The Leigh Bureau is a premium speakers bureau serving business and sophisticated cultural audiences worldwide. We exclusively represent some of the world’s most prominent leaders and personalities in a wide range of fields: business and economics, politics and public life, science and technology, entertainment and the arts. We specialize in speakers of substance — people who are thought leaders in their fields who offer the best in platform performance and valuable content.
History
The Leigh Bureau is the world’s longest-established premium speakers bureau. The business was founded in 1929 by W. Colston Leigh, the father of our current chairman, Bill Leigh. Since then, we have represented some of the world’s top speakers and public personages, such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Boris Yeltsin. We’ve also helped to shape the industry itself over the decades and we have made significant contributions to the wider culture. We led the way into the business speaking market in the early 1980s and this continues to be our distinguishing strength — that we represent speakers who bring real business value to the organizations they address and the best analysis, insight and commentary to audiences in the public sphere.
Businesses
The Leigh Bureau is the flagship firm of the Leigh Group, which includes five related enterprises. Three are speakers bureaus that have been separately formed to better serve the global speaking market. The Leigh Bureau serves audiences in North America. Leigh Bureau Limited serves Europe, India, Australia and New Zealand, the Middle East and Africa. Leigh Bureau International serves Latin America, Asia and other parts of the globe.
In addition to the speakers bureaus, we also have a literary agency (LeighCo) and an advisory services company, Leigh Advisory Services.
We sometimes define our businesses in terms of our speakers’ intellectual property: LeighCo helps our clients define and publish their ideas; the speakers bureaus help them promote their ideas; and Leigh Advisory Services helps business leaders implement ideas in their organizations through direct management consulting and advisory services.
Speakers
Business. Our business speakers include business leaders, academic researchers, business journalists, writers and consultants—all first-tier people with substantive content that has real value for business audiences.
Political & public life. The Leigh Bureau represents writers and historians, analysts and commentators, important academics and fellows at policy institutions—women and men who are major contributors to public discourse in both the United States and Europe.
General audiences. We also represent speakers with broad appeal who are inspirational, informative, and often very funny, in programs of great interest to any audience looking for substance presented with a light touch.
Special programs. We offer some unique programs that transcend categories. We have always found ways to create new experiences that are tailored directly to the desires of specific audiences.
Offerings
Keynotes. As a speakers bureau, we specialize in matching audiences with the speakers who can add the most value to your event, with keynotes of varying lengths to fit any slot in your agenda, with or without a Q&A. But that’s not all we offer.
Moderators. We also represent a number of people who are seasoned moderators and facilitators, who can lead a single panel discussion or MC an entire event and help you design your program. They combine depth in their area, often knowing as much about the topic they are moderating as do the other members of the discussion, with great people skills and experience at keeping things on track and in service to the strategic goals of the event.
Seminars & workshops. A single keynote not enough depth for your audience? Many of our speakers will develop a customized program of greater length—half-day, full-day or multiple days—or a follow-up break-out session on the topic of their keynote.
Advisory services, management consulting & executive coaching. Beyond the expanded program for a given event, many of our speakers also offer advisory services, management consulting or executive coaching custom-designed to meet specific strategic needs. Through Leigh Advisory Services, we would be happy to discuss how we might create such a relationship with the leaders of your organization.
On Getting Paid to Speak | GeekFeminism.org | Jan 22, 2015
In response to a thread on a private mailing list, a prominent woman in tech wrote this fantastic rundown of the details of getting paid to speak, including which speaker bureaus represent which kinds of speakers. We are re-posting an anonymized version of it with her permission in the hopes that with better information, more women will get paid fairly for their public speaking. Paying women fair wages for their work is a feminist act. This advice applies primarily to United States-based speakers; if you have information about international speaker bureaus, please share it in the comments!
Question: I’m interested in speaking with [members of the private mailing list] who either speak via a speaker bureau/agency, or otherwise get paid for their speaking gigs. I have done an absolute ton of speaking in the past few years (including several keynotes) and I know I’m at the level where I could be asking for money for my speaking, and I also need to reduce the amount I sign up for in order to focus on my own projects. So I’m on the market for an agency and would love to hear numbers from other folks who charge for giving talks. I know several women who ask for $1000-$2000 plus travel costs for engagement, but would love to know if that is typical or low as I definitely do know dudes who get much more.
Thanks!
PS this was a very scary email to write! Asking for others to value your work as work is really difficult!
Answer: I have a lot of experience with this & have done a lot of research. The main U.S. bureaus are:
(There are probably lots of others including ones that are more specialized, but these are the ones I know.)
I went with Lavin and they’ve been fine. The primary benefits to me are 1) They bring me well-paying talks I wouldn’t otherwise get; 2) they take care of all the flakes so I don’t have to, and they vet to figure out who is a flake; 2) they negotiate the fee; and 3) they handle all the boring logistical details of e.g. scheduling, contractual stuff, reimbursements, etc. I mostly do two types of talks:
For all my talks I get the base fee plus hotel and airfare, plus usually an expenses buyout of about $200 a day. A few orgs can’t do a buyout because of internal policies: that’s worse for me because it means I need to save receipts etc., which is a hassle. Lavin keeps half my fee, which I think is pretty typical. In terms of fees generally, I can tell you from working with bureaus from the other side that 5K is a pretty typical ballpark fee that would usually get a speaker with some public profile (like a David Pogue-level of celebrity) who would be expected to be somewhat entertaining. The drivers of speaker fees are, I think 1) fame, 2) entertainment value and 3) expertise/substance, with the last being the least important. The less famous you are, the more entertaining you’re expected to be. Usually for the high-money talks, there is at least one prep call, during which they tell me what they want: usually it’s a combination of “inspiration” plus a couple of inside-baseball type anecdotes that people can tell their friends about afterwards. The high-money talks are definitely less fun than the low-money ones: the audiences are less engaged, it’s more work for me to provide what they need, everybody cares less, etc.
When I spoke with [a guy at one agency] he told me some interesting stuff about tech conferences, most of which I sadly have forgotten :/ But IIRC I think he said tech conferences tend to pay poorly if at all, because the assumption is that the speaker is benefiting in other ways than cash — they’re consultants who want to be hired by tech companies, they’re pitching a product, trying to hire engineers, building their personal brand, or whatever. Leigh says they’re not lucrative and so they don’t place their people at them much. The real money is in the super-boring stuff, and in PR/social media conferences.
Talk To Me, Malcolm Gladwell! | Observer.com | Feb 2, 2011
“I think in the last year I’ve done, I want to say–it’s tough–a few dozen? Thirty to forty would be my guess?”
Jonah Lehrer, a contributing editor at Wired, was on the phone from Los Angeles Monday evening, trying to recall how many paid speeches he had delivered in 2010. Mr. Lehrer, 29, is the author of two books on the brain, is writing a third about creativity and is in high demand on the lecture circuit. Thousand-person convention halls, intimate corporate gatherings–he’s done them all. “I remember being at a podiatry conference in Denver for my first book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist,” he told The Observer.
Foot doctors in the Rockies are paying to hear about a madeleine, and they are paying well. For decades, media critics have scolded journalists who give speeches for outsize sums, deeming it unseemly at best and a conflict of interest at worst. But in an era with fewer watchdogs–and a profession that has had a measure of its righteousness sapped by pay freezes, furloughs, layoffs and bankruptcies–the practice is thriving once again. Scan the rosters of the various speakers’ bureaus, and you’ll find no shortage of names from The Times, TV news and the monthlies, all eager to hit the Hyatt ballroom and fling spittle over a sea of warmed-over salmon.
Not everyone pockets the money. Some speak gratis or donate their fees to charity, and straight newspaper reporters know better–or should–than to take cash from groups that they cover. But opinion journalists and ideas-y magazine writers are largely free to collect five- and even six-figure checks for a single afternoon’s work.
“There are journalists at every price point within the lecture field. You can say anything between $5,000 and $100,000 and up,” Bill Leigh, whose Leigh Bureau represents Malcolm Gladwell, Chris Anderson, Atul Gawande and others, told The Observer last week. “I can assure you that journalists are well represented–and that that is new. That much I can tell you emphatically.”
Mr. Leigh recalled, years ago, being unable to even gauge Walter Cronkite’s interest in a speaking tour: The CBS anchor’s reps assured him that the field’s maximum pay did not meet the minimum for the man’s time. Today, pretty much everyone has a price; the Washington Speakers Bureau discreetly lists a fee range next to each of its clients, from Luke Russert ($7,501 to $10,000) to John Heilemann ($10,001 to $15,000) to Christiane Amanpour ($40,001 and up).
It’s the multiplication factor that really pays. For most writers, an idea is only good for a single article, or a single book–and a single paycheck. But that same idea rendered in speech form can be delivered many, many times. “You can assume that speakers as a rule end up doing between 15 and 50 dates a year,” Mr. Leigh said.
Is this a ray of hope for the wily journalist, The Observer asked David Lavin, of Toronto’s Lavin Agency? A new way to actually make a career at reporting and writing?
“Viable? It’s the world’s best-paying part-time job,” Mr. Lavin said. He added: “Some people write books just to get on the speaker circuit.”
Old model: tour the country to promote your book. New model: write a book to tour the country.
“It’s interactive. They both support each other,” Mr. Leigh said. “Initially, the speaking promotes the book, and afterwards the book promotes the talks, and then the talks go on keeping the book alive.”
“The book doesn’t even need to be good. You just need to have written one good book, to get known,” said a longtime magazine editor who has worked at several large media companies. “The book is just the loss leader for the speech.”
Wired editor Chris Anderson cemented his speaker-circuit bona fides with a 2006 book, The Long Tail, that was hailed as cogent and disruptive. His last effort, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, met with considerably worse reviews, and its premise was derided on many blogs. Worse, chunks of it turned out to have been copied and pasted without attribution from Wikipedia. None of that matters on the speaking circuit, where Mr. Anderson’s agency says he is in more demand than almost any other client worldwide.
A PERUSAL THROUGH the media criticism archives indicates that the practice of writers speaking for money was probably invented shortly after writing itself. “The phenomenon of journalists giving speeches for staggering sums of money continues to dog the profession,” Alicia Shepard, now NPR’s ombudsman, wrote in the American Journalism Review in 1995, when the top fees were around $35,000. “Welcome to the era of the buckraker,” Jacob Weisberg wrote in The New Republicin 1986, coining the term; fees at the time could hit $25,000. Just 21 then, Mr. Weisberg knew a devilish way to tweak power when he saw one, and according to TNR legend, he installed a bell at his cubicle, taped to a photo of notorious yakker Robert Novak, that he would ring whenever a senior staffer snuck out to the podium.
These days, event organizers know to clam up when media reporters come calling about honoraria, as The Observer did this week. But numbers inevitably leak out. New York found Malcolm Gladwell netting $80,000 from a dental suppliers group in 2008, and the next year, Thomas Friedman was busted by the San Francisco Chronicle for taking $75,000 from a government agency, in violation of Times rules. “We have all become lax in complying with the parts of the ethics guidelines that require annual accounting of income from speaking engagements,” executive editor Bill Keller wrote the staff in a May 2009 memo that Gawker published. “The rules are vague and need a fresh look,” ombudsman Clark Hoyt frowned in the paper that month. (The policies have not been updated since, a Times spokesperson said.)
The lucrative lecture circuit may be the one thing that Mr. Friedman and his longtime antagonist Matt Taibbi have in common. In many thousands of bilious words over the years, Mr. Taibbi has savaged the Times columnist’s metaphors, ridiculed his worldview, insulted his mustache and worse. But when the $75,000 mistake happened, and readers inundated Mr. Taibbi with links to the news, eager for a fresh beat-down, he gave his favorite punching bag a pass. He didn’t say why.
But the clearest sign of just how unobjectionable the new speaking-fee era is may be this: Last week, the Lavin Agency says, it signed Mr. Taibbi as a client.
THE MONEY IS good. But the speaking circuit is not a glamorous world. “You end up getting existentially sad, where you look through your wallet and you realize you’ve got like seven hotel keys,” Mr. Lehrer said. “It happened last week in San Francisco, where I was convinced this key wasn’t working. I went down to the front desk, and they pointed out that I was using the wrong key. It was from a month ago.”
The way Mr. Lehrer tells it, joining the circuit just … happened. When his first book came out, in 2007, he didn’t even have representation; corporations simply sought him out themselves. Subsequent books and regular contributions to Wired, The New Yorker and other publications have kept his bio fresh.
“To be totally crass about it, I think I got into this for the revenue side, but I’ve been surprised in the last year by the other perks,” he told The Observer. He can see clear improvement in his writing as he tests out loud what elements of a given story work and learns how to build tension, withhold key information, deliver a punch line. His latest book is stuffed with characters he never would have met if not for his travels. The act of taking gobs of money, though, still feels strange.
“The stage fright, that’s something I’ve acclimated to,” Mr. Lehrer said. “But I’ve never really gotten over the sense of fraudulence that comes with being onstage and, you know, dispensing knowledge and wisdom. That’s where I think the feelings of insecurity and self-loathing come in.” He corrected himself. “‘Self-loathing’ is too strong a word. But certainly, it’s a strange business. And the enjoyment that comes from all the perks of it–the getting better at storytelling, the revenue, the meeting new people–that’s on the ledger against the fact that …” He made a digression about airport logistics and eating too many Egg McMuffins, and apologized.
“For me,” Mr. Lehrer continued, “the toughest part of public speaking is kind of psyching myself up onstage beforehand, to be like, ‘Who am I to do this? What could I possibly offer you that will make it worth the price you’re paying me to go up here?’”
nsummers@observer.com | @