For many public speakers, there comes a moment when the thrill of being onstage starts to feel different. The more successful you become, the more tiring the job can be. For one thing, constant travel is exhausting. For another, while being in the speaking business may mean you enjoy being on the stage, the stage is only a tiny part of running a successful speaking business.
You have to pitch the gig, prepare the talk, make the slides, coordinate with the event planners, make the calls, send the emails, travel to the gig, and deliver the talk. This can get tiring for even the most dedicated of speakers, and burnout is a real possibility.
If you understand this struggle, you’re far from alone. And more importantly, it means that it may be time to consider the final aspect of our SPEAK Framework – Know When to Scale. But knowing exactly when and how to scale a speaking business can be challenging. What does scaling even look like for your specific situation? In this article, we’ll take a look at these questions and more as we unpack what it means to scale your speaking business, when you should consider it, and how you should implement it. Let’s jump in!
Get The #1 Marketing Asset To Book More Paid Speaking Gigs Join us for the Booked & Paid Bootcamp — our NEW 2-day virtual event designed to help you start booking more paid gigs FAST. Over two 5+ hour days of live training and Q&A, our team of 6 and 7 figure speakers will give you the proven playbook you need to become a successful paid speaker.
Understanding Your Current Reality
The key to knowing if it’s time to scale your speaking business is to assess where you stand right now, in several different aspects of your life and career.
Understanding Your Time and Focus
The fundamental challenge that you face is a speaker is that you only make money when you’re onstage. Every dollar you earn is directly tied to your physical presence in a specific location at a specific time. It’s a great business in many ways, but it comes with inherent limitations.
Think about everything that goes into a single speaking engagement: pitching the opportunity, preparing your content, creating slides, coordinating logistics, traveling to the venue, delivering the talk, and following up afterward. Multiply that by dozens of events per year, and burnout becomes not just possible but probable. This is where scaling can come in.
Understanding Your Life Stage
Your ideal speaking business at 28 looks very different from your ideal business at 45 with three kids at home. It’s about more than just what you enjoy doing. If you’re single and energetic, perhaps speaking 75 times annually feels exhilarating. But if you’re married with children, that same schedule might be destroying your family relationships and personal well-being.
Scaling isn’t about doing more or getting more gigs. It’s about building systems that bring you into alignment with your ideal life and career. The goal is building a model that supports who you are now and who you’re becoming, not just maximizing income at any cost.
Understanding Your Revenue Streams
Before you can scale effectively, you need a clear insight into where your business stands today. Most speakers work in their business rather than on it, which means they lose sight of what’s actually generating revenue. Start by conducting an honest financial audit. Look at the past year (or longer if possible) and identify every source of income: speaking fees, consulting work, product sales, affiliate revenue, or any side gigs. Calculate the exact percentage each source contributes to your total income. This is your “income pie.”
Here’s the important part: compare those percentages to how you actually spend your time. Are you investing most of your energy in your highest-revenue activities? Or are you pouring hours into projects that barely move the needle financially? This exercise often produces surprising, and even sometimes jarring results. You might discover that an activity you barely think about generates significant income, while something you’ve been obsessing over produces minimal returns.
In addition to how effectively you’re using your time, you should also evaluate this “income pie” from the standpoint of how much you enjoy each job. Think about what you want your life to look like going forward. Consider what you want your work balance to be, and the way you produce value for your clients. This can help you as you make choices to scale your speaking business.
The Seven Speaker Revenue Models
As our founder Grant Baldwin explains in his book, The Successful Speaker, speakers can be broken down into roughly seven categories in terms of income streams and revenue models. Deciding which of these is the ideal model for you can be tremendously helpful for making decisions about your speaking business.
Model 1: The Super Speaker
These speakers derive nearly all their income from speaking fees. They’re often keynote specialists commanding premium rates, doing fewer gigs for more money. These speakers genuinely love the stage and can sustain extensive travel schedules.
Model 2: The Teacher
Those who fit into this model balance speaking with educational offerings like courses, workshops, and membership programs. They package their expertise into scalable formats that don’t require their physical presence.
Model 3: The Influencer
These speakers use speaking as a vehicle to grow their audience, then monetize that attention through affiliate partnerships, sponsored content, and advertising. For them, each speech is an opportunity to capture new followers and subscribers.
Model 4: The Industry Expert
These speakers leverage deep knowledge in a specific niche to command authority. They make money through books, information products, and speaking engagements where their specialized expertise is highly valued.
Model 5: The Coach
The coach sees speaking as lead generation for one-on-one or group coaching relationships. Each presentation demonstrates their ability to facilitate transformation, attracting ideal clients and building relationships with potential future clients.
Model 6: The Consultant
The consultant uses keynotes and workshops to showcase their knowledge and advisory capabilities, ultimately converting audience members into higher-value consulting engagements.
Model 7: The Jack of All Stages
This model combines multiple revenue streams, such as books, courses, consulting, coaching, and speaking. These speakers treat each talk as one piece of a highly diversified income portfolio.
Choosing Your Model
Which of these models resonates the most with you? Do any stand out as desirable and achievable based on where you’re at in your career? Once you’ve determined what kind of speaker you want to be, it’s time to take the next step, which is to begin expanding into new revenue sources.
What Does the Market Actually Want?
Many speakers make the mistake of creating products or services based on what they think their audience needs. This is backward. The most successful scaling happens when you discover what people are already desperately seeking, then create solutions to those specific problems.
So how do you uncover these hidden opportunities? Pay attention to questions that come up repeatedly after your presentations. Notice which topics generate the most energy and engagement. Review your inbox for patterns in the inquiries you receive. What are people consistently asking for help with?
Look beyond just your immediate audience. Use search engines to see what questions people are typing about your topic. The autocomplete suggestions reveal what thousands of people are actively searching for. You can even read negative reviews of books in your niche where people describe what they wanted from the book that was missing.
Talk to your peers and network. What do they consistently ask your advice about? These informal requests often reveal expertise you’ve developed but take for granted because it comes naturally to you. The goal isn’t to invent something revolutionary. It’s to identify existing demand and create something that meets that need better than current alternatives.
Validating Demand Through Competitive Analysis
Other speakers in your industry can provide excellent inspiration when you do a “competitive audit.” Identify speakers who address similar topics or the same audience within your industry. Visit their websites and social channels to explore what they offer beyond speaking. What products and services do they provide? Join their email lists to experience their content marketing. Look for patterns, and note what they seem to be primarily selling or offering beyond basic speaking engagements.
These patterns indicate opportunities available to you. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You want to base your products and services on what’s working in your space, but avoid becoming a carbon copy. The goal is being similar but unique. You should also observe the price points of these offerings. This reveals how much the audience values these product types, informing your own pricing decisions if you launch similar offerings.
After reviewing competing offerings, identify opportunities to offer something that meets needs without simply duplicating what already exists. This helps you create unique products that fill gaps in the market and will actually sell.
Testing Interest Through Focus Groups
Once you have product ideas, gather more specific feedback through focus groups. Digital surveys are one great way of doing this. Ask open-ended questions that allow for additional thoughts, since many times the best insights come from responses to questions you didn’t think to ask.
Phone calls with individuals in your audience or industry allow deeper exploration of each topic and can lead to unexpected insights, though they’re limited by your available time. You could consider using online schedulers to let people choose times on your calendar, reducing the back-and-forth of personal coordination.
When conducting these interviews, avoid leading questions that consciously or unconsciously push people toward specific answers. Keep questions as open-ended as possible to obtain the most useful information. Remember that people don’t always know exactly what solution they want. Instead, they just know they have a problem. Focus your questions on understanding the problem deeply rather than asking them to design the solution.
Once you’ve heard them out about their challenges, ask questions like: “Does this proposed solution address your challenges?” or “What value would you place on having this solution? How much would you be willing to pay for it?”
Monetizing Beyond Your Speaking Fee
Once you have products or services to offer, there are multiple ways to integrate them into your speaking business. Always confirm with clients that selling is acceptable and never assume permission. Mention this early in booking conversations, include it in your speaking agreement, and remind them again at the event.
You have two potential audiences: the clients who hire you and the attendees at your events. When someone books you for a keynote, mention your other offerings, whether that is additional trainings, all-day seminars, workshops, consulting, or something else. Always look for ways to add value beyond the single engagement they hired you for.
If you have a product like a book or course intended for your audience, sell directly to clients whenever possible. Rather than selling individual books to audience members, sell bulk quantities to the person booking you for distribution. It’s easier to sell fifty books to one buyer than to sell one book to fifty individuals.
Another good way to capitalize on your speaking business to sell products or services is by creating speaking packages that bundle products and services. You could have a package that includes a keynote plus one hundred books, and one that includes a keynote, workshop, and fifty books. Bundling increases your fee without requiring significantly more time. It also gets products into people’s hands for word-of-mouth marketing, particularly with physical products like books. You can even offer discounts when clients hire you and purchase specific quantities.
Get The #1 Marketing Asset To Book More Paid Speaking Gigs Join us for the Booked & Paid Bootcamp — our NEW 2-day virtual event designed to help you start booking more paid gigs FAST. Over two 5+ hour days of live training and Q&A, our team of 6 and 7 figure speakers will give you the proven playbook you need to become a successful paid speaker.
Conclusion
Scaling your speaking business requires absolute clarity about your current financial reality, identifying your ideal business model, discovering genuine market demand, and creating offerings that serve those needs effectively.
The strongest speaking businesses develop complementary revenue streams that work together well with the core of their business. You might discover that your true passion lies not in delivering keynotes but in deeper work that speaking makes possible. The stage can become a powerful lead generation tool rather than your primary service. This transition might feel strange initially, but if your ultimate goal is meaningful transformation, pursue whatever model creates the greatest impact.
Growth often means releasing what’s comfortable to embrace new challenges that stretch your capabilities. It means making strategic decisions about where to invest limited time and energy. And it means building a business that serves both your audience and the life you want to live.
