a couple of pages of A4. I wonder if I can do it in 500. And I worked in construction, and one of the standard contracts in construction is 50,000 words. So, I'm looking at trying to get rid of more than 99% of that contract. So, I knew it would be a massive challenge, but so it kind of took me into first principles. What does a contract need? What do we actually need, and what do we just put in there because other people have put it in and we're worried about not putting it in? So, That was my challenge and I never really kind of wanted people to say, yeah, 500 words, that's a, that's a standard length. It was more, if we start with 500 and add more, then we might get to sort of 2,000 words. So 4 or 5 pages. But if we start with 50,000, how are we ever going to get it down to 500? So it was kind of a challenge and I used it initially as a training tool. So that I would take my client's contracts, I would then pick them apart, tell them what was wrong with it, but then I'd also give them my contract and ask them to tell me what they didn't like about it, what they wanted to add in, or what they thought was missing, or whether they understood it. But then they kept saying, actually, we really like this approach. Can we do this? And I was like, no, no, no, of course you can't. This was just an idea. It's a concept. It's, you know, it was like, it wasn't meant to be, you know. a tool specifically for businesses, but the feedback was so good that it ended up being like that.

Oh, that's interesting. I would've been surprised at that because of the, you know, lawyers are famous for billable hours and a 50,000-word contract, I would assume, takes far more time, but then maybe not because actually, I'm just thinking back to speaking, actually a 10 or 20-minute talk is actually harder to write than a 45-minute keynote. So actually, perhaps the simplification is where the time is. I don't know if there's any merit to that.

Well, there is a lot of effort and it took me a long time. My last book took me nearly 5 years of trying to play with the words to get it to just 500 words. And I still get people sending me emails going, we think you should put this in. It's like, that's a great idea. What would you want me to take out though? Because I've only got 500 words. That's my, you know, that's my Constraint. What I think is the problem is that contracts have become overlawyered. We have allowed the legal profession over the last 150 years, 150 years is the only, is it kind of the length of which the English courts have actually enforced contracts between parties?

That's it.

So, but over that time, they've gotten longer and longer. And every time a case happens or a piece of legislation happens or something happens, a tragedy, we end up putting something in to try and solve that. So when the pandemic hit, We started putting stuff in to solve that, you know, and it, the problem is it doesn't actually change the commercial deal. Contracts are about recording the commercial deal. That's it. That's their purpose, their primary purpose. But we've got them too much away from recording the deal and managing the project to solving all the problems if it goes wrong.

Hmm.

And the problem is the data shows that so few contracts actually go wrong in the sense of needing legal advice or going to court or even getting to a hearing, that we've kind of over-engineered them for the very small majority, you know, minority that actually end up before lawyers. So we kind of are pleasing not the primary users, which are the companies or the consumers, we're pleasing someone further down the line, assuming it's going to go wrong. And that to me It just struck me as an approach which was not useful to companies, to be quite honest.

No. It's like that 80/20 rule, isn't it? You're, you're making a contract for the 20 rather than the 80. Yeah.

Although the data is much worse than that. The data is more like 0.02% of contracts globally end up in legal disputes. So we're not even talking 80/20, we're talking minute. 100%, you know. So, you know, I think for me, it just struck me that this was wasting people's time and energy and we could do something different.

Interesting. So, I mean, I guess, you know, there's clearly some benefits coming through, but if someone said to you, if they asked you this question outright, why should we bother to simplify? What about just carrying on? Like, it's not, that's the way it's been for 150 years. Why not carry on for the next 150 years like it is?

I think the problem is we don't understand the cost of the way we do business at the moment. So we don't understand that it puts some people off, so we lose work. It affects our profit margins because it's inefficient dealing with the contract during the project. We know that it, that long contracts actually increase people's prices. So when we're buying, they will charge more if the contract's complicated. We know that it takes time and money to get the contract signed because they are complicated when we could be getting the goods, works, or services that we really want. So it slows down business. It kind of hampers business. And we know that companies like Google have decided their contracts have become over-engineered. They can't deal with innovative startups who don't have internal legal. They can't deal with small and micro businesses because they don't— can't deal with the legal. So they kind of went away from their sort of super massive, you know, we are Google, you will work with us, to 4-page contracts for their For some of their projects, because they said, you know what, we Google, if people want to work with us, they will. The contract isn't what helps them to do what we want them to do, is our buying power. And that's kind of becoming true. So there are companies who are starting to do it differently because they see the cost of the status quo. And we know that they, those contracts, even though everyone thinks they're great and watertight and really legal, actually lead to disputes. Because people didn't understand what they were signing up to.

Interesting. Interesting. I wonder what, something's just occurred to me and I don't even know if this is right. I'm not a lawyer. But I wonder if you could make a distinction between, so there's something that I hear called heads of terms and then there's a contract. What's the distinction between those 2 things? And are you, is this more, are you shifting more to just capturing the Heads of terms, or is that obviously different?

It's a great question. Contract is a kind of, it's a legal term and it can cover things that we might also call an agreement, a proposal, depending on it, how it's structured, terms and conditions. A memorandum of understanding can be a contract. Heads of terms tends to be just the outline of the business. Outline of the deal to which we are going to add a bit more information. But heads of terms can in fact end up as a contract depending what happens after they're sent. So, you know, we have all this terminology. We have things like letters of intent, memorandums of understanding.

Yeah.

I was listening to somebody talking about speaker contracts and they said, oh, you know, we send out this document called a firm offer. It's like, but that doesn't really reflect how the law, how English law and quite a lot of Commonwealth law approaches The idea of a legal contract, because if you make a firm offer and they say, yeah, that's what we want, you've got a contract. So calling it a firm offer doesn't mean it's not a contract. So it, the terminology is difficult because unless you're really in it, it, we can use it too, you know, loosely because we all think we know what a contract is because we talk about them. We know what terms and conditions are because we read them all the time. And, um, But we don't actually understand precisely when the courts will say, yes, you, you've actually got a contract now. Whatever you called it, whatever you titled the beginning of your document or email, it doesn't matter. It can still create a contract.

So in its very simplest terms, regardless of what the thing is called, what constitutes a contract?

It's where 2 parties, whether that's a business-to-business or business-to-consumer, agree on everything that's essential, legally essential, for doing some sort of deal.

Okay.

So generally speaking, they need to agree who's doing it and how much they're, and what's being done there, so the scope. It could be that price is also important, could be timing, it's important. But if we're talking about speaker contracts, if you say, I'm going to give a 45-minute keynote at your event on the 1st of April, 2026, and they turn around and say, yes, you've got a contract. Now, it's not quite enough for us as speakers and for the client. They need a bit more information, but the courts don't need you to have agreed all that other information before they say you've got a contract. And this came back to me. I had, um, somebody in the speaking world sent me a proposal, um, to do some work with me. And they said, once you've agreed it. I'll send you my terms. It's like, well, no, but I'm just gonna say this. Once I've agreed it, your terms can't make any difference because we've got a deal. So your terms are coming too late. So, you know, I think understanding the process of contracting, what those steps are, is quite useful to understand whether or not we're actually kind of undermining how we want to do business. With other companies. And, you know, most of the time it won't make any difference. We've said very few projects end up in dispute, but occasionally it's important. And we had a lot of this in the pandemic where people had what they thought were deals, but weren't actually finalised. And then when the pandemic hit and they lost that work, they had no redress. So, you know, understanding that process is just a kind of useful business background or business context for most people who run a business.

Definitely. And you mentioned something that I wanted to shift on to. So one of the things that you say is that contracting should accelerate business growth. And you mentioned contracting in that answer. So we may have already covered it, but could you unpack what do you mean by contracting?

So the problem we've got is the terminology is not great. So whether you're in business or not in business, the terminology for how you get from interested in working to someone to bound, legally bound to work with them. That's a kind of tricky. So we talk about sales and marketing. We talk about closing, closing. We talk about executing. We talk about legals. You know, we kind of hive it off into these different business departments. Now, if you run a speaking business, you're every department anyway, but essentially contracting is that process of The proposal, the negotiation, the finalising, and the somehow agreeing it, whether that's just an email that says yes or hell yes, or is a document that's been signed electronically or otherwise between you and your client. So the whole process is contracting. So it means it needs to start early on in the sense that as soon as you send a proposal, you are beginning that contracting process because you are setting out what you want to be part of that agreement.

Interesting. So, I was just recalling while you were talking about this. So, my background before I left the corporate world was HR, and we used to make without prejudice offers when there was some dispute and we felt the best way to resolve it was for someone to exit the business. So, we would, and I guess, So, without prejudice, and that's a contract, I would imagine, in the same way, just a different context. Does that, so, is the proposal a sort of without prejudice, nothing's finalised, you know, we're just exploring this?

It depends how it's worded. So, you can, and this is the difficult bit because most people, you know, people think that if they write, say, subject to contract on documents, then it's not until they've actually got what they think of as a contract, whatever that document or process is, but other people don't put anything. And if you put in your proposal, you can accept this proposal for up to 30 days or 60 days and it remains valid, then if they come back and say yes, then your proposal was your offer to carry out works and they've accepted it and that's what the law requires. So there's, it's kind of, it's tricky because the legal process looks at kind of trying to divide things up. into different sort of scenarios, because the law has to look at what happens if we've got a signed contract, that's easy, you've got a signed contract, tick. Or if we've not got that, we've just got a series of emails, we've got a series of terms and conditions coming to and fro. So, you know, your client may have terms for buying speaking services or consultancy services, you may have terms for it, you may have purchase orders which refer to some of these general terms, you might have acknowledgements, which also, you might have invoices which still do Keep talking, and it just goes on. Um, and that's because we're not very good with this process. The process should, can be really easy. It can be as easy as having a proposal, which includes all the terms that you're interested in and the client saying yes, and then you've done it.

Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

Okay, cool. I'm going to ask, uh, I'm going to want to switch into your speaking a little bit, but I feel while we're on this. Topic we should continue. So, in your masterclasses, you talk about red flags. These are the red flags that clients miss before they sign. In the world of speaking, what would be your pre-gig red flags that a speaker should look out for when meeting an event organiser or client?

So, I think for speakers, if you've worked out what you're doing and how much you're going to get paid and where you're going, the basics, Then the red flags relate to things like, can they cancel without paying? So, you know, the fact that you haven't turned up to do the keynote speech doesn't mean you haven't done all the prep. You might have done briefing calls with them. You might have done some research into their business. You might have started tailoring your stories, your content, your illustrations, your slides, your props, whatever it is, to what their, to their event, to their objectives, to everything you know about their business. So cancellation, you need to think about when you want to be paid and when you want to say you can cancel for free, or we could move it to another date. Or actually, if you cancel us even after I've signed, I've already put that date in my diary. I've rejected other gigs.

Hmm.

So understanding their cancellation terms is really important. And this is, we saw a lot of this happening at, um, during the COVID obviously, where people, all gigs were being cancelled and there was this kind of fallout. Do you enforce it? Don't enforce it. Cancellation to me, you don't have to enforce it just because you've agreed it. So I always say to people, just because it's in your contract doesn't mean you actually have to go there. Just if, if you like the client and you want to do them a favour, you can say, well, according to my contract, you should be paying me this much, but if we can rearrange it to, you know, within the next 3 months, I'm happy to do the gig at the price we've agreed. That sort of thing.

Okay.

Cancellation's important. Your intellectual property. As a speaker, all the things that you share are what's known as your intellectual property. They're your ideas. They're the way you've put together everything that you've learned in your experience, what you've read, what you've studied, you know, everything you've got and packaged it in a way for that client to understand and take action on. That's called your intellectual property. And you may want to put some terms in relating to them being able to license materials or recordings, particularly, you know, Do you want them to take photos and share them on social media? Probably you do. It's good marketing. Do you want them to record the whole thing and keep it on their intranet for the next 20 years so they don't have to pay you to come back? Maybe not. So being in control and understanding what that looks like. Some speakers will say, you know, share it, share it widely. You can't get the experience without me in person. Other people are, no, if you record, that's an extra fee. So, you know, understand what you want and put it out there because if you leave it to be, you know, assumed or implied, it's going to end up in a bit of a dispute. So cancellation, copyright, I would always put something in to do with confidentiality. So they treat your information as confidential and you treat theirs as confidential. That opens up and builds trust between you. So those are the big things I think for speakers generally. So copyright, cancellation, and confidentiality, the 3 C's.

Interesting. And what, you know, what came up for me there was that even within those 3 C's, there may be contextual differences depending on your approach to your speaking and to your IT, which means that I would imagine you wouldn't advocate speakers going to Chatty Cathy, as I call ChatGPT, or any of the other ones to get their speaking contract because a one size doesn't necessarily fit all.

Completely. And I've done keynotes about if you wouldn't copy their business, you wouldn't copy their contract. Your contract, particularly as a speaker, should sound like you. It should have your values embedded in it. It should reflect the way you want to do business. And things like when you get paid, cancellation terms, all these are unique to you. You can choose what matters to you. And years ago, I worked with Joy Marsden, who was a former president of the PSA, and she worried about every single word because she wanted it to sound like her. She wanted it to be seamless, that people who were booking her, who'd seen her videos or read her newsletter or read her books, knew what they thought she sounded like, and the contract was an extension of that. Brand, and your contract is an extension of your brand because until they sign, they're a prospect. So it's marketing. So if you copy someone else's, you're gonna sound like them. Now I've made speaker contracts available to members of the PSA, and I've seen them come back to me exactly as written. I said, no, no, no, you have to adapt it. You have to make it yours. This is just the baseline. This is not You speaking to me, this is me speaking to everyone. That's not personal enough. A contract is two-way. It's just me and you or me and a client. And, you know, it should be personal to them. It may be different if you're travelling abroad. The way you deal with expenses might be completely different. You know, and the size of gig you're doing. If you're working for schools, you might have different terms for if you're working for corporates. So, you know, your, your contract should be way more than just something you found on the internet or got through chat— or GenAI, and then just kind of blurbed out. If it embarrasses you, stop using it. Okay? If it embarrasses you, stop using it. That would be like turning up wearing just knickers and a bra and handing over your proposal. If that would embarrass you, Don't do it. Same with your terms and conditions or your contract. Just don't do it because you're undermining your own business. Interesting.

I think that's not just a motto to bear in mind for contracting, but also for life potentially there. So, if it embarrasses you, don't do it. And I think that that's also some sage advice for how you interact with people on social media. If you're going to read it later, it's going to embarrass you. Don't do it. I just thought it'd be worth saying that.

Now—

It's true.

It's true.

Let's just make a slight shift. So, you went into the law, you were training, you came up with this new approach. At what point did you decide to sort of move from teaching to keynoting? And so, that's the first question, and then I've got a follow-up.

Okay. So, I went to the very second PSA event I went to, and my sister suggested I go, was at PSA Northwest, and it was a Speaker Factor competition. And I, very naively, I knew nothing about the PSA at the time. I put together a 5-minute talk, extremely difficult to put together a 5-minute talk, and won my regional heat. So, before I knew it, I was then sort of about 6 months later competing on the stage at Old Trafford in front of 200 speakers and feeling completely like an imposter. And to be fair, I wasn't at that point really a keynote speaker. I did my first speech probably in the mid-'90s where a big engineering firm had asked our law firm to supply a speaker, and I loved it. I really loved it, but I kind of put it to one side because it didn't seem core to what I was doing as a lawyer, and because I was doing training, It wasn't really part of that, but all the skills that I had as a trainer and a facilitator come out in keynote speaking. And if you are the sort of person who can, as I can, simplify quite complex concepts into something that makes sense so that people can understand legal concepts in training courses or in 500-word contracts, then it seemed to me, yeah, a really good idea. Because I really wanted people to fall in love with their contracts. I wanted them to Know how important they were to their business and stop hiving them off to the legal team or their external lawyers and kind of hoping that when they got back was something that actually meant something to them and they could use as a business. So I, the best way for me to kind of reach that sort of audience was to do keynoting.

Oh, brilliant. And then at what stage did you feel Yes, I'm a speaker. I'm not just someone who talks about simplifying.

Oh, that's a really good question. I think some days I don't know that I feel that I am a speaker. I don't do a lot of keynote speaking. And I think that's partly because I struggle with the concept of selling a speaking business. So, it's always been a sort of, I do it, but I don't talk about it a lot. And I, you know, part of that is maybe laziness because I know that The effort you have to put in to run a speaking business is huge. And, you know, I already have a relatively comfortable sort of business that suits my lifestyle. So, you know, part of me is kind of, do I really want to press this? And I'm well known in my sector, but I'm also the sort of person who struggles to get fees because quite often I get asked to talk at association conferences where they just don't have a budget. And it's like, how much do you do in order to build your profile? And that I've always kind of worried about, you know, doing too much for free and then being known as a free speaker. So, you know, I love talking on stages. I get really good feedback. Most people are just, you know, delighted that somebody can talk about the law in a way that is exciting and funny and relevant to them and makes them want to go and take action.

Interesting. So, there's a couple of things that I just want to— first of all, we've been talking about PSA. For anyone who is not in the UK, that stands for Professional Speaking Association. There are a range of them in different countries with variations on those sorts of words, but it's Professional Speaking Association. So, first of all, the first thing that I wanted to say was that I don't think you're alone. I think there's quite a few people who are speaking who don't feel like they're a keynote speaker because not all of the gigs that they do are paid gigs. However, for you, I don't know if this is helpful, and for anyone else that's listening who I've already sort of talked about this in the past, but I do think that there is a thing called speaking-driven income, and whether you are standing on stage and getting a fee, or you're standing on stage and that talk does everything a paid keynote does for that audience, but also generates business for you, that is still, you are still paid speaker. You're a paid speaker. It's just a slightly different way in which those monies that you're monetizing that message. And most speakers that I work with or know of do not have a speaking business which relies solely on speaking, as very few of them do. And I think that's important for everyone to know. And most people have this hybrid model of some will be paid, some will be generating business because seeing you in person on a stage is a brilliant way to generate business. And I'm, I know just the having these short interactions that I've had with you, Sarah, I'm not surprised that your business is doing Well, because you are able to communicate these concepts so clearly and powerfully. Excellent. Now, you've spoken for audiences such as REBA, RICS, PSA South Africa, there's all these different audiences. Do you, or when you adapt your keynote for different sectors or different cultures even, what's your key step in tailoring the language and tone?

So, that's a really— it's a great question. I always check with a local person that my— that I'm talking something that actually reflects their jurisdiction, particularly if I'm talking outside the United Kingdom, because laws are different wherever you are in the world. The process of getting into a contract and the kind of general principles are the same, but I didn't want to use jargon that didn't make sense. I tend not to use too much legal jargon anyway, so that was good, but I will always try and get copies of relevant contracts that are used in that sector, if it's not a sector that I work in regularly, because I want to talk in a language that makes sense. I will use, if I use visuals, I will use visuals that are relevant to that sector, to that jurisdiction. I will, you know, just make sure that the stories that I tell are relevant to the audience, because The audience needs to see themselves in your stories. If they don't, it doesn't matter how brilliant your talk is, they're just gonna switch off. They need to be engaged by knowing that this is for them and only for them. So, if I'm talking to a speaking audience, I will talk about speaking contracts. That's not my business. I'm a construction lawyer. So, you know, my talks to the speaker audience would be massively different to the ones to the RICS, which is a surveying audience. They're consultants who provide services, that would be different to architects who also provide services but have a slightly different standing in the profession. The same is true if I talk to contractors or subcontractors. Again, now I work with some demolition engineers and I've worked with the demolition trade association, so I know that they all have slightly different nuances, slightly different approaches, slightly different issues. With contracting, some of them can define the terms that they want to work on. Other ones have to kind of react to terms they're given, and that's quite a different approach because you can't use the same talk between those. You can't use the same examples. You can't use the same projects. You have to make it really look like you've worked a core message to suit an audience. And I remember vividly, and this wasn't a keynote, this was a half-day workshop. I was working with a company that did a lot of work in railway engineering in the UK. And I'd deliberately gone out to find images that I thought might be relevant to them, even though they were about kind of generic concepts like time or progress or all that kind of stuff. I found images and I put an image on my slides and said, does anyone know where this is? A chap put his hand up and goes, I not only know where it is, I took that photo.

Oh, wow.

And that was a moment of connection, which I couldn't have guessed, but was brilliant because they knew that I made the effort to make it relevant to them. And they were all ears. They were, you know, that's the point at which their attention was so key. And it was, it's a really good way of making sure that your audience is really highly engaged.

Absolutely. And I think that's really important. The only distinction that I would make, just to sort of check in with you on, is the core message is the same. Simplification works. However, how you, the outfit you put on that message will be tailored to the audience, because I think it's important for people to get to a point with their talk where the core of it, Is the same so that you can get to that level of confidence and excitement and passion about your content and also, um, you know, delivery. But, but you have those moments that are for that audience.

Completely. It has to be what you're known for.

Yes.

You don't want a harp which has beautiful lots of strings, but nobody knows which one they're getting. No, you want it to be harmonious with your brand, what you're known for. You know, I don't like it when people say, oh, you know, my normal subject is this, but today I'm going to you about X because I thought about it when I was on the bus. It's like, really? I mean, I can read a self-help book and do a talk on it, but that doesn't make me an expert in that subject. So, you know, what is your deep expertise? Because if you have unique and deep expertise, that should be the core of your talk. And, you know, I can, it depends on, you know, if an audience is part of sales or marketing, they have a different approach to a legal team or a procurement team or an operations team. They all have different nuances. They have different, you know, parts of their job, their roles, their controls. So you need to reflect what matters to this audience because there isn't a one-size-fits-all talk. There really isn't. If it is a one-size-fits-all and you can do it for 20 years without changing it, okay, that's brilliant. You can make money from it, but it doesn't make it the same engaging sort of content that people really will rave about. And we'll take action on. Because I'll listen to it, it'd be like a warm bath. I remember there used to be a speaker who talked about, you know, do you wanna be a warm bath or do you wanna wake them up like a cold shower and then get them to do something different? Because nobody, you know, we all like a warm bath, but you're never gonna remember it the way you would a cold shower. Yeah, I like that analogy. That's great.

Good. I think we've cleared that one up. Yeah, so that's brilliant. Okay. Now, I don't know if you've come across this, perhaps everyone just falls in love with what you're saying straight away, but have there been situations where your speaking content or the concept of simplification has met resistance, maybe from experts or clients who believe complex equals credible? And how have you handled that?

So, yes, I remember many years ago talking to someone and You know, a lot of my content, because of the simplicity, I talk about the importance of trust because effectively, because you haven't written every tiny last thing down, you have to rely on your relationship a bit. And that means you have to trust the people you're working with. And so somebody asked a question at the end of a keynote at a RICS event, as it was, that says, well, you know, what should I do if I don't trust the person who's buying my services? I said, well, no contract in the world is going to help you at this point. So either don't work with them or just choose any contract, because at this point you're in trouble. If anything doesn't go right on this project, you don't have a relationship on which to build or to fall back on. So, you know, there are people, when I first wrote a 5-in-1 contract, a lot of the lawyers said privately, I really like this idea. Publicly they said, it can't possibly work. We don't, you know, it's not watertight. It doesn't cover everything. It'll end in litigation. It's like, well, Current contracts ended in F litigation anyway. Tell me what's different. So, you know, there is, there is people who want proof before they'll take action, but there's other people who just see the difference it could make to their business immediately. They can see the amount of stuff they could cut out from their whole process, all the effort and the frustration and the waste and the time. They see that, they see the benefits, but yeah, it's not going to be for everyone because there are people that I've written contracts for who've said, we love it, but we gave it to our biggest client and they said it wasn't legal enough. Legal, meaning weighty enough. They are so hardwired now that terms and conditions have to be, even for buying a phone, have to be 32,000 words long that we never read because yes, we'll just tick I agree, frankly.

Yeah.

We're so used to the idea that it has to be complex to be legal that we can't understand that things can be legal and simple. And it kind of, it, there's cognitive dissonance.

Yes.

And it's difficult to get over that, but we make contracts every day that are really short. When you buy a train ticket or a coffee or put car petrol in your car, whatever, when even you plug in your hybrid, a lot of that is based on contracting. And we don't expect that to be difficult.

No, absolutely. It's like you say, it's conditioned cognitive dissonance because this is what we've been led to believe is the right way, but it's not necessarily the best way. Interesting. Now, final question before we shift into the standard ones. You mentioned, and I think we've had evidence in this podcast interview, that you have an expertise, an aptitude for making the complex simple. When you've watched other speakers, especially business speakers, have you seen them sabotage their credibility because their process or their language is too complex or legalistic? And I wondered, without naming names, if you could give some examples.

Yeah, I think we underestimate as speakers the importance of creating a really good, confident context to what we're talking about. You know, we assume everyone uses the same jargon and understands it the same way. So, I've seen speakers who are extremely good in their area of expertise, but they get too academic too quick. And they, they, you know, put references to reports in, they put, you know, quotes in from very high-level academics, you know, that they're almost like, I'm only credible if I got support, without having the confidence just to say, you know what, this is how easy it could be. And, you know, when we start talking about plain language, people think it's dumbing down, but it's not. It's about keeping the whole audience. Understanding what you're saying in the same way. The simpler you can create that context, you give confidence that it's relevant to them, that you can explain it in a way that they'll understand. But if you're kind of cursed with knowledge, which a lot of speakers are experts in their own field, you can start putting people off if they kind of just go, oh, I can't, I I haven't, I've kind of missed a bit. I must've missed a bit because I haven't quite understood their second point and now we're on point 3 and I'm lost.

Yeah.

It's too easy, or it's, you know, it can be the curse of knowledge. It's known as the curse of knowledge where we try and put everything in that we know. And what I realized is that they don't need to know everything you know. They need to know what they need to know. And they need to know that if they need more, You're the person to come to, to get that extra. That's it. And I've seen lawyers do this all the time, giving presentations. It's all about what they know. It's not about what the client should do differently because of that knowledge.

Right.

That's the bit they need to get around to. They really need to say, because of this new case or this new piece of legislation, this is what you need to do differently from how you currently do business. But actually, even going back and going, this is how you need to do business. I don't care how you do it currently, because I don't know what you currently do. And I did make that mistake early in my career. I went to do an update on a piece of legislation, and it turned out the clients didn't understand the original piece of legislation. So I was talking about how it had changed. They hadn't got the basics right. So, you know, understanding that the basics can put clearly. made relevant can be as powerful as all those, you know, PhDs and reports and everything else we've read. That's really key to keeping a client engaged because it's about what they will think, feel, or do differently afterwards. And that can be based on high-level information or something really simple.

Yeah, I think that's, those are really important points. I think some of the things that I've talked about in the past is around like, you may be an expert, but you'll never land your message unless you step into the beginner's mindset. Meet your audience where they are and then take them on the journey, but you have to do it. In the UK, we have a product called, or a company called Ronseal. And basically it says, what it says on the tin is what you get. And it's like making it as concrete and relatable to your audience As you can. And I think the other point to make on this is that it's actually a sign of mastery if you can distil complex concepts and technical concepts into very simple terms. That's a sign of real expertise and understanding to be able to do that, which I think you do very well, Sarah. So, that's great. Excellent. Thank you for sharing all of this stuff. I've learnt a lot, I feel, today, and I— and we're going to talk about where people might go to if they want to book you to speak, or if there are, you know, there are any resources that you have that people may benefit from in just a short while. First, I want to ask you a few questions. The first question is, What's the best thing that speaking has done for you?

I think just allowed me to meet other people and to often, when I'm at conferences, I'll stay for the whole conference, learn from those other people more about their sector. So, get that kind of deep understanding of another sector. And I like the idea that I can learn from them and not be too much navel-gazing, not get only involved in speaking or construction or law, but actually broaden who I know and what I know because of attending those sort of events.

Brilliant. Cool. Now, the second question is, has there ever been a time where you've spoken in any sort of format and it has not gone to plan and you're like, I'm going to put that in the back of my mind and never go there again? Has that happened to you, Sarah, at all?

I don't think it has. I, you know, I've turned to, well, I turned up to an event in, I was in Abu Dhabi doing a favour for a friend of mine, speaking to an audience of Russian HR managers.

Oh my goodness, you couldn't write that one.

No, you couldn't write that down. We were running, I think, 3 hours late by the time I turned up for my session, but it was simultaneous translation and that was a real unknown. I did not know that there was going to be simultaneous translation. So, suddenly, the time, first of all, we were running late and, you know, there was a lot still to pack in. So, I wanted to shrink it anyway, and then I had to shrink it again. And one of the things I did learn though was the importance of not having too many words on my slides because the simultaneous translation would've been struggling to also read all the words on my slide and all the things I was saying. And then keep some flow going. So, interestingly, I had learned a bit of Russian as part of my degree, so I started in Russian, which actually did help the whole kind of vibe in the room. It was a relatively small room. I think there was about 30 people there, but yeah, not knowing that there was going to be simultaneous translation was a huge, you know, lacuna in the information I'd been given. And to be fair, the person who booked me didn't know at the time either, so they couldn't have told me, but it was a, it was a real lesson in the ability to actually shrink what you need to say quite on the hoof in order to meet the needs of your audience whilst not running even later than they were already.

Oh, that's a really good, a really good thing. And I think I just want to draw on one of the points that you made. Is, and I think this is for everyone listening, there is absolutely a valid, besides the simultaneous translation, if you have wordy slides and you don't use, I mean, I think wordy slides are a bad thing anyway, but if you have text on a slide, I do believe that you should animate it because if you put a slide full of words up, your audience is reading the slide, And not listening to you. And you should always be in control of leading your audience through your talk. Completely.

Yeah.

So, I think that's a really good point that you made there. Excellent. Okay. Next question. What's the book that's had most impact on your life and why?

There was a book by a lady called Tara Moore, which I must have read about 10 years ago, which I think was called Playing Big. And at the time that I wasn't, I wasn't really taking my business very seriously, I think. And I read it and it basically said, you know, stop doing your good girl behavior and try to do X, Y, and Z. And also, people need to hear from you. So it was all about, um, that kind of classic female, I'm not very good, or, you know, I'm part of a team, or whatever. So, uh, at the time it, it had a huge impact on it. It made me— kind of reassess my, the excuses I was giving myself or giving to other people for why I wasn't taking my business seriously.

Interesting. And made some changes, I suppose, after that.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Cool.

Thank you for sharing that. We'll look that up and put a link in the show notes so that you people can check that out if you want to. Okay. Next, penultimate question. What's the best bit of business advice that you've had and why?

So, one of the best bits of business advice, and I can't remember whether it was somebody who was in business, it might've been my twin sister. She's very good at this kind of stuff. But we were talking about fees and I'd done an associate piece of work, a full-day workshop, traveling to a godforsaken industrial estate, had to take my own lunch, didn't even get a cup of tea, that kind of thing. And came home and thought, I'm not even sure that was worth it. And then it was like, okay, Well, let's work on what your happy fee is. Let's work on, you know, moving up. You can do it going down as well, but you know, what's the point at which you kind of go, yeah, I'll get out of bed for that, you know? And that was just a really interesting sort of idea that my— because a workshop is very difficult to kind of price in terms of value and everything else, it was just like, but What would make you happy? Because you want to do work and not resent having done it. So work out what your happy fee is, and that'll change regularly with how experienced you are, the sort of clients you're working with. And don't be afraid for people to say, oh, that sounds like quite a lot. Be happy to say, well, that's my fee.

Hmm. That's it.

You know, I've never pitched for work against other people and Competitively, because I always say, I'm not gonna be cheap. You know, that's, but if you want me, this is how much I charge.

And that's it.

And I just, you know, being prepared to say, this is my fee, and just not being prepared to discount it for any reason, unless they want to discount some of my services. It's like, well, you know, what services of mine don't you want then if you want a reduced fee?

Yeah.

So, you know, having that courage and just having that thought, X, you know, out of, away from any project, any client, any gig, any event, just going, what would make me happy?

Yeah, definitely. I think this is, it's interesting because that's a very glass half full. I think I position it, and you mentioned the word, like, what's going to stop you being resentful? Which is the other side of it. Yeah, like, it's like, it's the same thing, the other side of the coin. And that, I think that's a really, you know, what's going to make you happy. Brilliant.

Okay.

Last question. If you could have one mentor and they could be alive or dead, fictional or non-fictional, who would you choose and why?

I would've chosen Joy Marsden. She was an incredible person, a great speaker. She was, her book is one of the best speaker books. Um, that I know. Uh, and I just, I really, I'd been in a mastermind with her for a short period of time. She was just an amazing human being. And I, she was where I wanted to get to. Um, and I could see that as her journey and as she became more and more, um, famous or known, um, then I would just kind of creep up behind her sort of thing, always behind her. Creeping up nonetheless. So, I would've loved to have had Joy Marsden as my mentor.

That's brilliant. And what we'll do, because I interviewed Joy back in 2018, I think, I will put a link in the show notes to the episode that I recorded with Joy shortly before she passed away, unfortunately, so that you can get some of her wisdom today.

Brilliant.

Well, Sarah, thank you so much for coming onto the show. It's been a pleasure to talk to you and to, you know, have fun talking about contracts. If people do want to book you to speak or check out some of your resources, perhaps get on an email list or something to get that wisdom in the future, where's the best place for them to go?

So, if you just want to connect with me, I'm on LinkedIn, Sarah JV Fox, but if you search for 500 Words Limited, that normally brings me up because my name is relatively common. But my website is 500words.co.uk. I've got free contract resources. I've got my speaker pack is on there. So, there's speaking pages, there's pages to my books, and there's contractual free stuff that can help anyone who's looking at contracts to decide whether or not it's a contract they ought to be signing. So, plenty of materials on there.

Smashing. Do go and check those out. We'll put links in the show notes so that you can shortcut to those places. And all that's left for me to do is to say thank you once again. Best of luck with everything you're doing, Sarah, and hopefully I'll catch up with you in person again at a speaking event soon.

Yeah. Thank you, Sarah, for inviting me. It's been a pleasure.

Cool.

So, what came up for you in that episode? Maybe you realised that your current contract makes you sound like some Victorian solicitor, or You've just been winging it with email chains and keeping your fingers crossed, or perhaps you just breathed a sigh of relief knowing that it can be simpler and you can still protect your business. Either way, now is the time to give your T's and C's a little bit of TLC, and not just for legal protection, but to align them with how you Do business. You know, I'm all about personality. And as Sarah said, we want to be feeling that all the way through the interaction that you have with people that do business with you. You don't want to just say it for the stage. We want to have that continuity through your website, your one sheets, all of that stuff, and your contracts too. So hopefully this has been useful for you. And if it has, go and have a look at, um, Sarah's website, check out her resources, her speaker pack, the 500-word guides, and I've put all the links in the show notes for you. And if this did spark a thought, a chuckle, or a plan to sort out your paperwork, let Sarah know. I think she's on LinkedIn. She said you can pop over and say, share that with her. Or if you want to give me some feedback, if you've got some ideas about the show or, you know, something that I said, Then come and find me too. I'm on Instagram @SarahArcher15, on LinkedIn, same thing, Sarah Archer 15. And if you like the Speaking Club and you're watching on YouTube, please leave a comment there or subscribe. And if you're listening on the podcast, then do go to ratethispodcast.com/tsc and you can leave a review there. Or wherever you happen to be listening to the show. All that's left for me to say is thank you so much for listening. As I always say, I value your time and your attention. There's so many shows to choose from, and I really appreciate you spending some time with me and my guests here on The Speaking Club. Well, I'll see you soon. In the meantime, all that's left for me to say is, you know what's coming. Go out, grab your life by the nuts.

And get cracking. Bye-bye. It's a nightmare. You're an expert with so much to say, but now that you've been booked to speak, you're struggling to know exactly what to talk about. You want a talk that engages the audience and wins you new clients without you losing your personality or anyone feeling pitched to. But what happens when you sit down to create that talk is that you end up staring at a blank page for ages, or worse, surrounded by hundreds of sticky notes with content that you could include. With so much material, you just don't know where to start or finish. Don't worry, because many experts like you face exactly the same challenge, and that's why I created the Blank Page to Stage Guide. In just 15 minutes, this breakthrough resource is going to help you identify the big idea of your message, make it relatable for the audience that you're speaking to, and convey it all in a way that gets the audience inspired and on board with your idea. And it works even if you have tons of material or your subject feels less than exciting. If you want to cut through swathes of content and get a talk that your excited to share, your audience loves, and wins you new clients, then grab your Blank Page to Stage guide from saraharcher.co.uk/newguide-tsc. Oh, I forgot to say, it's completely free. Enjoy!