The author
Jimenez Julien, the person accountable for SpeakerOneSheet
I publish this product, I answer its email, and I sit in the calls where speakers tell me what the booking process really costs them.
Why I built a one sheet that stays alive
I came to professional speaking sideways. I was building booking and scheduling software for small service businesses when a facilitator in Chicago asked me to look at her process. She had eleven versions of a PDF on her desktop, a spreadsheet of soft holds, and a rule that she answered inquiries on Sunday nights because that was the only block of time nobody else wanted. She was booking more than fifty paid dates a year and she was still losing work to the six day gap between a planner's question and her answer.
What struck me was that none of the tools she had were wrong, exactly. Her website was handsome. Her calendar was accurate. Her CRM was tidy. The problem was that the three of them never agreed with each other, and the document she actually sent to planners agreed with none of them. Every inquiry became a small act of reconciliation performed by the most expensive person in the business.
So SpeakerOneSheet started with one rule: there is exactly one record of what you speak about, what it costs and when you are free, and everything a planner sees is a view of that record. Change the fee band once and the page, the kit and the contract template all move. That sounds small until you have watched a speaker apologize for an out of date rate in front of a program committee.
The second thing I learned took longer. Speakers do not lose bookings because their material is weak. They lose them to sequencing. A program chair has a committee call on Thursday and needs something to show. If your topic description, your range and your availability are not in her hands by Wednesday, the shortlist is made without you, and no amount of follow up reopens it. Speed of information beats polish almost every time, which is why the product optimizes for a link that is correct at three in the morning rather than a beautiful export you have to remember to refresh.
The third thing came from the bureaus. Coordinators are the ones who feel double booked holds most sharply, because they carry six calendars and none of the goodwill. Building the shared pipeline and the cross roster availability view was a direct response to a coordinator in San Antonio who described her afternoon of phone tag to me in detail I have not forgotten.
I work with operators in this trade the same way every month. I run short calls with speakers and coordinators, I read the inquiry threads people are willing to share with identifying details removed, and I ship against what those show rather than against a roadmap I wrote in advance. When a request will not make the build, I say so plainly and explain why. When something in the product costs a customer money or time, that is mine to fix, and my address is on this page for exactly that reason.
I am accountable for what this site claims. The numbers on the home page come from the accounts on the platform for the 2025 booking year, the testimonials are from named customers who approved their words, and the pricing is the pricing. If any of that stops being true, it changes here first.
Experience and expertise
- Founder and publication director of MLJ, SASU, the company that publishes SpeakerOneSheet.
- Twelve years building booking, scheduling and inquiry software for small operators, including calendar sync and availability systems.
- Ongoing research work with keynote speakers, workshop facilitators, bureau coordinators and corporate meeting planners in the United States.
- Responsible for editorial standards, pricing accuracy, accessibility and data handling across every page of this site.
How this product is built and maintained
Releases go out on a two week cycle, with security patches shipped as soon as they are ready. Every customer facing claim on this site is traced to a source before it is published: platform figures come from aggregate account data, testimonials are approved in writing by the person named, and anything we cannot evidence does not appear. Pricing pages are reviewed whenever a plan changes, and the change is announced to existing customers before it takes effect.
On the product side, availability sync, fee bands and the inquiry pipeline are covered by automated tests that run before every deploy, because a page that shows a wrong date costs a speaker real money. Accessibility is checked against WCAG 2.1 AA on the marketing site and inside the application, with keyboard operation tested by hand. Customer data is stored in US regions, encrypted in transit and at rest, and never used to train models or sold to anyone.
Published articles
Everything I have written for The Booking Room, the SpeakerOneSheet magazine on the working economics of the speaking and workshop trade.
- How do I set a keynote fee band that survives a corporate procurement review?Published
- What should be in my speaker contract before I agree to a corporate date?Published
- Do I need to file taxes in every state where I give a paid keynote?Published
- Should I sign with a speakers bureau or keep booking my own events directly?Published
- How far ahead do conference planners actually book their breakout and keynote speakers?Published
- Why do my workshop proposals get shortlisted but never actually confirmed by the committee?Published
- What does it really cost me to travel to a one hour keynote across the country?Published
- Are corporate clients still paying for virtual sessions or has that market gone quiet?Published
- How are event planners in my niche choosing speakers this season, and what changed?Published
Contact the author
Write to me at jimenezjulien42@gmail.com. Product questions, a correction to something on this site, a request to see the roadmap, or a hard question about whether this fits your practice: all of it reaches me, and I answer within one business day.
What I answer personally
Pricing questions, data handling questions, and anything about how fee bands or holds behave in an edge case. If the answer requires an engineer, I bring one to the call.
What I publish
Product changes, pricing changes and any correction to a claim on this site. Corrections carry the date they were made.
Where the numbers come from
Aggregate platform data for the 2025 booking year across 1,340 live speaker pages, plus approved customer statements.