Ron White memory expert gets ‘real’ with how he become a professional keynote speaker:

I get asked several times a month, ‘How did you become a professional speaker?’ I won’t say my route is the ONLY route but I think it is the best :) It teaches you skills that are invaluable and those who skip this process can succeed but I will always think this is the best – except of course for celebrity speakers and memory speakers ARE NOT celebrity speakers! – :)

Very soon I will have spoken on 6 of 7 continents and I don’t mean I took a vacation to Asia and a group of friends asked me to teach them memory and I am counting that. I mean a group hired me, paid my airfare, paid my hotel, paid me thousands of dollars to speak and I sold my CDs afterwards on 6 of the 7 continents. Does anyone know anyone in Antarctica? :)

Did I get these engagements because I am the USA Memory Champion? Well, maybe a few but not more than a handful. I had spoke in Bangkok, Malaysia, Singapore, Belgium, Puerto Rico and 40 of the 50 states and Canada for 17 years before I ever won a championship! Did I get speaking engagements because of tv/radio/newspapers? Sure, maybe a few and being on the Martha Stewart Show or History Channel do certainly give you a ton of credibility but the speeches come after when I show videos of those shows to prospects and rarely from the shows themself.

I recently declined being on the largest morning show in Houston (and Houston is a HUGE market) and a PBS show. Why? Because both shows would have stroked my EGO but not my bank account and I am in business to stroke my bank account NOT my ego. To be completely candid though, if I had nothing conflicting those days in my calendar I would have done the shows. It was just more important to do some less glamorous but more profitable work such as getting in the trenches.

How did I become a speaker? At the age of 18 I took a memory seminar and then developed a ‘FREE’ 30 minute memory presentation. I began calling car dealerships, mortgage companies, insurance offices, real estate companies asking them if they had a weekly sales meeting and if I could speak at it for FREE! I would then go out (sometimes for groups as small as 4 people) and speak for FREE then sell my 2 day seminar at the conclusion. I did this for a DECADE before I ever earned a fee to speak!! I would sit at my desk and make 80 cold calls a day to book these meetings….that is 400 a week or 1600 cold calls a month!

After over a decade of doing this I honed a POWERFUL 30 minute talk on the power of a trained memory. It got so good that companies then decided they would pay me as much as $10,000 to talk for an hour (yep….the first 30 minutes is always that standard speech I developed in the trenches)

When someone contacts me and says they want to be a speaker and get paid $5,000 plus per speech and travel the world giving the talk I tell them to start with the free talks in their local city. Guess how many have taken me up on this? ONE! Most want to skip that step….WHY? It doesn’t stroke their ego…..it is HARD…But when you are speaking for free you will be FORCED to master the art of selling from the stage and many seminar promoters won’t put you on the stage if you can’t sell from the stage! (Exception would be if you are a ‘big name’ speaker and can sell tickets just by having you on the stage)

So figure out what it is that you want to be a keynote speaker on the topic of. For me I wanted to be a memory training expert and I have devoted my time to that and honing my memory training speech.

My answer to you is forget the ego stroking and embrace being a SALESPERSON, cold calls and HARD work. You do that and I will be happy to coach you along. If you are unwilling to do that please don’t event talk to me….speakers like that are a dime a dozen and members of the NSA (Not Speaking Association) Is it wrong to want the $7500 fee plus travel to speak in The Bahamas at a conference? NO!! It is FUN!!! But it is unrealistic without paying your dues. You can make a 6 figure income without being famous or getting paid to speak…that is the good news. The bad news for most….it requires work….dang it…..