When should I speak for free?

The invitation arrives and it sounds like a compliment. Our members would love to hear from you. There is no budget for speakers, but the room will be full.

You have about a day to decide, and the arithmetic is harder than it looks.

Free is a price on one side of the arrangement. The other side is what you carry out of the room. That side is where the decision lives.

The people who tell you never to speak for free are selling speaking

Their argument is a good one, and it deserves to be heard properly.

Connie Podesta has worked as a professional keynote speaker for more than 25 years. She puts it in a line. Imagine asking any other professional to do their job for nothing. The hope is that somebody watching will be impressed. A Forbes column on unpaid professional work makes the harder version of the point. Speaking free tends to introduce you to more people who expect free work.

Both are right about the business they are describing. For a professional speaker, the fee is the revenue, and every unpaid hour is a paid hour given away.

Your business is different. You sell engagements, and hours on stages are how people find you.

So the fee is rarely the number that decides anything. A modest check from an association matters less to your year than one person in the third row. That person runs a firm you would like to work with.

That is the reframe the whole question turns on. Speaking is business development for an expert practice, and it gets judged the way business development gets judged.

Two questions settle most invitations

Who is in the room?

The headcount matters less than the guest list. Look at titles, seniority, and whether these people buy what you sell.

A room of 40 buyers beats a room of 400 peers, and it is not close. Peers are pleasant company and they rarely hire you.

The second question is whether you leave with the recording.

A talk you can publish keeps working after the room empties. It becomes the video an organizer watches next year. It becomes the transcript that turns into three articles. It becomes material your own marketing draws from for years.

A fee is spent once. A recording you can publish is still working three years later.

An unpaid hour that produces a room of buyers or a usable recording has paid you. An unpaid hour that produces neither has cost you a day.

Free is never free, so price it before you answer

Count the whole day.

A talk you have given before still takes a few hours to fit the audience. A new talk takes considerably longer. Then add the travel and the day out of your practice. Add the evening you spend rewriting slides in a hotel.

That is the number the invitation is asking for. Not zero.

A lunch talk 20 minutes from your office is one decision. A two-day trip across the country is another, and it should clear a higher bar.

What to ask for when there is no fee

An organizer with no speaker budget usually has other things to give. Most of them are worth more to you than the check would have been. Ask before you accept, warmly and once.

• Permission to record the session and publish the video.
• A description of who registered: roles, seniority, and organizations.
• Travel and lodging covered, when the trip is real.
• A slot people attend, rather than the final hour of the last day.
• A written comment from the organizer afterward, while it is fresh.
• An introduction to whoever builds next year's program.

None of that is a negotiation tactic. Each item makes the hour worth giving. An organizer who can offer none of them has told you something useful about the event.

When the answer is no

Some invitations answer themselves.

The room is your competitors. The organizer will not allow a recording. The panel has six people and you get nine minutes.

Or the event sells tickets and pays the venue and the caterer. It pays everybody except the person the audience came to hear.

Declining is not a small move in this market. Turn down a room calmly, without a lecture about your worth. That is one of the clearer signals that your calendar holds other things.

Later, the fee becomes the filter

There comes a point when more people want your hour than you have hours.

At that point the fee stops being income and starts being a gate. It sorts the organizations that have thought about the program from the ones filling a slot.

That is the same reason a private practice publishes a price at all. The number does work before anyone pays it.

Getting to that point takes a year or two of the small rooms that put you on programs. So the early answer to this question is usually yes. The later answer is usually a number.

What free stages will not do on their own

A shelf of unpaid talks does not become a paid speaking career by accumulation. Speakers who made that transition got demonstrably good and built the proof. The proof is what a page and a recording hold.

Exposure is also the weakest of the three currencies. Being seen by people who cannot hire you is a pleasant afternoon. Nothing is attached to it.

And a room of buyers converts nothing by itself. What happens in the days afterward decides that. Most experts leave a good room without a single next step arranged.

So the claim here stays narrow. An unpaid stage buys you access and material. Whether either turns into work depends on what you do with them.

The three currencies

Money, the room, or the recording.

An invitation pays you in at least one of those, or it does not pay you.

The stages worth your week are the ones whose payment you can name before you say yes.