0:00:00 A: I’ve been trying and you know, I’ve been tested. Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast with your hosts, Ben Wright and Jemimah Ashley. Ben, known as the sales strategist, and Jemimah, our resident visibility expert, are here to share their wealth of knowledge and experience with a little fun along the way. Whether you’re a leader, entrepreneur, or aspiring business owner, this is the podcast where we share everything we know about business to help you succeed.
0:00:31 A: Lets get started. Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast.
0:00:43 Ben Wright: Hi, Jemimah. Welcome back.
0:00:45 Jemimah Ashleigh: Hi, Ben, how are you?
0:00:46 Ben Wright: Excellent. Now, before we start today, I’d like you to tell everyone what you were just doing before we started.
0:00:52 Jemimah Ashleigh: I was found. You caught me videotaping you because you were putting up a green screen.
0:01:01 Ben Wright: That’s correct, yes. And what did you call me when I put that screen up?
0:01:05 Jemimah Ashleigh: I called. This is gonna bite me. I called you MacGyver.
0:01:09 Ben Wright: Yes.
0:01:10 Jemimah Ashleigh: But I also called you MacGyver in Ugg boots. And why did I call you that?
0:01:14 Ben Wright: I do have ugg boots on. But let’s focus on the MacGyver, that is.
0:01:19 Jemimah Ashleigh: Richard Dean Anderson Is that. That was all.
0:01:20 Ben Wright: That’s it. Richard Dean Anderson.
0:01:21 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:01:22 Ben Wright: That was. I don’t know. For me, I’m 41. When I was growing up, if I had knowing that one day someone would call me MacGyver would have absolutely made my day. So thank you. You’ve made my day.
0:01:33 Jemimah Ashleigh: He’s got like a spoon with peanut butter and a jelly sandwich and a hair tie, and he fixed everything. It’s incredible.
0:01:39 Ben Wright: And it doesn’t matter how much you spudge me, for the rest of the day, you call me MacGyver. What I will say, though, is this is actually take two for this podcast because it started about 10 minutes ago, recording this. And as you called me MacGyver and I gloated.
0:01:54 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yep. What happened, Ben?
0:01:55 Ben Wright: The green screen fell down.
0:01:56 Jemimah Ashleigh: Everything fell down. And crushed a plant and some rocks.
0:01:59 Ben Wright: Yeah, crushed a plant.
0:02:00 Jemimah Ashleigh: And please find that floor because it will exist. Very much so, because it was one of the funniest moments and Ben and I just sat laughing for five minutes. I’m like, we better clean this up.
0:02:10 Ben Wright: So we’re now back, we’re now into it, and we are actually going to spend some time today completely unrelated to what we’ve just spoken about, about speaking gigs. And before I hand over to you, Jemimah, I think speaking gigs, they are something that for many, particularly entrepreneurs, this episode, for entrepreneurs wanting to build a public profile or for leaders wanting to build a public profile and speaking gigs are often regarded as quite difficult and almost unattainable for people, but they don’t need to be. And I know you’re going to provide some chunky advice as to how we can be better prepared to become a speaker. So, yes, I’m going to hand the baton over to you. I’m still in that Olympic spirit from a little while ago. You are now bringing us home in the fourth leg of the relay. Talk us through Speaking Gig.
0:02:56 Jemimah Ashleigh: Thank you, MacGyver. I appreciate that. Going to use that for the rest of this episode. I want to talk about speakers agencies and getting signed with them and doing speaking engagements because I think it’s one of those tools that, like you said, people think can’t be done. And as soon as you give people tactical things and ways to do this, they go, oh, that was really easy. Way to add $50,000 to my profit and my bottom line.
So let me start by saying there’s about a hundred different speaking agencies around the English speaking world. So I’m talking about the US, Australia, UK area. Yeah, yeah, there are about 100 decent agencies. There are also a lot of other little ones that are out there as well. So these ones you can often expect to do and they’re looking for multiple different things. Keynotes like Gary V, we know is getting 250,000, 300,000 per keynote. He didn’t start there though. And this is the important part. You have to remember that one is always band greater than zero, always. And so something I always say is do a speaking gig for free and then you can start charging, do some free ones, get some runs on the board. So some of them, 250,000 keynote, where you’re talking to whole stadiums, then you have other ones which are smaller, 15, 20 minute presentations inside networking groups or potentially emceeing an event or taking a stage at a local council meeting. When you have these, the business chamber events, these ones are really good ways to really start teething.
So when we talk about speaking engagements, we’re talking about the breadth of the free gig up the road at the council all the way through to $300,000 for one hour keynote out of the bench. There’s multiple. So we really can encapsulate pretty much every speaker.
0:04:39 Ben Wright: Very diverse, very long tail.
0:04:43 Jemimah Ashleigh: 100%. So let’s start by saying that pretty much every single speaker’s place really does have a whole bunch of different speakers that are listed, but all those speakers speak about very, very different things. So if you’re a leader in any industry, if you attend conferences regularly. The only difference between most of the speakers that are out there doing that is just that the agencies that look to them know they exist. And this is a really big part for me. The average speaking gig. How much do you think the average speaker gets paid per gig?
0:05:12 Ben Wright: Yeah, look, I think if you’re doing a one hour gig. Yeah, probably for an average is probably three to, three to $6,000.
0:05:19 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, it’s about 2500 for the average person. And then you would add GST, so you’d be sitting, you know, about 2700.
0:05:25 Ben Wright: Yeah. Okay. And that’s for an average presenter. That’s someone that’s not necessarily skilled at their craft.
0:05:31 Jemimah Ashleigh: I’m good at it. But like this is something I, I would not bucket 2500 hour of my time. You’re gonna pay to fly me somewhere. Because it’s the other thing. They’re going to pay for your travel, they’re going to pay for your accommodation. If you’re speaking first thing, you are going to get given some sort of accommodation for the night before. You’re going to be taken care of for sure. There’s often dinner, you get to meet other delegates. That $2,500 can often be changed into a much bigger price tag by the end of engagement.
0:05:57 Ben Wright: Yeah. And I think that’s important is to see what work will come from speaking engagements. Because sometimes 2,500 for days travel there, the gig and then a day’s travel home. That doesn’t always make sense. But when you look at the broader package and what else it can bring. And also that’s often a starting point.
0:06:12 Jemimah Ashleigh: Absolutely.
0:06:13 Ben Wright: Because I’ve had a little bit of experience here and certainly I think that level very much is the average. It’s very easy to climb above that. And I think it’s also worthwhile. Right. You go to a room that’s got 100 people in there, $100 ahead is $10,000. That is very fair and reasonable.
0:06:27 Jemimah Ashleigh: 100%. And if you start looking at really getting very clear on, I’m walking into this room and we’ve talked a lot about being specific on the rooms that you’re in. You’re being in there. They’re putting you on a literal pedestal, if you will. They’re going to give you an hour where you get to talk about your expertise, share the knowledge that you have and stand in front of people to not only position yourself as a leader, potentially an employer of choice, because your boss is out there doing the hustle, doing the good stuff, and also as an entrepreneur and business owner bringing fresh ideas to the table. These are. This is. And you’re effectively getting paid to publicize yourself, doing your own pr. That’s kind of the landscape that we’re dealing with with. Another thing I want us to be really clear here on is that there are a lot more opportunities than you think there are.
So as an example of this, Ben, during the Olympics, we had that earlier in the year, I received so many so, like 60, 70 different per week. That just said we’re looking for a female presenter Tick willing to fly to Tasmania to do this. Tick. $3,000 tick. Love that. Stay for a couple of days. Love that. Networking opportunity. Tick. Have to be an Olympian. I’m out. So not all of the opportunities I’m getting every week are exactly a bit. But what they are sometimes is extremely relevant to my career. So. And some of these are, you know, $1,200, $1500. But when you start taking into account these bigger things, they’re not always going to be winners. Some of them, over time, they really are very, very quickly.
0:08:01 Jemimah Ashleigh: So we are talking about pretty breadth. We are talking about a lot of different opportunities and that can be delivered to your inbox. So today I want to talk about a couple of ways right now that you can start preparing yourself to start looking for speaking opportunities.
0:08:15 Ben Wright: Right, let’s do it.
0:08:16 Jemimah Ashleigh: So, number one, and it’s really simple, you have to write a keynote. And it’s the one thing that people go, I don’t know how to do that. Well, actually, we talked about this in episode, I think it was episode 12, where we talked about stories. This is effectively just a story you gave.
0:08:31 Ben Wright: Episode 14.
0:08:32 Jemimah Ashleigh: Episode 14. Sorry, my mistake. Then, my apologies. Ben, the numbers guy. You can tell who really takes what role in this podcast. The thing is with this, that in episode 14, we talked about this process of storytelling. And a good keynote is just a good story. A great way to see this played out is watching any sort of ted Talk or TedX Talk because they follow a very formulaic approach. They start to tell you the problem that they had. They generally always have a moral story to some degree. One of the things that you would have heard, I’m sure, Ben, is that there is a story about FedEx that went a little bit viral and it actually is told all the time in keynotes because it is such a good little moral story. And the story goes that what? Do you know what FedEx’s promise is?
0:09:18 Ben Wright: All I can remember with FedEx is Tom Hanks cast away, Lost with Wilson the Volleyball.
0:09:25 Jemimah Ashleigh: Perfect.
0:09:25 Ben Wright: Can we run with that or is there more?
0:09:27 Jemimah Ashleigh: I’ll give you an ad. So their ad was when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight. That was their role. And they basically said in every ad, we’re going to get your thing where everything’s to be 24 hours later.
0:09:37 Ben Wright: Right.
0:09:38 Jemimah Ashleigh: Their machines one day break down. And the first mechanic walk in, and he walks around, he tinkers, he says, I don’t know what’s wrong with this. I’m so sorry. The second guy walks in, he tinkers, I don’t know what’s wrong with it. The third guy walks in, he’s there for two minutes, walks around, he opens up the box, he sees a button and he goes, click. And all the machines start. And the boss says, ah, thank goodness, you’ve saved us. We love you so much. And he said, how much will that be? And he goes, all right, you are. He goes, that’ll be 20,000, thanks. The boss says, 20 grand. Can I get that, please? Itemized. And he said, time to come out $100. And then finally, for $19,900, knowing which button to push. And the moral to the story is you don’t pay for the one minute that I was here. You’re paying for the 10 years experience for me to know what to do here. And that’s really. I have heard this opening talking note so many times. And this moral little platitude, if you will, has formulated because we all have experiences of this. When you have, you will have had clients have had built shock, you will have had people that you know have your clients have picture people, and you’ve grown like you can’t afford that. So what’s the cost if you don’t?
0:10:48 Ben Wright: Absolutely, yeah. Now we pay for the now, but we also pay for the previous. And that’s the experience that people have. And in looking keynotes, I mean, for me, when we’re pricing, are we talking about pricing later today, how to price a keynote?
0:11:00 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:11:01 Ben Wright: Great. Okay, I’m going to hold it until then. But certainly the number of bums on seats that are prepared to hear about your previous experience or want to hear about your previous experience is so important. Because if that previous experience can make the difference to every person for one thing, then cumulatively it just adds up to be so powerful.
0:11:23 Jemimah Ashleigh: Absolutely. So you grab these ideas and we can take either a real life experience with something like that it’s happened to us, or vice versa. We take a moral lesson and what we do is we create a story where we take the person and the person listening on a journey. We take them from the issue that we face at the beginning, how we overcame it, and the resolution part of it. So really do use quite a good. It’s always a story and it’s always really based on our reality.
Now, one of the things that is really important here is that it comes back to you being a leader. It comes back to you being an entrepreneur and the thought leadership that you brought into that. That is the key difference between someone just recanting a story and you being a keynote speaker.
0:12:03 Ben Wright: Right.
0:12:03 Jemimah Ashleigh: That is the number one mistake. I see people saying, so say that again.
0:12:07 Ben Wright: Go through that again.
0:12:08 Jemimah Ashleigh: So what we really want to make sure when we’re doing, when we’re putting together a keynote, they go for about 45 minutes. And what we want to do is bring in a moral story or a real story. But we want to bring in your thought leadership here. What is very easy to do is to recant someone else’s story and to go, oh, I heard this story once, my cousin Susan’s friend. It’s not what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to say we can use this moral story, how it relates to me.
If you want to see a really good example of this, because I could spend four hours explaining how keynotes work. Really good examples of this are TEDx talks. They are exceptional of get to the point, but make it relevant and take the person on the journey. How did they go? They start with punchy statements, punchy lines, and that’s how we start to put a keynote together.
0:12:54 Ben Wright: Right, Cool. Okay. So we’ve got a moral story and we’re putting our own thought leadership onto it.
0:12:59 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes. We can also use real life stories as well. So a moral story or a real life story that happened to us and how you went to overcome this stuff. Some people use their life story. Some people have had really, really big things happen in their life and therefore they can then go and tell their story and it really becomes quite inspirational.
Now, one other thing I want to say as you’re looking at putting this together, because I could do whole courses on this, I do whole days on this with people. You don’t owe anyone any part of your story. One of the things I say when people are putting this together, especially for leaders, once you put that out there, it does now belong out in the universe. You will hear that story come back to you when you start to do more keynotes. You’ll hear other examples. You’ll have people come in and say, I relate to that. But also your team will know stuff about you, the broader community. Once you put it out there, they will know things about you. And you have to be mindful that you say it on stage. Once you say it into a microphone, you’ve got to be really clear that that story is no longer yours and it now becomes part of stage, somebody else’s laundry.
0:13:58 Ben Wright: Okay, so you no longer own your stories.
0:14:00 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, exactly.
0:14:02 Ben Wright: Okay, good.
0:14:06 Jemimah Ashleigh: So one of the key things is you just have to have an idea. When you are pitching to different agencies and if you throw into Google, you’ll find 400 women that are out there. The first thing they’re going to ask you is simply have you done a keynote before and do you have a video of this? What you’re going to do is record that video. It’s actually what is very much what we’re doing here. If you tell a keynote, they just listen to the cadence of your voice. Can you hold attention? Can you stop and keep someone’s attention? That’s what they’re looking for. They’re looking to hear how you relate to other people. People that are already doing, already running meetings and are already doing presentation for work. These people are great at this because they’ve got an in depth skill because they’re already flexing that muscle all the time. People are better at keynotes than you think you are straight away.
So first thing you’re going to do is record five minutes of that first part of the story. Just record that five minutes is all agencies are looking for. I would always say you should really put the horse here before the cart. I would say start to put some keynotes together, get a couple of them ready to go. They don’t have to be the world, they just have to be great, interesting stories with the lessons for your ideal client, but also potentially exactly your employees. If you’re trying to put yourself out there as a better leader, exactly who you want to bring into the business.
0:15:23 Ben Wright: Great. Okay, so we’ve got, we have telling stories, moralistic stories that we’re adding thought leadership to. Yes, preparing a keynote, getting it ready, 45 minutes in length.
0:15:33 Jemimah Ashleigh: But that being said, I would say do jot points. I would not be sitting there and writing 45 minutes speech. You do not need to do that yet because the chances are at this point you’re not going to have to have it ready yet and it’s going to develop over time. But we are going to record a couple of minutes of it so people can see your capacity to do these things.
0:15:49 Ben Wright: Okay, okay. So we’re saying build the broad structure of a keynote.
0:15:53 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:15:53 Ben Wright: And get something down on video.
0:15:55 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes, absolutely. Now, big question. Pricing.
0:15:58 Ben Wright: Yes.
0:15:58 Jemimah Ashleigh: How much?
0:15:59 Ben Wright: Right.
0:15:59 Jemimah Ashleigh: This is the first question I always get. Well, I don’t know. What am I worth?
0:16:02 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:16:03 Jemimah Ashleigh: What are you worth?
0:16:04 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:16:05 Jemimah Ashleigh: For people who are listening to this, who have never done anything before, I will say again, one is greater than zero. I would just say $100 is better than zero.
0:16:12 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:16:13 Jemimah Ashleigh: But there’s some people here and that listening to this. Giving up the day with your family.
0:16:17 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:16:18 Jemimah Ashleigh: Flying, Going into state, Getting hired. Car.
0:16:21 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:16:21 Jemimah Ashleigh: If none of that stuff’s included.
0:16:22 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:16:22 Jemimah Ashleigh: It’s like you’re in trouble at that point. You’re out of money. It may not be worth doing, but if 150 of your ideal clients are sitting in that room.
0:16:31 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:16:32 Jemimah Ashleigh: Suddenly it might become worth your while. The truth is, with this, it’s very, very hard to judge, but I will say I’ve never seen anyone kick back from under two and a half thousand, $3,000. If you start at the median, you can then negotiate.
0:16:44 Ben Wright: Yeah. I’ll give you an alternate speech on this as well. So I like that. You start. The first thing is to look at who else is in the room and what your future opportunities are. Now, there’s only so far that’s going to take you. The second piece is you’ve got an average mark, which is at 2,500 to $3,000. Third piece, which is the rule that I follow personally is number of people in the room times $100 per head.
0:17:06 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, love.
0:17:07 Ben Wright: That works really, really well for me. So if you’ve got 100 people in the room, it’s a $10,000 speaking gig. If you’ve got 30 people in the room, it’s $3,000 speaking gig plus expenses.
0:17:19 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes, of course. And the expenses part is really important here.
0:17:21 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:17:22 Jemimah Ashleigh: I cannot recommend this enough for the people who have never done speaking stuff for you. Absolutely love that. The people who have never done anything. Three grand is great. We’re loving that. The other thing is they’re always going to negotiate.
0:17:33 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:17:34 Jemimah Ashleigh: There’s always room here in this situation to go. Actually, you know what I would like to do? I would like to additionally say, I want travel, I want this.
0:17:43 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:17:43 Jemimah Ashleigh: The other thing is, when you’re starting to approach them, you will get a ton of questions. So some of these will be like, is there an airline you only fly with? If you’ve got conscious points, use it like, put your conscious points down there. If you only fly Virgin, put That down too. Is there a minimum hotel that you’re willing to stay at? Don’t go below four stars. Don’t do it to yourself. I’ve stayed in many freestyles and speaking engagements. I won’t do it again, you know, big jump.
0:18:09 Ben Wright: So, yeah. So we go back to price for a moment. There’s a three tier aspirational journey. We’ve actually said that one of the five things we’re going to cover in this podcast back in episode one was aspirational Journeys. And so I think here we’ve got. If we’re just starting in speaking gigs and we’re really new to it and we really don’t have the confidence, we’re probably going to do a few for free.
0:18:26 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:18:27 Ben Wright: Second stage of that speaking.
0:18:29 Jemimah Ashleigh: Everyone has done that. Let me be very clear. But anyone said I’ve never done one for Fred, they’re lying. Everyone’s done speaking.
0:18:33 Ben Wright: So I still do them for free every now and then, depending on the. I did one for a LinkedIn local up here. 100 people in the room was fantastic. So second place is that mid tier. As you start to grind your teeth. Grind an axe. Right? Build out your portfolio, the two and a half, $3,000 mark. And then the third thing is you can move to a per head now that of course change. And these are just broad guidelines, but I like them as a standard approach. I also really like the piece. In fact, I think my key takeaway from today, there’s two things. One is get your keynote broad structure written down. But the really big one for me is there are speaking agencies out there to help you. You don’t have to go all the way to a Saxton speakers straight away. Right. Who are going to be hard to get on. There’s lots of others around there that are going to be able to help you. So I like that as my key outcome.
How about yours, Jemimah?
0:19:18 Jemimah Ashleigh: I think my big one for this one is that there are so many opportunities that people don’t realize are there and you don’t have. Again, you don’t have to do the Saxon. It’s not straight away. You don’t have to do celebrity speakers, any of that stuff straight away. Those things will come, but you need to do the one greater than zero to start with. Take the opportunities that are presented to you because that will really help you in the long run. Absolutely, yeah.
0:19:39 Ben Wright: Love it, love it. And do you know what? Even worst case, you can get out and do this keynote, practice it with your family, practice it with your friends. Right. Or practice it with your Friends in Business. Who are us? We’ve been here this week. We’ve loved having you here. Can’t wait for next time.
0:19:59 Jemimah Ashleigh: Thank you, Ben.
0:20:00 Ben Wright: That was.
0:20:01 Jemimah Ashleigh: It’s always a pleasure.
