The Importance of Owning a Direct Relationship With a Customer

I was getting paid for a one hour speech and now people are asking me to do them for free because the economy is different. It's a very different game when you're paying your own way to go speak in front of 50 people. I'll continue to do stuff digitally. The event, space will bounce back overall. For me, I have the leverage. I don't need it. I actually have probably a larger audience than the event. This becomes a key lesson in you need to own a direct relationship with a customer. You need to own your distribution rather than going through middleman,. Like paying some conference to 20,000 sponsorships so your CEO can speak for 20 minutes.