How I became one of the UK’s most in-demand female motivational speakers

04:52 Navigating the speaker business model

because I was foolish enough to enter the speaker factor of the year that year about 10 years ago. And that's the finalists, five finalists all lined up in the dinner just before we, know, just after we'd heard that we were, you know, about to win. I didn't win it. Some guy from the RNLI who like does saving lives and stuff like that, you know, can't compete, had actually won it. And it was a really good experience. But my topic had been about fairness in speaking and gender equality.

on the stage. if you're attending a line up of all males, then if you're one of those males, maybe step down and suggest that a female colleague could speak instead. And similarly on panel discussions, it just doesn't... So anyway, it was 10 years ago. This was pre-hashtag me too. It was quite radical to be talking about that sort of thing. I certainly ruffled some feathers in the PSA at the time. I wouldn't now though, would I? Would I?

So three ways that you can power up your own business and have a successful life. And that doesn't mean having a six-figure business. Sometimes those six figures in the early days also included the pence. So you know, you've got to start somewhere.

Like 9,900, no, okay, we'll talk about it later. Okay, so impact one, the milestone that I had around my neck was that I could do lots of things, right? I'd exited a career in broadcasting and I'd somehow been on the telly as a celebrity brand ambassador and done some stuff that was more mainstream than just business news. So I could do lots and lots of things. I'd done voiceover work, sure. I'd hosted things and panel discussions.

I had a lot. And then I'd had that gig speaking, and I'd had that experience at the speaker factor. And that looked quite enticing as well, to be honest, but I didn't know much about it. And I was really confused. I had many things on my list that I could do. Many things. And so I was trying to do all of them. I was trying to position myself on my website that I could do this, I could do that. You have a pulse and a wallet. I could do anything, really, pretty much. ⁓

And it was too much. It was confusing. It diluted any message I had. And people kept on saying, you've got a niche, you've got a niche. I'm like, I don't know what that is. And I don't know how to get out from under these identities, I suppose. I've been a broadcaster for so many years. I didn't know how to leave that identity behind.

So I had a chat with a good friend of mine, and she's clever. She's got her own business. And she said, right, OK, let's have a look at what you love and what is lucrative. So the question that I'm going to ask you, that you're going to answer in your own minds, maybe with a pen and paper, is do you love it, and is it lucrative?

Now, there's a clue in the title of this association. It's the Professional Speaking Association. So ideally, you would be making money being paid for the good work that you do and the value that you bring. So let's have a look at the Do You Love It and Is It Lucrative? Game of fun. Are you ready? OK. So what I did first was I drew a grid.

I'd been drinking... No.

It's just hand drawn, right? OK, I wanted to give that hand drawn sort of vibe, you know. So here are my graphics of slides. It's a grid. It's got three columns. It's got two rows. OK? And in the first column, all the things I could do. So you probably want to think about that for yourself. Now, that might be big career stuff that you could be doing, or it might be topics that you are speaking about. I know some speakers have 17 topics that they could speak about. If only someone would book me for one of them. Yeah? So maybe it's a lot.

Or maybe it's the mode of delivery. Webinars, in person, round table discussion. How are you delivering your stuff? It could be those. So anything that's you bit of consternation, you want to whittle down the list and get something that's really powerful, put it in the column there. So I could have done TV presenting more of that. I could have really sought that kind of work out. Being a journalist, a business journalist, a media trainer, I'd done a bit of that.

using my skills and helping other people appear on TV and radio. Event moderator, I'd done a bit of that. Yeah, that was okay. You know, all these things. Awards host, I'd done one of those. And then speaking as well. I could do that, couldn't I? I had a bit of a taste of that. Maybe, maybe. So my list was long. My list was long. In fact, it was so long, it was getting me nowhere. It was a millstone round my neck.

09:58 The love it and lucrative framework

Anyone here got a millstone of a list of all the things they could be doing? Have you all sorted it out beautifully? You do, yeah? What's on your list?

Yeah, topics? lot of topics. Okay. And how are you getting on in your business with a lot of topics? Not very well. Okay. That's why I'm seeing you the front row. Come on, would you be my volunteer? You can see why it's not going anywhere, isn't it? Like, come on. Come on.

Okay, you don't need your glass of water, it's not going to involve speaking.

Thank

Half an hour, okay. Right, so staying there. Is this a piece of paper? Yeah. Yeah. No, I don't want you to touch it.

A simple piece of paper, A4, I think you'll agree. Right, no breaks, no tearing in there. You've got a million things on your list of topics, okay? Let's just call them five things. Put your hand out like that, five things. I'd like you to pierce this piece of paper with your five phalanges?

there. I don't want you to forcefully do it because you may end up hurting me, but if you can just press against that and see how far you get. Get the point? Was that easy or hard? Quite hard? Okay. Take one thing. All right, not so aggressive.

and see how you get on with the pressing business. Woo!

Peter Peter well done Peter and applause

Well done. Okay, so there's real benefits to whittling down your list of things that you're doing. Okay, so let's have a look. Do you love it? Peter, think about the one thing that you've got in mind there. Do you love it? Is it lucrative? Let's have a look. TV presenter. Didn't love it that much. Only one heart. It was okay. A lot of early mornings. And being treated like crap. So, you know, didn't really love it. Was it lucrative?

One pound sign, not that lucrative. Hmm, interesting. Because I'd always thought that was my primary passion and my primary career. Journalist, no. That wasn't cutting it for me either. And was it lucrative? Was it? Bugger. OK.

Media training, I enjoyed that because I could take my skills and I could be useful to others and be valuable and that felt good to me. I couldn't quite pin down why, but yeah, and for that kind of money I could really get to like media training. Event moderator similarly liked it, not so lucrative, but you know, could be in the wheelhouse. And then speaking.

Awards host, by the way, no. The lectern when you're doing an awards is so high that also when you've got a strapless dress on you look naked behind it.

And as a woman, barely cut. And then everyone's pissed, and it's not fun, and say, no, I didn't love it, and it wasn't lucrative. But speaking, I really liked it. I really loved it, in fact. And I'd heard through the PSA that it was off the scale lucrative. It really could be. Ding, ding, ding. It was like a fruit machine of my career in front of me. And I like that approach, because it's on a piece of paper. It's right in front of me. And you can't really go wrong. The hearts and the pounds tell you what you need to know. So if you're confused about anything in your

world, bob it on the love it and the lucrative. You can put partners on there, you can put family members, it really works for a lot of things. So I had this big list and finally I whittled it down to three things and then finally over the last 10 years I've become bolder and more clear in how I operate and we're literally talking, speaking, coaching, training. I do this method pretty much every 12 to 18 months because things creep in that I don't enjoy doing.

I need to ditch them, I to stay focused. So that is the love it and the lucrative list. I hope you find that useful. Just my way, not the way, okay? So onto my next millstone that became the biggest milestone really. And this is about marketing. So let's think about when you go to a party, right, or you meet somebody and they say, what do you do for living? And you say, I'm a professional speaker.

14:45 Marketing strategies for professional speakers

and they look at you like you're mad because why would you do that? Why would you come up? Why would you do that to yourself? Like literally stand on the edge of a diving board with your toes curled over and jump off happily, right? That's how the sensation is for most people when they get up on stages. For five minutes, 20 minutes, 45 minutes, you're up here and flying, right? But that's a really small part of your time. The rest of your time, if you're not speaking, you should be marketing, speaking.

But

who do you speak to when you're doing that? My suggestion would be, do not speak to your audience. What? What? What does this mean? Okay, let's break it down.

I didn't know anything about business or marketing. I'd spent my career doing business journalism, asking people about business, not really getting under the bonnet of it or understanding how it works for me. But when I came to do marketing, I was all over the place. And in fact, my first approach was to make it all about me. And you'll have seen those speakers who go, I'm on a stage. Great.

It's useless, not very helpful, and so what? And so you kind of need to answer the so what. And so I'd heard this phrase, which you're probably familiar with, whiffum.

what's in it for me, right? It's a really sort of simple approach to marketing. When we're talking about making sure you're a bit more useful to the customer, blah, blah, you're speaking to the audience, right? I thought, yeah, what's in it for me? And I went about and I was doing some videos and socials and like, when you listen to me speak, you'll know how to communicate better. When you've heard me speak and been at one of my events, you'll know that you're more confident in how you get your message across, et cetera, et cetera. And then it just was... ⁓

Again, a best kept secret, really good at what I do, but just not engaging the customers that I wanted to, just not getting as many gigs as I needed, you know, to do things like, ⁓ I don't know, eat, food, that sort of thing. And so the question arose for me, who's the me? Who's the me?

Who do you need to be spending most of your time speaking to? As Nick Gold said when he was here earlier, ignore the audience. Forget your audience. You're not speaking to your audience unless you are a B2C, a business to consumer type of offering. And your audience members are the paying customers, the people you'll be invoicing. Do not speak to your audience.

One way of enabling you to speak to the customer, the customer, the invoice payer, the bill payer, the one with the wallet, is to speak to their pains and gains. Heather Wright, ages ago, told me about this idea. because she's so elegant and wonderful and eloquent, said, it's like picking the scab of your customer, making it bleed.

and then offering the plaster.

So really, agitating pain points can be done through your marketing. And it also demonstrates that you really understand your customer. So again, how to do this? Let's go to a grid situation once more. OK. This is the ugliest slide ⁓ of all time. It's called a value proposition canvas. And I'm going to give you the QR code in a minute for it. And you'll get the download. And you'll also get the video explainer. On it are two crucial areas that we

to focus on. So forget the left-hand box, forget, you know, just forget it. But this is a really decent exercise when you're considering your customers, your customers. My customers are HR directors, learning and development directors, that sort of thing, anyone involved in encouraging people along in their organizations in training.

And I need to think about what their pains are and what their gains are. And their pains are like retention, engagement, leaders not being very good at communicating and cocking it up, basically. They've also got their own reputational aspiration. They want to able to show that they've done a good job. They want to achieve that. And so when I know that and when I can begin to understand my customer more, I can begin to speak that language and speak to those ideas. And it was a subtle shift in language.

You might set off on Monday morning thinking, right, I'm going to do some marketing. By the way, we know that marketing works. We know that only 50 % of marketing works. We don't know which 50%. So keep going with marketing, OK, is the idea. When you speak, when you write your content,

And you might in the past have said, you're going to find my talk amazing. You're going to really understand how to do X, Y, Z by the end of it. Maybe think about the you bit. Your team will understand much more. Your organization will be able to do X, Y, Z. And just begin to speak about the bigger picture. So this is what happens when you do this well. HR director, absolute target audience for me.

20:06 Understanding your customer's needs as a professional speaker

on LinkedIn after I'd posted something, Penny, I always find your posts informative and engaging. Thank you. Because I'm speaking her language, I'm offering her the solutions, the plaster to her pain points in small little bite-sized bits that marks me out as somebody who really understands what her problems are and can offer solutions as a partner. And that is a really lovely space for me to be in. I love being in partnership with people.

Like Nick says, know, be the person who can say, yeah, you've got that time slot, this is how we could shape it together. Offering recommendations for solutions and being more of a consultant figure. Oh, and by the way, being the person on stage who's commanding those pound signs time after time because you're a trusted pair of hands. So not you, your people, unless you're B2C.

Okay, those are the QR codes. I'm sure they'll be made available somehow on a post-event follow-up. But yeah, the value proposition canvas was invented by a marketing company called Strategizer, and they've got great resources if you've not come across them already, to just really help your business, just refine what it does and how it sells. Okay.

So, impact two was don't speak to your audience, speak to your customer. And I've happily put in a green pound sign in place of the final E in the word customer to help you remember it. Because that's what's going to help you buy some food and things like that. And fancy feature blouses.

So my final idea, my serving suggestion for you, is to really think about you in all of this. And we think about speak better, speak more, or speak more-er, speak better-er, whatever the grammar is around that. And... ⁓

And sometimes we'd hear about ourselves in this with self-care and mindfulness perhaps and meditation and yoga and all the good things. But I needed something a bit more than that because I never felt very good at being mindful or listening to my body. I'd never heard my body before. I didn't want to listen. I ran on really high energy, young person energy. And over the last five years, I've really needed to find another way that isn't going to drive

me into the wall to operate in this business that is really challenging. You know, if you think being a speaker is easy, this is the easy bit. The rest of it, the getting the gigs, the getting the work, that's the graft, the hard work where you need to really lean into this and you've got to look after yourself in all of that. And there's a number of ways that you can do that. First of all, is to back yourself.

back yourself. I've heard speakers saying out loud, how nervous they are, it's going to go horribly wrong. ⁓ all of that. Stop. Expect to be great. That's your benchmark. Expect to be a professional who is great. And then stick with that and develop further if you want. But don't give in to the voices or all that kind of negativity. So I was struck particularly by a birthday card I got sent by a mate.

And it really helped me do what I'm about to share with you and develop this idea of backing yourself a bit further. And it was this, my daily routine. One, get up. Two, be amazing. Three, go back to bed.

Now, I really like sleep, and I like my bed. And so I was particularly struck by this. I was like, I really like the third on that list, getting back to bed. But how can I be amazing? How can I support myself and back myself to be more amazing in the hours that I'm awake? I'm not awake for long, by the way. I'm like a lion. I sleep for 20 hours a day, and then I'm like phosphorus for four hours, burning brightly, high focus, and then off again. So how can I be more?

amazing without burning myself out with the kind of adrenaline and young energy approaches that were no longer applicable. So I looked at health, mental and physical, and there are some things that I do that I think really form my success manifesto.

It's not like I have to do these things. It's my operating manual. What helps me perform at my very best on a stage and in business? How can I show up healthy and well? And I think about the inputs and what those do to me. I'm thinking about like kind of Superman kryptonite versus the Popeye's spinach. And so I don't drink white wine.

25:01 Self-care and performance in professional speaking

because it lowers my mood, it makes me feel tired, it gives me achy joints. I only drink red wine. And that's in my success manifesto. I'm backing myself through that methodology.

There are other things that happen like early nights. ⁓ so boring. So boring. But if I can get four decent early nights a week, I am cooking on gas. That's how I support myself. It's so dull. And swimming for physical health. I don't want to take off all my clothes and get into cold water and then get out and shower. And my hair's thick. It takes ages to dry. You know, these are inconveniences.

But it really helps. If I can go swimming two or three times a week, then I know that my problems will be left at the bottom of the pool and not carried around with me. But I don't kill myself if I haven't, you know, don't beat myself up if I haven't done that. I just know that over a week, over a month, over a year, swimming is pretty good. Eating salads is pretty good and early nights and red wine.

The business model, as I mentioned earlier, there is no one speaker business model. If anyone tells you there is, they're lying, it's absolute rubbish. Back yourself by deciding your own. Decide your own.

Not so far into my speaking career, I was at an event, it was a regional event, and I saw one of the established speakers there, one of the fellows, one of the old guard fellows, right? Really experienced, amazing business, always busy. And I'd seen on social that he'd been in Scotland, he'd been in London, he'd been on the other side of the country, and now here we were in a regional meeting. And I was pretty impressed, I have to say. I mean, that's a lot of travel.

a lot of train journeys and lot of Premier ends. I said, aren't you really tired? He said, well, it's what we do.

It's what we do. We as speakers, it's what we do. And for the next two years, that's what I did. I said yes to everything, whether it was free or paid. I ran around the country. I did whole day leadership events, and the next day a whole day hosting. And that night, after doing those two jobs together, after doing two years of all the running around, I sat on my sofa with palpitations, crying, because I was burnt out.

cliff edge burnout right over the edge, not pleasant. And I knew something had to change.

So I decided my business model would support me and my desire to go to bed more often than most people. I decided that instead of chasing 5, 1K gigs for a week, I would settle down and chase one 5K gig a week. So that's my business model. What am I selling? What's my product? Who's buying it? And for how much? It's that simple. So you can decide that.

I need to push myself with that. want to earn more and work less. I want to up my fees and work fewer hours. And I want to do that with more holidays in between. In the mastermind group that I'm in, we call it a circuit breaker. Every quarter, make sure you step out your business. And even if you're at home or you're away, it doesn't matter, but just take time out. So that's in my success manifesto. And finally, performance.

Your performance is key to your success. You're only as good as your last few gigs. And as we heard earlier from Andrew, when you're good in front of people, you get booked again and again. And that does take time, by the way. I've been doing this 10 years. And only in the last couple of years, people will come up to me when I come off the stage and ask me to speak at their gig, if the setting is right. So it's not something that you can just start doing. Performance is key.

and how you approach that performance. I have worked really hard on that. I get really nervous, get adrenalized, I get thirsty, I get bit of a twitch in my eye. You the one that you can't stop. Not the one that you gave me earlier. He's looking at his piece of paper, never mind.

It happens before you get on the stage in the weeks before. Michelle and I have talked about this. Why would you do this to yourself? Why would you make yourself feel sick? Why would you stand on the edge of the diving board about to dive off? Why? Supporting yourself and backing yourself in the doing of that. So it starts a week before I get even onto stage with breathing, more water, thinking positively, visualizing positively, all that good stuff. And then on the stage, it's OK. I can do that.

29:49 Collaboration and building a support network as a profesional speaker

handle. Just remember to breathe Penny and pause occasionally yeah and then off the stage the day after I need a recovery day. I can't just go back straight to work that's a nonsense. So it's what we do meh. It's what you decide to do in the way that you approach your performance. Pam Burrows. Pam where are you darling put your hand up.

She gone home? OK. Well, she's brilliant. So she was at a regional meeting, PSA Northwest. She did this exercise with us about ⁓ anchoring. Any NLP people in the room? Anchoring, right? OK. So ⁓ it was new to me. I've never heard of it. And I started doing it. It's basically think of something brilliant where you were brilliant and you felt really brilliant, right? OK? And then anchor it somehow. And when you're speaking, maybe you're waiting to go on stage like the

yes, why people are. You might want to just grip your arm or something and think of that thing, that brilliant thing that you did. yeah, yeah, mm, mm. Those connect, those two things connect. And so the next time I did a gig, I sat around this sort of table area. I was about to come up and be the host for the day. I was thinking, oh, it's going to go horribly wrong. And then I remembered anchoring.

yeah.

I'm the best. I've got this. I've absolutely got this. And I felt like Wonder Woman with my gold cuffs anchoring those amazing thoughts in your satin tights fighting for your rights. And so every time I go on stage, I have that in me to give to my audience. And it's fun.

You know, it's daft. Whatever you think of my speaking, doesn't matter. And whatever I think of your speaking, it doesn't matter. As long as you're earning your crust, you're doing a great job, and you're looking after yourself. And when it comes to collaboration, it may be that your collaborative projects are external-facing. They might be things you're doing together for other people. But they might be things you do together that enable you to do those things. This is my mastermind group. Most of those people are in the room today.

Judge, it's not the most flattering photograph of you. I think you'd forgotten your selfie stick that day, hadn't you? Never mind.

But yeah, we talk to each other about how much we're charging. We're honest. We're called the Big Stage Speaking No Bullshit Mastermind Group, because it's clear, it's transparent. And we talk about health and our business models and our well-being and our performance, all the things. We collaborate together to have powerful, brilliant businesses. So a recap.

Do you love it and is it lucrative? Is it lucrative? This is not a race to the bottom for doing the most free gigs you can do over a year. It's a race to the top to hold us all up high, well paid and keeping that professionality. Don't speak to your audience, speak to your customer in your marketing. And back yourself with your own success manifesto. I've been Penny Haslam. Thank you.