I’ve been booking speakers for twenty-five years. In that time, I’ve watched speakers I
genuinely believed in, those who are talented, prepared and commercially aware, disappear from the market. Not because they failed, but because they stopped.
And that distinction matters more than the speaking industry tends to acknowledge.
The question speakers ask me more than any other is: ‘I’m doing everything right, so why
isn’t it working yet?’ And the honest answer is that the timeline they have in their head and
the timeline the market operates on are almost never the same.
Speaking careers don’t build in a linear fashion. There’s a period (and it can be a long one)
where speakers do all the right things, but don’t see a tangible return. You’re building
relationships with bureaux, producing content, and refining your positioning. You’re speaking at events that might not feel like the right fit for you. And yet nothing seems to be
accumulating.
Then something changes. And it’s not because of one thing you did three months ago, but
because things have compounded. Maybe a bureau recommended you to three separate
clients, or someone in the audience at a conference six months ago moved to a new
organisation and pulled your name from their memory. A colleague could mention you in
passing to an event organiser who is building a shortlist.
None of these connections were visible when you were making them, they’re only clear in
retrospect. The speakers who break through are almost never the ones who had a single eureka moment. They’re the ones who continued to put in the work until the compound effect finally caught up with them.
In most cases, the speakers who disappeared were no worse than the ones who succeeded.
They were simply operating on a shorter timeline and expected that doing A, B, C and D well would produce a result on their preferred schedule. When it didn’t, they concluded that it wasn’t going to happen. And they stopped.
Consider a footballer who spends years in the lower divisions. They might be technically
better than players getting chances in the top flight, but they never get the right trial at the
right moment. It’s not because they’re not good enough, but because the invisible network of moments that creates opportunity hasn’t aligned yet. And after a while, some players stop turning up for trials. If you never take the shot, you can’t score. But the more specific truth is: if you turn down the shot just before the goalposts move, you’ll never know whether you could have scored or not.
This isn’t to say persistence alone is sufficient. You have to be doing the right things.
Persistence without positioning is just noise. But the majority of speakers I’ve seen struggle
aren’t doing so because their positioning is fundamentally wrong.
They’re struggling because the market hasn’t yet caught up to the work they’ve already done.
The speakers who figure this out, who build the kind of career that compounds over time,
rather than spikes and fades, tend to understand that the work you do today is not for
today’s bookings. It’s for the bookings eighteen months from now, when someone in a room you haven’t yet entered makes a connection you can’t yet predict.
The gap between knowing this concept and acting on it is where most speaking careers are
won or lost.
