What does community mean for public speakers?

Community means getting more done in a faster and simpler way. It is a shortcut that makes the journey more enjoyable. If you want to be a public speaker, it also means saving up to $3050.88 in saved time per week.

Think about the value of a community from a mathematical point of view. These things are hard to quantify, but we are going to do it anyway.

The Pareto distribution power-law states that 20 percent of the work will provide 80 percent of the results. Identifying those twenty percent is worth a lot of money. It means that one speaker being part of a community will get $3050.88 value in just one week (assuming an US-standard average hourly income).

Sounds nerdy and confusing? It is both, but we’ll try to break it down as we go along.

For now know that a power law is a functional relationship, where two quantities relate to each other in such a way that changes in one will result in a proportional relative change in the other. In other words, the effect can be substantially larger (or smaller) than the cause.

For instance, one such quantity could be the hours you put in. The other quantity could be the money you get back.

This sounds confusing. In reality, it is a mechanism so pervasive that you’re likely to not even pay attention to it when you come across it.

For instance: If you are very poor, getting an additional ten dollars makes a substantial difference to your happiness and well-being. If your household is making more than $105.000 (and you live in The United States), you really will not feel much difference even if your income increases to $200.000.

The mechanism is essential to get your head around regardless of what you do for a living. It means you have a lot to win if you can focus on what is essential. This is hard if you are on your own. If you are part of a good community of people with the same goal, you’re very likely to jump straight to doing the powerful 20 percent of tasks.

Getting down to business

There are a bunch of things that you need to master to be a professional speaker.

Let us, for the sake of clarity in argument, focus on five things, that you need to get in order:

• Find out how to get a booking agency (Read about why you’d want to do that here)
• Learn to set up shop on Facebook
• Design and write promotional materials
• Organize your presentation
• Get a website

These things can all take quite a while to get right. Especially if you are trying your hand at them for the first time.

These situations are where the community provides a shortcut. As a rule of thumb, it can help you identify the 20 percent of your work that yields 80 percent of the results. Doing this is the difference between struggling and winning.

The value of community

Most of the above tasks aren’t hard if you put your mind to it. The issue is, that if you want to do good at them, you need to fail a few times and learn. That takes time.

Let’s throw some numbers in there and say they’re each going to take up about 30 hours to complete. Some take more, some take less, but for now, it is a useful average.

If only 20 percent of your time is going to be efficient, that means that these 30 hours tasks could be done in 6 hours. Barring, of course, all the time used on distractions like making tea, calling friends and looking out the window.

At 30 hours per task and five tasks, this equals 150 hours. If you work for 8 hours per day, that is almost 19 days. That is a lot of time.

At 6 hours per tasks and five tasks, this equals 30 hours. If you still work 8 hours per day, that is a little less than four days.

Even if you add one day to browse the community and seek advice, this is a lot of saved time. Even if you spend an entire workday reading up on these topics in the community before getting to work, you will still have saved 112 hours.

If you are in the United States and make the average hourly income ($27.24 at the time of writing), this means that you save $3050.88 in wasted time just from using our community resources solving these five tasks. This value equals 62 months of membership of Speakersloft.com. And we haven’t even counted the pleasure of meeting new people and building your network.

Imagine the savings you can gain over a year or longer as a member.

You can save $3050 dollars in a little more than a week by using the power of community.

Multiply by talent

You are not the only speaker in town, and this is where it gets really exciting.

You may reason that a thinner herd of speakers would be good. In that case, there would be less competition for the available jobs. That analysis would be wrong as speaking is not a zero-game and the size of the market is a function of the talent in the niche. Read more about why speaking is not a zero-sum game here.

Working with other speakers will always get your further than treating them as competitors.

Let us advance the overall argument by giving the number of people who want to break into speaking a value. Let’s say there are 5.000 budding speakers, whom all need to complete the five tasks and that neither is a professional at any of the tasks.

For one person it was 150 hours or (almost) 19 days. So for 5 000 people, it is 750 000 hours and 95 000 days.

750 000 hours equals $20.4 million of added value in saved time to the public speaker market. If this is even in part invested back into bettering ourselves as speakers, we will add tremendous value to the whole business. Doing this means more demand for speakers and more business for everyone.

This calculation is a piece of utterly fictional math of course. That doesn’t mean it is not essential or correct.

Tasks like the ones we are looking at in the above are plentiful. There are many more than the five mentioned here. They are menial tasks that become incredible time-sinks. Collaboration in a community is skipping all this.

If 5 000 people independently try to learn how to be masters of (for instance) tagging videos on Youtube to get the most views, they will, each take just as long as one person doing it.

If one guy learns it and tells everyone else how to do it, the 4 999 people do it in one-fifth of the time they would otherwise have spent on it.

On top of that, the community will have gained one subject-matter expert (video tagging on Youtube). Not too bad for what is essentially one week’s work.

Greasing the wheels

Let it be our closing phrase that all of this only works if people in the network trust each other enough to share valuable experiences. This information is as often as not the things that didn’t work. They could share the ways NOT to build a website; they could share the ways NOT to approach agencies.

This could save your peers, and everyone working in speaking, countless hours. It could be your contribution to speaking.

As a matter of mathematical fact, if you don’t join a community and build with it, there is a genuine chance that everyone else will outrun you, even using the least trusting and thus most inefficient of networks.

We want to know what you learned the hard way. In return, we promise to share all our tough learnings from building SpeakersLoft.com.

NOTE: I have no statistical basis for saying that you can save 80 percent of your time. It could be more; it could be less. Either way, the point still stands.

I am using 80/20 as a variable because it was popularized as the Pareto distribution; a power-law probability distribution that can describe a wide range of phenomenon.

Come join us at Speakersloft.com