Librarian Turns In Card for Booking Speaking Gigs

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

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What's up and welcome to Side Hustle School. Approaching the end of November here. My name is Chris Guillebeau. I've got a great story for you today. Got a bunch of stuff coming up for you in December.

Back tomorrow I'm gonna have a special announcement, so stay tuned, don't miss it. Now in today's story, a Canadian librarian uses her experience in conducting trainings to coach others in creating powerful presentations. She does this on the side for several years before nearly matching the income she earns in her day job, creating security just in case it's needed. And when that time arrives, she finds herself well prepared. Listen, what steps are you taking to protect and prepare yourself against a change in your industry or a loss of employment, some other change in circumstance?

Remember, your goal is to go to work, your day job, because you want to, not because you're completely dependent on it. So consider this example, today's story, in light of your own planning. If you haven't started, well, today is as good as any. At the end, I'll also include a bonus tip on how to set a price for a speaking engagement or consultation when you aren't sure what that price should be. Hang tight, that story is coming up in just 30 seconds.

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For many years, Lauren Sergey worked as a librarian at a library consortium in Canada. In her role, she coordinated conferences, organized slide decks for the CEO, and ran training programs. During these programs, she'd often be asked to give presentations to a variety of audiences. While training presentations can often put listeners to sleep faster than reading the dictionary, Lauren's presentations were different. People would approach her after she spoke and ask her to present at their conference.

If they wouldn't want to hear her speak about library databases, they wanted her to teach them how to present. With a background in acting and radio announcing, it's not surprising Lauren excelled at speaking to a crowd, and she was happy to share her knowledge and support others in improving their skills. The more requests she got, however, the more she realized she could add to her financial bookshelf by offering her knowledge to others in exchange for a fee. To start, she made a free posting on Kijiji, Canada's version of Craigslist. She positioned herself as a speaking and presentation skills coach, and within two weeks had received her first paid client.

From there, more requests started rolling in. Now gaining clients and being compensated for sharing her knowledge helped Lauren to boost her confidence. She began to wonder, what if I could get paid for giving presentations on how to give presentations? Based on the number of requests she'd had, she suspected there was a real demand, so she decided to give that idea a try. She created a website under her name, which was her only real startup cost, and positioned herself as a professional speaker who specialized in presentations.

From there, she reached out to all the rotary clubs in her city to build up her experience. She also told every single person she knew about her new business. This hard work paid off, and soon she was asked to speak. Now here's a not fun fact, although it gets better. Even though Lauren was confident in her skills, when she got her first real gig, she hyperventilated into a paper bag as every doubt in her head suddenly popped up.

Thankfully, by her second customer, she felt good enough to buy herself flowers and celebrate. Speaking of that first customer, she began by pricing her services fairly low. For coaching, she started by charging a modest rate of $30 per session. She had based that price on what she thought others were charging, but she then learned from other coaches that she was charging too little, and raised the price per session to $40 and then $80. These days, she charges $250 per session to match the value and demand of this type of coaching.

Similarly, for her speaking gigs, she started by charging $1,000 to $1,500 per talk. She then made the smart move of asking event coordinators what the budget was for a speaker, began matching her fee to their budget. Much of her business still comes from word of mouth, but she's also utilized Google ads and YouTube pre-roll ads to boost visibility. She also asked anyone who attends her classes to share her information with their colleagues, which has brought in a number of new clients. It's not just the number of clients that has increased, the number in her bank account has also gone up.

Within the first couple of years, she had earned $10,000 from coaching and speaking, and that number seemed poised to rise. However, she was still working as a librarian, as well as raising children at home and was starting to feel burned out. So she created two scenarios that would signal an exit from her day job, a way to create some light at the end of the tunnel and keep going. The first was obvious, the scenario in which she would be laid off. Her organization had been going through several rounds of cuts and she knew that her job might be next, but she didn't know for certain when or if that would happen.

So she also decided that if her business could bring in the same salary as her day job and give her 12 months of runway just to be safe, she would leave. In a way, both scenarios ended up coming true. In 2018, her company downsized again and Lauren was laid off. But at that point, she was now bringing in over $50,000 a year on the side and just a couple of months shy of quitting anyway. So it turned into a win-win situation.

Looking back, Lauren is grateful that she saved her side hustle income so she could smoothly transition after that job loss. It also supported her during two maternity leaves with little change to her family's lifestyle and allowed her husband to become a stay-at-home dad. She recommends that you remain flexible. By leaving herself open to work with different types of clients, she's been able to custom tailor her services based on their input. She's also determined to keep things simple and not worry too much about getting everything perfect.

Those qualities have allowed Lauren to now bring in a steady yearly income. Looking forward, her goal is to improve her systems to become more efficient. [Music]

All right, what steps are you taking to follow Lauren, the librarian's example? Prepare yourself for uncertainty by diversifying your income and also your skillset. In this story, you can hear the genesis of how she gets this idea to do something, and then she goes from coaching clients to actually presenting on presenting, learning along the way, increasing her fees, and so on.

And ultimately, it does lead to her going all in full-time, but the main goal was to create security so that she would have that option if her circumstances changed as they did. All right, now some quick comments on naming a price for speaking. I thought about this as I was working on the story. I mentioned in the story, for Lauren's speaking gigs, she started by charging $1,000 to $1,500 per talk, and then she learned to start asking event coordinators what their budget was and then match her fee to their budget. So this is a good approach to take when you think the budget might be higher than what you would quote.

And when the situation is reversed, you actually do the opposite. That's when you lead with your number. So to make it specific, in her case, she was gonna charge $1,000, or she did that at first, and then she learned often the budget could be more than that. So now she says, "Okay, what is your budget?" If the budget is $3,000, just for example, then obviously she's doing three times as well. But what if it was the opposite?

What if she was trying to get $3,000 and the budget that they had or the first number that they would put out would be $1,000, okay? So in that situation, you actually do wanna say, like, "Here is my fee." And obviously you don't always know, but over time you kind of get a sense of it. I remember one of the first paid speaking events that I did, it was for a major conference produced by a major business magazine. And so obviously this was a corporate event, a lot of sponsorship, a lot of funding behind it. And they came to me kind of at the last minute and said, "Would you be willing to do this?

And what's your fee?" And I was like, "Well, I don't know, like you tell me, but I don't think I said you tell me." But I was like, "I don't know. What's your budget?" basically. And they quoted me a number and I accepted it, went and did the event, and I was happy. So it's totally fine, just a lesson learned. But I realized later that actually the number they gave me was pretty low compared to what I probably could have gotten if I had said, "Actually, here's my fee." So these are things you learn as you go along.

Just wanted to give a little bit of an example if there's anybody out there trying to do something similar. Okay, and for everybody, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes, including links to Lauren's work, her work on coaching, on speaking, lots of resources, are at sidehustleschool.com/1064. Episode 1,064, coming up tomorrow, a weekly recap and a special announcement. Don't miss it.

My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

From the Onward Project.