The Disadvantage of Hosting Events and Speaking at Gigs Annually | Facebook Walk With Reid
Reid: Hello sex geek! It is Reid Mihalko from https://reidaboutsex.com/ creator of http://www.sexgeeksummercamp.com and this is going to be some business advice because I got the green sex geek summer camp T-shirt and when you see the canoe with the two Hitachi magic wands or the magic wand as they call it now as the kids are calling it. When you see that logo unless I’m wearing a sweater then this is a business advice for sex educators and it’s a little windy today. I was going to walk by the water but the wind is blowing so hard that I decided to walk you around this other neighborhood and hopefully the buildings, see where we are. Hopefully these buildings will keep it a little…little quieter but now there’s trucks going by, there’s somebody with a with a leaf blower this is why people recording sound studios ladies and gentlemen.
As we do our little walk together today like chime in let me know where you’re viewing from? I love seeing where people are and please feel free to continue emailing me questions and…and things. We’ve got a lot of non sex educator emails coming to me @Reid R.E.I.D Reid@Reidaboutsex.com/ and the….but I’m also curious about like business questions for sex educators, workshop facilitators people like that. Yeah! This has been really fun doing our daily walks and I don’t want to jinx it but we haven’t missed the day yet since we started in early January. So I’m going to keep it going on I’ve never really done a thing where I did something every day for a year except maybe when I was 12 and discovered masturbation or when I discovered coffee and…and started drinking coffee every day. Let see, so talking about things hum I say Hi! Hi Christian. Sweden! Oh my goodness, that’s awesome! We love Sweden. And Kayla! Hi Kayla! Oh, mwah! Mwah! Mwah! Mwah!
So, here’s something I had a really interesting conversation this morning. I had to get up early ‘coz I have to talk to somebody on the East Coast, Ken [Inaudible 00:02:39] who is a business consultant geeky dude in the sex you know sex adult toy Sex Ed, Sex Ed world. I got introduced to…to Ken from Emily Morse who and Hi Emily! Thank you so much for introducing me to Ken and we had some nerd brain sex this morning. Just about you know speaking gigs and hosting events and just the business of being an educator and being like a personality if you’re you know like a sex celebrity or something like that or you know anybody in the expert field where you market your advice, you position yourself as an educator in a way where people can find you and not all you know like they’re some of my friends, some of the people to come to sex geek summer camp they’re in like the sex therapy, sex therapist world, relationship counselor world where you know people who need who are looking for a therapist, who are looking for a counselor they know to kind of do those Google searches and so there’s kind of a business model already out there for folks like that who can you know get the licensing and plug themselves into to that world but a lot of us as relationship coaches, intimacy coaches, educator [Inaudible 00:04:03] teachers whatever you know however you want to identify. We don’t have that kind of system so to speak to plug ourselves into. You know for me, I’m not going to position were any…any entity will allow me to accept insurance to pay for my services. So it’s how do you market your services and get your name out there? And one of those ways was just you know that’s kind of like the expert industry where you’re you know using social media I would advocate to promote your services so that people can find you and so that people learn what it is that you do. And for those of you who want free resource that will help you find words to explain what it is that you do, you can go to https://reidaboutsex.com/IDoSexEd and that’ll give you a…a link to sign up for to get a worksheet and two things I want you to do: one I would like you to go download that worksheet because I think it helped a lot of people and I get feedback that it does but I also want you to watch like the behind the scenes of what’s happening right now. I’m talking to you and teaching and just maybe I’m just sharing pontificating on my thing you know my ideas and thoughts. I send people to a link that has a little video or blurb that encourages people to download a free thing that will help them in this case the worksheet and then you…you get the email with the link because not everybody can do the worksheet right away. So you should email them so they have the link for later and then you can continue to build a relationship with them and teach them, what it is that you do? In this instance, I help sex educators and…and other sex positive entrepreneurs get better at the business of teaching people what is that they do so that they can then hire them. And I would advocate in the way that we talked at our camp that you Always Be Educating we say ABE. Abraham Lincoln or Abe Vigoda or whatever there are other Abe that you want to put in there to remember this but you just educate people for free. You teach them in fun ways. I’m geeking out on Facebook live and walking around my neighborhood to get outside a little bit and hopefully this all works really well and then people get excited. They feel like they’re better at solving certain problems of theirs. In this case educators trying to learn how to make a living and then if you’re interested in camp you learn about camp because I mentioned camp. If you want to learn how to design workshops you check out sex geek design studio and that’s https://reidaboutsex.com/designstudio and https://reidaboutsex.com/campFAQ for this year’s camp for if you only ask questions.
So you can you can promote the things that you do in ways that are fun for you. Back to Ken’s thing and now my phone is telling me it had a full battery but now it’s telling me it’s ten percent. I hate this! I’m going to get my phone fixed. What Ken and I were talking about with this idea of sometimes you do speaking gigs for free or for less than you would normally charge because the…the gig itself is really useful for you and its good positioning. It’s a good business opportunity because the opportunity will allow you to do other things. So we’re talking about this and we’re talking about hosting the same event annually or you know several times a year if it’s a multiple…multiple more frequently run event and Ken brought up this really interesting…I got…concept that I’ve never thought about before never occurred to me is, if the same kind of people are coming to the same event over and over again, you’re speaking gig the reasons you might want to say yes to a speaking gig at first and maybe do it for free or maybe lessen your speaking fee because maybe the event doesn’t have a huge budget there’s just enough money there for them to pay you so you have to figure out how to get paid later you know on the back end so to speak.. So for me I can speak at a conference for free sometimes because I’ll get a bunch of people’s emails, I’ll meet a bunch of new prospective clients or customers and maybe there’s so much promotion about that event that is just good for my brand. However, hosting that same event each year for the next six years there’s a kind of a diminishing return perhaps to me doing that gig. So there’s…there’s a word for depreciation so like there’s a….the event the benefits of the event to me and my brand could possibly depreciate over time and I just never thought of it like that.
So, again like this is your…your reasoning to do certain things may change over time and that’s okay like that’s normal, that’s fine and when you negotiate opportunities business opportunities with companies and organizations and individuals or conference you might want to bring up that conversation that “hey, you know over time this might not be a good fit for us” and so we may just want to kind of acknowledge that at some point we may break up or that our needs may shift and that that’s going to be cool and it’s the idea of like pre-negotiating the break up conversation even in your business deals, not to be fatalistic but for you to let people have a bigger picture of who you are and what your business is about so that when you need to change your mind, or when you are negotiating like a five year contract or something like that you could negotiate into it; check-ins every once in a while just to make sure that everything still feels good for everybody. One so that you’re not locked in to a bad situation or situation that becomes bad or less useful and I just thought that was a really interesting concept that hadn’t thought about the…the depreciation of opportunity and I thought that I would share that with you because I think that might for some of you be a more advanced negotiation and just kind of bigger picture business con….concept but I think it can be just useful to look at it like that and especially for me that supplies because I get approached to speak at things and host and emcee things a lot which I love. It’s really fun because it makes me an excuse to wear my tuxedo which is still the best money I ever spent was buying a tuxedo. I bought it used almost 25 years ago and it still rocks.
So, I don’t know. I just wanted to share that with you. It was in my head. I’m sharing it with you to anchor the concept from myself and also to because I think it’s useful and I try to do a good job of not hiding information and tools from the com…my community but also I’m curious about what you think? For those of you who teach and do speaking gigs like how does this is…land on you?
So that’s it! Apparently my phone is about to die. Again! Leave some questions email me at Reid@Reidaboutsex.com/. I’ll… when I get home, I’ll check out the comments because they’re hard to read just on my little phone but…but then I’ll put the links up in the description for the stuff that we talked about today. Thank you so much for giving me excuse to get outside and to enjoy the wind, the breeze, the sun!
I hope things are good for you. Email me let me know how it’s going and the…hopefully someday I’ll see you at camp or at sex geek design studio or at the conference or online somewhere and the…
Thanks everybody! Thanks Ken! For the brain sex this morning and thanks Emily Mores for all that you do and I’ll see you guys later. Bye! Mwah!