Build Professional Equity. Build a Speaking Career That Appreciates in Value.
Stop chasing the next speaking gig. Build the authority, relationships, intellectual property, and industry integration that make your professional speaking career increasingly valuable.
Ed Rigsbee, CSP, CAE coaches professional speakers who want to build careers that become more valuable with time. Rather than focusing primarily on chasing the next speaking engagement, Ed helps speakers build Professional Equity through industry specialization, professional authority, trusted relationships, intellectual property, thought leadership, strategic contribution, and Industry Integration. The objective is to become increasingly valuable within the industries you serve so that your accumulated reputation, relationships, ideas, and contributions continue creating speaking and consulting opportunities.
Why Chasing Gigs Is Not a Career Strategy
Most professional speakers learn how to improve their presentations, market themselves, network, and pursue the next engagement. Those skills matter, but they do not necessarily create a career that becomes more valuable with time. After nearly four decades in the professional speaking business, Ed Rigsbee came to believe there is a fundamentally different way to think about building a speaking career. That thinking became the foundation of his forthcoming book, Stop Chasing Gigs. Build Authority.
Stop Chasing Gigs. Build Authority.
Professional speakers understandably spend a great deal of time thinking about the next engagement. We improve our presentations, develop marketing materials, attend networking events, contact decision makers, and search for opportunities. When an engagement ends, however, we frequently have to replace it with another one. Do that long enough and it is possible to build a successful speaking business that continually requires you to start over.
That observation caused me to ask a different question: What if the objective is not simply to become better at getting booked? What if the objective is to build a professional reputation within an industry that continues creating opportunities because of the value you have contributed over many years?
That is the central idea behind Stop Chasing Gigs. Build Authority.
I call the asset we are building Professional Equity. It is the accumulated value of your expertise, ideas, relationships, reputation, contributions, and involvement in the industries you serve. Every worthwhile article you write, relationship you develop, introduction you make, committee you serve, book you publish, and problem you help an industry solve can add to that equity. Unlike a marketing campaign that ends when you stop funding it, Professional Equity can continue producing opportunities long after the original investment was made.
Building that equity requires us to think differently about specialization. Rather than trying to become everything to everyone, I believe speakers should develop genuine depth within carefully selected industries. Learn their language, economics, challenges, organizations, leaders, and emerging issues. The objective is not merely to become a speaker who happens to address an industry. It is to become someone the people within that industry recognize as genuinely valuable.
At the same time, I do not believe specialization means becoming permanently dependent upon a single industry. My philosophy is to Specialize Deeply. Diversify Strategically. Develop enough depth to become genuinely valuable within an industry, then thoughtfully expand into additional industries where your expertise and intellectual property can also solve meaningful problems. Your expertise does not have to change simply because the marketplace changes. Done correctly, specialization builds Professional Equity while strategic diversification creates a stronger and more resilient speaking business.
Relationships are equally important. I have long described relationships in terms of a Relationship Bank. Before continually asking people for introductions, referrals, engagements, or assistance, we should be making deposits by contributing ideas, connecting people, sharing resources, and helping others accomplish what matters to them. Over time, those relationships become another form of Professional Equity.
The progression continues as expertise and contribution develop into Authority and Thought Leadership. Authority gives you access to conversations you might not otherwise enter. Thought Leadership gives you an opportunity to influence how people think about important problems. When those ideas and relationships become deeply connected to an industry, you begin achieving what I call Industry Integration.
That is when the economics of a speaking career can begin to change. Clients may stop viewing you simply as someone who delivers a keynote and begin seeing you as someone who understands their industry. They are no longer evaluating only your topic, video, testimonials, and fee. They are investing in the judgment, perspective, relationships, and experience you have accumulated over years of involvement.
None of this means you stop marketing or stop pursuing speaking opportunities. It means today’s engagement should be capable of producing more than today’s speaking fee. Every engagement should provide another opportunity to learn, contribute, develop relationships, deepen your authority, and increase your Professional Equity.
The ultimate objective is to build a speaking career that appreciates in value rather than one that requires you to continually replace yesterday’s business. Stop chasing gigs. Build authority. Then use that authority to become increasingly valuable to the industries you serve.
What Does This Mean for Your Speaking Career?
Understanding the strategy is one thing. Applying it to your own career is another. Which industries should you be investing in? What Professional Equity have you already accumulated? Where are the gaps? Which relationships should you be developing? What ideas could become uniquely associated with you? And what would it take for the decision makers in your target industries to see you not simply as another speaker, but as someone whose perspective and involvement they value?
That is where working personally with Ed Rigsbee can accelerate the process. Rather than offering generic speaker coaching, Ed helps you examine your existing expertise, intellectual property, relationships, target industries, positioning, and opportunities through the lens of Professional Equity. The objective is not simply to help you get your next gig. It is to help you build the professional assets that can make the next ten years of your speaking career more valuable than the last ten.
Why Ed Rigsbee?
If you are looking for someone to help you write a better speech or chase more speaking gigs, there are plenty of speaker coaches who can help. But if you want to build a professional speaking career that becomes more valuable with time, Ed Rigsbee, CSP, CAE brings a very different perspective. With decades inside both the professional speaking and association worlds, Ed helps speakers build Professional Equity, the accumulated value of their authority, industry relationships, intellectual property, strategic contributions, and marketplace reputation. His approach goes beyond getting the next booking. Ed helps professional speakers identify the industries where they can become valuable, develop relationships before making requests, become connectors and contributors, build genuine thought leadership, and achieve the Industry Integration that causes decision makers to see them as more than another speaker. The objective is simple: stop chasing gigs and start building a career in which your Professional Equity increasingly brings opportunities to you.
First, Learn How to Get Booked. Then Build Something Bigger.
In BOOKED! The Insider’s Guide for Speakers Selling to Associations, Ed Rigsbee explored how professional speakers can better understand and access the association marketplace. His forthcoming book, Stop Chasing Gigs. Build Authority., represents the next step in that thinking. Getting booked matters, but the greater opportunity is using those engagements to build Professional Equity, deepen industry relationships, develop authority, and create a professional speaking career that becomes increasingly valuable with time.
If you are ready to apply these ideas to your own professional speaking career, there are two ways to work with Ed Rigsbee. Choose the level of access and personal guidance that best fits where you are today and where you want your speaking career to go.
Option 1: ASSC join the monthly subscription Association & Society Speakers Community
Cost? $99 per month subscription, no minimum agreement. Cancel anytime.
The ASSC provides members with weekly Zoom calls and a treasure chest of speaker training.
Option 2: Personal Coaching with Ed Rigsbee for the speaker who wants you applying the Professional Equity framework specifically to his or her career. This is a year-long all-access personal coaching relationship. Minimum of 12 months paid monthly at $2,000 per month or pre-pay $20,000 to receive a $4,000 discount for the year. Reach out to ed@rigsbee.com