How much of your time does a conference programme with a speaker agency take?

With a speaker agency, a conference programme costs you a few conversations at the start, a single sign-off and your days on stage, about two to three travel days per talk. If you do it yourself, submitting alone takes 2 to 15 hours a month for the minimum quantity and about 20 to 27 hours in a full submission operation with fifty submissions a month. The ranges come from the acceptance rate of our own submissions for clients and from experience values for daily output, and preparation and follow-up come on top in both cases. This article sets both routes against each other in hours, puts a figure on the preparation and shows which time stays with you when you work with an agency.

How much of your own time does a speaker agency need?

A speaker agency needs a few conversations and one sign-off from you. It takes over the part of the work that comes before the talk: it develops the talk and the abstracts, the short descriptions of a planned talk that you use to apply to a conference, and it researches the right conferences. A submission is the talk proposal a conference collects through its call for papers, its public invitation for talks, and a programme committee, the group that puts the conference programme together, decides on it. This is the work Stage Starter takes on for you: we find the right calls, write the submission and submit it, then we follow up and accompany you all the way to the stage.

You contribute the expertise, which we gather in a few conversations at the start, and the sign-off on the talk and abstracts, which you give once before the start for all later submissions together. The guide to speaker agencies sets out what an agency delivers in detail and how working together runs.

How many hours does submitting take when you do it yourself?

If you do it yourself, submitting takes about 2 to 15 hours a month for the minimum quantity and about 20 to 27 hours in a full submission operation. The calculation rests on three quantities: the acceptance rate, the number of talks you aim for and the number of submissions you can manage in a day. In our own submissions for clients the acceptance rate is about 7 per cent per abstract, since 94 of 1,374 decided abstracts were accepted. Per conference we reach up to 19 per cent acceptances, while 5 per cent at most is typical in the market at this volume of submissions.

For four to six talks a year, our experience value from the second year onwards, you need about 60 to 90 abstracts at 7 per cent. With a finished profile and standardised abstracts, experience shows that 15 to 20 submissions a day are possible, which makes 3 to 6 working days a year, or 24 to 48 hours at eight hours a day, which is 2 to 4 hours a month. If you tailor every submission to its conference, you manage only 4 to 6 a day and arrive at 10 to 23 working days, which is 80 to 180 hours a year or 7 to 15 hours a month. Tailored submissions have a higher acceptance rate, so the quantity needed is smaller there, which makes the 7 to 15 hours an upper limit.

In practice, a considerably larger operation sits behind this minimum quantity. A submission operation that works on volume reaches at least a hundred submissions to around twenty conferences in the first month and at least fifty a month after that, because only this volume lets the acceptance rate work reliably and every submission teaches you something for the next one. At 15 to 20 submissions a day, that is 5 to almost 7 working days in the first month and then 2.5 to just over 3 working days, or about 20 to 27 hours, every month.

How much time do preparation and follow-up take?

By our estimate, preparation and follow-up take about 20 to 40 hours once before the start when you do it yourself, and about 4 to 8 hours every month after that. Preparation starts with the talk topic, which has to be shaped so that a programme committee sees a gain for its audience in it. Then come the abstracts in several versions with titles, the bio with a photo and the conference list, which has to be kept up to date because deadlines move and new calls appear. Writing a new abstract from scratch takes about two to four hours including the title and revisions, adapting a finished abstract to a form takes only minutes, and if you take tailoring to a conference's audience seriously, you need one to two hours each time.

After submission comes the follow-up, which the article following up after a call for papers describes. Conferences often reply only weeks or months after the call closes, and during that time someone keeps track of every open proposal, answers questions from organisers and chases where a decision fails to arrive. With twenty or more open conferences this adds up to several hours a month, spread in small pieces across the whole year, which is hard to put into the calendar as one block.

How many travel days does a conference talk take?

A one-day talk in another city takes two travel days, or three with a long journey or an arrival the evening before, and this time is the same with or without an agency. Preparing the talk is counted separately. With four to six talks a year that is 8 to 18 travel days, or roughly 0.7 to 1.5 days a month. A breakdown of the other costs, from travel to preparation, is in the article what a conference appearance costs.

These are the days in which submission work turns into clients. In our example a talk brings about five serious conversations, two of them lead to meetings, and every third meeting becomes paid work, all of these experience values from our own work. You hold these conversations yourself because they build on what you said on stage, and two weeks after the talk is a good point to follow up with the contacts.

The counter-calculation: hours in euros and the price of a bought slot

To convert hours into euros you need a day rate. Take €1,000 as an example: the 20 to 27 hours of a full submission operation then come to about €2,500 to €3,400 of working time a month at eight hours a day, and with preparation and follow-up it is about €3,000 to €4,400. At Stage Starter, working together starts from €990 net per month, and for that the whole operation from research to accompanying you to the stage is with us. If you want a written plan first, you begin with the Speaker Audit from €2,000 net, which is credited when you book the agency.

There is one more way to save time, and it costs money instead of work. With pay to speak, an organiser sells speaking slots, usually as part of a sponsorship package, and you can easily pay €10,000 or more for a single speaking slot. The submission falls away, and because sponsored sessions are often not labelled in the programme, a specialist audience notices the purchase in the content as soon as the talk advertises more than it informs. The article sponsored talk and pay to speak explains when such a slot is worth it.

Who the model pays off for most

The model pays off most for experts with a high order value, a full calendar and several talks a year as the goal. Managing directors and founders almost always belong to this group, because every hour spent on submitting is missing in the company. If you aim for one to three talks in the first year, you need about 15 to 45 abstracts at 7 per cent, and an operation that reaches this quantity reliably still runs at full volume. Doing it yourself remains the more laborious route, whose time costs you value at your day rate, and the article submit yourself or hire a speaker agency sets out the full comparison.