Introducing the Pomona Partners Index: Your Guide to the State of the Speaking Market

One question we get a lot from you is this: "How am I doing relative to everyone else?" This question comes in various forms, but basically you want to know whether everyone else is having a quiet quarter or whether it's just you.

We think this is actually a smart question for anyone serious about their speaking career. If you're doing well when the market is down, then either your particular niche is in demand right now, or more likely you're doing something right. And if you're quiet when everyone else is busy? Then maybe it's time to do something different.

Committed as we are to transparency, we can't be sharing details of your peers' careers with you. But we still want to give you a useful answer to this question. Which is why we have created the Pomona Partners Index.

Key Metrics for the Speaking Industry

The Index takes a bunch of our core metrics and combines them into a single number to give you a sense of where the market is at. This includes:

1. Are people actively seeking speakers?
2. Are people actually making bookings?
3. Are people paying decent fees?

We've indexed these metrics against our targets from a fixed point in time. That means that over time, the Index will be a bit like a stock market. It should keep going up on average, but there will be peaks and dips. You can get a sense of whether things are good by looking at its performance based on previous months, and how it was performing at the same time the previous year. Over time as we get bigger and gather more data, it should become more and more useful.

Holes in the Model

A few caveats though. First, we remain a very small agency in terms of the number of enquiries and bookings we handle each month. That means we don't have huge amounts of data - yet - to base the index on. Until that changes, the index will be quite peaky. It will only take a couple of big deals to shift it quite significantly. But as we grow, it should start to smooth out.

Second, the way we've chosen to do this makes it impossible to decouple the Index from our success. We did look at a variety of different data sources to draw from, but nothing except our own figures gave us the depth we wanted. We looked at ways of doing the index that would keep it within a static range - i.e. decoupled it from how big/successful Pomona Partners became. But that left us with a number that was, for boring mathematical reasons, a bit arbitrary and open to manipulation - conscious or otherwise.

So, not only are we giving you insight into how everyone else is doing, we're giving you insight into how we're doing. Which feels very in line with our commitment to transparency. But it does mean we won't be sharing the index publicly, just with you our speakers. We'd appreciate you not sharing it outside the community.

What do the numbers say?

Now that I've explained how the Index works, what does it actually show? We've taken the data from right back before we even formally launched, and calculated the Index for the last two years, running right up to April 2025.

There are a few key takeaways from this:

1. We're growing year on year. Average Index for 2023 was 788. For 2024 it rose to 1186. And across the first four months of 2025 it's at 1985, albeit boosted by a bumper February.
2. April this year was terrible (202), but there's always a dip around this time each year, it just seems to move between March and May (see my caveats about not having enough data above)
3. As well as that trough, there's also maybe a spike that goes alongside it - perhaps connected to year end and/or Easter
4. As expected, July is quiet and October/November is a solid period

Published Monthly from Now On

From this point on we will be sharing the Index every month on this blog, and in the first Talent Update that goes out following the month end. If you have further questions about it, or want us to dig deeper into the numbers then we might be able to do that. Again though with the caveat that while our numbers are still fairly small, digging too deep into them might not tell you too much.

I hope you find this useful - all feedback welcome. And as I say, please don't share this outside the Pomona community.