How to Use Speaking to Leverage Your Time
Make the most out of your life by leveraging your time. There are two ways to leverage your time; one, is to buy back your time; and the other is to get in front of more people.
Buy Back Your Time
It doesn’t matter how rich or poor you are; you have the same amount of time as everyone else. So how can you get time back? Leverage it. How? Buy it back.
If you are cleaning your house, why? Each hour of your time is probably worth five times as much as you would pay to have it done by someone else. I learned very early on that a housekeeper is a godsend. If you don’t have one, get one. They will actually do a better job and you will save time.
I also have a bookkeeper. I used to set up accounting systems in corporate America, so I know accounting, but is it worth my time to do it now? It is better for me to use my time for something else. Now, I might decide to sit and brainstorm, drinking hot tea, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m not a slave to my business or my computer.
Think about it. What is it that you do now that you can pass off to someone; that you can hire someone to do? I just hired a sales professional to reach people on my behalf. More and more, I hand off things to my assistant. I’m not saying I’m out of the loop. You have to supervise, but there are a lot of things you can pass on to save yourself time.
Leverage Your Time Through Public Speaking
If you want to make more money, you’ve got to speak in front of more people. Period! You can’t sit behind your computer or in the office. You can’t just call people, onesy-twosy, and get ahead. You’ve got to get in front of more people. How?
Networking is a great way. You say your self-introduction for 25-30 seconds, or your elevator speech, but that’s still one-on-one. It’s when you speak to the whole networking group that you reach more people. Their eyes, their attention, their energy is all on you. You’re mesmerizing them. You’re getting into their minds and souls. That’s when the big effect happens. That’s when the money happens. That’s when you start to change lives.
If you want to make more money, you have to get in front of more people!
Let’s just say, hypothetically, that you speak once a week. If you want public speaking to grow your business, to get referrals, to get all the clients you ever wanted, to live the dream life; you’ve got to be consistent and get out there and speak.
You can’t dabble in public speaking and get great results. It doesn’t mean you have to be a full-blown Tony Robbins. You can do what you want to do, live the life you want to live, and use public speaking as a marketing strategy. Or you can go all out and become that professional paid speaker. Either way, you have to start somewhere.
Calculate It
Say you make a commitment to speak once a week — somewhere. I recommend that in a month that you make the goal to speak at six places, so that you at least reach four. That’s how the law of the universe works. Set your goal higher so you can accomplish it. For the sake of calculations, let’s say four.
In an average room there are 25 people, like a networking meeting (some meetings are 80, some are 15). That’s 4 (speaking engagements) x 25 (people) = 100 people that you are in front of every month. One hundred more people!
Out of those 100, how many leads are you going to generate from your talk? Now I’m not talking about gathering business cards and getting warm leads. I’m talking about hot leads; the people who come up to you at the end of your talk and hand you their business card!
Out of a group of 25, it’s reasonable to get 5 hot leads. 5 (hot leads) x 4 (speaking engagements) = 20.
That’s 20 hot, hot leads a month! (You’re still going to do whatever you ordinarily do to generate hot leads — this is beyond that!) You now have 20 extra hot leads a month. Out of those hot leads, how many will you close? Let’s be conservative and say 3 out of 5. You get them on the phone, you build trust and rapport, and are able to move them to take action, rather quickly, because they’re hot. They took the time to talk to you. Conservatively, you close 3, so that’s now 12 new clients a month!
Again, let’s be conservative and say you have 10 new clients a month and multiply them by your cost (the range for a coaching service is $500 a month, or a six month coaching service for $6000-$10,000).
For the sake of this calculation, let’s say an average client is worth $5000 to you: $5000 x 10 clients more a month. That’s $50,000 extra per month because you’ve implemented public speaking. That’s leveraging your time!
That’s what’s possible in public speaking if you learn how to do it right, how to intrigue them so they want more, how to give them a lot of value, and how to speak from your soul and be authentic.
Learn how to close from the stage and people will come to you. They’ll want what you have and rightly so because you’re the solution that they’ve been looking for for a long, long time. You’ve just put them out of their misery. You’ve just stopped their suffering. They saw value and saw you as the solution. That’s how you can leverage your time through speaking.
Leverage Your Community
Your “community” are those you know with common interests; colleagues, clients, friends. Leveraging your community means asking for their help, asking them to send something out for you. I’m having one of my one-day seminars, “Speak up, Cash In,” in Los Angeles because one of my Mastermind superstars wanted to host a party because she just remodeled her home. I thought, “why don’t I have an event in LA since I’m going to be there anyway?”
Since most of the people on my list reside in Orange County and the Inland Valley, I reached out to my Mastermind community to help me and to let people know about the event. Think about what communities you know. Are you in an network marketing company where you have a down-line and an up-line to leverage? Or maybe you want to create a “joint venture with another company.”
It’s all about leveraging. Can you leverage them to help you promote so that it saves you time or so you can get in front of more people? Most people don’t even leverage their own close-knit community. I’m guilty of this. I forget to use my own community, my own students and my own clients.
Benefits of Leveraging
Here’s a phrase we’ve all heard before: “work smarter, not harder.” Personally, I don’t like that phrase. I don’t purposely work dumb, and I don’t know anyone else who does. But there is some wisdom in the “not harder” part.
One of my first assistants would go with me to my events. We’d load the car, I’d drive, then we’d unload. I got another assistant, Kelly, and when we got to the event, she said, “what are you doing?” I said, “I’m helping you unload.” She said, “You get in there and relax, and do what you need to do to get ready for your training.” That was one of those “duh!” moments for me. What was I thinking?
It not only gave me extra time, but quality time to focus on what I needed to focus on to make more money. It also protected my feet because I wasn’t walking back and forth, unloading my car, or getting all sweaty. I leveraged a lot just by passing that on.
Sometimes we don’t see what it is we can give up. We oftentimes think we have to do it all. Most of the times, we don’t. That’s why we hire assistants. It doesn’t mean you don’t supervise or have check points or accountability.
In conversation with InfusionSoft which is setting up a new system for me, they said, “we’ll send everything over to your assistant.” I said, “oh no, I need to be in on it. This is my data base; the heart of my business.” I had to be involved. Once I know what’s going on; then, yes, I can leverage my assistant’s time and have her do the actual work, but I never give up something really important to my business.
More Business
When you leverage your time, you can build a bigger business. You have time to hire more people, build a new website, develop marketing materials, or travel internationally. I always get excited when I hear people are going somewhere internationally to speak. There are a lot more places I want to go.
The more leverage, the more money. You can have a bigger house, better location, have more vacation, fancy car; build your business.
More People Helped
When you have more time, that’s when you can help more people. You can talk longer on the phone with them. It frees you up to do what you want to do.
I have a client who is a successful interior designer, but her dream was to start a not-for-profit organization. She was involved with Habitat for Humanity. She said that when the family would go into their new home, there was no furniture. The house was entirely empty– no beds, no tables, nothing; and they had no money to furnish it.
Being the big heart that she is, she started Furnishing Hope. She gets designers together and they work for free and design the house furnishings. They interview the family and find out what they want, how they want it decorated. They don’t just decorate it with second-hand stuff, they design it like something out of a magazine. They get donations. It is just fantastic what they do.
This one little 5-year-old girl wanted a princess room. They painted her room pink with white furniture. One of the wall decorations was a pink princess outfit. When the little girl ran in, she pulled the decoration off the wall, put it on over her clothes, and ran to show her mom. She was so happy. She had never had anything so nice in her life.
My client also works with Wounded Warriors, an organization that helps those wounded in the war. She started designing rooms for them. Sometimes they have to have special showers or larger doors, etc. I get chills every time I tell that story. This is a regular person, like you and me, who is using public speaking to start an organization and raise funds to help people.
Recently, she had a tea party to raise funds. There were less than 30 people, and she raised $37,000 based on the closing script that we worked on. She leveraged her community. She got people to donate. She got people to sponsor. She leveraged her business to build a charity organization, one that could help people.
More Freedom
What is freedom to you? I’m going mention a few things: more time with family and friends, enjoying longer vacations, more exotic vacations, guiltless retreats (I’ve always wanted to go on a long retreat and have it be guiltless; a place without a computer, no email, no voicemail).
When I went to Egypt and Jordan, if I didn’t have this kind of business in place; I couldn’t leave for 23 days! I don’t have an automatic cash machine on my computer like some internet marketers do, but I did have the ability to speak and sell. All I had to do, when I came back the next month, was to have plenty of speaking engagements already lined up. I hardly skipped a beat.
Or maybe you want to send your children to the best colleges and have the freedom to go with them to see that college. Or leave a legacy or a trust for your grandchildren? Maybe it’s just about doing what ever you want, when ever you want.
Speaking can be that vehicle for you. How do I know? Because it’s the vehicle for me. And I do what I teach, and teach what I do.
Just by adding this one step, and leveraging it by getting in front of more people, leveraging your time, and your community; you too, can be enjoying a lot of things that you don’t already have.
Arvee Robinson, is The Master Speaker Trainer, International Speaker, and Author. She teaches business owners, service professionals, and entrepreneurs how to use public speaking as a marketing strategy so they can attract more clients, generate unlimited leads and grow their businesses, effortlessly. She teaches a proven speaker system for delivering persuasive presentations, and easy formulas for creating killer elevator speeches and magnetic self-introductions. Arvee has helped hundreds of individuals to win clients and close more sales every time they speak. She offers private coaching, workshops, and weekly teleclasses. Her programs will make you money for the rest of your life.
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