So we're almost at the end of this course. And only Now am I going to talk about speaker bureaus. Why is that a lot of people assume, hey, I'm a speaker. Now I've got a business card. This is I'm a professional speaker. All I have to do is write to all the speaker bureaus and they'll start booking me.
Sorry to tell you, it just doesn't work like that. If I were you, and you're not firmly established in your speaking career, I just wouldn't spend any time communicating with Speaker bureaus because you're not a value to them. Speaker bureaus work on getting a commission of the sale. So they get could be as little as 15%. It could be as much as 30% 20 25% is more the average. So if someone's going to spend a lot of time marketing, you booking you collecting all the paperwork back and forth, ask yourself, would you rather get twice 5% of a beginning speaker who makes $1,000 a speech?
Or would you rather get 25% of Hillary Clinton's $200,000? For basically the same work? Well, obviously they want to go for the larger speakers, they are looking for well known speakers now. Not every speaker bureau represents Hillary Clinton. She's represented by Harry Walker and so no relation. But still speaker bureaus want to represent people who are established.
Brand names have been on the circuit for 10 1520 years, and are making $20,000 or more quite often. And they they really don't like to deal with people who are charging less than 70 $500 because when you are looking at the 25%, commission it the numbers are just too small. So that's why it's simply a waste of time. You're not what they're looking for. You know, it's it's very difficult to move out to Hollywood and you were the star of your High School Musical and just show up at endeavor ICM or say, hey, George Clooney, where's your agent? I need an agent.
It just doesn't work that way. Typically, although it's probably easier doing that in Hollywood than with the speaker bureaus. You need to track record, the thing that's going to get speaker bureaus interested in you is that you have a brand name people are talking about you as the expert, people who've seen you speak and are saying what a great speaker you are. And for you to have a track record of being paid a lot of money per speech for a number of years. You do those things, and then we can talk about the whole speaker bureau thing and your demo reel and all that but your best demo reel frankly, should be your YouTube channel, which should be updated every single day. So again, it's not the speaker bureaus are bad people, some them are great people.
But if you are an aspiring professional speaker, they are not the solution. There's no easy solution. No one is going to market you. Except for you and you've heard me say it but it's it's really true.