Calculator
What a keynote really nets after travel and prep
Enter the quoted fee and the true cost of getting to the stage, and see the effective hourly rate hiding behind a date you were about to accept.
Free tools
Calculators for the speaking business
Two small tools for the arithmetic every professional speaker does badly in her head: what a date actually pays, and how much inbound it takes to fill a calendar.
Speaking hides its economics well. A five figure fee reads like a good week until you count the two travel days, the nine hours of client calls and deck customization, the hotel, the airport parking and the Monday you lost to recovery. The number that matters is not the fee on the contract, it is what the engagement paid per hour of your working life.
The same blindness applies to the pipeline. Speakers set a target of twenty four paid dates and then work backward with no math at all, which is why April looks full and September is empty. Both calculators below run in your browser, keep nothing, and use realistic starting values so you see a meaningful result before you touch a single field.
Calculator
How many inquiries it takes to fill your speaking year
Set the number of paid dates you want and your real conversion at each stage, and see the weekly inquiry volume that has to exist for that calendar to happen.
Working document
The speaker one sheet checklist
Twenty items that turn a page about you into a page a program committee can act on in one sitting.
Why the calculators are open with no sign up
You should not have to trade an email address to find out what a Tuesday keynote in Phoenix actually paid you. Both calculators run in your browser, store nothing and ask for nothing back. That is deliberate, because this is arithmetic working speakers already do badly in their heads, usually at an airport gate while deciding whether to accept a date the program chair needs answered by Friday.
They earn their keep even if you never open a booking page from us. Run the net fee calculator against your last three engagements and you have the beginning of an honest fee band structure, because you will see which format and which travel radius has been quietly subsidizing the rest of your year. Run the pipeline planner once in January and you will know whether your fall is going to be thin while association education slots are still unassigned. Write the results next to your topic list and let them decide what you charge and which invitations you turn down.
Now put those numbers where a buyer can see them
An effective hourly rate and a weekly inquiry target are useful in a spreadsheet and far more useful published as fee bands and open weeks a program chair can read without emailing you first. Ask for a demo and we will show you how the output above turns into a band structure tied to format and travel radius, the kind a procurement reviewer can follow. Bring the figures you just produced.