Talent Conference 2026

We held the first Pomona Partners Talent Conference in December 2025, and based on the feedback you all loved it. So we’re thinking about how and when to do it again, and what we can improve. We’d love your input below. But a few notes before we get to the questions.

Ticket Prices

We ran the first Talent Conference for free, but we won’t be able to do that again. It won’t be a lot but we will need to add a small ticket price to cover costs. What we can do at the event - e.g. the scale we can operate on, and the speakers we can attract - will depend to some extent on how much we charge.

Location

Pomona Partners is a Northern speaker agency and we’re committed to growing Northern talent. But that doesn’t mean all our speakers are based in the North. Or that events necessarily have to be held in Manchester. But if we do run an event somewhere else, costs will go up exponentially as we will have to cover travel and possibly accommodation for the whole team.

Frequency

The event was such a success - not just in terms of the value you got from the content, but in terms of how well we felt it communicated our proposition and values - that we are wondering if we should run it more than once a year. But we’re also aware that everyone is busy and budgets are tight, so we’d love your input on this based on a really realistic assessment of how often you would be likely to attend.

Timing

The corollary to the growth and success of the Talent Conference is that we think we’re going to stop doing the MingleBells drinks event. It’s great fun but for similar expenditure, the Talent Conference delivered exponentially more value and is much more in line with our goals. So if we’re not making it a Christmas event, we can be much more flexible about when we run the conference, avoiding Christmas prices, winter flu, and all the other events going on in December.

So, with all that in mind, we’d really appreciate your feedback below.