Talent Conference 2025: a Five Star Event
Yesterday we hosted the first Pomona Partners Talent Conference at Manchester’s Malmaison Hotel, and it was an enormous success. The afternoon event featured interactive educational sessions for our cohort of speakers, designed to help them to accelerate growth in their speaking careers. Speakers travelled from across the UK to take part and departed leaving a full set of five star reviews.
Keynote speaker was former BBC business news presenter turned full time professional speaker and executive coach, Penny Haslam. Penny is one of the most popular coaches for Pomona Partners’ speakers, who rave about the transformative effect she has had on many aspects of their speaking careers. Penny spoke about her own career evolution and provided some key tips for speakers looking to better connect with bookers.
The Pomona team led a series of sessions looking at the three critical components of a speaking career: Proposition, Profile and Performance.
Development lead Monika Neall walked speakers through the latest iterations of the Talent Map, our unique self-assessment tool that helps speakers determine a plan of action to advance their careers, and links them to our extensive training library, highlighting the importance of continued development
Pomona Partners founder Tom Cheesewright spoke about the importance of nailing and optimising your Proposition, and how this translates into a content strategy that attracts inbound leads
Marketing lead Katharine McNamara and digital marketing consultant Steve Hancock teamed up for a deep dive into search engine optimisation and pay per click advertising for speakers, using live examples from the campaigns Pomona has been running to show how it works and provide incredible clarity on an often-confusing subject
We finished the day with an open mic session, seeing five of our speakers give their elevator pitches in front of their peers and receiving both great validation and valuable feedback. And lots of applause!
After that everyone decamped to North Star Piccadilly for our annual MingleBells event. We hired the venue out for the evening, offering speakers and invited guests Christmas tunes, mulled wine and yakitori skewers - a great combination! Huge thanks to owners Jenny and Adam for hosting us.
The feedback on the day absolutely speaks for itself with every attendee giving the event the full five stars using Pomona Partners own Feedback Engine - a tool we provide all our speakers to help them to collect audience feedback, photos, and contacts.
"What an afternoon of value - the travel from Brum was well worth it. In particular I really enjoyed the proposition focused segments! And open mic - so many lessons"
"A day where the investment in attending was more than matched by the investment Pomona has made. Really looking forward to optimising that investment to the benefit of all"
"Fabulous speaker in Penny. And other presentations were really valuable and useful with practical elements I can immediately implement. Great venue too. Thank you"
"It was good to feel part of the community."
"Great discussions, great mix of information shared. Lots of takeaways"
The Pomona team also learned a lot from the day. The event was such a powerful way to connect with our speakers, to get to know them face to face, and to share with them information about how we’re working on their behalf, that we’re now thinking about how we can evolve and extend the format in future.
Huge thanks to everyone who came and participated so enthusiastically. We all loved the energy in the room and it has really inspired us to keep growing and developing this wonderful community of speakers.
