Are you worth $40,000 an hour?  How can you be worth $40K per hour?  That’s the question people often ask of the top public speakers, the keynoters, the ones who have written bestsellers and whose names you probably know. 

In fact, celebrity speakers, like former presidents and prime ministers, make considerably more — $100, 000 – $250,000 per speech.  Malcolm Gladwell, with bestsellers like Blink and The Tipping Point to his credit, asks $86,000 per speech.   President Reagan was famously paid $2 million for a speech he made shortly after leaving office.

But still, $40K per speech?  How can that be justified when the minimum wage is $7.25 per hour? 

Three points about that apparently obscene compensation.  First of all, the hour you see is not the whole story.  To get to that stage, a speaker at the $40K level has to have written one or more books.  That speaker has to have achieved success in her field, enough so that the public wants to hear about it.  And that speaker has to create the speech, rehearse it, and travel for days to hard-to-reach places in uncomfortable airplane seats to get to the venue, where she has to try to please a roomful of strangers so that the whole process can begin again.  In fact, there’s a lifetime of hard work leading up to that golden hour in the spotlight. 

Second, $40K is the cost of a coffee break at a moderately funded conference for 500 people or so.  Most of the money – a million or two – for that conference has gone to the venue, for room and board.  The entertainment is a relatively small part of a typical meeting budget.   

Finally, if you’ve ever been inspired by a speaker to change your thinking – or your life – you know that a speech can indeed get people thinking and doing in new ways.  Speeches can topple governments, launch careers, and inspire movements. 

Speeches can change the world.

And that’s worth $40K an hour.  That’s why the market pays it.  Every time.