[JOE SANOK]
This is the Practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 643.

Well, this is the Practice of the Practice podcast. I am so excited to be hanging out with you today. Every Wednesday we do our Ask Joe show, and it’s so exciting to do this because you are submitting your questions all the time over practiceofthepractice.com/askjoe. Tons of questions, keep coming in. Really excited about this most recent one that came in. I’m actually going to bounce to this, even though it’s more recent than some of the other ones because it’s one that I get, but I don’t get very often. So I want to make sure I talk about this and it’s regarding speaking and corporate consulting.

So this is Jade Wu who says they’re not in private practice, currently located in Durham, North Carolina. Jade says I’m getting more speaking and corporate consulting inquiries than I can accept nowadays, but I still feel very much in the dark about how I should set my fee, especially for speaking. How should I set and negotiate my speaking fee and do factors like size of audience, type of client, corporate versus nonprofit, and whether the talk is recorded or distributed matter. Thank you in advance for your insights, Jade.

I just love this question so much because, there’s a few different things to factor in here. First you’re at a point where you have done some hard work to get more referrals from these corporations. So let’s back up for people first that maybe have yet to even get corporate referrals. How did you get there? You know, most people would say it’s some really strong networking with companies. Usually you had someone on the inside that brought you in, maybe you even did it for free at the beginning, but if you’re just looking to break into that, there’s a number of different things that you can do to really stand out.

One would be to just start doing more articles on LinkedIn. Look for the types of people that you really want to work with. See who they’re following, what they’re commenting on in LinkedIn because that’s all professionals doing all sorts of different things. For them to be able to spotlight the types of articles that they’re reading, they’re sharing, they’re commenting on, you want to start there. As well I would use help a reporter out to get your name out there. That gives you some great credibility to have been quoted in some articles to do other things.

Then the last piece of advice, and this was actually an exercise a number of years ago when I did consultant school, which was this live hybrid model of like live teachings and then a whole e-course around how to consult is to put together if you’re doing it locally, or if you’re doing it nationally, whatever the specific industry is interview people in that industry to do a white paper around trends in that industry. So for example, say you want to help banks with crisis management because you’ve been in crisis management, you’re a therapist, you’re getting training in that. You eventually want to do public speaking and crisis management, you want to do training crisis management, you want to teach de-escalation, all those things at banks.

So it might be helpful to say, okay, I’m going to interview 50 or a hundred top executives at, you could say at credit unions. Maybe start with credit unions, and you try to do that throughout your state or throughout your region. Maybe it’s the Midwest. You put together an email that says, “Dear president so and so. I’m working on interviewing presidents of credit unions and specifically around looking at psychological trends, post pandemic, or kind of in the tail end, hopefully of this pandemic. I’m doing 15-minute interviews and then I’m going to put this together and I’m putting together this paper to then send to all of the people that I interview to just, here are the macro trends we’re seeing in regards to emotional intelligence, crisis management, things like that within companies. Also I’m I would love to be able to interview someone in your HR. All this is confidential. I’m happy to sign a confidentiality agreement. No names will be stated. It’ll just be that I’ve interviewed this many people.”

So it’s a great way to create a really solid piece of content that you put together, some macro examples and some qualitative examples, as well as having them the quantitative, to have some sort of assessment that you bring together here’s all the different numbers, here’s the different things. That’s how you position yourself. So this is sort of pre-question in regards to getting into that field and through that process, oftentimes you’ll make so many connections that then you’ll be in the same situation, or how do I even set my fees?

So whenever you’re doing public speaking or consulting, you always want to to make at least two to three times more than what you’re making in private practice per hour. So if someone wants you to do a from scratch talk and you look at it and you’re saying, okay, I’m doing a 90-minute talk, this is from scratch. How many hours of prep will this actually take? Will it cost me something in regards to having a designer make really nice slides or am I going to be spending time doing that? So then looking at the total hours, it may take you five or six hours. So then if your typical rate for counseling is a hundred a session, you want to be getting at least two to $300 per hour for the prep, for the calls, with the people for all of that.

So this may be a $2,000 to $3,000 90 minutes with you. Now that may not work for some people but especially when you have business coming out of your ears like Jade said, well, we would really want to make sure that we can say, okay, how are we going to make sure, in this situation, that we’re going to just make that kind of money. So when you’re doing that keep raising your rates. You can say, so for this type of consulting, for this level of talk, it’s usually $5,000. Does that fit within your budget? Oh, no, that’s kind of outside of it. Okay, well, I have a couple spots that I can bring down the money or the amount or you can look at different factors.

There are no set rules in regards to when you do consulting, how you have to structure it. So you want to look at first year time, you want to look at the return on investment for these people. Like you’re saving them by being an expert. It’s not just 90 minutes of your time. It’s the years of getting a PhD, the years of getting a master’s degree of study of understanding all of this.
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[JOE SANOK]
I remember hearing a story a while back and I don’t remember who told it, if someone knows, feel free to tell me and there was this huge power plant, this nuclear power plant, where there was all these issues going on and something was about to happen. They called in this expert that they could tell them what to do and he was going to cost like a million dollars or something crazy like that. He walks in and in two minutes he just walks in and he pushes one button and then it makes all of this stuff, all these alarms stop, and they’re like, we’re going to pay you a million dollars for this? And he basically said, you’re not paying me for just pushing the button. You’re paying me to know which button to push to avert catastrophe here.

So your knowledge, isn’t just that 90 minutes. That’s where I think a lot of therapists, counselors, social work types really don’t understand the true value that they bring to a company or corporation. So even our most basic understandings of reflective listening, of not jumping in and just problem solving of basic emotional intelligence with the team for most companies that’s mind blowing and you have that expertise. So I would start by charging quite a bit for your time and then if for some reason that doesn’t work, you can always narrow it down.

Sometimes when I’m working with larger companies I’ll say it’s in my interest to work with you because to say that I have worked with you builds my credibility, and if I can get a quote or a testimonial afterwards, if you feel like I’ve earned that, that I can put publicly on my website, that’s going to be really helpful. That was part of what I did with Nissan Infinity, Canada. They did a bulk book buy, which was substantial, but also it wasn’t what my typical speaking fee is for the amount of prep. But to be able to say, I worked with Nissan Infinity, Canada, they bought a whole bunch of my books for their entire company, they also gave me a testimonial and I can use their name saying, I’ve worked with Nissan Infinity, Canada. I’ve done keynotes for them. I’ve helped them out with mental health issues and to have better connections in the workplace. That has tremendous value or my brand personally and for me as a consultant, if I want to work with other larger companies.

So that sort of thing then positions me differently than if I’m just some random mental health person that’s talking. So finding those ways that you can help them within their budget, but then to also maybe do some tests. So maybe it’s, “Hey, for two months I will do a 60-minute call with your C-suite. We’ll do this kind of follow up. We’ll see if it’s a good fit after those two months. We’re going to look at the KPIs, the key performance indicators of how we’re going to judge the success of this project and then at the end of that two months, we can decide if we want to renew. Maybe we will do a six-month program or 12 month. You can create this.

I would say though if you are just bursting at the seams, just like in counseling, you should at least double your rates. So if you feel like you want to say no, double your rates. A lot of people sometimes have trouble with that. They feel bad about it, but if you are doubling your rates, if you are continuing to make more from those that can afford it, you can then choose where to spend that extra energy. You can choose to see clients at a lower cost. You can choose to bring in nonprofits that you work with. You can choose to have time for your family or to meditate or to become a better person.

All these things are then choices because there’s people that do want to pay you. What’s unfair to people is if they say we have a budget to pay you a ton of money, and you’re saying you’re full, you’re busy. You don’t have time to work with us. We would pay you. Like if someone came to you and said, okay, your rate’s 500 bucks an hour? We’ll give you $2,000 an hour if we can please work with you. There are those corporations with deep pockets that if you want to work with them, if they’re the kind of corporation that you want to ethically help that will pay high, high dollar amounts to have you come in.

So making sure that you understand that you have tremendous value, you can set your rates and if you need help, reach out to me, I help people all the time with this. If you go to practiceofthepractice.com/apply you can apply to work one-on-one with me. So most plans start at $1,500 a month and usually last at least nine months, just so you know kind of the budget for doing one-on-one work together. But in doing that, we’re going to connect you with all sorts of people, help you launch, help you grow outside of your practice. So if that sounds good, head an over to practiceofthepractice.com/apply. We can chat, we’ll jump on a phone call and see if we might be a fit. For me, I’m looking at what’s the best use of your time and money? If it’s not going to be worth it for you, if I don’t think I can get you a good ROI I’m not going to try to sell you on it.

So that’s what we’re doing over here at Practice of the Practice. So we also want to thank, today we have our sponsor Blueprint. So Blueprint is the all-in-one measurement-based care platform designed to help behavioral health providers personalize their care experience, scale their practice with integrity and drive better outcomes faster. So you are eligible to get your first month for free of Blueprint over at bph.link/joe. Again, that’s bph.link/joe. They are a new sponsor. We are so excited. They have hundreds of symptom rating skills. They have all sorts of tests and scores and ways that you can bill out the insurance of your clients in a way that maybe you couldn’t before around all of these different types of assessments. So go test them out over at bph.link/joe.

Thank you so much for letting me enter your ears and into your brain. I’ll talk to you soon.

Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. We really like it. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.