The Most Expensive Sentence in the Speaking Business

"Let me think about it is not an answer. It's a placeholder. And there's almost always something that's real underneath that."

Welcome back to The Speaker Lab Podcast! In this episode, Dan Irvin is flying solo — just you and Dan, one-on-one — to talk about one sentence that has probably cost you more bookings than you realize: "I need to think about it."

You've heard it from event planners. Great discovery call, proposal sent the same afternoon, then: "This looks really great. Let me think about it and I'll get back to you." Weeks pass. Around week three, hope turns into "maybe I read it wrong." Dan says almost every speaker he coaches has a folder full of polite maybes. But here's the part most people miss — speakers say the exact same sentence to themselves. "I need to think about raising my fee." "I need to think about my niche." For months. Sometimes years. Dan breaks down what a planner actually means when they say those words (there are four things it could be, and each one calls for a different response), shares the one warm, curious question that gets to the real answer, and walks through his Friday rule — a simple framework for making the decisions you've been sitting on. He also talks about two types of speakers he sees all the time: one who walked into burning buildings for a living but couldn't bring themselves to send one email raising a fee, and another who'd been "thinking about" picking a niche for a couple of years. Two different problems, same sentence holding them back.

Whether you're staring at a planner's "let me think about it" right now or you're the one who's been saying it to yourself, this episode gives you a concrete way forward.

You'll learn:

The one sentence that quietly costs speakers more money than anything else a planner can say

What "let me think about it" actually means when a planner says it — four possibilities, four fixes

The single question that turns a polite stall into a real conversation

Three follow-up rules for keeping a "maybe" from dying in your inbox

Why the same sentence shows up on both sides of the table, and what to do about your own version of it

How to give a planner an easy way out (and why that makes them more likely to reply)

Dan's Friday rule: a four-step process for making decisions you've been putting off