Our team starts by understanding not only the where and when your event is taking place, but more importantly what impact you as a client want to have on your audience and what emotional legacy you want them to be left with long after the event has taken place. Each of our clients has a dedicated JLA Account Manager who works with you to learn your culture, working processes and the way you run your events to build an ever-growing understanding of how to give you the best possible service.
Once we know what you are looking for at your event, we provide you with a shortlist of suggested talent to fit your brief – which comes complete with all the relevant biographies, photos, links to other speeches and our personal insights to help you narrow down your choice. Once you have selected your preferred shortlist, we will quickly check with the talent to ensure they are available and help and advise with any other considerations to help you make your final decision.
From this point, JLA’s three decades of experience will help you on every step of your journey to the event. We ensure your chosen speaker is briefed to deliver the best possible performance on the day. We are on hand to support confirmation of hotels, flights, transport and make sure that every part of the logistics are organised. We do this while keeping an eye on the less-obvious details to help make sure that, where relevant, all aspects of copyright, publicity, production equipment, dress codes and even things like dietary requirements are considered; it’s the little things that can make the difference between a seamless experience, or a problem that can throw the less experienced off course.
Making sure you and the talent are aligned on all logistics is only half the task. We are also the conduit to ensure the performance is perfectly pitched to create the best impact. We can organise and attend a briefing call to ensure the talent understands the cultural background, commercial context and reasoning behind your event. We help make sure it’s not just the desired content that’s understood and agreed, but ensure there is a nuanced understanding of the emotional impact that the speaker needs to have.
Your dedicated JLA Account Manager will guide you through every aspect from the initial suggestions all the way to the final performance and we are always on hand to support you at every step. On the rare occasions something unforeseeable happens, we have years of experience and are on call round the clock to make sure any issues are resolved. We love what we do, and we ensure we do it better than anyone else.
A good conference speaker delivers a mixture of inspiration and insights. The best guest speakers share their experience and invite the audience to draw parallels, without telling them how to run their organisation. As with all speeches, the secret lies in story telling rather than graphs.
A speaker bureau advises which speakers, presenters or performers match the buyers’ objectives and budget. They do not normally represent the talent exclusively, so the advice offered is ostensibly impartial. Unlike theatrical and model agencies, the buyer is the client – not the talent.
The best speaker agencies listen to the brief, deliver on their promise and elicit the desired audience reaction. This is still a ‘human’ business – relying on in depth knowledge, relationships and integrity. The last matters because speaker fees vary enormously, giving free range to rogue agents.
Keynote speakers are a conference highlight, so the stakes are high when setting out to find one. Unless you know who you want and you’ve seen them speak, you will need expert advice from a reputable agency or bureau. Write a detailed brief, interrogate their proposals and ask for relevant reviews.
There are as many types of motivational speaker as there are styles of dress – from Paralympians to entrepreneurs to so-called ‘performance gurus.’ And there are good and less good in each category. The best way to find out who’s right for your audience is to ask a speaker bureau for a range of suggestions.
