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I spent 7 years helping to build one of the largest speaking bureaus in the country before leaving a couple years ago to launch an unrelated startup. Couple obs

I spent 7 years helping to build one of the largest speaking bureaus in the country before leaving a couple years ago to launch an unrelated startup. Couple observations: The business is dominated by celebrities. If you are an event planner often all you care about is getting people to show up-- so you'll pay $30k for a celebrity who is a lousy speaker over $5k for someone who is a real expert. We made a real effort to develop some tech related speakers but it was difficult to do. It's not worth it for a large agency to book 1-2k engagements. More importantly, if you want to have a speaking career you have to be consistent in your pricing. You can't charge someone $5k for a speech and then give your next speech away for $500. Most tech speakers if you tell them they can't accept any dates less than $5k they really don't like that. Often what has gotten them recognition is giving away their content (both on the web and speaking) for free or nearly-free and so the shift is hard to make because in the short term they have to turn down free exposure. Sadly most of the tech speakers making 10-20k are total wankers. You've probably never heard of them and they are mostly full of shit. They haven't done anything particularly remarkable but they have their pitch down and know how to sell it to bureaus and CEOs. I've seen people walk away with $15k for a one hour talk about how second life is the future of business accompanied by a walk through-- and the audience walks away with a big chubby. What a joke.

joe_the_user 17y ago
Fascinating parent and fascinating though depressing article. I tried to help a would-be new age guru more up in that world and it's a strange freak-o-nomics situation. Rich are the most desirable customers for any establishment that doesn't seat 60K people. The rich have more time than money, so they don't mind spending a lot of money for a positive experience. But the rich also don't have a lot of time to determine who's an actual good speaker or spiritual healer or whatever. So they instead go with those who are preselected. That's celebrities of some kind. Many celebrities still have poor skill levels, we can be sure. But they might be a bit better than non-celebrities. If the rich had the time to research the matter, they could find even better speakers but they won't spend extra time researching the question for the same reason they will pay $1000 - their time is worth more than their money. It's paradoxical - there's lots of money to be if one can master these processes but virtually by definition only a few do so.
- keeptrying 17y ago
  Why is this depressing? This is how the world works right now. If your an entrepreneur you should want to make it better and earn a living (or a 100 livelihoods) from this situation. I've seen lots of businesses which focus on allowing the rich to make better use of their time. 1. A service which looks for all the new restraunts in NYC and gets each user a booking to such openings. 2. Social network for high networth individuals. 3. A "linkedin" for CEOs and COOs. (A friend works for one of these and he makes a ton of money just as a salesperson). I personally dont think I could be passionate about such a business but I've seen that people who have the means to pay usually are more likely to pay (at least Americans are).

joe_the_user 17y ago

Fascinating parent and fascinating though depressing article. I tried to help a would-be new age guru more up in that world and it's a strange freak-o-nomics situation. Rich are the most desirable customers for any establishment that doesn't seat 60K people. The rich have more time than money, so they don't mind spending a lot of money for a positive experience. But the rich also don't have a lot of time to determine who's an actual good speaker or spiritual healer or whatever. So they instead go with those who are preselected. That's celebrities of some kind. Many celebrities still have poor skill levels, we can be sure. But they might be a bit better than non-celebrities. If the rich had the time to research the matter, they could find even better speakers but they won't spend extra time researching the question for the same reason they will pay $1000 - their time is worth more than their money. It's paradoxical - there's lots of money to be if one can master these processes but virtually by definition only a few do so.

keeptrying 17y ago
Why is this depressing? This is how the world works right now. If your an entrepreneur you should want to make it better and earn a living (or a 100 livelihoods) from this situation. I've seen lots of businesses which focus on allowing the rich to make better use of their time. 1. A service which looks for all the new restraunts in NYC and gets each user a booking to such openings. 2. Social network for high networth individuals. 3. A "linkedin" for CEOs and COOs. (A friend works for one of these and he makes a ton of money just as a salesperson). I personally dont think I could be passionate about such a business but I've seen that people who have the means to pay usually are more likely to pay (at least Americans are).