Speakers, Trainers, Consultants and Coaches Make 21
Sunday, November 19, 2006
Are you Dabbling in the Four Disciplines?Our industry offers four different professional roles to
choose from -- and making the right choice is crucial to
your success. In this article, we'll describe four types of
private practices -- Speaking, Training, Consulting and
Coaching and explore the pros and cons -- and earnings
potential -- for each. We'll discuss the dangers of
dabbling and take a personal inventory of its impact on
your future.
"Dabblers are rarely DO-ers and DO-ers are rarely
dabblers."
One of the things that people in our industry have in
common is that many of our business cards say that we
are a "Speaker, Trainer, Consultant, Coach". Some may
choose just two or three of those identifiers, but more
and more are putting ALL 4 or even MORE. In addition to
Speaker, Trainer, Consultant, and Coach we also have
Author, Facilitator, Counselor, Lecturer, Professor and a
growing litany of others. Its amazing the kind of creative
labels that some people have put on their cards, but the
four basic disciplines in our industry are Speaker, Trainer,
Consultant and Coach.
Over the more than two decades we've been working
with human development professionals, we've discovered
that the people who achieve success in our industry are
the people who entered the profession with a very clear
picture of who they are and what they were trying to do.
We believe it is such a critical factor to their success that
it has become central to the work we do with our
instructors and instructor candidates. As someone
progresses through the pre-work for becoming certified in
the MasterStream Method, we help them explore the
differences between the four disciplines in vivid detail,
and before their certification is over, each newly-certified
professional has to make a personal choice as to which
one of them he or she favors. Likewise, the success you
will achieve and the speed at which you will achieve it
depends on you understanding the choices -- and making
the one that is best for you.
So your first step -- whether you are embarking on a new
career or trying to take your existing business to a new
level -- is to distinguish between the various roles you
can serve. Keep in mind your background, skills,
experience, and goals when making your evaluation. Your
choice will establish a basis on which you will focus your
business strategy and marketing plan.
Let's take a closer look at each of the professional roles
and explore some of their pro's and con's:
Speaker -- A Speaker is someone who travels frequently
on a national or even international basis, stands in front
of a large audience for a relatively short period of time,
delivers an upbeat message, and gets paid a substantial
amount of money for doing so. On the downside, as the
audience gets bigger, the chance for meaningful audience
contact suffers -- and regardless of the quality of work
they do, when they step off stage they are generally
unemployed. That's the nature of the beast for being a
professional speaker. In order for a speaker to fill 100
days of billable services over the course of a year, he or
she is going to need to have the better part of 100
different clients. They may have the occasional client who
will bring them back again, but in all likely hood the
intervals between those engagements is going to be
measured in months or years before someone will be
brought back. To make matters worse, the Speaking
profession is the one most susceptible to changes in the
economy and, as the events of 9/11 clearly
demonstrated, changes in the marketplace' s willingness
to travel to or sit in a large public venue. While speakers
command a seemingly large fee for their services, their
total income divided by a 40-hour workweek normalizes
their actual earnings. For example, a speaker with two
$5,000 engagements per week is actually making about
the same as a consultant billing themselves out at $300
per hour. Finally, to develop a successful career as a
speaker requires a very specific marketing plan, very
specific marketing tools, a very marketable "main stage"
image and a lot of time "paying your dues" before your
reputation earns you access to the bureaus and meeting
planners who in large part control the pool of potential
bookings.
Trainer -- A Trainer spends considerably less time in
airplanes and rental cars, and can build a very tidy
practice while staying relatively close to home. They
spend more time with a smaller group of people and have
an opportunity to get to know their students more
intimately as they share practical information with their
audiences. The goal of a trainer is to impart a body of
knowledge, and to make sure that knowledge has been
absorbed to whatever degree the client has asked them
to attain. If the trainer does a good job, then the
likelihood of being asked to come back and do more
training is very high. Also, since trainers focus on longer
programs than speakers -- routinely conducting programs
ranging from a full day to an entire week -- trainers tend
to be more content-rich. If they choose to focus on
mission-critical topics like sales, leadership and customer
service, trainers have an even greater opportunity for
repeat business with their clients. When a corporate
client finds a trainer they love and a training program
they love, then they are going to continue to use that
program and that trainer in whatever frequency they
need it done. In addition, training engagements generally
feature far more billable hours in the customization
process prior to and the reinforcement program following
the main training program. A trainer markets their
programs as much as they market themselves and
building a successful training practice requires a very
different approach than the route taken by speakers.
Consultant -- A Consultant is an individual with very
specific knowledge and skills, who is brought in to serve
as an adjunct to a client's management team. They are
contracted to work on a particular project, deal with a
challenging issue, serve in an advisory capacity, or
complete a specific task, but one way or another,
consultants are brought in to DO something. Once that
something is done, the contract ends. While consultants
may travel to a destination anywhere on the planet, once
they arrive, they are there for the duration of the
contract, so in their daily routine, they stay pretty local to
where they landed. The challenge with consulting (and
coaching for that matter) is that you are trading time for
dollars. As a trainer or speaker you develop one program
and you can keep doing it over and over, but the work
you do as a consultant is unique to each specific client
more often than not. But the biggest problem with
building a stable and successful consulting practice is that
during the time the consultant is working with a particular
client, they don't have or take the time to continue
marketing themselves. The longer the contract, the
longer the period of unemployment that follows. Feast or
famine is the reality for most consultants.
Coach -- Coaches work primarily with individuals on a
one-on-one basis to pinpoint areas in which they might
be in need of attention and focus their energy on helping
their clients take care of whatever their issues happen to
be. Within the realm of coaches, you will find a broad
range of levels of intensity and involvement from "life
coach" to "performance coach." Whether the individual is
trying to better understand themselves, to set
meaningful goals, to be held accountable or to develop
greater skills, a coach could be the perfect tool for the
right client. In general terms, a coach is a professional
who is working with an individual to deal with specific
areas of need. It is certainly possible for a coach to do
more of a group kind of thing, maybe a small cluster of 3
or 4 people, but by and large what they are doing is just
for those specific people. As a result, the likelihood that
these clients will become large contracts is low because
they are dealing with individuals. Coaches have very
little need to travel and can work very effectively with
their clients over the telephone. But, while a coach's goal
is to build a rather small pool of lifetime clients, the truth
is that most people who seek out the guidance of a
coach do so for a much shorter period, generally a few
weeks to a few months. Creating a stable and
consistent income stream proves to be the coach's
greatest challenge since the hourly rate tends to be
lower than that of any of the other three professional
roles and the coach must collect their fees from an
individual rather than an organization.
Perhaps the biggest problem that people in our industry
face is dabbling in these four roles and not focusing on
just one of them. If someone were to focus their energy
on one of these roles, they have a much greater chance
of becoming successful in that discipline. But if you start
to spread your energy across multiple and very different
roles then you are also spreading out your marketing
resources too thin to have any real impact, and you are
also confusing the market place as to what it is that you
do and what it is that that they can call on you for. By
putting your time and energy into just ONE of these four
areas, you will find that success is a much easier summit
to reach.
------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -
T. Falcon Napier offers professional certification programs
in the MasterStream Method for both individuals and
corporations . Visit http://www.MasterSt ream.com for
more free articles and assessment tools for building your
professional practice.
Leave your response