Public speaking is one of those interesting activities, like the arts, where there’s a lot of passion and a lot of talent, but not always a lot of money. If you’ve been in the business for any amount of time, there’s a good chance that you’ve been asked to give your time for free or to speak at an event in exchange for travel costs only.
Opportunities like these can be useful when you’re first starting out because they can help you to build a portfolio, increase experience, and gather resources like photography and videography. They can also help to put you in front of key decision makers in your industry.
But exposure doesn’t pay the bills, and it’s a bad idea to make a habit of speaking for free. Once you become established, you can and should command higher and higher fees for your speaking engagements, but even then, it can still be difficult to make a living in this business.
That’s why public speakers are increasingly turning to other avenues, like publishing books or working as consultants. Consultancy work in particular is a good call, because it tends to be much more lucrative than publishing, and doesn’t require the huge time investment needed to write and publish a book.
But how exactly can public speakers get started with consultancy, and what do they need to know before they set out? Let’s dive in and take a look.
Consultancy takes many different forms, but the general idea is that people will pay you an hourly rate in exchange for your time. You will need to provide your clients with strategic advice and learning opportunities as opposed to getting your hands dirty with actually doing the work.
In some cases, you’ll simply want to provide training sessions and workshops that aren’t too dissimilar to the speaking engagements that you’ve made your name with. Companies can hire you to come in and deliver workshops to their staff where you provide them with training and answer any questions that they might have.
Another option is for you to work with senior management and to host brainstorming sessions where you gather key players around a whiteboard and flesh out plans, strategies and processes.
It really depends on where your specialisms lie. Let’s say that your public speaking engagements revolve around compliance and risk mitigation. In that case, you’ll be perfectly placed to go into companies and to help them with the specifics of those considerations as they relate to their business.
There are various options available to you when it comes to how you charge people. You can have a day rate that you provide to people in exchange for your services for a full day, or you can also work with an hourly rate where you simply add up all the time that you spend working for a client and then send them an invoice.
One of the big advantages of consultancy is that it’s scalable. As a public speaker, your earnings are limited by the number of hours in a day. You can’t appear in two places at once and so if you have two enquiries for the same day, you’re forced to choose just one of them.
If you run a consultancy business, though, you can hire other people to work for you. Even though you’ll be the face of the business and will likely be the speaker who’s in the most demand, you can also send your other consultants out in your place.
One option here is to offer a tiered system for your consultancy gigs. In fact, hiring consultants to work for you can enable you to raise your own rates. The companies that can afford it can still book you to do consultancy work, while those that are on a budget may wish to utilize the services that you can offer them through the consultants that do work for you.
Done well, everybody wins. You’ll be able to service more clients and share your knowledge amongst a wider pool of people, your employees will be able to pick up valuable training and learn from the master, and clients that previously couldn’t afford your rates will still be able to work with your company.
The good news is that consultancy and public speaking are a natural fit because for you to be successful as a public speaker, you’ll need to be a specialist. Your consultancy work can then revolve around the specialist subject that you talk about.
Then there’s the fact that both consultancy and public speaking are all about personal branding. In the same way that no one will book you as a speaker if you don’t have a good reputation, no one will hire you as a consultant if you can’t prove that you’ve got the goods — and what better way to demonstrate that you know your subject than to speak publicly about it.
One can feed the other. Your speaking engagements essentially put you in front of an audience of potential clients, and if people enjoy your presentations then they’re more likely to want to bring you in to provide consultancy. Likewise, a consultancy gig can often lead to you being booked as a keynote speaker if that company goes on to organize an event. Done well, it becomes a virtuous cycle that continues to deliver revenue.
Now that you know the basics of consultancy and how it can help you to supplement your income as a public speaker, it’s time for us to turn it over to you. As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts, especially if you’ve got experience of doing consultancy work, so be sure to leave us a comment.
In the meantime, be sure to follow us on your social media channels of choice for more and to keep your eyes peeled for future articles. We’ll see you soon!
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