Good Life Project - Working for Free: The Good, The Bad, The Truth

Episode Date: May 7, 2015

After years of paying to wear your favorite shoes, you're getting paid to be seen in them.After years of speaking for free and paying to travel, you're now getting paid to speak.After years of buying your favorite meals, jewels and gear, you're getting paid to eat, wear and use them.After years of writing for free, you're getting paid to contribute.How did this happen? How do you go from working for "free" or even paying for the "privilege" to getting paid to do the exact same thing?It's all about a little thing called “brand hand." It's the defining element in your ability to make the leap from paying to learn to being paid to build your own brand.And it's what we're diving into in today's Good Life Project Riff.Along the way, we'll bust some huge myths about what's really happening when you're working for "free." We'll come to the realization that it's never really about free versus paid, but rather cash versus non-cash compensation.We'll dive into how and when "free" is not only okay, but smart, when it should be off the table and how to leverage this experience to make the leap from non-cash compensation to cold, hard money.If you'd like to read the full text of this week's Riff, you can find it here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey guys, it's Jonathan. Thank you so much for joining me for another Good Life Project Riff. Today's riff is entitled The Myth of Working for Free. So after years of paying to wear your favorite shoes, they're now paying you to be seen in them. After years of speaking for free and paying to travel, they're now paying you to speak. After years of ordering your favorite drink, they're now paying you to drink it. After years of buying your favorite jewels, they're paying you to wear them. After years of writing for free, they're now paying you to contribute. I'm fascinated by this transition. I call it the brand hand moment. It's that point where the value of your brand and contribution becomes so self-evident or clearly

expressed that it gives you enough power and leverage to start getting paid cold hard cash for the very thing that you were paying cold hard cash to do the day before. I've often wondered what is it that happens in that moment? So sometimes you can peg this shift to a specific happening. You write a book that becomes a massive bestseller. You win some kind of industry award or accolade that anoints your arrival into the land of brand hand. Or you give a talk or post a video that explodes online. You build a company, a venture, or an event that defines a moment and becomes a phenomenon. I call this booming your way into brand hand. And sometimes it can be that. But other times, it's a much slower, more grueling, and gradual evolutionary process. Every day you build a bit more social

currency, value, brand equity, and over time, months or even years, your brand evolves to a point where instead of paying to wear or consume or contribute, you're now being paid to do the very same thing. Truth told, this is the way it happens for most people. Going from paying to be paid is a blend of perceived value and demand. So let's take the world of speaking as an interesting example. You start out believing that you have something to say, and truth is, you may or may not. And even if you do, it'll take a lot of work to develop your message, your voice, your tone and presence to a level where you're contributing serious value. So how do you do that?

Well, you practice. You talk your way into any conference room, gathering or stage where people will have you. And in the beginning, it's not about money. It's about not sucking. Because we all do in the beginning. We're supposed to. Your compensation at this point is data. It's having someone else pay to create the forum for you to practice and hone your craft,

your message, your presence, and your voice. And there is very real value in that. Along the way, you start to get better and people start to learn a bit more when you talk. You learn to tell a better story, to give information in just the right way, to entertain and inspire. You learn how to engage emotions and modulate your spoken voice. You develop a point of view and language to share it that is uniquely yours. You cultivate a sense of physicality on stage that draws people in. You start to move from being a newbie on a quest to learn to being an evolving brand. So you get invited to share your brand in process with larger and larger rooms,

but still you're speaking for free, except that you're not. You're getting paid. You just haven't crossed the cash threshold yet. Your compensation at this stage is the opportunity to leverage the resources of the organizer to bring together increasingly larger numbers of people who will be exposed to your work and start to build your community, your personal brand, your following, and position of thought leadership. Your compensation is the form that, well-leveraged, gives you the opportunity to move closer and closer to that moment when you land brand hand. So over time, the blend of your maturation of craft and skill and brand as a speaker leads to so many opportunities to speak that you can't keep up the pace for a quote free, which we really know isn't free. So you start to charge a small bit of money to speak

at places where the size of the event or the alignment of the audience does not provide adequate, you know, quote compensation to build your brand. And very likely you continue to speak without cash changing hands for certain communities and groups you're just drawn to serve, regardless of the economics or brand opportunity, because that's just what you do. Then it starts to happen. You've built a name, lots of people know you, you've got something powerful to say and the craft to say it in a way that makes people line up to hear it. You build enough brand hand that you become what's known as a draw. People will actually come to the event because they know you're speaking. They want to hear from you and likely meet you. Still, this is entirely relative. So you may now

have enough brand hand to be a draw at a smaller or more tightly niched event, but not massive national ones. So the organizers of the smaller ones proactively ask you to attend and pay you cash money to come. But the bigger ones still expect you to speak, quote, for free. Because at that level, they've still got brand hand over you. Over time, if you keep working and growing and building, you end up the best at what you do. And you build brand hand on a national level. You become sought out by organizers of the largest events, offered plum keynote positions and lineup and paid not just in brand building opportunity, but in money. And you gain exposure to more-level organizers. And if your business is built upon, say, a broader basket of services or products, you gain access to potential clients.

So a good friend of mine who's a multi-time New York Times bestselling author, gets paid five figures for big keynotes, still does a handful of events every year for free. Why? Because he's not actually doing them for free. He's well aware of the non-cash elements of compensation, so he chooses those events very strategically. He looks for gatherings that will either build his positioning as an industry expert, give him access to an audience of direct match prospects for his consulting company or give him green room access to other speakers who are high level decision makers at potential client firms. Almost entirely on the back of this strategy, he's built an eight figure consulting firm. The non-cash compensation he's mined in these quote free opportunities has massively exceeded the value of the highest

cash-based keynote fee he's ever been paid. This, by the way, has been my journey in a way. So I haven't boomed my way into the bigs. It's been an evolutionary process. I spent a lot of years paying to go to conferences, then going for the perception of free in exchange for speaking while I built my brand and my craft, and then getting paid to speak at bigger and bigger gatherings. It's taken years. I now have what I would probably consider a reasonable amount of brand in, but still nowhere near the top circuit speakers who make their entire living doing it. And funny enough, while it'd be nice to get paid what they earn, I don't aspire to ever be speaking at that level of frequency that it would take to get there. I love being home. I love playing with my girls and making

cool things. So the speaking part for me is more about sharing what I'm discovering along the way to making stuff that matters. And here's the thing. Had I taken the stance in the early days that cash is the only form of compensation I'd accept every time I stepped in front of a room, I would have missed out on immense non-cash compensation that was being offered. The ability to leverage someone else's resources and efforts to assemble a group of people in a venue to serve as a forum for me to practice, to get good, to connect with future organizers and potential clients and build my brand. And also to serve. At every step along the way, I never would have grown or made it to the point where I have enough brand hand to speak on the next level and then the next and then the next. So I hear a lot of people,

especially early in their careers, proclaiming that they'll never work for anyone for free. They've got value. I agree with this statement. What I don't agree with is the notion of cash as the only form of value or compensation. Money is not the only currency. Depending on where you are in your professional journey and brand development, it may well be the least valuable type of compensation that you can receive. So when making a decision about whether to work for a quote free. Consider the full scope of the potential benefit and the less quantifiable, yet often far more valuable forms of compensation

that come bundled with the opportunity. Consider things like brand association, reach and exposure, relationship potential, exposure to potential clients, positioning, brand building potential, associative positioning, the ability to say, I was on stage with so-and-so, the opportunity to craft and hone your voice and your presence, introductions to the right people, a way to give or serve, and the probability that each of those added elements are forms of very real compensation. Look at the potential

that each will march you increasingly down that path to brand hand on a level that will both allow you to make the shift from non-cash to cash compensation and potentially build something much bigger than that more immediate exchange of value. So does that mean you should take every opportunity whether cash is on the table or not? Of course not. I'm simply inviting you to look at the fuller opportunity and take a longer horizon. Look at what's really being offered. Own where you are on the brand hand spectrum at this moment in time. If you're not consistently being offered what you believe you're worth time. If you're not consistently being offered what you believe you're worth,

then either you're not worth that yet, which is okay, we all start at the beginning, or you haven't done the work to clearly demonstrate your value. That's not on the people who you want to actually pay you more and write a check. It's on you. Create more value or learn to tell your

story better so that others understand what you have to offer. If you're at the beginning, that's cool. Be there fully. Continue to look for those rare opportunities to boom your way down the spectrum. And yes, look to at the risk, the ethics, and the likelihood of any and all promises being real or just smoke and mirrors. That all goes into it. Then make a decision not just on the money or lack thereof, but on the full basket of potential benefit being offered. Because that bigger scope of possibility is often a far more linear path to brand hand, which is also another word for freedom. and if you found this episode the conversation valuable and you think other people maybe friends or family would enjoy and benefit from it

go ahead and share it with them as well and as always if you want to know what's going on with us at Good Life Project then head over to goodlifeproject.com and that's it for this week I'm Jonathan Fields

signing off for Good Life Project.