You Want To Be a Speaker! One Simple Step to $10k Keynotes.

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I get asked all the time how I built my career as a speaker and how someone else can do what I do. Anyone can follow this one easy step to build a successful full time speaking career and land high paying keynotes in front of huge audiences.

Step 1: There is no simple step.

But if you really want it, here’s what it takes:

Spend years hustling your ass off by getting in front of tons of teams and crowds for free or peanuts. Do this hundreds of times so you can develop your curriculum, hone your stage presence and message, build connections, and work towards delivering a mind blowing experience and content every time. Create unique content and a message that people haven’t heard before, delivered in a way that will keep people engaged and provide valuable takeaways. This is harsh but true:

Do not hold up a glass of water and ask them how full it is. Regurgitating inspirational quotes for an hour is not exceptional. Do not settle for providing mediocre, forgettable content.

Spend years in the trenches on the front line as a salesperson and marketer promoting your brand and business. Building and nurturing relationships, getting in front of as many groups as possible, building your website/online presence and creating high-quality promotional materials that are relevant and specific to your target clients.

Gather honest feedback every single time along the way and make sure that every attendee actually loved what you had to say. Be prepared to hear glowing and painful feedback as you learn and grow. Don’t dismiss or ignore negative feedback, heed it to focus on improving and being amazing enough that you stop getting it. Don’t be satisfied until you can deliver your message on a consistent basis without one single piece of negative feedback.

Continue to develop and improve your entire package to ensure that the value you bring each time is much higher than your fee. As you grow in experience and value, your fee will grow too. Make sure that your content and what you deliver isn’t just ‘fun and forget’ with a few good one liners, but will actually provide long term impact.

Once you have some experience under your belt, apply to a ton of relevant conferences throughout the year with the hopes that next year you will be accepted by a few of them to speak. These will be free breakout sessions where you can gain experience, prove yourself, make connections, and be seen.

Then the year after reapply to all of them again and any new ones you’ve learned of. This time hopefully being asked to keynote one or two of them if you went and totally kicked ass when you came the first time. More than likely that won’t happen yet and you’ll need another year of applying to a ton and getting into just a handful. That’s ok, you’ll be gaining more audience feedback scores and testimonials to share the next year as you attempt to leap up into a keynote spot instead of doing free breakouts.

By now between these conferences and the private companies and group workshops you continue to give, you’ve honed your message and stagecraft, and your content is engaging, unique, and awesome after the hundreds of times you’ve presented it. This third or fourth year will likely finally lead to some keynote spots at smaller/midsize conferences which are great for your resume and the path to eventually bigger and better ones.

You’ll continue this cycle year over year, gaining bigger and bigger opportunities and audiences over time as long as you’re crushing it every time and delivering a ton of actual value. Continue like this for literally about 15 to 20 thousand hours of hustle until you book your first $10k keynote. Easy!

Real talk.

There is no easy way to build something exceptional. This is how it’s done; it’s years and years of unwavering hard and smart work, long hours, grinding, and constant improvement just like any other business. Being a speaker is being an entrepreneur and owning your own business. It contains all the effort, stress, 60hr work weeks, and losing sleep that comes with that. Full of big wins, and big disappointments.

It’s a lot less sexy and lot more work than it sounds. And you can’t be satisfied with being good, or even great, you have to aim to be the best. If you want the keynote spot, and 300 people apply then your content, messaging, reputation, credentials, and topic has to be better than 299 of them.

I love you, now get back to work.

Galen is a keynote speaker and trainer, working with teams to create awesome workplace culture. His blood type is entrepreneur and business junky. Check him out at shiftyes.com