You’ve got to treat your speaking career as a business for it to thrive. For many people, speaking in front of an audience is a bit of a sideline. It’s something they’d like to do, but they don’t commit to it. Even if they want to do more of it. Often, they don’t treat it like it’s a business. They treat it like it’s a hobby. And of course, they get the result of it being a hobby.
Have a plan and implement a strategy
If you really want to be successful as a paid speaker, you have to look at your speaking career as a business. This means you’ve got to have a plan. You’ve got to have a strategy. You’ve got to have a budget. You’ve got to have marketing. You’ve got to understand how you’re going to get customers. This means you’ve got to have a sales strategy. You also need promotional material. You’ve got to have all of these things that you would have in any other business. Why wouldn’t you have these elements in your speaking business?
Most of the time when I start working with speakers they don’t have any of these fundamental elements in place. Often they’re starting out as a speaker, and I understand that. But this concept applies to the beginning of a speaking career as well. Treating your speaking career as business, means you’ve got to spend time developing skills and resources. You’ve got to have an expenditure budget and an income budget in target. You also have to know who your ideal customers are. All of these elements are important if you want to build a world class speaker business.
Your business reflects your attitude
Start to think about your speaking as more of a business and less of a hobby. And the first thing you’re going to notice is that it will start to behave like a business. You’ll start to generate more speaking jobs, you’ll start to get more results, you’ll make more money, and you’ll become better at speaking as a result of that.
So this is a simple and easy rule. Ask yourself right here right now, what is your philosophy towards your speaking? Is it still in the hobby category, or have you moved it into the professional arena?
