Motivational Speaker Salary

Video Transcript

"I get asked, "How much do you make, Rick? How much does a motivational speaker make?" And I think the one thing about that is that the more experience you have, the more you can draw on an audience, the more people will want to attend your event, obviously the more you'll get paid. The bigger connection you have with people and when you go and do a presentation, when you do a speech, a class, an event, that actually causes people to go back out and tell others about you, so that next time you're in the area, you get a better event. In my case, I'm going to be honest with you right here. I'm going to tell you that my fee is right now $2000 a day and growing. That's up from a year ago, being a thousand dollars a day. And I hope -- my big, hairy goal -- is to one day is to be paid more than Bill Clinton gets paid to make a speech. And, who knows? Maybe, as Bill Clinton goes on, he'll be not asked as often and I'll be asked more. Ha! Anyway, so, as we think about it, the pay is very much looked at as in correlation with what you're delivering, what value they get, what they can charge the students or the attendees to come to the event and then, of course, how much then can they distribute to me. A lot of motivational speakers are paid a portion of the "take", or the "door", as they will say. In my case, I'm paid a portion of the profit of the event. Once I'm paid and the hotels are paid and my airfare and my expenses and the cost of the booklets are all paid, if there's money left over, then I typically get some percentage of that profit. So, it varies dramatically. I mean, I've had one day events where I've made $2000 and I've had one day events where I've made $8000. And it varies. And I hope, like I said, my goal is to one day be a nationally known speaker, so that I can make much, much more than that. And I think if you want to consider what would somebody be making if they were brand new to it. I've heard as little as $250 a day for a speaker. Yet, a lot of the times, no one is asked in the early stages to speak for an entire day. I met a lady once who was paid $2500 for a half-hour speech. Yet she had to fly from Kansas City. So, really, she wasn't really paid $2500 for a half an hour's speech. She was actually paid $2500 to take, basically, a day and a half out of her life. So, and again, I've seen people right here in the local area commute 45 minutes for a talk, spend half a day talking and get $250. So, it does vary, but I've not seen people recently who didn't get paid a minimum of $250 to $500 a day in starting out."