The Five Principles That Built My Speaking Business

I did some soul searching while I was flying around this week.

On the way to Raleigh… driving the rental car to Charlotte… sitting in the hotel in Atlanta... and then flying home.

When my friend Dan Gingiss shared his six guiding principles, it sparked the desire to define my own.  

Why? I think this is a really insightful and powerful exercise for any speaker.

Success for your speaking business isn’t about having all of the right answers. It’s about having the right constraints and focusing on what matters the most.  Knowing your principles – and actually writing them down – really makes a difference.

Everyone’s principles will be unique.  Mine aren’t like Dan’s.  And they won’t be like yours.  But hopefully, this exercise will help you start to discover what principles are most important in shaping the kind of business you want to build.

Andrew’s Principle #1:
Create one masterpiece per year.

This first one is the “principle of compound excellence.”  

With every speech I give, new ideas will emerge and feedback will unlock new issues to explore.  My goal is to constantly compound this experience and use the previous content to start building new speeches.

For me, iteration beats innovation in the speaking business.  If I can deliver a speech fifty times, I know it’s going to get better and better.  Sometimes the end result works, and sometimes it doesn’t.  

But that’s one of the pieces of the business that I enjoy the most.

That’s why I make it a goal to master one new speech each and every year.  If I can do that, it’s a huge win.  I’ll end up with a portfolio of speeches, more opportunities for repeat gigs, and ultimately growth in my thinking of the world.

That’s really powerful for me.

Andrew’s Principle #2:
The speech is the product, not me.

This is the “principle of value hierarchy.”  

There’s a brutal market truth that I’ve seen play out time and time again. Unknown speakers persistently stay unknown because they think they are personally more important than the ideas they’re preaching.  They spend endless hours trying to build their own reputation rather than promoting the thing that actually matters much more… the speech!

The opposite is true too.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen “A-list” names come to a conference with everyone expecting some sort of life-changing session.  Turns out… their session is terrible. Like, ‘check-your-email-during-the-opening-story’ terrible.

They poured all their effort into self-promotion, but the message itself was underdeveloped and flat.

And it really taps down my ego.

If I get poor feedback from an event, I try not to take it personally.  The feedback is for the speech – aka the product.  It’s just a sign of what needs to be improved. I go back to the drawing board and look for ways to make the product deliver the most value possible.

When the speech is the product, any sort of rejection for me just becomes constant research and development for how to get a better product out there.

Andrew’s Principle #3:
Never blame the audience.

This is the principle of “radical ownership”, and it’s transformed the way I think about evolving the speeches I create.

It’s expensive in your business to just say...

“The audience didn’t get it.”

Or...

“That’s not my normal audience.” 

And...

“They had lots of questions that weren’t relevant to my topic.”

Instead of letting these excuses cloud your brain, use the ideas and feedback from the audience as product development.  It will really help build your business and your speech.

If you’re constantly asking what you could have done differently to have a bigger impact, then your speech will constantly evolve – the product will constantly improve – and you will never find yourself blaming the audience.

And that makes you a much more inclusive and accessible speaker.