Fees. What do you charge? Everyone always wants to know, what's your fee? How much you make? How much should I charge? If you are a professional speaker aspiring and you're not used to getting fees, this can feel awkward, this can feel scary.

You certainly like as much money as possible, but you want experience and you want more video and you want to be in front of people. Here's my recommendation if it is a business organization, a trade association, and they say what is your fee? Just say my standard fee is $5,000. Don't say anything. After that, wait and see what they have to say. If it's a serious organization, and they are looking for professional speakers, that's considered about the bottom there, that shouldn't be a problem.

Now, there are plenty of exceptions to these rules. If you are speaking to the Bar Association, and you're a lawyer and you want to speak about International patent law, and all the other speakers, there are lawyers and no one's getting paid, chances are, you're not gonna get paid. But it still might be a great opportunity for you because someone in the audience might give you a client that generates millions of dollars of fees for your firm. So I'm not saying you should never ever, ever speak without being paid. Everybody speaks without getting their full fee plenty of times, when YouTube goes on David Letterman. They're not getting paid when they're getting the union scale of $1,000.

But they're not really getting paid for that they're doing it to get in front of a larger audience to sell albums, and CDs. So don't kid yourself. There are a lot of people in the professional speakings circuit talk about fee integrity, you can't ever drop a single penny. Everyone charges differently from time to time George Clooney charges 20 $25 million for some movies, other movies he might do for 200,000 it just Depends. Anytime you fly somewhere, every person on that airplane may be paying a different fee for that ticket. It's variable pricing.

So there's some flexibility here. But you do need a starting point. And I do believe if you want to be treated seriously, as a professional, you need to have a set starting point and you probably shouldn't go less than $5,000. The easiest way to increase your fees, frankly, is to be so busy doing other stuff that you can easily say no. Now you can also just arbitrarily decided this is my value, this is what I want. And I would thoroughly recommend Alan weiss's books on professional speaking and selling on value versus time.

Excellent, excellent writer and someone who has shaped the professional speaking industry, so I would recommend his books to give you more guidance on charging. But here's the thing, whatever you Do it can't be like 2000. The second, someone who hears doubt in your voice, they're gonna think we're gonna get this person for free, this person is going to be paying us to speak at this event. So you can't be hesitant. You can't have doubt. You can negotiate sometimes.

Maybe this particular organization you're speaking to has an audience of people who could be major, major corporate clients to your consulting firm and generate millions of dollars. And maybe there could be times when it's more valuable for you to have a full page ad. In the convention, handout, the convention manual catalog and a width to get a $10,000 fee. Whatever it is, you've got to decide what your value is your time and what value you want from this organization, what they can give you. Cash Money is obviously the best value The most convertible and most flexible but there may be other things as well. So sometimes you do have to get creative but have a starting point.

Have a base and be ready to tell people that with absolute complete confidence