From Zero to 40+ Stages in One Year

Applications go out within your first week — but the timeline is set by the conferences, not by us. Most events run a committee review, and the gap between submitting and hearing back is two months best case, more often three or four. That's why real traction typically shows up in months three through six, and why we recommend budgeting for a full six months. Direct outreach to professional organizations runs alongside the applications specifically to create earlier wins while the conference pipeline matures.

Yes! Our research team reviews your material and recommends which of your talks and themes align best with the events actually out there — getting that match right does a lot of the work. You also have the opportunity to consult directly with Luke on your talk write-ups and speaker bio to maximize their appeal to event planners.

That's your call — we research based on the preferences you set during onboarding, where you tell us the event types and industries you want to be in front of. That spans industry conferences, corporate training sessions, professional development days, chamber events, and leadership summits, across industries from HR and project management to technology, healthcare, and financial services. Our list typically includes a lot of professional organization and association programming too, which is exciting for a specific reason: these groups have chapters across the country and around the world, so one good relationship can multiply into many more events. Their audiences are also made up of people from organizations all over — so every talk is double exposure, to the association and to the companies sitting in the room.

No. This is a human-driven operation. Real researchers scan LinkedIn, Google Alerts, and event directories daily, and real people write and submit every application. A person chooses the event, adapts your material to its tracks, and works through the forms, logins, and verification steps one by one. Event planners read hundreds of proposals and can spot a generic one instantly, so we'd rather send a targeted application than a fast one.

The opportunities are definitely out there! There are typically three kinds: engagements that pay a fee or honorarium, engagements that cover your travel expenses, and engagements that cover your registration — and they're somewhat evenly split. The higher the quality of your application and your speaker resources, the better your odds of landing the prominent, well-paid gigs. But either way, our system maximizes how often you get seen and discovered, and how many relationships you build along the way. Those relationships are what turn into future speaking invitations and new business for you — coaching, training, workshops, consulting, and more.

You absolutely can! Just know they're not nearly as common — any given conference has a handful of keynote slots and a whole lot of breakouts, so breakouts are simply where more of the opportunity lives. How you position yourself as a speaker makes a real difference here, and strong speaker assets — a reel, photos of you on stage, testimonials — go a long way toward getting selected for a keynote. If you don't have those yet, don't worry: this is the best way to start building them. Luke has had events where a well-received breakout one year turned into the keynote invitation the next.

Never. This is not an agent or bureau relationship — there's no commission and no percentage. You pay a flat monthly rate for the work we do on your account, and you keep 100% of every speaking fee, honorarium, workshop, coaching client, and consulting deal that comes out of it.

Replies land in a shared inbox and we filter them first. For each one we pull the details that actually drive your decision — keynote or breakout, how many concurrent sessions, expected audience size, whether there's a fee or honorarium, whether travel is covered, whether you can sell books — then hand it to you as a clean yes-or-no. You have full autonomy on every single one.

No. A compelling talk title and write-up is enough to start applying. Once you get accepted with a date on the calendar, you'll have the motivation and deadline to finalize your content. Many successful speakers in our program started applying before their decks were finished.

Never intentionally, and the Call for Speakers process is your best protection against it. Applying through a review committee means you're evaluated on the merits of your content, which is a fundamentally different conversation than a cold pitch to a conference — those often come back with a sponsorship price tag attached. If a pay-to-play event slips through (some don't advertise it upfront), we remove it from our database immediately.

After onboarding (about 30-60 minutes), your main touchpoint is reviewing the weekly Friday report. We handle everything else unless a rare situation needs your input. Most clients spend less than 15 minutes per week on the program.

Absolutely. We support up to 3 active talks at any time, and you can rotate them based on what's performing best or what's most relevant to upcoming events. We track acceptance rate per talk, so you get concrete data on which topics are landing and which are worth subbing out.