Seven years ago, Norma T. Hollis
fielded a request to help find a black
speaker for a client in the $5,000 to
$7,000 price range. But she couldn’t find
one. There were none on her roster, and she
couldn’t find one on the Internet either.
That’s when she recognized a void that she
knew she could fill.
From that realization, Hollis launched Black
Speakers Online, one of the largest African-American speakers bureaus in the world.
Although her niche calls for specialty
speakers, Hollis still faces the same challenges that speakers bureaus everywhere
come up against. But she bolsters her business model with a separate career as a
professional speaker and also hosts her
Power of Voice Summit events. Plus, she runs
another business called Speakers Etcetera,
a training and development company that
tutors and markets professional speakers of
all backgrounds.
Black Speakers Online books approximately 200 engagements a year and
boasts of a roster showcasing more than
200 African-American speakers, including
Tavis Smiley, Alice Walker and Les Brown.
“We refer to ourselves as a relationship-building organization,” she says.
How does that work? One of her clients
started with one booking each year, but the
client increased its call for speakers. Now that
client books a dozen speakers a year through
her. “Speakers have to understand that the
decision on who is hired is a subjective one
made by the meeting planner, not by the
bureau,” she says. “The bureau’s job is to submit the appropriate individuals, and the client
makes a decision. I may submit five names,
and a speaker may not even know that I submitted his or her name. And it’s not until the
client narrows down those who are in the
realm of possibilities that we go back to the
speaker and check availability.”
How does she pick that final five from her
roster of more than 200 speakers? First, she
checks her database to determine who is
an appropriate choice for a client. Of
those, she then asks herself, “Has anyone
ever given us a problem in the past?”
“I love people,” she says about the joy
she finds in running her own bureau. “I love
helping them. I love watching them grow.”
What kinds of problems? “I had one
speaker who was with us for a couple of
years, and we never had a chance to book
her. Then we got a request, and she was
appropriate. We sent an offer to her, and the
offer indicated who the client was. The next
thing we knew, the client called us, saying the
speaker had called them. That’s an absolute
no-no! That turned the client off because the
contract had not been completed. We lost
the booking—and lost the client.”
Column coordinator
Dave Lieber, a
member of NSA/
North Texas, is a
columnist for the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram and a
professional speaker. His Web site is
www.yankeecowboy.com.
Another example: “We had a celebrity
booked for a brand new client. The speaker
called the day before the event. He made
a number of demands. The client scurried
around to meet the demands. But the
speaker never showed. And because we
didn’t know this happened until the event
was over, we didn’t have to time to find a
last-minute substitute.”
One more: “Another speaker we booked
was upset because the client was taking too long to pay. The speaker
called the client directly, and that created a whole other set of problems.
Speakers have to trust the bureau
to look out for them.”
Naturally, Hollis says, speakers
who don’t respect bureaus are
the least likely to get referrals.
If you get involved in other
services that the bureau
offers, such as teleconfer-ences, coaching and marketing services, Hollis says that she can
get to know you. The likelihood that
she’ll suggest you to clients
becomes greater.
