Making Money from Strategic Training

Speaking isn’t a business. It is the way you conduct a business. The real speaking and training business in which people make money is a very different model from the pay-per-speech model of celebrities that charge $50,000 for speech—the Colin Powells of the world. Some celebrities grow out of the real world of speaking—Tony Robbins and Dr. Weil, for example—but the model on which they built their multimillion dollar empires is a model that is being used successfully by thousands and thousands of others. It is a model that people within the industry understand, but which is largely hidden from those outside the speaking industry. I will let you in on its secrets.

One of the things that I discovered in my research is that my own history in speaking and training organizations is not a good model for others. First, I started with certain credentials—starting with being the founder of an Inc. 500 company with a lot of Fortune 500 customers—that are nearly impossible to duplicate. Secondly, I never had to seek speaking engagements, as such. Even today, organizations seek me out. I have never made a single call setting up a speaking engagement. If nothing else, the fact that I am financially independent puts me in a different position than everyone else in this program, all of whom, I assume, have to make a living.

The good news is this path to making money in speaking is much easier than the path I took. My path had a very difficult one--step one: start a multimillion dollar company--compared with the path taken by most successful speakers and trainers. There are thousands of people in the US alone who make a great living speaking. Very few train large organizations. Virtually all of them offer much less valuable and less interesting information than the science of strategy seminars that you can offer. Many of these trainers make much more money than I do. And they make it selling ideas and product that are in every way inferior to the seminars on strategy.

Our research shows that all of you, as bright capable people, with no special advantages, can make money giving seminars on strategy and how it all works. I am going to go into this in detail in this series of articles.

As a trainer, a lot of people are worried about having to finding engagements. I am going to show you how to do this very easily. I am going to show you how you grow a seminar and training business one step at a time and make all the money you want without every having to go more than thirty miles from home. Now, this information isn’t going to automatically make you wealthy, but it is a key piece of what you have to know. Misconceptions about Speaking

Myths and Misconceptions

First, let us explode some myths and misconceptions about speaking.

First, speakers and trainers, at least the successful ones, do NOT make money from their actual speaking engagements. That is why we say that speaking isn’t a business; it is the way you conduct a business. They use speaking to sell products. The vast majority of their speaking engagements are not paid, in the traditional sense. When I start speaking to promote my software company, I was acting more like a traditional speaker, though I was offering an atypical product.

Second, these speaking engagements do not really offer real training, though they all offer valuable information. As one very successful speaker put, “Any skill that you can teach someone in an hour and a half isn’t much of a skill.”

Money-making speaking engagements are designed for one purpose and one purpose only: to get people excited about learning more. To do this, they only give training that teaches and excites people about the value of learning more, and more, and more.

The biggest mistake I have made in preparing speaking materials is that I put too much hard knowledge into my seminars. The result is that the audience feels that they have gotten a lot of good information, but the fact is that they have gotten too much information. It takes fourteen days to establish new habits. By dumping months’ worth of new ideas on them all at once, I am actually making it less likely that they will ever master strategy.

The Key is a Product-Offering

Money-making speaking engagements are built around product offerings. You might this that the most common product is more training, but more training, though part of the mix is the highest priced product offered because it consumes the speakers more valuable commodity: time. Successful speakers make their real money from offering products that do not consume their time. This gives these speakers more time to what is really profitable: make speeches that sell products.

This may lead you to think that a good speech is just a sales pitch. This is also completely false. In a good speech, the audience doesn’t even notice that it is being sold. The key do making money in speaking is building you talk around your product so that the audience doesn’t realize that it isn’t being educated. It is being excited about the possibilities of being getting more of what it wants in the form of your product. Again, this is how I started when I was selling software. I was teaching strategy from The Art of War, but the end point was that people had to get software that was modifiable-by-design so that they could adapt their businesses to their strategic situation and continue adapting as their situation changed.

The money-making speech is built around the product. The point of the speech is proving to the audience that they need and want that product. The speech is both educational and entertaining because discovering what you really want and need is really fun when it is done right. And I will explain in detail in a little bit how this is done right.

The Science of Strategy Institute Makes it Easy

Speakers who make a living do not do it by selling individuals books for $20. They have discovered that the more you charge for a product, the more an audience values it. While in the past, Clearbridge Publishing just sold its information in the form of bookstores, most of what we teach it better offered in another form. We repackaging all our knowledge of strategy around into high-ticket items that you can make money on. The most obvious of those are training programs, but since your time is limited, you can make even more by selling our memberships, on-line school access, and other programs. We also encourage you to develop your own products. Products that you own entirely to work into your presentations. But just starting with us, you have a host of products:

This Works for Any Audience

Every type of group and audience is interest in learning the basics of strategy. The science of strategy is the Swiss Army knife of solutions: it is easy to adapt to specific problems. This means that a profitable speech can be easily adapted to fit the topic of strategy to the audience.

Maybe you already know what your product is. It might be your “other” business, a company you want to promote. It might be you: selling yourself for promotion within your larger corporation. However, there are a number of traditional, very profitable products that you can sell, from books to tapes to memberships to on-line training to personal training that we will be creating at the Science of Strategy Institute.

These products will be designed to allow you to make thousands of dollars at virtually any speaking opportunity to any audience. We will be covering these products in detail in the final section of this later article. However, in the next article, I will cover the path most commonly taken to build a speaking career from scratch.

Copyright 2005-2008, Science of Strategy Institute / Clearbridge Publishing, Gary Gagliardi
The leading publishers of award-winning books based on Sun Tzu’s The Art of War