Here at the Maple Money Show, we’ve talked a lot about side hustles and ways to make more money. But one idea we haven’t covered is how to start your own public speaking business. If getting paid to speak sounds intriguing, this week’s episode is for you. Grant Baldwin is founder of The Speaker Lab and author of the new book, The Successful Speaker. In his book, Grant takes readers through what he says are the five key steps to becoming a successful speaker. He breaks it all down in our discussion while sharing some valuable insights from his own career as a public speaker.

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Tom: Hi, Grant, welcome to the Maple Money Show.

Grant: Tom, my friend, my man, I’m excited to be here, man. I appreciate it.

Tom: You’ve recently launched a book around public speaking. And the first thing I thought was this is a great income source. Here on our show we cover everything in personal finance but I really like the side hustles, especially the unique ones. We’ve covered things like how you can get into Facebook ads, how to start a blog. But something like this is something I’m kind of a rookie at. I’ve done a bit of public speaking, often for free within personal finance. I’ve been paid a couple times to speak, but it’s not something I really consider a big part of my business at this point. If we could kind of just jump right into it, how did you get into all this? How did you decide to become a public speaker?

Grant: If we go way back in time, in high school I was really involved in my local church and my youth pastor had a big impact on my life. And I thought I wanted to do that. It seemed like a cool gig. He was a great speaker. He’s one of the better speakers I’ve seen. That was kind of the path I was on in college. I actually worked for a guy who was a full time speaker and eventually I worked at a local church as a youth pastor. It gave me a lot of opportunities to speak and work with students. I really enjoyed it. Ultimately, I decided I wanted more of that. It was one of the things I felt I was good at and wanted to do more of but just had no idea where to go from there. How do you book gigs? Who hires speakers? How much do you charge? How does the whole speaking world work? I stalked a bunch other speakers and tried to just figure out how this world works. Eventually, I figured out a few things and started booking a couple of gigs here and there. Finally, I got to a point where I was doing 40, 50, 60, 70 gigs a year. I really, really enjoyed it. I had a lot of people who are asking how they could become a speaker too and how to go about doing that. Then we got into more teaching and training side of it. What we do today is run a company called, The Speaker Lab, where we teach speakers how to find and book gigs. You mentioned the new book, The Successful Speaker – Five Steps for Booking Gigs, Getting Paid and Building Your Platforms. One of the things I like about speaking is that it’s not a one-size-fits-all. When I was speaking full time I was doing 70 gigs a year. I know speakers who do more than that. That’s all they do is speak full time. That’s all they ever want to do. There are plenty of people who may be listening or watching saying, “Well, that sounds cool. I’d like to do that,” while other people might say, “I have zero desire to do 70, 80, 90, 100 plus gigs. But I wouldn’t mind doing, two, three, four, five gigs.” But they’re still having the same challenges of how do you know how much to charge and who’s hiring speakers? What do you speak about? How does that world work? So speaking can fit into a lot of different businesses in a lot of different ways, depending on what your goals are for your business.

Tom: I remember when I was first seeing this world of public speaking with some local speakers in my city. It seemed like everything was tied around a book. You had to have a book even if it was self-published. And it seemed like half the goal was to sell a lot of those books to them in the back of the room after the talk. Is it all book related or can you hop into this with nothing? How do you establish yourself?

Grant: I think people have kind of a misconception that in order to be a speaker you need to either have a book, have a big name, be famous or have some type of crazy obstacle that you’ve overcome. Or that you have won a gold medal, that you have cured cancer, that you climbed Mount Everest in your shorts, blindfolded—that you’ve done these things that have qualified you to be a speaker. In reality, you don’t need any of those things. Now, if you checked the box on any of those things, that’s fine. And if you have a book, it can help you but it can also hurt you. It’s not necessarily a prerequisite that in order to be a speaker you have to have a book. That’s not true at all. I can give you my own context. When I got started speaking, I spoke for a couple of years. Because I was a former youth pastor, initially I did a lot of speaking with high school students, colleges, did leadership conferences and events. I did a lot in that space. I even self-published a book for high school students but for the first couple years I didn’t have a book at all. When I did have the book it worked really well. It probably helped with some credibility stuff but the big part was just an additional revenue stream. I would go speak to an audience of several hundred or several thousand and at the end of the talk I would mention the book. And you’d have a whole bunch of people line up to buy a book for $10 a pop. So it was a really good revenue stream. But again, I had built a successful speaking business without having the book. The new book we have, The Successful Speaker, for those watching online, you can check it out there. I’ve been in the speaking industry for over a decade and have been teaching and training on this for the past four or five years, and just now have a book. And it hasn’t affected business. We’ve still had a successful business to this point without the book. A book can certainly be helpful and beneficial, but it’s certainly not the end-all-be-all.

Tom: You mentioned speaking in schools. That’s where I remember you at five or six years ago. Were you getting paid to speak in schools or was that just building up some experience?

Grant: No, I was absolutely getting paid. I’m not running a nonprofit here. People assume schools don’t pay. But yeah, absolutely, I was paid well to speak in schools. It’s still bizarre to me that anyone would pay me to talk— or for any speaker to talk for that matter. But whenever you’re providing something of value to the audience and the event (in general) you should absolutely receive value in exchange for that. Oftentimes, ideally, that comes in the form of a check but there’s a lot of ways you can get value that doesn’t include a check.

Tom: Maybe that’s the people selling books at the end? Is that just part of the model? Maybe that helps make up for lower pay?

Grant: It kind of goes back to whether or not you should speak for free. When does it make sense to speak for free? Should you ever speak for free or is that a bad thing? Speaking for free can actually be a good thing as long as you know why you’re doing it. Let’s talk about a couple different reasons why it might make sense to speak for free. The way you get better as a speaker is the same way you get better at anything—you do it. The way you get better as a writer is you write. The way you get better as a podcaster is through your podcast. The way you get better at editing videos is by editing videos. You’re in the trenches. Now, the nature of speaking is it requires an audience and you to stand in front of that audience and deliver something which requires a few more things beyond just practicing on a piano where you don’t need anything other than a piano to get better at it. With speaking, you need that audience. It may make sense for you to speak at something locally just for the practice and for the at-bats. Another reason it may make sense from a business standpoint (as you mentioned) is if you have a book, a product, a coaching or consulting course, some type of training that maybe you can offer to the audience. It’s not a heavy sale from a stage type of environment but just something to give someone who might want to work further with me or go deep with me as an option or opportunity of what that might look like. Other reasons may make sense for credibility and authority. I remember when we first met at a conference. When someone is speaking at a conference, it gives them a certain amount of credibility, recognition or “prestige” or authority in that type of space. I remember we were in this diner or something in a casino. Do you remember that?

Tom: Yes.

Grant: I don’t remember what it was. It felt like a diner or something in a casino. But nonetheless, there was a group of six, seven or eight of us sitting around talking. The fact I was speaking at that conference and speaking at another conference and we were all mutual friends, knowing you guys didn’t know me from Adam, I think gave me at least a little bit of credibility; if he’s speaking here and there then he can’t be a complete goofball, right? It gives you a certain amount of credibility just by speaking at it. Some other reasons it may make sense to speak for free is for legion—for additional speaking engagements. If I speak at an event and know there are other event planners at that event, they may be looking for speakers. So it may be a win for me to speak at that for free. All I’m saying is, it can make a lot of sense to speak for free in an event, but you just have to be clear on why you’re doing it.

Tom: Yeah. So it’s not just for fun. It’s building onto the next thing. Would this be similar to freelance writing where you might do a couple posts for free but it’s really the direction you want to go? Is it something where you want to get published somewhere you can brag about and then let word of mouth kick in?

Grant: Yeah. Speaking is very much a momentum business. It’s so much more than just wanting to be a speaker where you just speak here and there for free and then just sit back and wait for it all to magically work out. Even to this point today, there are still things that I would speak out on an annual basis that are worth it for me because I can point to revenue in other ways. Let me give an example. There’s this conference that you and I attend, FINCON, which I’m sure many in your audience are familiar with. I’ve spoke at FINCON for five, six, seven— several years.

Tom: I think I’m in the same range.

Grant: Somewhere around there anyway. It all kind of blends together. I’ve been paid one year. There’s a year I keynoted I was paid for. Every other year, I was not been paid a dime. Now why would you or I keep going to FINCON to speak at the conference if we’re not paid anything? For example, the very first year I went, I wasn’t paid to be there. I had to pay my own travel. So I show up and I’ve already lost money. And why would you do that? That doesn’t make any sense. But I look at that one workshop I did there that led people to hire me as a coach or for our course or training material. The organizer of the conference heard I did a really good job with the workshop and hired me as a keynote speaker the following year. So I can look back and point to thousands of dollars in revenue that came from that event, even though I spoke for free. It’s the same reason I’ve continued to come back to FINCON on an annual basis even though I haven’t been paid these past three years. I can attribute revenue to speaking at those events for free. Now, again, you typically can’t do that just year round; speaking for free and hoping it all magically works out. You have to be really strategic that if you’re going to speak for free, you want to be clear on why you’re doing it.

Tom: Yeah, it’s kind of like a network booster. If you’re at a conference that has 2,000 people, it’s nice to be in that elite 100 or 200 that might be speaking in some form.

Grant: Yes, very much so.

Tom: If someone decides this is something they want to pursue, how did they start? If they have no experience at all, how do they pick what they want to talk about? How did they position themselves as any kind of expert?

Grant: Inside the book, we walk through a five-step framework we call, the Speaker Success Roadmap. And so it makes the acronym speak – SPEAK. The S is the most important part; select a problem to solve. This really comes down to two things. One is, who is it that you want to speak to? And number two, what is the problem you want to solve for that audience? You have to be really clear on these two things. We just enjoy speaking. Speaking is a lot of fun. So who do we speak to? I don’t know—I speak to humans. I speak to people. I speak to everyone, right? But that does not work in the same way as what you speak about. Someone says, “What do you want me to speak about? I can speak about anything. I can speak about personal finance, investing, retirement, insurance, sales, leadership, customer service, marriage, parenting or golf.” You may know something about all those things. You may care about all those things, but you cannot try to position yourself as an authority on all of those things. One of things we talk about is that you want to be positioned as the steakhouse and not the buffet. What we mean by that is, let’s just imagine you and I were going to go grab a steak somewhere. We have a choice. We could go to a buffet where steak is one of 100 different things that they offer and they’re all mediocre. Or we could go to a steakhouse where they do one thing, but they do that one thing really, really well. They don’t do lasagna or tacos. They don’t do pizza. They do steak… and that is it. That’s what you want to be as a speaker. You don’t want to try to speak on this and that and this and that. The same thing is true for the blogging space. This isn’t just exclusive to just speaking. This is true for anything; if you’re doing a blog, a podcast, writing a book. Who is my podcast for? Who is my blog for? Who is my book for?” It’s for people? It’s for humans? It’s for everybody? So be clear focusing on one specific audience. By doing that, it actually makes it easier to attract the right type of audience and repel the wrong type of audience. So get really clear on that, which again, is counterintuitive because we think that the more things I can speak about, the more people I can speak to, the wider and broader net I can cast, the more opportunities I’ll have. When the opposite is actually the case. The more narrow, the more clear and more focused I am, the easier it is to actually find and book gigs.

Tom: Before we get to any other steps, this actually kind of reminds me that you went through a pivot at one point. You were you were speaking to schools and had a podcast called, How Did I Get Into That? It seemed like it was about the same time but did you drop all of that and go in the “speaking about speaking” direction? Was that one conscious decision to niche down that way?

Grant: Yeah, a little bit. In terms like a timeline, I had been doing a lot of speaking and got to a point where, in order to increase your income and impact as a speaker you had to do one of two things. Either you had to do more gigs, which I didn’t want to be doing. I was doing something like 70 gigs a year which is already a lot. Or you just had to charge more. That was already on the upper end of the market in the education space and what I felt comfortable charging. I started to do a little bit with associations and corporations. But basically, I enjoyed speaking and really enjoy being an entrepreneur. And at the time, I sort of started learning about people who were doing some online business stuff which kind of caught my attention. It sounded intriguing. I wanted to do more there to figure out what that really looked like. I was doing a lot of speaking around careers and helping high school and college student’s kind of figure out what they wanted to do so I created that podcast you referred to called, How Did You Get Into That? We were interviewing people who just had unique, interesting, fascinating types of careers. I had this podcast going on and was doing a lot of speaking. And I was doing some teaching and training around speaking, on how to find and book speaking gigs. That really started to take off. Eventually, it got to the point where I was doing a lot of speaking and a lot of teaching and training about speaking. Then I had this career podcast which I like—it’s really fun but it just doesn’t really fit anymore with what I’m doing. In 2015 or 2016 (somewhere around there) in one month we finished the, How Did You Get Into That? podcast. Then a couple weeks later we started The Speak podcast. That’s kind of how that transition happened. Again, we were just trying to find the lane we wanted to be in. Even if we fast forward to today, the company I run is called the Speaker Lab. We’ve found there are a lot of people interested in speaking who are also interested in writing a book or publishing or doing a blog or podcasts or courses or webinars or funnels or consulting—any number of other things. The other day I had someone email and say, “Hey, you have the Speaker Lab. It would be cool if you created the Author Lab…” And I get that. But again, the more things we try to dip our hands into, the more watered down the core thing becomes, versus saying, “No. We’re a steakhouse. We do one thing. We make steak and we make it really, really, really good,” versus saying, “Well, what if we do macaroni or pies?” The more things we dip our hands into, the less good we are at core things. So, yeah, that’s kind of the transition of how we get to this point.

Tom: You mentioned this SPEAK acronym. Can we go through those other steps so we’re not leaving that hanging?

Grant: Yes, Again, S is, select a problem to solve. The P is, prepare your talk. At this point you’re clear on who you speak to and this is the problem that I solve. But as I’m putting together the talk, what needs to go into that? How do you create a talk? How do you deliver a talk? Are you using slides, stories, humor, intros, outros, all of that? We dig into that. The E is, establish yourself as the expert. What we mean by that is you need two key marketing tools; a website and a demo video. In this day and age, if you don’t have a website, you don’t exist. People won’t take you seriously so you have to have a website. And also, it’s important that you have a demo video. Now, what exactly is that? Think about a movie trailer. A movie trailer is basically when they take a 90 plus minute movie (give or take) and boil it down to two or three minutes. Within those two, three minutes you have an idea of who’s in it, the plot, theme and so on. The point of the movie trailer and the point of a demo video is to make people want to see more. So before an event planner is going to hire you (and especially before they’re going to pay you) they’ll want to see a little bit of footage just to get a sense of how you speak and communicate. What do you talk about? How do you interact with an audience? Maybe you’re a great speaker but you’re just not what they’re looking for. So it’s got to be more than just you describing it, “Here’s what I speak about… And trust me, I’m a good speaker.” Most of them will see that as taking a risk putting you up on stage. People typically want to see something first. That’s what the demo videos do. The A is, acquire paid speaking gigs. It’s more than just saying, “Okay, I want to be a speaker. I’m clear on who I speak to, what I speak about. I’ve got my talk put together. I’ve got my website. I’ve got my video. So now I’ll just sit back and wait for the phone to ring and hope it all magically works out.” That doesn’t work. You have to be able to proactively find and book gigs. We teach a system on how to actually do that. And then the last part, the K is, know when to scale. Again, people interested in speaking may also be interested in any number of other things like coaching, consulting courses, webinars, podcasting… There are a lot of different options there so you’ve got to be clear on how speaking fits into the mix. That’s kind of a big picture overview of SPEAK we cover in the book.

Tom: For those looking to do this as some kind of side hustle, what can they look to make? We’ve kind of covered everything from free to being paid. But what’s a realistic point when you’re starting out?

Grant: The realistic answer is it depends. That’s a horrible answer so I’ll give you the short answer. We have a speaker fee calculator we put together. It’s totally free. You answer six or seven questions and it will tell you what you should be charging as a speaker. Go to myspeakerfee.com. It’s totally free. Just answer a couple of questions and we’ll tell you what you should be charging as the speaker. Now, let me give you some of the science behind that and some of the variables that go into it. One is going to be your industry. You can charge more in some industries versus others. You can charge more speaking to corporations versus nonprofits. You can charge more speaking to colleges versus elementary schools. It’s not that one is better or worse than the other but you can charge more in different industries. Another variable and factor is going to be your experience. If you’re a brand new speaker just getting started, you typically won’t be able to charge as much as someone who’s been doing it longer or is simply just a better speaker than you. And the third variable is going to be your marketing materials. Like we talked about earlier with your website, demo video, whether we like it or not, people judge books by their cover. So if your website sucks, your video sucks, people will assume that you suck as a speaker. It may not be fair or right. It may not be accurate, but that’s the perception. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to have spent tens of thousands of dollars on a site or a video or anything like that. You can still do things on the cheap but you want to make sure that you do it with excellence, especially if you’re charging higher dollars because you’re going to be compared to other speakers at that fee level. So if their sites or videos are astronomically better than yours, then it’s just going to make you look bad. So make sure your stuff looks professional. Again, the shortcut answer is just to go to myspeakerfee.com.

Tom: We’ll add that to the show notes, for sure. I know you mentioned FINCON before. In the blogging space it turns out we’re all rather introverted. It’s one of the few places where I can feel like the extrovert. I do not believe it, but that’s how introverted the crowd is. Is this something that is the opposite with public speaking? Do you need to be more extroverted to pull this off? Or is that something that introverts can still kind of overcome?

Grant: That’s a great question. I think that’s a misconception people have. They think you have to be this big extrovert, the life of the party, this very charismatic person. And the reality is, you don’t. I’m actually pretty introverted. I like people but I also don’t like people. I have no problem hanging out with people but I’m also… My wife and I joke about it saying we’re not anti-social, we’re selectively social. I don’t need to be around a whole bunch of people. I’m really selective in who I hang out with and how I spend my time. In fact, most speakers I know are very introverted. We enjoy being around people but we’re also completely fine sitting in a hotel room by ourselves. Again, it’s a misconception we think of when it comes to speakers. We think of someone like Tony Robbins who is a larger than life big presence who bounces around the stage. He’s loud, claps and is a very charismatic person. But on the other end of the spectrum you look at someone like Brené Brown who’s very quiet, very soft spoken but is also a very powerful speaker. Both work. It kind of goes back to what we were touching on; speaking is not this one-size-fits-all. In order to be a speaker, you don’t have to do many dates, talk about this topic, charge this fee and speak this way… You don’t. You can find all different levels and all different types of speakers that can be effective and work.

Tom: This idea of you providing the “steak” with speaking. I want to talk about your book. You’ve given a lot of credit to Jeff Goins. He kind of came up with this idea and brought it to you. I know we’re talking about speaking and this is about the book, but I want to cover that because you did something smart, I think, where you—going back to the steakhouse analogy, you know what you do. And Jeff is certainly a very solid writer, that’s his niche. He should have The Author Lab. How did that come together and how were you focusing on each other’s strengths?

Grant: Jeff and I have been friends for several years. It started with a text message he sent me a couple years ago. He asked if I had ever thought about writing a book. Like I mentioned, I had self-published a book several years before. I had written every single word of it. I had done the whole self-publishing process of getting the ISBN, getting the list on Amazon, doing all the printing—and it is a crap-load of work. When asked if I had ever thought about writing a book, my thought was, yes. I recognized the value of a book. The value of a book is still very strong. It provides a lot of authority and credibility. But there are certainly other things that do that too. And so my initial reaction was that I was not interested. We kind of talked about it and I told him, “I get it. I get the value of a book but there’s certainly other things I would rather be doing with my time to help build and grow the business.” We talked about it a little bit and he said, “Here’s an idea. What if I wrote the book for you?” He said, “ Grant, you already have all of the intellectual property, all of the content, all the course material, the podcast with interviews, training and case studies. You have done hundreds and hundreds of gigs. You’ve been in the speaking industry for years and years and years. You have a ton of boots on the ground experience. What if I just pulled that out of your brain and put it together in a book?” So that’s basically how it worked. It’s all my content. Jeff was kind of the non-ghostwriter, ghostwriter for it. To the steakhouse point, I had the content but Jeff has written multiple books, is a phenomenal writer and is extremely good at that. So for me it was a no brainer to stay in the lane of what I’m good at. Jeff’s really, really good at writing so I decided to partner with him on it and figure out how we could work together. We worked together on—well, I already had the Speak framework. We had already been teaching that. Jeff said, “Okay, perfect. There’s our outline.” Basically, he’d get to a section and we’d get together and he would interview me on it—just do a brain dump on anything I knew. He would move stuff around and make it look and sound pretty. In fact, it’s funny… the day the book came out I had a guy email me saying, “Hey, I got home from work and the book was here. I’ve already read the whole thing cover-to-cover and it was amazing. This is the best book I’ve seen on the topic. I’ve read a whole bunch of books on it…” yada, yada, yada. I remember telling my wife it was cool to hear one of the first “strangers” read it and have great feedback like that. I was kind of joking with my wife in that I don’t know if people would have said that if I had written it. But because Jeff wrote it, that’s a big piece of what made the finished product so good and well-produced. That was in his steakhouse. That’s what he does really, really well. So, yeah, I really enjoy talking about this a lot publicly because I think for a lot of people who use a ghostwriter, it’s a very hush-hush, quiet thing where you want to pretend you did it. But Jeff did a lot of the heavy lifting on the actual pen-to-paper type of approach. I’ve also tried to use it as a marketing mechanism where they may not be familiar with me but they know Jeff. They’ve read Jeff’s other books. They may not be interested in speaking, but Jeff wrote the book so they’re interested in picking it up. I think it’s been a really good experience and process to go through with him.

Tom: One more thing I wanted to cover… For someone that’s interested in speaking but unsure they can do this, obviously there is The Speaker Lab and your book (which we’ll get to) but what about something like Toastmasters? Should they be doing things like that? What else is out there where they can hone these skills and get more comfortable?

Grant: Toastmasters is good in the sense that there are thousands of different chapters all over the world. What we touched on earlier is, one of the ways that you get better as a speakers is that you speak. Toastmasters gives you some at-bats. It gives you some opportunities. The thing I would say I don’t like about Toastmasters is it can be very formulaic in that in order to be a speaker, you have to do it these ways; everything has to fit inside this box and that’s the only way to be a speaker. I’m just generally not a big fan of that. Going back to Tony Robbins versus Brené Brown; those are two very, very different speakers. But they’re both effective. They both work. It’s not that either of them are fitting into a certain mold or box as far as what it means to be a speaker. I would recommend anyone to go to a Toastmasters. There’s a really good chance there is Toastmasters (or multiple chapters) near you. I would say to go to one and just try it. Go a few times and see if it works for you. See if it makes sense for you. When I got started there was a chapter I went to several times. It was kind of hit and miss for me but I’ve heard of other people who had a great experience there. So I truly wouldn’t say it’s a one-size-fits-all because there are so many different chapters. There are thousands of chapters and they’re not all going to be completely identical. Go to your local chapter and see if it’s a win for you.

Tom: Can you let people know about your book and everything else that you’ve got that can help them with this?

Grant: Yes, the book is called, The Successful Speaker. It is out now. The subtitle is, Five Steps for Booking Gigs, Getting Paid. Building Your Platform. That’s on Amazon, Barnes Noble, Book A Million—wherever books are sold. Hopefully it’s there. It’s also in airports everywhere right now and the Hudson news so you can look for it there as well. Then everything we do is over at The Speaker Lab, thespeakerlab.com. We have a podcast by the same name. There is no shortage of resources there for anyone who’s looking for help as the speaker. Again, whether you want to speak full time or you want to do a few gigs here or there, we’d love to be able to serve you and support you on that journey.

Tom: Great. Thanks for being on the show.

Grant: Thanks, Tom.

Thank you, Grant, for the great tips and getting paid to speak. You can find the show notes for this episode at maplemoney.com/grantbaldwin. If you’re on Facebook, I’d love for you to join the Maple Money Show community where you can ask questions, share money tips and just hang out with people like yourself who are interested in all kinds of money related topics. You can search for Maple Money community on Facebook or head to maplemoney.com/community. Thanks for listening. I look forward to seeing back here next week.