Speakers Have a Responsibility to Write

Consider that as a speaker, the expertise you have developed is desired by other people.

Assume that as a speaker, you’ve earned the right to share your expertise with others.

Assume that as a speaker, consultant and coach that it’s your RESPONSIBILITY to help people learn and do.

RESPONSIBILITY—You have a responsibility—if you’ve taken on a speaking engagement, a consulting contract or a coaching relationship—to make sure your clients have full access to your ideas you claim can help them.

My issue with professional speakers has always been this—you make a speech, share some ideas, collect your applause and your paycheck and everyone goes away happy. Rarely, however does the audience go home with enough information to implement the ideas you’ve just shared. Rarely does the audience have access to the details behind the ideas that are needed to succeed.

No matter how good your speech was or how much time was allotted for it, rarely is your audience equipped to implement your ideas.

Not only is that a shame, I think it’s criminal. Well, not in the legal definition of the term, but I think it’s at least unethical to deliver a one or two or three hour presentation, collect a fat check and hope against hope that you’ve given them enough to make your ideas work.

Few people will remember what you said. Even the best note takers get only pieces of it. And, most of us have just enough time to layout a few concepts without the details to make the concepts work.

Have you ever left a presentation saying “It all sounds good. But I wish I knew how to do what he/she just said?”

That’s why I think it’s your responsibility to give your audiences and clients an opportunity to get everything from you that they need to be successful and to continue to learn from you well after you’ve departed the platform.

If the goal of your speeches, consulting and coaching is to truly make a difference in the personal and business lives of our audiences and clients, why would you ever stop with just a speech, a consult or a coaching session?

On Tuesday, February 25th, I will present a marketing seminar to 80 small business owners at the West Orange Florida Chamber of Commerce. The president of the Chamber has asked me to give her members as many marketing ideas as I can in the 2½ hours I have with them.

I will present about a dozen easy-to-implement, low-cost, sure-fire marketing ideas and I will send them home with information they can use to succeed. But time doesn’t permit me to share my more than thirty years of experience, trials and errors, best practices and hundreds of case studies that turn good marketing ideas into great ones that make money.

The best I can hope for in my best speeches is create excitement about the possibilities that exist if they try new ideas and give them enough information to move them beyond their current situation.

But I want my audiences and clients to know as much as much as I do to be as successful as I am. Pretty touch hill to climb after a 2½ hour seminar, isn’t it?

So, I consider it my RESPONSIBILITY to make available, to anyone who wants to implement my ideas for the greatest impact—all the information they need and can continually turn to—far beyond my time on the platform.

It’s no longer a matter of “it would be nice to have products to sell.” It is now, “It is mandatory, as part of my responsibility as an educator to make available my tools for implementation and success.” It’s my responsibility to offer my educational materials as next, logical step in my audience’s educational process. My meeting sponsors expect it, my audiences demand it and along the way it’s pretty nice to get paid for it.

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