Using speaking to grow your business profits

* Transcript created by AI – may contain errors or omissions from original podcast audio

It’s not a personality trait, it’s a skillset. If you want to look effortless, you’ve gotta put in the effort. If you would’ve seen the first time I spoke in front of people compared to now, you wouldn’t think it was the same person. If you are starting out, you do need a bit more structure than that because you haven’t put the reps in yet.

Your story is your superpower.

Welcome to the Intentional Money Show, where we talk business growth, profitability, mindset, and building a wildly successful creative or digital business without sacrificing your life in the process. I’m Clare Wood, business profit coach, speaker, author, and unapologetic believer that you can build wealth and freedom doing work you genuinely love.

Each week on the podcast, we dive into the strategies and honest conversations that will help you scale sustainably, increase your profit, and build a business that actually feels good to run. Let’s grow your profit.

Clare Wood: so let’s talk about building a speaking career. I might hand over to you and let me know where do you get started? How do you go about it?

Nicole Joy: So I would say the first thing that you need to do is looking at what speaking model is best for your business.

Because there’s speaking as a business and then there’s speaking for your business. So speaking as a business is when essentially you don’t do anything else but you do paid speaking all over the place. So these would be your traditional corporate keynote speakers. They’re opening seminars and conferences, or they’re closing, or they’re one of the main speakers for the day.

Now, typically speaking, those speakers don’t have programs or any other sort of services. They’re literally getting paid to speak, and that is a very small percentage of people. Speaking for your business is when you don’t have to say no to everything else. Like you said before, you’re adding just another revenue stream on top of what you’re doing.

And speaking for your business, yes, you can get paid for the actual talk, but a lot of the times it’s coming, especially when you’re first starting out, you’re coming along, you may not be paid for your actual time that you’re speaking, but you are getting put in front of your ideal clients. And that’s where I would say the number one thing that you need to do if you- particularly if you are speaking for free, is to make sure the people in the room are your people.

Because if I went and spoke to 50 construction workers about speaking who never wanted to become a speaker, wasn’t on their vision board, we just weren’t aligned. It wouldn’t matter how many people were in the room. If they were the wrong people, it wouldn’t matter. So the first thing is, one, are you gonna do speaking as your business and only do that?

I would say 95% of people would answer no. And if it’s speaking for your business, okay, where are those people? I need, you need to find your people, and you need to get in front of them. So that’s a little bit about looking at it as a business model, and I would say most of us, myself included, it’s a tool.

It’s a revenue stream, not the only thing that we do. The next thing is- So

Clare Wood: before we jump on, can I- Yeah … dive into this a little bit? Of course. Because I wanna make this really practical for the listeners. So what’s an example? Let’s just say that someone is a builder. When you say get in front of the right people, what kind of rooms do people wanna get into? Can we Name a couple of different industries, for example?

Nicole Joy: Yeah, great question. You’re going to know where your people are once you figure out what problem that you’re solving for them. So when you know what you’re talking about and you know the pain point that you’re solving, you know what are the people that you want to most help, what are they going through and how you can help them.

Where are they? So are they a part of a membership? Are they a part of associations? What kind of events do they go to? Are there council events or chamber of commerce events? What industries are they a part of where there are events where th- are specifically catered to them? And then you work backwards and you go, “Okay, well, where are they?

Where are those events being held?” And you approach the organizers of those events and you get into it. So look to be honest, I don’t know if a builder would be kind of using speaking as a way to grow their- I mean, they could. Everyone can. But I’m talking more of those service-based businesses where you…

Like for example, what you do. Financial, anyone, like, in the finance industry anyone that perhaps mentors other people. Maybe you’re a franchisee. Maybe you help people get their franchises off the ground. Like, where do they hang out? Maybe you’re a homeschooling expert and you need to get in front of families that you know are fed up with the system and want to make a change to their life.

So normally with homes- and this is stereotypical, but normally with homeschoolers, they’re very invested in their health and wellbeing as well. So it’s like, okay, where are they getting their food from? Where do they do their shopping at? So once you identify the pain point and the problem that you’re solving, okay, where’s that person?

Yeah. Where should she or he, where are they hanging out? Where do they go? And can I then make a list? Well, you don’t need to make a list. You can ask chat or Claude to make a list of where those people hang out. Where are the events that they go to, memberships, associations, all of those kinds of things.

Is that the right answer to your question in terms of-

Clare Wood: Yeah, absolutely. My husband’s done his first speaking gig. So he works in animal health, which is this really niche- Very niche. Yeah … very niche kind of area. He’s a recruiter, and so he got to speak at one of the, the vet conference events.

Oh, good. And that’s, uh, you know, a room full of the right kind of people. Right

Nicole Joy: people.

Clare Wood: And I think that that’s important because a lot of times we get that wrong. I know that I’ve spoken at

Nicole Joy: events- Me too. …

Clare Wood: events sometimes thinking that it’s gonna be a room, ’cause, you know, it was business owners. Yeah.

And then, as the day unfolds, you realise that a lot of them are not perhaps at the stage where they’re diving into their finances yet. They’re just getting started with a bit of a side hustle. Mm-hmm. And they probably weren’t gonna be my ideal client. So again, fine if you’re getting paid to be there.

Nicole Joy: Yes. But if it’s free, absolutely

Clare Wood: not. If you are there to find clients, probably not much. Yeah.

Nicole Joy: And I would go so far as to say as well, and I’ve done this quite a few times- What exchange are you getting? So you’re doing it for free. Yes, you’re getting in front of the right people, but can you have the email addresses of everyone?

Can you then do an email blast out to them? If they’re not gonna g- actually give you the email addresses, can you make sure as part of your contract with them, can you send them an offer or whatever you want them to enter your world, whether it’s a lead magnet or a paid offer? Footage is huge.

If you are starting out, and I will get to this in a sec, but if you’re starting out as a speaker, you need to film everything. And part of, I always say, if I go and do something for free and you’ve got professional videographers there, no-brainer is I get my audio and my video of you. Because as a speaker, anyone can put speaker in their bio.

Does everyone back it up? No. If you’ve got actual footage of you on a stage doing the thing, speaking in front of real live humans, that’s gonna do far more than you having a static picture of you speaking. They can help. It all adds to your authority. It all adds to your credibility. But if you’re a speaker, you need to be filming absolutely everything.

Clare Wood: And getting the full clip. I was just sharing this with Nicole off-air. So I’ve got a ton of footage of me speaking, but none of it’s co- like, it, it’s clips. Mm-hmm. And so when you’re trying to pull together something to share for a speaker’s reel, for example, we’ll get to that I’m sure I didn’t have I haven’t had an event where it was end-to-end filmed and I’m kicking myself- Absolutely

in hindsight.

Nicole Joy: Kicking myself. From now on, Clare, you are gonna make sure that you hire a videographer. And this is the other thing too. Yes. You can’t just have someone doing it on their phone because you need the high- Yeah … quality audio as well. So you need to be mic’d up and connected to that camera.

Otherwise, if they’re at the back of the room just getting B-roll, which is still good, it’s still great, but it’s not enough. You need the audio as well.

Clare Wood: Absolutely. Okay, love that. What’s next?

Nicole Joy: Okay. So the framework that I teach inside of She Speaks Academy and to my private clients is the three Ps of speaking.

So you’ve got your product, practice, and positioning. Product is obviously your talk. So I am a huge believer in the law of reciprocity. Did I say that right? Reciprocity? Yes. I did, yes, reciprocity. Don’t be one of those people that hold onto everything and just do 60 minutes of pitching to get into your paid program or whatever it is.

Actually give value in your talk. Solve those problems, whether they work alongside of you in the future or not, or whether they buy from you in the future or not. So what you need to do is start with the end in mind. So if the people in front of me Could walk away doing one thing differently because they heard from me or thinking differently, changing their perspective on something, what would that be?

And then you wanna reverse engineer that. So if my goal is to make them think or do this, this is what I’m going to share with them. So you wanna work backwards. Always start with the end in mind and be of value. You don’t wanna sit for 60- stand for 60 minutes pitching about how great you are, “As long as you come and join my program I’ll give you the secrets.”

You wanna actually give value away. So the first thing is making sure your talk is good. We’ve all been to events before where people get up and you talk and five minutes into it you’re going, “Oh, wow, this is really bad. This is awful.” Because here’s the thing. You can be brilliant at what you do, but that doesn’t mean you can be brilliant about speaking about it or brilliant at speaking about it, I should say.

Two very different skillsets. You can be great at what you do and have no idea how to communicate that. And we’re in a time now where real life events are coming back. $1.3 trillion was spent on global events this year so far. That’s a lot of conferences, that’s a lot of seminars, that’s a lot of stages that you can get on.

And if you are a great public speaker, you will be in demand because in the age of AI and in the age of information, the person who can communicate confidently with humans, not a computer screen is gonna be the person that stays ahead. It’s not a nice-to-have skill anymore as a business owner particularly, it’s a must-have skill.

So if you can translate your expertise and your experience into an engaging talk that actually transforms people whether they buy from you or not, you will be remembered for all the right reasons. People will be, “She was epic. I need to go follow her.” Not, “Oh, God, she sucked.” You know? So- Oh,

Clare Wood: God, she sucked.

Yeah.

Nicole Joy: God, she sucked. That was awful. And the thing is I’ve worked with some pretty high-profile people that have done a lot of great things, and before they came to me they were reading from palm cards at conferences, they were reading from their phone. That is my biggest bugbear, is reading from your phone, because they’ve never been taught.

Mm-hmm. They’ve never been taught. In public speak, it’s not a big secret. It’s not a personality trait, it’s a skillset. And there’s a particular structure that I follow which, and I’ll get into the next thing. We’ve got the product, but there’s practice. Yeah. There’s a way of practicing that is gonna make sure that you are the speaker that gets remembered for all the right reasons, and that does not include trying to memorize a script.

Speaking is not memorizing a script. That, it’s not performing a monologue. It’s having a conversation with that person in front of you, and that’s where I think a lot of people go wrong with speaking, is they say, the very first thing so many women in She Speaks Academy will say, “How the hell am I gonna remember everything?”

That’s not what we need to be focusing on. Yeah. If you’re focusing on that, you’re focusing on the wrong person.

Clare Wood: Mm.

Nicole Joy: If you’re super nervous and nerves in- f- uh, nerves and excitement are the pretty much the same thing in the body, you just got to label it the right thing. If that’s all you’re worried about, you’re focused on you.

So you’re focused on the wrong person. If you’re just, “Oh my God, what are they gonna think? What if I forget? What if I go blank?” all of the things that someone who’s not confident would think, I would say turn that spotlight out onto the audience. Go back to why you’re there in the first place.

What do you want them to do differently? How are you gonna transform them? Go back to that and focus on that person. Focus on having conversations with every single individual person in the room, as opposed to, “I’m standing up here speaking at you all.” You want to speak with them. There’s a difference. I’m- m- you would have felt that at an event before.

Clare Wood: Oh, 100%. And I was actually just thinking about an event that I spoke at. It was the first time they asked me, uh, g- given the Vegas brief. Mm-hmm. They’re just like, “We just want you to come and inspire the room.” And it was well-paid, so I’m like, “Hey, I’ll-” Hey, I’ll inspire. I’ll, I’ll inspire. Um, and I did not have any… I jotted down a couple of bullet points and I sat there.

I walked… It was a small room, like 20, 25 people, and I walked around and I looked people and I had conversations and I interacted. And the feedback afterwards was, “That was fantastic.” Because instead of me going in with this pre-prescribed

Nicole Joy: blah,

Clare Wood: this is what I’m gonna say, whether you- Right. Mm. I was having conversations and I was modifying it depending what the, the feedback in the room were telling me, and it was an experience for the people who were there as well.

But again, I could never have done that back in the day. I’ve had to practice. I was gonna say. I’ve practiced and practiced and got a lot more confident. Because to your point, you know, if you’re all consumed with yourself, then you’re not delivering the best version for your, your audience.

Nicole Joy: And you, you just said two things that I’d love to circle back to.

One, it was the experience, and that’s what great public speakers do. They provide an experience. It’s not a speaking at you, “Here’s my monologue.” And how many times have we been to events where the te- the slides are just full of text and the speaker turns around and reads it to you? That’s-

Clare Wood: Yeah.

Nicole Joy: It’s not called public reading, it’s called public speaking.

Yeah. But there’s no conversations at all happening there. And the other thing you said, “I would never have been able to do that back in the day.” And I would say, too, if you are starting out, you do need a bit more structure than that. Because you haven’t put the reps in yet-

Clare Wood: Yeah …

Nicole Joy: to be able to modify on the spot, to be able to read the room.

That’s, that skill set comes with time. And when people say to me, I actually did a post about this the other day. When people say, “You’re such a natural, it’s easy for you,” I’ve had 20-plus years experience. I wasn’t the kid that grew up on the debating team, in musical theater. I wasn’t on the stage at all.

I never used my voice on stage at school. But I became a schoolteacher. And when I started university, you had to get really comfortable delivering in front of your peers. So that’s kind of where it started for me, and then it spilled out into obviously the classroom. If you can control 30 ru- unruly kids, you can control any bloody audience I reckon.

So that, I kinda got my start there, and then I moved into… After I, I entered my beauty queen era. I won Miss Queensland back in 2005, and that’s when a modeling agency picked me up. That’s when I got in front of TV cameras. I was doing presenting. I hosted a kids show. I did some work for Fashion TV. I did all the TV commercials.

So that, I mean, this is 20 years ago. And then, you know, fast-forward a few more years, I created a sleepwear label, as you do. I’m a typical manifesting generator that starts all of the businesses all of the time. And every time I had a new launch for a, a, a range, I would throw a big event and then emcee that.

No idea what I was doing. I didn’t know what an emcee was but I figured it out on the spot. And then it was, I moved into the wellness era. I published cookbooks. I had a network marketing business, and I have done that many classes, whether they’re on people’s lounge room floors, in cafes. I traveled Australia at one point doing essential oil classes and talking about healthy eating with my cookbooks.

So I- the- all this to say, I have done this in front of thousands of people by now over the last two decades, which is why I can get on a podcast without notes. I can show up at a speaking gig. Yes, I’ll always prepare. I’ll never completely wing it ’cause I think that’s kind of disrespectful to your audience.

You always want some kind of guidance- Yeah … to make sure you’re gonna give them what they really need. But that’s why I can do that, and that’s why I’m a natural, because I’ve got 20-plus years experience. So getting your practice in wherever you can goes back to what I was saying before. Find your people, start pitching yourself and offering to come in to speak for free.

Get it all filmed. And the other reason why I film everything is, yes, it’s building up your evidence and it’s building up your bank as a speaker. But two really powerful things you can do with every piece of footage is watch it back without the sound And critique yourself on your energy, on your posture, on your stance, the way you carry yourself, your hand gestures.

Do you look in command of the room? Do you look energetic? Do you look like you know what you’re saying without actually hearing your voice? So first you wanna analyze what’s going on with your body, and you might realise you’ve got really bad posture. You might realise your arms are stiff. You might realise you talk too much with your hands.

And it’s not wrong, it’s just feedback for the next time that you do it. And then what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna turn your phone over so you can’t see it, and you’re just going to listen. So what’s your voice doing? Without having the backup of your physical presence, what’s your voice doing? Are you too fast?

Are you too slow? Do you sound monotonous and boring? Do you have emotional quality to your voice, your tone? Can we go on a journey with you? Or do you sound the same the whole way through? So these are things that you can do with every piece of footage so you can improve. I still do this. I’m 20 years in, I still do this.

So that’s, there’s two reasons why we film everything. One, we wanna build up that speaker bank and put a showreel together. Hint, hint nudge, wink, wink, that’s for you. And two, it’s a really powerful way on how we can, on how we can improve. So if, d- don’t ever say, “Oh, but it’s easy for them ’cause they’re confident.

It’s easy ’cause they’re natural.” You put in the practice too, you’re gonna look like that. If you want to look effortless, you’ve gotta put in the effort. It’s not a, oh, I’m just, I’m gonna become a speaker and I’m gonna get up on stage and everyone’s gonna think I’m amazing. That doesn’t happen. If you would’ve seen the first time I spoke in front of people and, to- compared to now, you wouldn’t think it was the same person.

But again-

Clare Wood: Yeah, same …

Nicole Joy: through decades. Well, you’ve had, and you had the crippling fear of public speaking. I didn’t have the fear, but I didn’t, I wasn’t I wasn’t- Didn’t

Clare Wood: have the confidence … yeah. I went and watched recently when trying to pull together my speaker’s reel. The first time I spoke to a big audience, I had, did have it filmed.

When I said I didn’t have it filmed, I did have it filmed. It was so unusable because I constantly I said it’s so like, so like, like, oh my gosh um, the

Nicole Joy: filler words.

Clare Wood: I watched it and thought, “Wow, I’ve come a long way.” I still definitely stumble over my words from time to time.

Me too.

Nicole Joy: That’s

Clare Wood: common. But the only way that you identify that is by actually watching and seeing the footage and realizing that’s the experience that my audience is having when they’re watching. So I love that. And I hadn’t thought to do the silent one. Mm-hmm. I, I love that. That’s a great tip.

Nicole Joy: Yeah. A really good tip.

And, and I think to going back with recording yourself, if you don’t have, if, look, if you wanna be a speaker, you’re really looking at this and you don’t have any footage to look back at, start listening to your voice messages and start, instead of texting people, voice message people more regularly, and then listen to it back.

I still do that because filler words like, basically um, and uhs every now and then, that shows you’re human. I- as long as it’s not distracting. But so many people, like, you know, when I was like doing this and like I thought that like. The like one, it’s very common. It’s really common. So just listen back.

Do you have filler words? And all you need to do is just, the first step is just to become aware of that. And let’s just say it’s like. Let’s pick that. Every time you go to feel it come out of your mouth, stop yourself. At first, you won’t be able to stop yourself. It’ll still come out. But the recognition and the awareness of, “Oh, I just said a filler word,” means it’s less likely to keep happening.

So the first few times, if you give yourself seven days to remove the word like from your speech, particularly if that is one of your filler words. Change it if it’s not. Every time it starts to come out, you just stop yourself. You might even want a s- a rubber band on your wrist and just slap yourself.

Ping back every time it comes out. Eventually, you will lose it. It’s a muscle. It’s a muscle. So one minute

Clare Wood: And it, it’s so distracting as lit… I, I saw someone the other day who did a talk, and she kept saying the word literally.

Nicole Joy: Mm-hmm.

Clare Wood: That happens. And she’d be like, “I literally died.” And I was sitting there thinking, “No, you didn’t.”

“You didn’t literally die. You don’t know what literally means.” And she kept repeating it. And it took so much away from the talk that I was there just being angry that she was liter- thinking that she literally died. Yeah. That I wasn’t listening to the, the core message that she was delivering. Totally.

Nicole Joy: And she might have had, I dare say she did have a really great message, but when your communication style clouds that, people aren’t listening to the message because they can’t. If you’ve got lit- literally and basically and, literally, basically, and are three very common filler words. And it’s only happening because your brain doesn’t like silence.

So we need to get comfortable with silence. And if you start to intentionally put pauses in within your sentences, think about the last time you read a piece of text in a book. There’s commas and full stops for a reason. There needs to be commas and full stops in our spoken word as well. But you don’t know what you don’t know.

So if you don’t listen back to yourself or someone doesn’t point out, “Hey, you say like and literally a lot. It’s really annoying.” You’re not gonna know. So you need to do it yourself. And if you’re serious about becoming a speaker, you’ll pick up on those things. Another one, this is mine, the before you talk, opening your mouth.

Clare Wood: Oh.

Nicole Joy: So exa- like you do that. It’s so distracting. And once you hear it, you can’t un-hear it. And if I will then go back through old footage and I’m doing this before I go to open my mouth. Or, oh, people that are listening won’t see this, but people watching the visuals will. If I’ve, you know when you’ve just put lip balm on and you rub your lips together?

Clare Wood: I’ll do that before I talk. I’m still working on that one. I’ll watch footage and I’m, I- Before I go to speak. So everyone’s got their thing. What I’m trying to say is everyone’s got their things, and if you don’t know about it, you can’t change it. So the first thing is bringing an awareness to that.

Amazing. So hang on, is that the three P’s? What have we got, product-

Nicole Joy: Oh, that’s, yeah, hang on. I’ve got one more We’ve

Clare Wood: got practice.

Nicole Joy: Yes. So we’ve got the product. Figure out the problem of the people in front of you and give them a valuable talk, whether they decide to work with you or not.

 Practice is getting in the practice, getting in the reps as much as you can. The third one is positioning. So this goes to a lot of what we were speaking about before we pressed record, is using social media strategically. So if you want to become a speaker, does it look like you are one if I land on your Instagram or LinkedIn or wherever you hang out?

Is it really clear to me what topic you speak about? Because we don’t need generalist speakers, we need specific topics. If you think about an event organizer, they know what hole they need to plug. I need a finance speaker. I need a wellness speaker. I need a mindset speaker. I need someone to speak about marketing.

They know what they need, so it needs to be really clear that they’re getting the best person for the job. If you’re someone that says, “I can speak about everything,” no one’s going to hire you because you’re a generalist. We want someone who’s an expert, a subject expert matter. So is it really clear for you?

Finance. Am I going on your Instagram? Does it look like you’re a finance speaker? Do you, are you all talking about money? Does it look like you have authority? Are you doing speaking to camera reels? Because before you get your footage, we’ve got to start somewhere. Speaking to camera reel builds your authority.

You look like somebody that knows what they’re talking about. If I just see pretty pictures and B-roll I don’t know if I trust her to talk. And never underestimate the power of a speaker reel or even those clips before you put your speaker reel together. Those clips are really powerful. I had a woman in She Speaks Academy, my second cohort I think it was, and she was having this conversation with a big event organizer that does big two to 300 person events.

He really wanted her on the stage, but he wasn’t quite trusting of the fact that she could deliver. Because as I said before, you can be good at something, but doesn’t mean you’re good at speaking about it. As part of She Speaks, you get professional footage to essentially launch you into your speaking career.

Within days of him seeing that, she was booked. Mm. Because he thought, “Okay, she’s got the reps. I can see that she’s got a real audience in front of her. She didn’t crumble. She held the room. She’s great. She’ll be fine.” So that’s how important having those types of media on your social media is because they can go she doesn’t just have speaker in her bio, she actually knows what she’s talking about.”

So if you are serious about becoming a speaker, do you have speaker in your bio? Is it really clear what your topic is? Are you having conversations around the topics that people your audience would like to know information on? Speaking to camera or on stage. You gotta start somewhere. I know that if you’re aspiring, you may not have the footage on stage, so speaking to camera is the next best thing.

So it’s all about how you position yourself and if you look like you know what you’re talking about and you show your face and you have real-life conversations, and you’re not using an AI twin that’s not you. Oh my gosh. Th- that, at the start of the year, I was blown away about how many big accounts were saying, “I don’t even need to show up on social media anymore.

I just take three photos and three selfies, feed it into my AI, and it makes all my content for me.” Yeah. And we can

Clare Wood: tell.

Nicole Joy: It looks like AI. We want real humans. We want real conversations with real humans. So I know

Clare Wood: that- And when, and people have a really ick experience when… So I used to put lots of Instagram filters on.

Mm-hmm. And I met one of my clients in real – She looked at me and I was like, “I need to lay off these filters.” Because I do not want people having an experience where the person they meet in front of them isn’t what they’ve seen on camera.

Nicole Joy: Exactly. And those AI twins will generally never stumble over their words.

There’s a perfection about it, and a human isn’t perfect, and that’s part of the experience when you’re either listening to someone on stage or even listening to someone on a podcast. If they are perfect and never trip over their words, there’s almost a, a… We don’t trust them. We think this is too perfect.

I need a human. I need, I need her to stumble over her words at some point so I know that she’s real.” And essentially, that’s what it does. That’s why I’m not hung up on, make sure you remove every single filler word, every single um and uh and get it out perfect, because that’s just not achievable.

But the three Ps are simple. Is it easy to follow? Not necessarily. But honestly, if you’ve got a great talk, you know the problem you’re solving, you’re giving value, you know what topic you live under so it’s easy for event organizers to hire you. You put the reps in, you film everything, you market yourself as a speaker.

If you do that consistently, hello more stages.

Clare Wood: So, can we talk about two things here? Sure. One I wanna talk about, this is a money podcast. Mm-hmm. What kind of money are people getting paid to speak about niches on stages?

Nicole Joy: If you’re… It widely varies, okay? It widely varies. If you’re in the upper echelons of corporate keynote speaking, you’re getting at least five grand.

At least $5,000 for a 45 to 60-minute keynote. And that’s the difference too, that there’s a speaker that holds the room for a keynote. That’s a speaker. Being on a panel, not so much. If you’re answering a couple of questions on a panel, don’t expect to get anywhere near that, unless you’ve got a huge name.

But in, in corporate speaking, $5,000 is what you’re looking at. You go to the big speakers in Australia, they’re getting upwards of 10, easy. That’s corporate though. Corporate is very different to the private independent events. And you know, on the Gold Coast, there’s so many events. A lot of those businesses don’t have that budget.

But then that’s where you sometimes, depending, are allowed to sell from the stage. So corporate keynotes, I’m talking opening for Westpac or ANZ or Google or Meta. You don’t- you’re not allowed to sell from the stage. That’s, you are there, you get paid for your talk. However, if you go into more of the private entrepreneurial world and those events, so- sometimes, quite often you’re allowed to sell from the stage.

So maybe you don’t get paid, but maybe you land three clients. This has happened to me before. I’ve got, so it’s $5,000 to join She Speaks Academy. I go to an event where my perfect female business owners are there, two to three people join. So I just made 10 to $15,000. So it de- it depends again, are we speaking as a business, we speaking for a business?

So you can get p- and you can get both. There’s no rule. You can definitely get paid to speak as well as then be able to sell from the stage. But I want you to think of speaking too, particularly in that second model as for your business. It’s a pipeline builder. You’ve now got All these new people either following you, they’re in your world, they’ve got your lead magnet, they know about you.

And if it isn’t too much of an inconvenience to your life to go and speak at an event, I would say this is where businessm- owners are leaving a lot of money on the table. Mm. And how many women do you know that get asked to speak, “Oh, no, no, I’m not a speaker, I couldn’t do that.”

Clare Wood: Yeah.

Nicole Joy: No,

Clare Wood: 100%. “

Nicole Joy: I can’t do that.”

And we, I had this really interesting conversation. There was a really big event in Sydney a couple of weeks ago, and there wasn’t any female keynote speakers. There was, they were on the panel, but they weren’t actual female keynote speakers. I do think there’s a problem with that, ’cause there’s enough incredible female speakers that they could have had someone on the stage.

But the other half of me goes, “Mm.” But when, now this is stereotypical, this is not everyone, but across the board, when brilliant women who’ve done brilliant things in business or whatever the event topic is, when they get asked to speak, so many of them go, “No, I can’t.” Whereas stereotypically speaking, and this is across the board with everything with men don’t need to have it all figured out before they say yes.

It’s a, “I’ll figure it out. She’ll be right.” We don’t have that. Again, I feel like I need a disclaimer. I know this is not all women. I get it. But a lot of the time, so many brilliant women are saying no to speaking because they think they don’t have it in them. They don’t think- Mm … they’re a natural speaker.

 I’d love to, you know, put that question back on you. Imagine now you didn’t really invest in getting over your crippling fear of pub- public speaking. How different would your business look right now- Mm … if you haven’t been on all the stages that you have been on in the last few years?

Clare Wood: 100%, and I actually look back with a lot of sadness to, my son was talking about going for a student leader role.

And I said, “Oh, I got asked to be school captain at my school, and I said no, because I didn’t wanna speak.” And my grandmother passed away. At her funeral, I wrote a speech, and I couldn’t deliver it. My anxiety was so bad. And I look back now and think that’s so sad, all of the opportunities that I missed in my life because I didn’t do this thing.

And now that I’ve done it, I’m like, “Why didn’t I do it sooner?” Yeah. Because it does, it makes you, it gets you visible. It gives you opportunities. I’m now the person that a birthday rolls around, Clare’s gonna be doing the speech.

Nicole Joy: Yes.

Clare Wood: I genuinely love it, and I think that it just, for your business, for your own personal life, for your self-confidence, for how you’re able to contribute, it really, it changes your life.

Nicole Joy: It really

Clare Wood: does. And, um, yeah.

Nicole Joy: It has- A lifetime return on investment. Speaking is not, confidently public speaking is not something someone would ever go, “Oh, I wish I didn’t do that.”

Clare Wood: Yeah.

Nicole Joy: Every single woman that comes through She Speaks-

Clare Wood: Mm …

Nicole Joy: even, no matter how sh- quaking in their boots they were before they got off stage, I’ll- I’ll share with you this, this is my, one of my favorite transformations.

Beautiful Jen we met at a retreat. She could barely say, “Hi, my name is Jen,” in front of five women. Couple of months later, she got on the She Speaks stage in front of 100 and nailed it, smashed it out of the park, and she got off stage and she was shaking. She’s like, “Holy shit, I did it. Holy shit, I did it.

Holy shit, I did it.” I was like, “Yeah, you’ve done it.” Yeah. And we’ve kept in contact, and she says constantly, “You don’t know how much that’s changed my life.” Mm. “No, I’m not on the speaker circuit. No, I’m not doing it yet, but it’s just given me so much more confidence in every other area of my life.” and not everybody who does She Speaks wants to become a speaker.

Some of, some people do it as a bucket list thing. But not one person goes, “Geez, I w-  I regret doing that.”

Clare Wood: Yeah. “

Nicole Joy: I really don’t think I should’ve done that.” they say what you did. “

Clare Wood: Why didn’t I do this sooner?” And I look back, like I said, I feel so much sadness for how much opportunities I’ve missed.

And even when I say opportunities, I’m not even talking about money. Like, not speaking at my grandma’s funeral. To this day, I just feel s- like a, I’m getting emotional now. I can’t believe that I missed that opportunity. Um, so it really, it’s- it’s life-changing. And, um, yeah, there you go. So to wrap up today’s episode, the three Ps.

We’ve got product. Let me see if I can remember them. I feel like I’m on the spot here. Product, positioning, and Wonderful

Nicole Joy: positioning. Positioning’s the third

Clare Wood: one … practice, practice. Yes.

Nicole Joy: Practice before

Clare Wood: positioning. And this is the, the keys to be really becoming a confident speaker, to be getting yourself out there, and to be eventually getting paid really great money for it.

Um- Mm … like I said, I love getting paid to speak. I think it’s such a-

Nicole Joy: One of my favorite things.

Clare Wood: It’s one of my favorite things. I love talking, and imagine getting paid to do it. So I hope this episode has inspired you to get out there, to get speaking. Nicole, if people wanna get on the She Speaks stage, is it coming back?

Nicole Joy: It sure is, and the next cohort opens November 17th, and you’ll be on stage February 12th. So there’s four spots left. I only take eight women. So if that’s you, if you’re sitting here listening going, “It’s my time,” reach out. I hang out on Instagram the most, so Nicole… I know we’ll put this in the show notes, but Nicole Joy, full stop, official, and you can DM me there.

Clare Wood: Fabulous. Fabulous. Any final things that you wanna say before we wrap up for today?

Nicole Joy: Your story’s your superpower. Don’t underestimate what’s happened to you, because your story holds the key to someone else’s transformation. They won’t hear it. They might hear something similar, but when it comes out of your mouth and it lands on their ears, that is the transformation moment for them.

People are literally waiting to hear. I just said literally, but I actually-

Clare Wood: I needed to say it there.

Nicole Joy: That was

Clare Wood: appropriate.

Nicole Joy: Yeah, that was appropriate. They need to hear it come out of your mouth, told in the way that only you can. And don’t underestimate the power of sharing your story. The ripple effect that it has is something I don’t think you’ll ever understand-

Clare Wood: Mm

Nicole Joy: in a way.

Clare Wood: Love that. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Nicole.

Nicole Joy: For having me.

Thank you so much for tuning in to today’s episode of the Intentional Money Show. If you’re ready for more profit, come find me on Instagram at clare_wood_coach. Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast, and I’ll chat to you again next week

* Transcript created by AI – may contain errors or omissions from original podcast audio