Take "Keynote Speaker" Off Your LinkedIn

Why does it seem like every speaker writes "keynote speaker" on their LinkedIn profile?

I’m not immune to it. For a long time, my own website said both "motivational speaker" and "keynote speaker." At some point I dropped "motivational speaker," because I realized it wasn’t the best term for me, and it didn’t really suit my audience. And for a while now I’ve gone back and forth on whether to drop "keynote speaker" too. A keynote is a specific kind of presentation, and if I’m honest with myself, a lot of the ballroom sessions and breakouts I’ve done over the years were not truly keynotes.

Here’s what I’ve noticed. Whenever someone approaches me about getting into speaking, or asks about joining my speaking group, I ask them what they actually want to do. Inevitably, they say it. "I want to be a keynote speaker." And I hold up my fingers in the shape of a triangle.

Keynote speaker is the most visible part. It’s the part you see, right there at the top. And I’ll be the first to tell you there are a lot of dollars to be made in that little slice of the market.

But here’s the reality almost nobody starting out gets told. Some of the busiest speakers I know, the ones with the most reliable, steady income, live below the traditional stage line. Call it the curtain line, if you will. They are the rest of the iceberg: workshops, breakouts, trainings, retreats. And every one of those is still speaking. It just isn’t the slice everyone slaps on their profile.

And that is before you get to everything else hanging off the side of the stage. Podcasts. Books. Membership organizations and online communities. Assessments, licensing deals, sponsorships. Even MC and host work sits in there somewhere. All of it is revenue, and none of it is the keynote.

The visible slice

Let me give you a real picture of that little slice up top. I recently spoke at a conference that ran 200 concurrent sessions over three days, and it had exactly one keynote speaker. One. I happen to know that keynoter’s fee was somewhere around $50,000, and I have it on good authority from the meeting professional that between the private jet, the travel crew, and the security, that one keynote cost the organization close to $100,000 all in. Good for them, truly. But that is one seat. In that same building, everyday speakers were running sessions all day long.

I want to be careful throwing numbers around, so I’ll put it this way. I regularly get calls for speakers showing anywhere from $500 to $5,000 for someone to come run an afternoon session at an association conference. Based on my own internal database of where these actually land, a lot of them run $2,000 to $3,500 for a breakout at a conference. And unlike that one keynote, those come around all the time.

The Corolla and the Bentley

Think about cars for a second. The Corolla is everywhere, and it earned that spot. Toyota has sold more than 50 million of them, which makes it the best-selling car in history, and it still moves over a million a year. Now hold that up against a Rolls-Royce, which sold 5,712 cars in the entire world in all of 2024. That is somewhere around 200 Corollas for every single Rolls-Royce. The Corolla is common because just about anybody can have one. The Bentley and the Rolls-Royce cost a fortune because they’re handmade and rare. Keynoting is the Rolls-Royce. Beautiful, expensive, scarce, and you burn an enormous amount of time fishing for the next one.

Here’s the part that surprised even me. The people I know with the longest-lasting, most sustainable, most-booked speaking businesses are not the Bentley chasers. They’re the trainers. They’ll keynote now and then, they’ll take a main stage when it comes, but a long time ago they made peace with not being "a keynote speaker." A lot of them have quietly removed it from their LinkedIn profile. On purpose. Which is exactly the thing I still haven’t done.

I say all this as a recovering offender. For years I turned down trainings and workshops because I felt like I was better than a workshop for 30 people, which was so incorrect it’s almost funny now. The ego has tempered since, and these days some of the most fulfilling work I do is the intimate breakout, not the big stage.

The $100 math

So how do you decide which gigs to take when they aren’t all $50,000? Here’s the math I actually run.

Let’s keep the math really simple, with round, made-up numbers. Say the number I need to make every time I speak is $100. A corporation books me and the room is getting real value out of it, great, I want my full $100. But say it’s a breakout, and they’ve only got $25 to pay me. Do I automatically say no?

Not necessarily. Because what if that breakout is at an association, and I’ve got 200 people in my room representing 75 different companies, and I know from experience that five of them will turn into $50 clients down the road? Five at $50 is $250. That $25 breakout just became a far more valuable day than the one keynote. Same body, same hour on my feet, completely different outcome for my business.

That’s the whole point. You cannot judge a gig by the number on the check. You judge it by what it’s worth downstream. The keynote fantasy trains you to look up, at the biggest sticker on the biggest stage. The real business is mostly underwater, in the rooms nobody’s posting a lens-flare photo from.

So I’ll leave you where I started, with both of us and our LinkedIn headlines. You don’t have to delete anything today. I clearly haven’t. But it’s worth asking yourself honestly whether "keynote speaker" is the label that serves your business, or just the one that flatters you. Mine flattered me for years. It cost me, too.

Until next time,

P.S. Be honest with me. What does your LinkedIn headline say right now, and is it the label that pays you or the label that flatters you? Hit reply. I want to know how many of us are hiding the best part of the business below the waterline. I’ll go first: mine still says "keynote speaker."