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Some speakers / lecturers get paid £5.000 to speak.

These guys generally speak for about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, on a big stage and they usually fly in from somewhere else and fly back out again (first class, business class at worst)

The very top of the pyramid in our industry is about £10,000.

The guys at the top get paid this because they sell stuff so that means that people will walk out of the lecture theatre and buy what they show. That’s where the value is.

Other speakers in other industries get paid similar amounts of money because of what they’ve done or where they have been seen.

Many years ago, I was at a dental awards ceremony where Kriss Akabusi was the Keynote speaker after dinner and he was fantastic. I found myself sitting at the table though with the PR company that had put it together and they told me that they actually wanted Carol Smillie or Carol Vorderman but they couldn’t afford them.

You may not even remember who Carol Smillie was but you probably know who Carol Vorderman is and nearly 20 years ago she wanted £25,000 to come for two and a half hours. After two and a half hours someone taps her on the shoulder and she walks out!

Dentistry is a bit cheaper than that generally but there are still people at the top of the tree who think they’re Carol Vorderman.

I have ‘lectured’ a thousand times or more, I understand how the system works and when you start out you start out for free.

The ability to transfer the information that you have from your clinical experience to an audience is a learned skill and it has a style. For some groups it works and for some it doesn’t and you have to find a niche, an area where you’re successful at it following practice and reflection.

Just because you have done this many of that or so many of this, does not mean you have the ability to transfer that information into a useable way to an audience.

Just because you made a lot of money in dentistry doesn’t mean you know how to talk about it.

Why not use Ed Sheeran as an example? When he released ‘You need me, I don’t need you’ he had done ‘about 1000 shows’.

Of those shows that he had done most of them had been for free and a lot of them had been in people’s houses – that’s how he learned his trade.

When you start to talk about a subject in dentistry that you want to talk about you usually do it for free. Once you’ve done it a few hundred times you get to be better at it and once you add value to the people that are listening, you get paid for it.

Generally, when you stop working you lose all your validity and are unable to speak anymore, unless you manage to find a niche in research or observation and reporting.

Dentists get paid a lot of money for their day job (doing dentistry) and that type of income generation generally doesn’t transfer into speaking.

In my experience the greatest mistake people make is forgetting that the opportunity to speak to your colleagues is a privilege and certainly one that you miss if it gets taken away for any reason.

Blog Post Number: 1743