He's Booked Over 4,000 Keynotes. Here's What Actually Gets Creators Paid to Speak

Hey friends,

Welcome back to Creator Etiquette™.

I recorded this one at Possible in Miami with someone who has been on my dream guest list for a long time. Zach Nadler is the co-founder and CEO of VaynerSpeakers, and before that he spent over nine years at CAA as a speaker agent representing some of the biggest entrepreneurs, athletes, and political figures in the industry. He has personally booked over 4,000 keynotes. That number alone should tell you he knows exactly what separates a speaker who gets paid from one who never moves past free panels.

This episode is a full masterclass in the business of public speaking. We’ll get into how to actually build a relationship at a conference, how the fee ladder works, what brands and companies are actually paying for, and how creators specifically tend to sabotage themselves before they even get started. If you would rather listen in, catch the full episode on YouTube and Spotify.

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See It In Action

I asked Zach how to make a strong first impression at a conference, and he said that if you walk around any event like this, you will see almost everyone going straight into pitch mode. It is a massive turnoff, and it is also just bad strategy.

He referenced Gary Vaynerchuk's book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, which highlights the idea that you do the small things before you do the big thing. The opportunity at an event is to connect with someone. You sell them later. Zach's own career is full of relationships that started over something completely unrelated to business. He told me about a friendship that began over bourbon twelve years ago at an event and is still going strong, families included. The deals come later. The relationship has to come first.

If you are a creator with zero speaking experience wondering where to even begin, Zach's advice cuts straight through the noise. You have to find your message first, and it cannot be your journey to becoming a creator, personal branding, or how to grow followers. Unless your story is truly exceptional, those topics are too saturated to differentiate you.

His test: would Coca-Cola actually bring you in to talk to their employees? If the honest answer is no, you have not found your unique angle yet.

Once you have a message, the practice ground is simpler than people think. Zach pointed specifically to LinkedIn as a place to test ideas in real time. Post a thought, see if it resonates, and use that feedback loop to figure out what is actually landing before you ever try to turn it into a forty-five minute talk. A two-sentence comment that gets traction is not proof you have a full keynote, but a kernel worth developing.

This was one of the most useful frameworks in the entire conversation. Most creators want to start with the easy stuff, such as moderating a panel or doing a fireside chat, and work their way up to keynotes once they feel "ready." Zach says that is exactly backwards.

The hardest thing to do is give a forty-five minute talk with no slides, standing alone, holding a room. If you can do that, everything else becomes easier by comparison. Start with the hardest skill, not the easiest one. Budgets for moderators are also significantly lower than budgets for keynote speakers, so building your speaking career around the easy formats first can actually slow down how quickly you start getting paid.

I asked Zach directly what the difference is between a $1,000 speaker and someone commanding six figures. His answer: supply and demand, and what exactly people are buying.

When a company pays a speaker, they are not just buying stage time. They are buying prep time, your name and likeness, your reputation, and the branding that comes with putting your name on their event. That is why preparation matters so much. You are not just showing up, you are delivering on everything the fee represents.

He used Gary Vaynerchuk's own arc as the example. The first talk Gary ever gave, he did for free, and he brought wine from his father's liquor store to serve at happy hour in exchange for the speaking slot. Zach told him directly at one point that he was the best speaker on his entire roster and still could not sell him for ten thousand dollars, because nobody recognized his name yet. The credibility had to be built before the fee could climb.

One more thing worth remembering: you raise your fee when you want to do less speaking, not more. There are simply fewer companies with a $100,000 budget than a $10,000 budget. Pricing yourself up is about deliberately narrowing who you are available to.

Zach told me a story about how he booked a successful entrepreneur for a forty-five minute speech in front of an intimate group of about a hundred women. Five minutes into her talk, she decided she would rather do a Q&A instead, completely changing the format the organizers had planned for. Then, after the event, she kept the car they had arranged for her for ten hours longer than planned, costing the organizer thousands of extra dollars.

That is how you get blacklisted. Not through one mistake, but through a pattern of disregard for the people running the show. Zach's advice is almost embarrassingly simple: just don't be an asshole. Show up early. Do what you said you would do. Remember that every event already has a hundred headaches before you even arrive, your only job is to not become one of them.

The opposite is just as true. Stay longer for the meet and greet. Post about the event before, during, and after. Shake every hand. Event organizers talk to each other constantly, and they ask other speakers who they like working with. Word of mouth in this industry moves fast, in both directions.

Everyone wants the big conference stage with their name on the poster. But Zach was clear that corporate and private events make up roughly 80% of VaynerSpeakers' business, and he genuinely respects a creator who has spoken to a mid-size medical device sales company in Atlanta more than one who spoke to Google for free.

Speaking to a room that does not already know or care about you, and actually winning them over, is a real skill. It proves you can deliver value to people who have no built-in reason to like you. Conferences are great visibility, but until you are the single biggest name in your category, corporate events are where consistent, well-paid work actually lives.

I asked Zach what excites him and what scares him about where the industry is heading, and his answer was the same for both: AI.

His concern is real, AI makes it easy for anyone to generate a polished-sounding speech, which means the bar for "sounding good" has dropped for everyone. But his bigger point is that this actually creates more separation, not less. The speakers who do not need AI to perform for them, who have real lived experience, expertise, and the ability to actually hold a room are going to stand out even more in a sea of AI-assisted sameness. Authenticity becomes the differentiator precisely because it gets harder to fake convincingly at scale.

Lean into what you have actually lived through. Theory is cheap now. Lived experience is not.

“I got asked to speak at a conference for free, for the exposure. It is a real event with a real and really big audience. Should I take it? And if I do, how do I make sure it actually leads somewhere?”

Zach's answer: First, do you actually need the exposure? And if you take the gig, are you missing anything else that has real value (a paid opportunity, your time, your energy)? If the timing works and you genuinely need the visibility, go ahead and do it.

But before you say yes, make sure you are getting something in return even if it is not cash. Is your travel covered? Are they recording it so you walk away with usable footage? If none of those things are true and you are already busy, his advice is to tell them directly: I would love to do this, but it has to be worth my time, and at zero dollars, it currently is not.

Go follow Zach on LinkedIn and Instagram, and check out VaynerSpeakers if you are serious about building a real speaking career. This conversation was a full education and I will probably listen to this episode once a week, forever.

Welcome to Creator Etiquette™. I am so glad you are here.

Xo, Gigi Robinson Founder, Hosts of Influence® | Creator, Educator, Speaker, Author, Dog Mom

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