Town Hall - Q1 2025

Coming up to our second birthday, we now have 60 speakers on board or close to, and a very clear sense of direction as a business. And I really wanted to share a bit of a roadmap with you and answer any questions you may have.

Objectives Recap

To recap, we created Pomona Partners to address two issues that I perceived with existing agencies and bureaus who represented me for the last 12 years.

1. Weak performance around sales and enquiry handling

I wanted an agent that I could rely upon to handle leads that I brought them reliably, effectively and transparently. And who would work proactively to bring me work as well.

2. Lack of support around career development

I’ve always felt like I was making it up as I went along. I wanted someone to guide me through the steps in my speaking career and always help me to get to the next level.

Over the last two years we’ve worked incredibly hard to build our capability in these two areas and in the next 12 months you’re going to see a lot of that come to fruition. But fulfilling those objectives while being a profitable business means we have to make some changes to our approach as we grow.

2024 wrap up

First of all, where are we today? A few months ago I shared some stats with you about our performance around lead handling and acquisition and I wanted to update those.

In 2023 we received 149 leads. In 2024 that increased to 173. But 80 of those leads came from me (Tom).

Of the rest, Pomona generated 50 leads, and you all put 43 through us.

As I’ve said before, in the long term, I expect Pomona to generate 50% of your work, and for you to generate the other 50%. That’s orders of magnitude more leads from an agency than I or any speaker I know has ever experienced. But at this stage in our evolution, I really thought the ratio would be more like 80/20, with 80% coming from you.

If that was the ratio in 2024, instead of 173 leads, we would have handled 345. Assuming a consistent lead quality, that would have doubled our revenue. No-one is taking any profits from Pomona at the moment. In fact, I’m continuing to fund it with my own money. The more money we make, the more money we can spend. On building relationships with bookers, promoting you, and building training content and tools to support you.

If anyone is still worried that it will cost you money to put your leads through us, let me give you a few case studies from your fellow speakers to put your minds at rest and encourage you to route all your leads through us.

1. Martin SFP Bryant: “Putting my leads through Pomona has seen me get three times what I used to charge for the same type of event. And it’s much less effort for me.”
2. Ant Morse: “I was unsure about putting leads through Pomona at first. There are other futurists on the roster, and I didn’t see why I would give up 20% of my fee. But the first gig that Pomona booked for me was 2.5 times the fee I was charging for myself, so the 20% becomes irrelevant.”
3. Andy Spinoza: “Pomona dealt with an enquiry for me that started as having no budget. By the time it was confirmed they had secured me a £2,000 fee.”
4. Sarah Clarke: “I never considered signing up for an agency, though I frequently spoke at events for free. Tom and the team provided incredible support to help me understand the value of what I contribute and put me in touch with people who wanted my insights.”

Q1 2025

So, we can go faster with your support. But even based on current predictions we are continuing to invest this year and you’re going to see some changes along the way.

Let’s start with our plans for Q1.

Marketing

I hope you will already have noticed ramped up social media support from Katharine’s team. Some of you will have met Sadie at MingleBells. Post the stories you want to amplify in the WhatsApp group and we’ll try to increase the audience for them.

We’re also investing in our continuing SEO efforts and increasing the amount of content we put out, on the website and in email campaigns.

Plus, you’ll see the beginning of a new year-long campaign from that we’re asking some of you to collaborate on with us, analysing the ratio of female to male speakers across different sectors and highlighting the disparity.

Operations

We’ve been very tight on our contracts with bookers from day one, but we’ve never had a formal agreement in place with you, our speakers. That changes this quarter with our new Code of Conduct. As we grow, we need to systematise, and this lays out what we expect from everyone. I don’t think you’ll find any of it controversial but do get in touch if you have any queries.

Development

The big development change in Q1 is the rollout of the Talent Map to the platform. Many of you have had a go with the very early version of the Talent Map in spreadsheet form. In Q1 this year it will be integrated into the platform and you will be able to access it there.

This opens up the capability for us to connect the recommendations in the Talent Map directly to training and development support. Monika has been hard at work developing a whole raft of new training content that you will see start to drop this quarter and expand over the course of the year.

This is a really important step in fulfilling one of those two founding objectives: to offer all our talent support at every point in their journey.

Q2

Then on to Q2 and perhaps the biggest change. Or perhaps the one that will generate the most questions from you.

Our current business model means that we make money only when and if someone is booked. The more frequently they are booked, and the more money they charge, the more we make to invest back into the business. But if someone is only beginning their speaking journey, and doesn’t get booked at all, we make no money. And at really low fees, managing the occasional booking for them costs us money.

Right now, supporting people who aren’t getting booked - or at least are not getting booked through us - costs us hundreds of pounds per person. Because everyone gets the same support. That’s obviously not tenable in the long run, so from April we’re going to be tiering our offering.

There are three Tiers to start with, and which tier you fall into will depend on a few things: the frequency of enquiries we get for you, the frequency of bookings, and the fee you’re able to command.

Academy

This starts with our Academy. Our Academy members receive access to all the same online tools and resources as you have today and that we are developing, as well as representation when you want us to negotiate opportunities on your behalf.

But we will be charging a monthly fee for Academy talent of £20 plus VAT. And what we won’t be able to do is offer the one to one support from the Pomona team that we have been doing for many people. It’s very much a self-service model at this level.

The Academy is for speakers who are charging less than 6 events per year at a fee of less than £2000, and putting less than 2 enquiries a month through us.

Professional

Our Professional tier is for those typically charging £2000-5000 and doing 6-12 events per year through us, as well as pulling 2-5 enquiries a month through Pomona Partners.

The big difference with the Professional tier is that we’ll continue to offer the type of 1-1 support that many of you have benefited from, for example, helping to polish up your promotional materials, casting an eye over your websites etc. But we will be limiting the hours we can spend on this.

Premier

The third tier is our Premier tier and that is for those billing north of £5,000, doing over 12 gigs per year, and bringing in more than 5 enquiries per month. Right now there isn’t a huge difference in the proposition between the Professional and Premier tiers beyond a bit more flexibility in the 1-1 support we offer, but in time we’ll start to see more differences as more of you graduate to the two tiers.

Tiers Today

Your agent will be in touch with you soon to let you know which tier you are in but let me reassure everyone: if you were on our books at the end of March, we will not be charging you until 2026 if you do fall into the Academy tier.

But everyone joining from the start of April will be separated out into tiers and we will be billing those in the Academy tier. We’ve researched the cost of a variety of speaker training programmes and they go up to £15000. As you’re someone we’re representing, we want to help you move from the Academy tier to the professional or premier as fast as you are able to. That means making the training and development tools accessible to you. And as you’ll see, it’s going to get better value over time.

Q3

Getting us to the point where we can handle onboarding for multiple tiers, fully integrate the Talent Map, and provide a library of rich training content has required quite a lot of investment in the platform. But with that completed, Jamie will be turning his attention to other things. He’ll be working on a new value-added tool in Q2 that we hope to roll out in Q3, and that is what we’re calling our Feedback Engine.

Getting good feedback from audiences and bookers has been one of the most difficult and time consuming processes for us. We’ve gotten much better at it in the last few months, as I hope some of you will have noticed. But we think we can do better.

The Feedback Engine is a way for you to directly appeal to audiences for feedback, and give them a way to access added value materials and contact you after your talk.

The way it will work is this. Inside the platform, you will be able to create multiple QR codes, tied to customisable landing pages designed for mobile devices. Put the QR code in your slide deck and if people point their cameras at it, they will be taken to your landing page. Here they can leave you a star rating, and a comment. They can upload photos or videos of you on stage, or maybe a talking head of them saying how great you were. They can download files that you might want to post, follow a link to your website or socials, or contact you directly.

Once you receive feedback, you’ll be able to share it directly to social media, or add it to your profile.

As soon as this is ready, we’ll be rolling this out to all of you, regardless of which tier you are in.

Q4

The last part of the roadmap I will share is for Q4 this year, when we’re aiming to take the next step in addressing our first objective. We want to be the slickest speaker agency in the world. And that means having the best and most integrated system for handling leads.

In Q4 we hope to begin transitioning away from our third party CRM system, Capsule, and integrating the key features of deal handling into the platform.

This creates a number of advantages for us, and for you.

For us the advantages are time saving, reassurance, and analytics. We’ve done what we can to customise Capsule to our needs, and it’s a great system. But there are things it can’t do. We can’t create and send out contracts direct from the CRM. We can’t track which one of you an opportunity is for very easily - especially if we’ve put forward a shortlist of three or four of you for an opportunity.

Most importantly though, with the current system it’s very hard for us to share information with you. And as I said at the start, we want to be as transparent as possible. As soon as we can, we will be exposing all of the lead information that is relevant to you, to you, inside the platform. You will be able to see, at any time, what we’re doing on your behalf.

The brief for this piece of development is very large but it’s underway already and as soon as Jamie has wrapped up the Feedback Engine he’ll be starting on this.

Beyond 2025

That takes us to the end of the roadmap. We have plans beyond this, but there’s no point sharing everything at this time.

What I will say is that we remain a very small team, and we’re still 100% bootstrapped. I make no apologies if some of these timelines slip as it all depends on how well business turns out this year, and these are some very volatile times.

But as I said early in the talk, you can help. The more business you put through us, the more money we can invest in promoting you, developing your career, and building tools to support you.

Thank you

That’s everything we wanted to cover. I’ll post the questions you submitted, and the answers, in the FAQs section of the website.

A big thanks to all of you for being part of this and joining us for this update. If you like this, we’ll start to do them regularly.

Finally, a huge thanks to Monika, Rachel, Katharine, Gemma and Jamie for all the hard work they are putting in all the time to make Pomona what it is.