Tech budgets are the new travel budgets!

I’m curious, since the pandemic and the working from home mandates, have you struggled with presenting or facilitating meetings virtually?

A lot of my clients are speakers and facilitators of large programs, and I know they’ve been struggling with the technology side of things a lot. 

In fact, they’ve had a hard time justifying charging the same fees they would ‘usually’ charge if they were speaking from a stage or in front of a room full of people.

The shift to a digital stage has meant a whole new world of recalibrating speaking fees and setting realistic expectations for both the speaker and the corporate interested in working with them.

For many, it was a battle of keeping the business afloat  through the pandemic and I witnessed speakers and presenters charge less in order to simply seal the gig.

But here’s what I know - having worked as an intermediary between both speaker/presenter and corporate/vendor - while you may no longer need a travel budget, in order to keep your sanity, you need a tech budget!

Think about it… how much time, energy and financial expense have you invested into things you never had to do prior?

Lighting? That used to be the tech person's job… now it’s yours.

Audio? Again, someone used to mic you up, put you through sound check and off you went. Now you not only have to mic yourself but you have to figure out how to sound check yourself in a room where it’s not amplified but sent digitally to people’s offices and homes. 

I mean… WHAT?! How does one person do that effectively?

And that’s before we even get to the video element.

It’s another feather in your cap if you can master it (and you can… that’s what my Video Accelerator is for 😉) but what are all these leads and how do I get it to look crisp? You’ve mastered Zoom but that doesn’t mean you’ve mastered HIGH quality video feeds.

How does one person do ALL THE THINGS effectively when their sole role previously was to facilitate, educate and train their audience?!

So yes, you don’t have the inconvenience of travel anymore and booking flights and hotel stays and meals BUT you do have to navigate tech and quite frankly - you shouldn’t have to struggle with it solo.

So here’s a word to the wise - you know the budget you used to allocate for travel? 

Start allocating it again - but do it for tech so you don’t have the headache of figuring it out on the day you should be focused on your content and the delivery of said content. Use that budget to train a team member or bring in professional help or use a local studio - take the stress away and go back to doing what you do best, and what the client is actually paying the $$$ for.

If you’re not sure about how much you should allocate, book in here and I can show you what goes into that level of production.

All that to say, if you would like to be able to do all of the techy things on your own, turn your expertise into a video course or up your video game when presenting virtual join the waitlist for The Video accelerator here. Doors open February 1st!

Stay safe. Stay healthy. Stay positive.

Rebecca x