Speaking for fun and profit

April 7, 2020 / Fear, Marketing / No Comments

I recently spoke at an AIIP virtual event with Marydee Ojala on “Public Speaking For Introverts: From No Way to Speaking for Pay”. (AIIP members can watch the recording here.) The questions that we discussed got me thinking, so I’m taking this chance to expand a bit on my thoughts. And keep in mind that public speaking need not be in person, although it’s a lot more powerful that way; my answers below apply to virtual presentations as well.

What do you wish you knew when you first started speaking publicly? It took me several years to realize that it’s not about me… it’s about the audience and the event organizer. My goal is to give people a tangible skill or insight that they didn’t have before. If the audience feels that they learned something that they could put into practice immediately, then they’ll be happy they attended my talk and the event organizer will be happy that the participants are happy. And, remember that the ultimate client in a speaking engagement isn’t the audience—it’s the person putting on the event.

When did you first start charging for your speaking? For the first three or four years, I spoke for free or, when the engagement was out of town, I would just be reimbursed for my travel expenses. My goal was to get people to know me, to see that I’m generous with what I know and committed to sharing what I’ve learned with others, and to build my leads by offering valuable information and then inviting them to subscribe to my (then) email newsletter. I wanted as much exposure as possible, so I tried to always find a way to say yes.

I finally started charging when I was getting more unpaid engagements than I could afford to do; at that point, I realized that I had the chops to speak for pay. And as soon as I started charging, I resolved that I would lose at least a quarter of my speaking invitations because I was too expensive. The only way I could determine the upper end of my speaking fees was to keep raising them until I started to get push-back and, as much as I enjoy travel, I’d rather make more money doing fewer speaking gigs.

What helped you get over the jitters? I take two approaches to that surge of adrenaline that always hits me 10 or 15 minutes before I get up to speak. First, I remind myself that adrenaline is my friend; it sharpens my brain and will help me while I speak to think quickly and clearly. And then I take a few deep breaths and remind myself that the people in the audience are on my side. They aren’t waiting to catch me making a grammatical error or to smirk if I lose my train of thought. Rather, they are sitting there assuming that I will engage them, teach them something they didn’t know, and leave them with a fresh perspective. They’re actually all silently rooting for me to succeed. So as soon as I get to the podium, I smile, make eye contact with three or four people in the room, and then focus on just talking to those friendly faces. It works every time.

Any tips to help introverts get started speaking? As a fellow introvert, I’ll let you in on a secret—many of the best public speakers are introverts. Think about it… instead of having to make small talk, you’re free to talk about what you’re passionate about. You get to share what you know with people who are interested in learning. And afterward, instead of having to start yet another awkward conversation, people come up to you with comments about your presentation. In fact, a pro tip I picked up from Marcy Phelps was to include an invitation at the end of my presentation for people to talk with me afterward and share their favorite technique / experience/ idea—whatever I want to prompt my audience with that will give them something to come up to me and talk about after my presentation is over.

Yes, my first four or five public speaking engagements were nerve-wracking, and I still worry whether my audience is going to find my presentation useful, but I have learned to accept my worries as simply part of the process. As with anything that moves me outside my comfort zone, it’s both challenging and really gratifying to effectively share my knowledge and enthusiasm with others.

How to attract and keep GREAT clients

January 21, 2020 / Client relations, Managing yourself, Marketing / 1 Comment

I recently wrote a Coach’s Corner column for AIIP about how to manage difficult clients and, as I was writing it, I realized that I have had very few difficult clients over the last 25+ years in business. What’s my secret? I’m certainly not perfect, but here are the approaches that have helped me attract and keep so many clients I respect, admire and look forward to working with.

The New Year’s resolutions your business wants you to make

January 6, 2020 / Managing yourself, Strategic planning / No Comments

One of the standard jokes of solopreneurs is “If you hear me talking to myself, don’t worry—I’m just holding a staff meeting.” While there’s a lot to be said for the simplicity of being a one-person operation, we sometimes get complacent in how we run our business. This year, I decided to give my business a voice in setting my New Year’s resolutions, as a way to think more expansively about what I need to add, drop or change in 2020. Here are a few of the pieces of advice my business is showing me:

Help—I still don’t have any clients!

November 13, 2019 / Client relations, Marketing / No Comments

The solopreneurs I coach and mentor, especially those in their first year of business, often tell me how hard it is to figure out how to measure success, how to best spend their time, and how to turn interest into client engagements. While each business is different, a few pieces of advice apply in almost any B2B solopreneur.

First, make sure you know what your prospective clients need, value and will pay you well for. If you haven’t conducted at least a half dozen informational conversations, in which you were able to learn what your market needs and how your prospective clients talk about that need, then you need to invest the time and energy into these essential conversations. See my blog post Making Yourself Irreplaceable for lots more resources on how to conduct insightful informational conversations.

How to be a GREAT contractor or subcontractor

August 5, 2019 / Brand "You", Client relations / No Comments

I may be a one-person business, but that doesn’t mean I’m alone. In fact, one of the most rewarding aspects of being a one-person business is that I benefit from the cross-fertilization that comes from contracting and subcontracting with fellow infopreneurs. I subcontract out specialized work I can’t do myself, and I work as a subcontractor for a number of businesses that bring me in for my specialized skills. Over the years, I have learned a lot about what is involved in being a good contractor and subcontractor. Here are my rules for successful contracting and subcontracting.

Getting to ‘Yes’

July 22, 2019 / Client relations, Marketing / No Comments

One of the most common traps I see new infopreneurs fall into – and I’ve done this myself, too! – is equating a prospect with an actual, paying client. We meet someone at a networking event or have a phone call with someone we met through social media. The person sounds interested in what we do, accepts our business card, and maybe even says “Yeah, we could have used someone like you that one time.” They may attend a webinar we give or download a white paper we wrote. We end the encounter confident that the person will be calling us shortly with an assignment, but then we never hear from them again.

In my experience, failure to convert interest into engagement is often caused by some combination of the following factors.
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What will it take to launch?

July 8, 2019 / Fear, Managing yourself / No Comments

You’ve been thinking about starting a full-time consulting business for months… maybe years. You’ve read the books, you’ve taken the courses, you’ve done your reality-check interviews, you’ve written your business plan. But you’re still hesitating to launch your business, or you’re trying to work on your business evenings and weekends while spending your most productive time as an employee for someone else. What will it take for you to make the leap?

Getting something from nothing

June 24, 2019 / Client relations / 3 Comments

One of the things I often talk about with infopreneurs I’m coaching is the importance of knowing how to make something out of nothing. We may have thought the project we took on would be easy to handle, and it turns out the resources we thought we could use didn’t pan out. Or we thought there would be plenty of information on a topic and we find out that, nope, no one’s talking about it. In these cases, we have to be able to tell a story about what the lack of results tells us.

So, when a project results in far less than either my client or I had anticipated, I ask myself these questions:
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The top 10 myths of starting a consulting business

April 29, 2019 / Managing yourself, Marketing, Strategic planning / 1 Comment

I’ve seen a lot of myths about consulting, all of them as hoary and false as the idea that if you build a better mousetrap, people will beat a path to your door. Following are the infopreneur myths I’ve found to be most prevalent… and wrong.

#1. Consulting is what people do when they’re between jobs
In my experience, you can’t both start a business and look for a job; either you are focused on finding what your clients need most and how you can meet those needs, or you’re focused on finding who will hire you for your skills.

#2. The services I provided as an employee will be valued by consulting clients
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Doing what we don’t wanna do

March 4, 2019 / Managing yourself / 4 Comments

From both my own experience and that of people I coach, one of the biggest challenges for solopreneurs is keeping ourselves motivated and focused on doing the important things, even if they’re not the things we want to do.

When I hear myself saying “I know I should do such-and-such, but …”, I stop and ask myself what is keeping me from doing that thing. As a one-person business, I don’t have a boss to hold me accountable and the consequences of non-action aren’t as immediately painful as doing something that’s way outside my comfort zone. Here are a few of the things that help me move from “I know I should” to “I did it!”

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The Reluctant Entrepreneur