Inconsistency is the most common complaint we hear from speakers. Not that the work is bad when it comes, or that the stages are wrong, or the fees are unfair. The complaint is that the work arrives in bursts, and the gaps between them are impossible to predict or control. A strong quarter followed by three quiet months. A run of bookings that builds momentum and then, without any obvious reason, stops.
Most speakers attribute this to external factors: the market is slow, the economy is uncertain, a particular topic has gone out of fashion.
Sometimes those things are true.
But what we see consistently, looking across the careers of speakers at every stage and fee level, is that the real driver of inconsistency is almost never external. It is a positioning problem, and specifically, it is the problem of being too broadly positioned to be the obvious answer to any specific brief.
The way bureau bookings actually happen is more mechanical than most speakers assume.
A client arrives with a need, a bureau looks for the speaker who fits most clearly, and the speakers who come to mind immediately, are the ones where the connection between the brief and the speaker is instant and legible.
One or two names surface without effort. Those speakers get consistent work because they are easy to place.
The speakers who are positioned broadly, who speak on leadership and change and resilience and performance and culture, who could fit many briefs but fit none of them with particular precision, are harder to place. They require more effort from a bureau and more explanation to a client, and in a market where a bureau is responding to ten briefs a day with time pressure on each one, the speaker who requires the least explanation tends to get the call.
This is counterintuitive for a lot of speakers.
The instinct is to broaden, to cover more ground, to be relevant to more clients and more industries. There is a logic to it that feels sound until you look at what it actually produces, which is a speaker who is theoretically right for everything and therefore the obvious choice for nothing.
What we’re seeing across the market right now is that the most consistently booked speakers have made a specific decision about what they stand for and who they stand for.
Not a topic, but a perspective on a topic. Not an industry, but a type of problem within an industry.
The difference between ‘I speak on leadership’ and ‘I speak to organisations going through significant structural change who need their senior teams to lead differently’ is not just specificity. It is the difference between being one of several hundred options on a database and being the first name that comes to mind when a particular brief lands.
There is a fear that specificity closes doors, that narrowing the positioning reduces the pool of potential clients.
What we observe in practice is the opposite.
A speaker who is the definitive voice on a specific topic attracts more enquiries, not fewer, because they become the answer to a question rather than a possible answer to several.
Bureaux talk about this in terms of saleability. A speaker they can pitch in one sentence, where the connection between the brief and the speaker requires no work from the client to understand, is a speaker they want to put forward. The speaker who needs a paragraph of context before the case becomes clear gets suggested less, not because the content is weaker but because the commercial story is harder to tell.
The same principle applies when clients come directly. A client searching for a speaker on a specific challenge, asking a colleague for a recommendation, or scrolling through LinkedIn is making the same instant judgment. The speaker whose positioning is clear enough to be found, forwarded and understood in a sentence is the one who converts.
The one who requires investigation rarely gets that far.
Where speakers tend to lose momentum is in treating positioning as a task rather than a practice.
The market changes, topics shift in and out of demand, and the brief that was coming in constantly two years ago may have evolved into something adjacent. The speakers who stay consistently in demand are the ones who periodically interrogate where they are positioned and whether the market is still asking the question they are set up to answer.
Consistency is not luck, and it is not a function of how many bureaux have your details, how many LinkedIn posts you publish, or how many events you attend. It is a function of whether the right person, looking at a specific brief, can immediately see why you are the answer.
The speakers who get the call consistently are the ones a bureau can describe before the client even finishes the brief.
