I love speaking in San Francisco and one of the Meetup organizers asked me to come back to his group that meets in the  Potrero district. I live about 45 minutes from downtown and on the rare occasions I drive to the city instead of taking BART, I silently congratulate myself for not getting lost.

There were only 15 people signed up, but we had both done some marketing through social media and just as we were getting started it became obvious the small room we expected would be more than adequate, was sorely too diminutive. We ended up with about 25. I did my Blog presentation, without the help of Power Point for the first time while speaking ad lib for about 90 minutes.

There were several very knowledgeable attendees, in fact several who should have intimidated me other than I know I can hold my own with most people. Confidence is a big part of a speaker’s resources.

The extra half hour I spent was in answering questions and making suggestions. Most of the time, that’s my favorite part of speaking, being impromptu.

I ended up with two new clients, which made my free speaking engagement end up yielding about $200 an hour. Not bad!

There’s more to speaking than being the speaker!