Year in the life of a speaker bureau

By Nick Gold, MD of Speakers Corner   As a speaker bureau, our company prides itself on focussing on ensuring the best possible outcome for our clients, but we are also dependent on maintaining the best relationships with our speakers and artistes to ensure we can continue to negotiate and book them for our clients in the best way for both parties. The last 12 months therefore placed us in the middle of a fine balancing act and relationships have been put under pressure. As the first months of the pandemic unfolded, we were keen to demonstrate to our clients the power of the virtual platform and so we began running a virtual showcase programme which has since delivered many events. For the trickle of enquiries that came in, budgets were severely reduced, and we were grasping at any opportunity that came in. Over a short period of time, there was a realisation that clients were equating time to value of a speaker with the standard discussion around how they are delivering their speech from their living room therefore we should only be paying a fraction of their fee. At this point, it is worth mentioning that I am privileged to be the current president of the International Association of Speaker Bureaus (whose members are the major speaker bureaus, agencies, and management companies throughout the world), which has given me a great insight into the journey we have been going through in the industry. I came to understand that the journey has been consistent in its pattern for all of us, irrelevant of our location, the difference being where the country was situated in with respect to that region’s lifecycle of the pandemic. The challenge for us a speaker bureau and for the industry as a whole was to educate our clients to understand that the value in the virtual world isn’t equated to time spent on camera, but rather on the content delivered. The knowledge, expertise, ideas and inspiration delivered by the speaker were helping the audience to adjust to this strange world and help the business prosper in ever changing circumstances. Our fear in the speaking industry about whether it would survive and move to virtual was the wrong fear. The speaking industry and ourselves as a speaker bureau are in the events industry but, more prevalent to the times, we are in the content industry. As long as business still existed in the world in any sector, then thought leadership, creative ideas, macro and micro socio-economic perspectives, teambuilding, motivation – to name but a few – are subjects which we need to drive business forwards. Alongside that, as we dealt with professional and personal challenges that were unimaginable six months previous, our mental health and the businesses responsibilities to employees (and clients) meant we as a society have been on a steep learning curve in managing this new environment. With the recent release of the roadmap out of lockdown, we are back on to familiar questions about the certainty of a return to physical events or the safety net of the virtual platform. The truth in my opinion is that the two mediums are distinct; we can celebrate the impact of a speaker onstage during a physical live event while understanding the virtual platform can bring teams together by delivering instant content.