How to Launch Your Career as a Professional Speaker

Want to lecture at conferences? Give keynotes around the world? Here's how I did it.

I have lectured to five people at a study club in a dimly lit basement, main stages in front of several hundred at international conferences, and just about everything in between. This has been a means to further my non-clinical career (see “How I Stopped Being a Dentist”) and a way to generate decent income outside of patient care. Above all else, it has been really fun.

If you’re looking to supplement your healthcare career with paid public speaking work but don’t know where to start, this article is for you.

But what if I’m anxious?

Most people hate public speaking. The very thought of standing in front of a room of people causes their stomachs to churn and mouths run dry. I used to feel that way too and I can remember exactly when that started to change for me.

My dental school class was tasked with a case presentation exercise: build a 5-minute slide deck about a patient, present it to the rest of the group, and then sit back down. It was incredibly boring day for the audience with a short spike of adrenaline when it was your turn to get in front of the podium. After class was over, a person I respected came up to me and said I was entertaining during my presentation.

That was it. That was all I needed to hear to become hopelessly addicted to public speaking. The anxiety that I had felt had been converted into a sweet, sweet high. I’ve been chasing the next high ever since.

If you want to have a career as a professional speaker, you should get that same high. You don’t need to eliminate all anxiety about speaking; I still get some nervous energy from time to time. But you should feel a rush after the job is done. If you don’t, and all you feel is the anxiety, then please don’t subject yourself to this.

If you do get the rush but you want to work on calming your nerves and/or improve your skills, then check out my article, “4 Public Speaking Tips to Be More Engaging and Confident.”

Becoming a subject matter expert

Okay, so you’ve set your sights on becoming a speaker. People/companies/conferences are going to pay money to watch you take the big stage. Step 1 is getting laser focused on what you have to say that is so interesting.

I think the fastest and most effective way to build your brand as a speaker is to find a niche topic that few (if any) other speakers tackle. For example, in dentistry if you want to lecture about implants you’ll find the couch to be quite crowded. My niche was to lecture about implant restoration complications. Twenty years ago when I was a fresh graduate, no one was talking about how this treatment could go sideways. My colleagues were attending lectures about how great dental implants were and I was the little boy pointing out that the emperor was stark naked. I was young and inexperienced, but I was willing to get in front of a group of dentists and address the elephant in the room. And I shared my own failures which, in dental circles, is unfortunately not often done.

Step 2 is becoming a true subject matter expert. Immerse yourself in every research paper, textbook, and Private Facebook Group that remotely deals with your chosen topic. Figure out how to summarize complex science into practical advice for your peers. Form opinions. Find the bleeding edge of your profession and poke at it. Become such a nerd about your niche that you can justify standing in front of your colleagues to teach them a thing or two.

Getting noticed

Now that you’re an expert on a topic (hopefully something that’s unique), Step 3 is to announce it to the universe. There are two strategies: networking and publishing content.

(1) Power Networking

I know that you’ve been told countless times that networking is important. You meet people, tell them about yourself, maybe hand out a business card, and then probably never talk to them again. Yes, networking is like fishing and you will only get a few bites that lead to big catches. I do believe there are ways to vastly improve your chances of meaningful connections, like a fisherman with the most sumptuous looking bait on their hook.

I call it Power Networking because it’s a more strategic and proactive process. Here are the basic rules:

• Go to conferences… all of them

  You want to lecture at conferences, right? So go to as many of them as you can as an attendee. Spend some time watching your favorites from the audience, but spend twice as much time on the exhibitor floor. These company representatives will likely be the first people to give you lecturing opportunities. Get to know them. Let them know you’re interested in becoming a speaker and that you like their material/technology/service.

• Make deposits before you make withdrawals

  “Hi, nice to meet you. Now do something for me.” Obviously that sounds terrible, but that’s what we do when we meet someone and make any sort of request at that first encounter. Please don’t introduce yourself and then ask them to give you a speaking gig. Instead, explore ways you can provide them value to build the relationship. For example, you might already have lectured a few times and you let them know that you’re routinely mentioning their material/technology/service to audiences. Or perhaps you can introduce them to a colleague who can be a potential new customer. You’re making deposits.

• Say YES a lot

  After a relationship has been established, at some point the company representative will bite. They might ask if you want to sample a new product or record a testimonial for their social media. These are not the paid speaking gigs you’re looking for— and they may not compensate you at all for whatever favor they are asking of you— but they are positive signs that the company is exploring working with you. You are still making deposits and building the relationship. Take on these small projects enthusiastically; they will often lead to speaking opportunities.

(2) Publish or perish

Once upon a time, creating content meant publishing in a peer-review journal or industry magazine. There were limited media channels for your colleagues to consume new material and the club of influential professionals was limited and invitation-only. Today we have many, many more forums, including blogs, podcasts, and social media. There has been a revolution in self-publishing; the influential have been joined by the influencer. Honestly I am concerned about its effects on healthcare professionals and the quality of content being shared. I won’t get on my soapbox here, but I published an article in the Journal of the American College of Dentists, “Can a Dentist Maintain Standards on Social Media.”

I digress. The upside of these new media channels is that you have endless opportunities to be seen and heard. I had success about 15 years ago with my blog, The Curious Dentist. I committed to publishing twice a week and building an audience via Facebook. During my Power Networking with companies, I could pull up my articles that referenced their products to show them I was an evangelist.

Establish your brand online and hit your niche topic so hard that companies have to take notice. When Power Networking with your potential partners, share your audience size and show that one post that “went viral.”

Your first gigs

When you’re starting out, your early lecture opportunities will likely be smaller forums. In dentistry, that means local study clubs or association meetings. These aren’t glamorous and you’ll have to speak over the sounds of your colleagues eating dinner, but that’s show business, baby!

These lectures will probably not pay well, either. That’s okay, don’t look for a big pay day on your first gigs; you’re also being paid in experience.

About twenty years ago, one of my first lectures was on behalf a new dental implant company called Neoss. Since they were new on the scene, they did not have a large stable of speakers and Key Opinion Leaders yet. I had tried them out in my practice and loved their product. In a crowded marketplace, they had developed several innovations that made the dentist’s life easier and improved patient outcomes. That means it would be easier to create lecture material since it wasn’t just a generic or knock-off technology. But even better than that, they were interested in my niche topic of implant complications.

I was building a relationship with their local territory sales manager, John Glasser. I would photograph my cases and build Power Point slides even though I didn’t have any audience to show them to. But I showed them to John and he liked what he saw. My value to him was that I was an early adopter of his new company, I could appeal to younger dentists, and I had slides ready to go. So John gave me one of my first lecture opportunities.

It was a local study club hosted by a periodontist. John was looking to get some face time with the twenty-or-so dentists that would gather several times a year for dinner and continuing education. I was looking to test out my new material and call myself a bona fide lecturer. There would be no honorarium for this gig and I was perfectly fine with that. The company was already paying a good amount of money to the event planner to sponsor the event.

The lecture went well, John gave me great feedback, and a few months later there was another offer for a paying speaking opportunity. I began speaking for Neoss around Long Island, then around New York, then beyond. Two watershed moments in my lecturing career were when I boarded a plan for Seattle for my first cross country lecture, and later getting my passport for my first international gig in Australia.

Becoming less reliant on companies

Companies in your industry are a great way to break into professional speaking. But there are some pitfalls to look out for.

If you only ever lecture for a single company, or if you lecture for any company that will hire you, then you can suffer brand erosion. “He’s just a shill,” is the phrase I’ve heard whispered about some colleagues. Unfortunately it’s true of some of my peers. But it’s not really about how many companies you work with; your peers can sense when a professional is just saying whatever a company is paying them to say.

The answer is to try to work with a couple of companies (ideally not direct competitors… that can get messy) and to maintain your integrity with content. I have turned down lucrative lecture opportunities because a company wanted me to show their own corporate slides and make claims I hadn’t verified myself. That is a guaranteed way to lose credibility with your peers. Even when I do love the product/technology/service, I am careful to not be overtly commercial in my remarks. Your audience wants to learn about what your using to get great outcomes, but you can share that information without superlatives and hollow phrases like, “this product is a total gamechanger!”

Neoss, along with a few other companies, were terrific strategic partners in my journey to become a regular on the lecture circuit. I still work with them, but the dynamic has changed. Instead of them calling me with an opportunity, I call them. Let me explain.

After a decade of extensive lecturing, I started to get calls from professional event planners. These might be regional study clubs, state dental meetings, or international trade shows. So instead of a company like Neoss sourcing the speaking event and plugging me in, the events were now reaching out to me directly. This is the goal for professional speaking; you’ve successfully built a brand that gets butts in seats and delivers a good show.

Companies still play a role in this new relationship. When an event planner reaches out to me, it is not uncommon that they ask if there are any groups that will sponsor my lecture (i.e. pay money to the conference to help offset my honorarium). So now I am calling the company to inform them of my lecture opportunity and see if they want to come along for the ride. The dynamic has shifted, but these relationships are still quite important.

I have an agreement with the companies I work with that I will always include them in my lectures and say nice things about them, regardless of whether they sponsor the event or not. I don’t want to have a pay-to-play, transactional relationship with companies, especially the ones that invested in me as I was getting my start. If they help sponsor the event, they get some additional perks from the event planner— typically a booth to display their wares. After I reference their goods and services in my presentation, their exhibitor gets traffic and warm leads for sales. If they decide to not sponsor the event, I reference their goods and services all the same but those warm leads can run cold. Of course, I disclose my financial relationships, past and present, with audiences and allow them to decide if I’m a shill or just genuinely enthusiastic. Hopefully the latter.

Final thoughts

I’m excited for you to accelerate your career as a professional speaker. We need better storytellers in healthcare, presenting sound science and inspiring colleagues to improve outcomes of care.

Becoming a polished, professional speaker takes years of hard work, building relationships and staring a blank Power Point slides waiting to be filled with your ideas. It’s practicing new material, trying it out in front of an audience, and then reworking it over and over until it works. But if you get juice from it, lecturing can be one of the most rewarding endeavors of your career.