One Great Speech: Secrets, Stories, and Perks of the Paid Speaking Industry (And How You Can Break In)

By James Marshall Reilly

Tell your story, change your life

Think about people who are paid to speak at events. They're all celebrities, former politicians, or award-winning experts in their fields, right? Wrong. The truth is that every year, thousands of ordinary people generate five- and even six-figure incomes—just from speaking. And you can too.

With the right know-how, anyone can harness the power of their own story to carve out a lucrative speaking career. Listen in as veteran speaking agent James Marshall Reilly shares insider knowledge and tells compelling stories about dozens of successful speakers. Packed with clearly defined strategies and techniques, this book offers the tips and information you'll need to be well positioned for success as a paid speaker, including how to:

• Identify, hone, and frame your personal story—or message—so other people will pay to hear it
• Create compelling marketing materials and get an agent
• Work with that agent to develop a personal brand and own your niche
• Increase your speaking fees over time, interact with audiences, and handle failure
• Use paid speeches to sell an idea, attract customers, build your profile, and generate revenue for your business or nonprofit

One Great Speech is the only resource written by an insider that details the ins and outs of the paid speaking industry. It is the essential blueprint for finding that one great speech that will lead you to speaking success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sourcebooks
• Release date: Oct 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781492688273

Book preview

Introduction

What would you say if I told you that you could make an additional $5,000 per year by only putting in a few hours of work?

How about $10,000?

What would you say if I told you that you could make an additional $100,000 per year with no special skills or additional education and no up-front investment other than a few hours of your own time?

And what would you say if I told you that you could quit your current job—if you wanted to—and make more money by simply sharing your own story?

I must be crazy. Right?

I assure you, I’m not.

Welcome to the largely misunderstood, highly secretive, enormously lucrative paid speaking industry.

A $100 million industry with little transparency and few barriers to entry. And yet very few people understand how it works, or how to tap into it. Or, if they think they know, the information they have is often incorrect because it wasn’t explained to them by someone on the inside.

On top of that, there are very few outside resources that make this information available. While there are a ton of books on speech prep, speech delivery, and how to speak for free, there aren’t any books that explain how to actually get paid to speak.

Yet there are thousands—if not tens of thousands—of organizations in America that pay for speeches each year. Global opportunities make this market even larger. As a speaking agent, over the course of just a few years, I generated in excess of $25 million in offers for my clients.

And that $25 million is only a fraction of the money out there. As an agent, I’ve had more money turned down by speakers than booked. In fact, as an agency owner, my agents and I once had a cumulative sum of $1 million turned down in a matter of hours. And of course, as an individual agent—and even as an agency owner—I represented only a tiny segment of the total market.

Plus, it’s likely that you’ve never even heard of most of the people I booked. They weren’t famous politicians. They weren’t celebrities. For the most part, they weren’t household names. They were ordinary people. Schoolteachers. College professors. Small business owners. Nonprofit founders. Health experts. Cancer survivors. Because speaking builds profiles and visibility fast, you may be familiar with some of these speakers now—but the point is that anyone can participate in the highly lucrative paid speaking business—that is, if they know how.

But, you say, we’ve heard grandiose claims like this before.

In 2009, Tim Ferriss and The 4-Hour Workweek made an equally extraordinary promise: Escape 9–5, live anywhere, and join the new rich.

By working only four hours a week. Half a day.

The brilliance of this promise is obvious; it’s so big and so compelling that everyone wants to sign on. In fact, there have been a ton of other life-hack books that offer ways to get rich quick and free up time.

But what I’m outlining in One Great Speech will be, for most people, a far more accessible and actionable version of this same promise: work less and earn more. For some, what I’m offering in this book might manifest as a four-hour workweek. And, for a handful of people, it might even manifest as a four-hour work month. A week or a month in which you fly, all expenses paid—often first class—to a speaking engagement. A single speaking engagement for which you’ll be paid four, five, or potentially even six figures.

How many offers you accept, and how much you earn, is largely controlled by you. And you don’t need to own a company or to have done something extraordinary to join the party. You just need a story. A story you already have.

In my experience, everyone wants to be a speaker. TED made speaking sexy. And TEDx made speaking accessible to the masses. But the thing is, TED and TEDx don’t pay speakers. And getting paid to speak is much better than speaking for free—even at TED. Paid speakers are the new rock stars. And the money can be huge.

In this book I am going to explain every detail and inside secret of the paid speaking industry so that anyone—and everyone—can monetize it. I am going to invite regular people to participate in what is one of the most misunderstood and surprisingly accessible markets available for personal wealth-building in the world today. I will also expose the inner workings of this elusive and lucrative industry and the people who inhabit it.

If you think that the kind of democratization and market creation I’m talking about isn’t possible or hasn’t been done before—that inviting normal people into what has traditionally been a closed marketplace can’t be done—you’re wrong. Consider Uber and Airbnb.

In 2011, Uber launched to the masses with a unique value proposition: You own a car, so let us help you monetize it. What made Uber so successful was that it repositioned the concept of owning a car by presenting it in a different light—your car is a distressed asset, and one you can put into service. Uber invited people to be taxi drivers who would have otherwise never considered driving taxis. They invited new people—new drivers—into a market in which very few car owners had previously participated. Actors, students, retirees, the unemployed, and others suddenly had the means—and better yet, the opportunity and mindset—to generate additional income by putting their car to work for them.

A few years earlier, in 2008, Airbnb launched to the masses with an equally compelling promise: We can help you cover your mortgage or your rent, or simply add to your bottom line, by providing a bridge to positive revenue based on leveraging something you already have—your home. Just like Uber, Airbnb invited people into an income-generating market in which most had not previously participated.

Despite the mass appeal of these two companies and the billions of dollars they generate for everyday people, both have a costly barrier to entry. You can only drive for Uber if you own or lease a new model car. And you can only earn money through Airbnb if you are willing to let someone else move into the home you rent or own for a while.

According to Uber, the median wage for an UberX driver working at least forty hours a week in New York City is $90,766 a year.* According to the Washington Post, this isn’t realistic, and, in most markets, drivers make closer to minimum wage. When Money analyzed the income generated in the sharing economy, it was estimated that the average Uber driver’s income was $364 a month—$4,368 per year—and that the average Airbnb earnings were $924 a month—$11,088 a year.

Regardless of which numbers you believe, as a paid speaker, sharing your story, a fully utilized YOU can make far more money than the average Uber or Airbnb participant makes in a year—in an hour. And without the up-front investment. There is a zero-dollar entry fee to the speaking market, and enormous potential for earnings.

I am essentially going to show you how to rent yourself—and your life experience—instead of your car or your house. And for a lot more money.

• • • •

Here are examples of just ten of the individuals I’ve represented as a speaking agent, followed by the cumulative dollar value of what they were offered† for speaking engagements in a single year. Keep in mind, each individual offer was for what would have amounted to a few hours of work:

Social Entrepreneur: $2,500,000

Diversity Expert: $96,000

T-shirt Entrepreneur: $600,000

Nonprofit Founder: $780,000

Science Writer: $650,000

Schoolteacher: $212,000

College Professor No. 1: $400,000

College Professor No. 2: $325,000

Food Expert: $550,000

Happiness Expert: $200,000

In this book, I’m going to teach you how you can become a paid speaker and generate income to cover your annual grocery bill or pay your monthly mortgage—and entertain you with fun, insider stories. I’m going to show you how you can generate a new revenue stream to help pay for your vacations and cover your kid’s college expenses. I’m going to teach you how to potentially fund your retirement, buy a sports car—or anything else you want—by being paid to simply talk.

But wait, you don’t mean me. I can’t be a paid speaker, can I?

Yes, you can.

Some of the speaking requests I’ve received over the years that weren’t for a specific speaker were based on topics that weren’t suitable for any of the speaking clients I exclusively represented. This means that I booked quite a few of the incoming inquiries based on one of two things: Either spin, which is exactly what it sounds like—I would take my biographical knowledge of my exclusive speakers and spin their stories to meet the needs of the enquiring parties. Or cold-calling—I would locate someone who had never given a speech and convince that person to do so. Which means that I had to track down and call an unrepresented expert and say, Hi, I read your story about guerrilla marketing online. I know you’ve probably never given a paid speech before, but I work with a Fortune 500 company that is looking for someone to talk about guerrilla marketing on March 15. I have a signed, firm-and-binding offer to pay you $10,000 plus first-class travel and expenses to give a forty-five-minute speech. Are you interested and available?

How would you like to get that call out of the blue?

As a speaking agent, one of my biggest challenges was locating and identifying unrepresented experts in various fields based on the incoming requests of buyers and event sponsors.* Experts, who—in the speaking world—are unknown and therefore not on the menu. People just like you who are not being pitched for paid speaking engagements because they aren’t represented by an agent.

And don’t be confused.

When NASA wants to pay for a speaker, they’re not looking for an astronaut.

When Bank of America wants to pay for a speaker, they’re not looking for a banker or a financial services expert.

And the State Department isn’t looking for a diplomat.

These organizations have plenty of their own in-house.

Instead, these organizations are looking for someone who has founded a small business, is an exercise guru, runs a women’s group, or sailed a boat through a storm. They are looking for someone with a unique perspective, a new idea—someone who has information to share. And passion; they are looking for someone with a story that resonates.

For example, I once booked Sarah Jones, a Tony Award–winning playwright, actress, and poet, to give a forty-five-minute presentation at one of the largest aerospace companies in the world. For this speech she was paid $45,000 plus first-class travel and expenses. And she knew nothing about aeronautics.

Hold on, you’re thinking. I’m not a Tony Award–winning playwright, actress, and poet. So, you don’t really mean me, right?

Wrong! I do mean you, and this book will explain why.

OK, but don’t I need a published book in order to get paid to speak?

Nope.

•If you already wrote and published a book—great. It will help you to secure representation at a speaking agency.

•If you don’t have a book, I’ll explain why you don’t need one to become a successful paid speaker. And then I’ll explain that you may be able to leverage your speaking career to secure a book deal, if you want one.

Because paid speaking engagements can get you a book deal. I’ll explain how I was able to negotiate five- and six-figure book deals with some of the biggest publishers in the world simply based on the platforms I built for my speaking clients and the demand for their future speeches.

Who is this book for?

•This book is for people who never thought that they could give a paid speech—and who still think that. And it will show them how they can make additional, reliable income every year by doing so.

•This book is for people who already want to be paid speakers and would like to have a speaking agency represent them. And it will show them how to get one.

•This book is for people who already have speaking agency representation. And it will show them how to better monetize their relationships: How to get their agents to work harder, smarter, and more efficiently—to the tune of higher-profile, higher-paying gigs. And how to leave agents, event sponsors, and audiences pleased.

•This book is also for people who may not want to speak themselves, but who are interested in learning about the behind-the-scenes workings of an industry that few people know anything about.

What this book will teach you:

•How to identify, hone, and frame your personal story in such a way that other people will be willing to pay you a ton of money to tell it.

•How to rethink your personal brand—and if you think that you don’t have a personal brand, I’ll convince you that you do.

•How to craft the best materials, and the type of agencies to approach, to ensure representation.

•How to position your topics, bio, and collateral marketing materials in such a way that you are best positioned to be signed to a speaking agency.

•How to differentiate between the levels of speaking agencies. For example, why you likely shouldn’t be targeting household-name speakers bureaus unless you’re extremely well known or retired from the Senate yesterday; the difference between agencies that simply field incoming calls versus those that actively sell; and, if you have a book, why the in-house speakers bureau at your publishing company might not be all it’s cracked up to be.

•How to secure an exclusive speaking agent or agency, and what to do when you are offered representation.

•What your speaking agent is thinking but isn’t telling you, and how to get ahead of prospective challenges simply by being prepared.

•Why signing with a speaking agency is only 50 percent of the battle.

•How to get your agents to pitch you and book you, and how to empower those agents to make you the most money possible.

•How to set a speaking fee that best positions you for success based on the dynamics of the market.

•How to increase your speaking fees over time.

•How to further monetize your speeches without being pushy or coming off like you’re selling something.

•Best practices when it comes to data capture, list-building, and interacting with audiences after the speech.

•How to use the paid speaking industry to attract customers, build your profile, and generate revenue if you run a business or nonprofit.

•When and where and why—and if—you should speak for free.

•Why everything you know, or think you know, about sales and marketing is likely irrelevant in the paid speaking space.

•And, most importantly, One Great Speech will teach you the language and inner workings of the paid speaking industry so you are better positioned to monetize it.

What this book isn’t:

•This is not a book about how to give a speech.

•I will never tell you where to stand on stage.

•I will never tell you to envision the audience naked.

•I will never tell you to conform to cookie-cutter standards.

•I will never tell you how to write your speech. In fact, I might tell you not to write a speech at all.

•I will never tell you how to build a killer PowerPoint presentation—although I will explain why you might not need one.

•I will never tell you how to dress. Though I will tell you that a few of my most successful speakers go on stage barefoot, or may not have showered in the previous three days, and I’ll tell you why this doesn’t necessarily matter.

•I will never tell you not to say um or like. Though I will advise you that being yourself—regardless of flawed grammar, how you look, or if you stumble—is the most endearing thing that you and your agents are selling.

So Who Am I, and Why Should You Listen to Me?

I’ve been working in the speaking industry for over a decade. In 2011, I founded a speaking agency based in midtown Manhattan. At the time, I represented no one—not a single client.

I didn’t have a list of buyers or event sponsors, either. I had Google, a basic website, an email address, and a few years of experience working as an agent at an international speaking agency.

When I started my company, I was still in my twenties. Five years later, I represented over one hundred speakers exclusively and began generating between $6 million and $10 million a year in offers for them.

I represented a few big names. But more importantly, I represented a lot of nobodies. Regular, hardworking people just like you and me. I’ve also worked with just about every speakers bureau in the world. Not just major speakers bureaus, but the small ones too. In fact, some of my biggest customers were other speaking agencies, and I’ll explain later in the book why that matters and what it means.

I’ve worked with companies that are household names—Bank of America, Facebook, Disney, Coca-Cola, Chick-fil-A, FedEx, Viacom, and Gatorade, among others. I’ve worked with hundreds of high-profile nonprofit and government organizations—including NASA, the U.S. Department of State, Phi Beta Kappa, Children’s Miracle Network, Doctors Without Borders, Girl Scouts of the USA, and the United Nations. I’ve worked with hundreds of colleges and universities—Harvard, Yale, UCLA, Notre Dame, USC, University of Chicago, Wharton School of Business, and University of North Carolina, to name a few. I’ve also arranged speeches in countries all over the world, including England, Peru, Australia, Belgium, France, South Africa, Taiwan, and Colombia.

One insider secret of the speaking industry? Most of the money for paid speeches lies not with big, recognizable names, but with speakers and organizations you’ve never heard of.

As a speaking agent, I got hundreds of emails each week from organizations looking to pay for a speaker. But most of these organizations had less than $5,000 to spend. This means that, in a traditional speaking agency mindset, these inquiries were unserviceable because the dollars weren’t large enough to bother with. So, in addition to teaching you how to get an agent to go after the bigger dollars, this book will also teach you how to motivate your agent to convert these unserviceable and small dollars for your benefit.

Like most marketplaces, the speaking industry has a high end and a low end. Both are lucrative. And there’s mobility between the two extremes—I’ve taken speakers no one has ever heard of from getting $500 a night to $60,000 a night. And I’ll demonstrate how.

Because I’ve been in this industry for so long, I also have a lot of stories.

Funny stories. Hard-to-believe stories. Insider stories about a world very few people know anything about. Stories about famous people—Academy Award winners, celebrities, bestselling authors, powerful businesspeople, high-profile entrepreneurs, influential nonprofit leaders, former heads of state, Nobel and Pulitzer Prize nominees—and about regular people like you and me.*

I’ve had speaking clients who didn’t want event sponsors, or the public, to know that they were flying in on private jets to give their speeches. (Depending on your branding, it’s not necessarily good optics—or good PR—to take a flight that costs tens of thousands of dollars.) I’ve had speaking clients who have led event sponsors to believe that their five- and six-figure speaking fees were going to charity when, in fact, the fees were going into their own bank accounts. But I’ve also had clients who have donated their speaking fees back to the universities where they spoke; who used their speaking platform to build nonprofits and better the world; who worked to improve awareness of global social issues; and who improved the lives of tens of thousands of people around of the globe because they got massive exposure as paid speakers.

In this book I am going to teach you how I helped a specific group of people make tens of millions of dollars by simply talking—and I am going to teach you how you can get a piece of that market too. On the pages that follow I will share the closely guarded knowledge and insider secrets of the paid speaking industry so that they can be monetized by you.

*Matt McFarland, Uber’s Remarkable Growth Could End the Era of Poorly Paid Cab Drivers, Washington Post, May 27, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/05/27/ubers-remarkable-growth-could-end-the-era-of-poorly-paid-cab-drivers/.

†For clarity, not all speakers accept all offers. In this book I will discuss both offers (a firm and binding contract for a speaker to give a talk for a specific fee on a specific date) and bookings (an offer accepted by a speaker).

*Technically, buyers and event sponsors are the organizations, committees, or governing bodies that are holding an event and footing the bill for the speakers. For simplicity, in this book, when I refer to buyers and event sponsors I am often referencing the individual who is the point of contact for the overall event and who executes bookings.

*Every story in this book is true. However, in many cases the names and details have been altered slightly in order to protect the privacy of the individuals and institutions discussed. In each case, I preserved enough of the details to make sure the core value of each story remained intact.

1.

Show Me the Money

HOW IT ALL WORKS

Here are the short answers to three of the most common questions every aspiring speaker asks:

1.How much money can I get paid to give a speech?

How much speakers make can vary from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single speech. More specifically, unless you’re a celebrity, you can expect to make somewhere between $5,000 and $30,000 for a single booking.

2.How often can I get booked?

Anywhere from never to constantly. Vague, I know, but it’s the truth. I’ve represented speakers who have never been booked. I’ve represented speakers who set limits, saying, I only want to speak four times a year. I’ve also represented speakers who get so many offers that they could never possibly accept them all. Perhaps most importantly, I’ve represented speakers who start out small and unknown who go on to build highly lucrative careers by following the rules set forth in this book. On the flip side, I’ve also represented speakers who get booked once and never again—and later on I’ll explain why that happens and how to prevent it.

3.How does my agent get paid?

Just like literary agents and real estate agents, speaking agents work on commission.* The best part of that is there’s no up-front cost to you. But while a real estate agency might get 5–6 percent and a literary agency gets 15 percent, a speaking agency will generally commission 20–25 percent of what you get paid for a speech. That means that if you get booked four or five times, your agency will make as much as you do for giving a single speech—and I’ll explain why your agent is worth every penny of that money.

This said, here are two critical questions speakers never ask, but should:

1.Who controls the dollars?

2.And how can knowing this enable a speaker to make more money?

Sometimes, after a speech is booked, on the days leading up to the event I worry that something will happen and that the speaker won’t show up for one reason or another. It’s important to note that, as an agent, I only get paid if the event actually occurs. And I work on a draw against commissions, so a no-show can have a disastrous impact on both my current income and my relationship with an event sponsor—which can hugely impact my future income. Now, a no-show can happen due to bad weather, flight delays, and unexpected work conflicts—among other things. I once had a speaker who had a heart attack right before a speech. I even had a speaker who forgot that she had a speech in Switzerland and didn’t show up for her flight from Los Angeles. And I once had a speaker—a Pulitzer Prize–winning author—who passed away seventy-two hours before his scheduled speech.

Mind you, things like this rarely happen. But as an agent, the possibility of a speech—which is on a fixed date typically booked many months in advance—being canceled or forfeited by the speaker and therefore not paying out is top of mind, particularly on big-dollar bookings. And while we, as agents, put measures in place to prevent cancellations from happening—such as not letting a speaker fly in on the day of a speech or on the last flight out the evening prior—I’ve still sweated it out over more events than I can count.

Consider these four actual examples:

1.I had a CEO flying in on a private jet with a full security detail—armed to the teeth—on a flight to Bogota, Colombia, to give a forty-minute speech to a group of South American businesspeople.