There's nothing better than experience. I love the expression "He doesn't know what he doesn't know." That surely applied to me when I first arrived in the speaking profession.

In 1977, an insurance client in Columbia, SC, Patrick Callahan, asked me to join a Toastmasters Club. Later that year I made it all the way to the International Speech Contest finals in Toronto, Ontario, Canada but got disqualified for going eight seconds over my time limit. I learned this after they took away the first place trophy (that I thought I had won). Oops.

A year later, I did manage to win the International Speech Championship in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The day I won, there was a guy down on the front row by the name of Cavett Robert. He was the founder of the National Speakers Association and was long considered the dean of professional speaking.

Cavett pulled me off the stage immediately after I had won and said that he wanted me to join him and a group of other speakers including Paul Harvey, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, Zig Ziglar, Earl Nightingale and others on a tour called the Positive Thinking Rallies.

I'm thinking to myself, "This speaking business is easy. Just win a title and the offers will come pouring in." I didn't realize that "I didn't know what I didn't know."

I didn't realize that I had inadvertently skipped from Step A (speaking to a handful of people at a Toastmasters Club) to Step D, speaking to 40,000 people in the Super Dome. In fact, I didn't even know there Step B and Step C existed.

Step B are the hundreds of civic club presentations, rubber chicken luncheons and free school banquets you have to do if you expect to pay the price to climb to the top of your profession. Step B are the hundreds of one-on-one presentations you do with yourself in the mirror or before four people at the local Toastmasters Club. Step B are the three or four speeches you deliver every day when you're trying to sell a client life insurance and you decide to use a story that is in its embryo stage of development. Step B is testing out that blue humor that is on the edge before people who will not only forgive you… but will love you enough to tell you to pitch it out. Step B is all that and much more.

And then there's Step C. Step C is when you do the speaking circuit for groups like the Associated Dinner Clubs or the Knife & Fork Clubs or the Sales and Marketing Executives or the Young President's Organization or the Jaycees or Sertoma or Rotary or the Knights of Columbus or the local society of Association Executives or dozens of other similar groups.

In some of these venues, you earn a modest $100 fee. In others, you literally pay for the right to give the presentation so that you can generate full-fee speaking engagements. It's the price every professional speaker pays to earn their spot on the platform. I did hundreds of these for ERA Real Estate as my real estate firm in Lexington, SC was an ERA brokerage back in the seventies and eighties. Even today, I still speak 80 times a year on behalf of the Knights of Columbus Insurance to promote the men in my life insurance agency, all for free. I lector at Mass almost every Sunday.

There's a line in the bible in Isiah that says: "The Lord GOD has given me a well-trained tongue, that I might know how to speak to the weary a word that will rouse them." If it's your job to communicate…. then communicate!

And finally there's Step D, where you've earned the right to earn a five figure speaking fee for a 30 minute presentation. Do you get paid that every time you take the platform? Absolutely not, but you paid your dues for decades by going through A, B and C. My colleague Zig Ziglar, CSP, CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame, once told me he gave over a thousand free speeches before he was ever paid a dime for a presentation.

When my friend Jerry Bellune called me years ago to ask me how to become a professional speaker, I should have written this column and sent it to him. You have to pay the price to get to the top and an even greater price to stay there. The late Ralph Ruscetta, a GE scientist and close family friend, once game me the singular best piece of advice I ever heard. "To be the best," said Ralph, "You have to be willing to work twice as long, twice as hard for half as much." Ralph was right about the first two thirds of the formula. It is twice as long and twice as hard, but the reward is ten times as much.