Deep listening
Understanding the person and the full body of work before deciding how it should be presented.
About Cheryl Janis Agency
Close attention, clear strategy, and relationships built over time.
Cheryl Janis Agency is an intentionally small speaker representation agency built around close attention, clear positioning, proactive outreach, and long-term relationship development.
Cheryl and Philip work closely with each client, bringing different but complementary roles to the work.
Founder
Cheryl Janis
Founder & Speaker Representative
For nearly a decade, I have hosted and produced Healthcare Interior Design 2.0, interviewing the architects, designers, clinicians, and healthcare leaders behind major care environments—including SOM’s Winship Cancer Institute at Emory Midtown and Montréal’s 3.6-million-square-foot CHUM. Preparing for those conversations taught me how to enter someone else’s body of work with curiosity, find the thread running through it, and draw out the ideas that give it deeper meaning.
My earlier career as an interior designer, with a focus on human well-being and sensory experience, still shapes how I work. I pay close attention to language, structure, visual rhythm, emotional tone, and the experience people have when they first encounter someone’s work.
Today, I bring those instincts to the outward-facing work of representation—learning a client’s work deeply, researching aligned opportunities, developing organizer relationships, shaping outreach, and helping the right opportunities move toward booking.
I also stay close to the language and materials that support that work. Positioning, biographies, speaker materials, websites, and topics are not isolated creative products to me; they are part of the professional infrastructure that helps a speaker’s value register clearly when the right opportunity appears.
My approach is grounded in long-term, trust-based partnership: learning the full body of a client’s work, identifying the rooms that genuinely fit, and building meaningful relationships over time rather than relying on impersonal, high-volume outreach.
Speaker Strategy & Development
Philip Morgan
Director of Speaker Strategy & Development
Philip has spent more than a decade studying how independent experts become easier to understand, differentiate, and choose—and how positioning, point of view, research, audience development, and the way buyers make decisions can turn expertise into opportunity.
His work has moved through specialization and market positioning, point-of-view development, small-scale research, lead generation, and audience-based marketing. He has written extensively on these subjects, including The Positioning Manual for Indie Consultants, The Point of View Guide, The Small-Scale Research Guide, and The Lead Generation Model.
A recurring thread in Philip’s work is looking beyond how experts describe themselves to understand the other side of the relationship: how audiences and buyers perceive expertise, establish trust, and decide whom to choose.
At Cheryl Janis Agency, Philip brings that background directly into his work with speakers. He leads onboarding and strategic interviews, works with clients on positioning and speaker development, and provides coaching that helps them clarify what they want to say, who it matters to, and how to communicate it with greater precision.
He also helps translate what the agency is learning through outreach into strategic decisions—so a speaker’s positioning, materials, and approach can continue to evolve as we learn what resonates in the market.
How We Work Together
Different roles, one closely connected practice.
Cheryl is primarily outward-facing—researching markets and opportunities, building relationships, conducting outreach, following up, and helping opportunities move toward booking.
Philip is primarily speaker-facing—helping clients sharpen their positioning, point of view, and presentation, with particular attention to how their expertise will be understood by the audiences and organizations they hope to reach.
The roles overlap intentionally. What Cheryl learns through conversations in the market informs Philip’s strategic work with the speaker, and what develops through that work makes the next round of outreach stronger.
We both learn the speaker’s work, pay attention to what the market is telling us, and adjust the strategy over time. The agency stays small by design so the people shaping the strategy remain closely involved in the work.
What We Bring
A different kind of agency relationship
Clear positioning
Finding language that is distinctive, honest, and easy for audiences and organizers to understand.
Human-centered design
Creating materials and pathways that feel balanced, inviting, and easy to use.
Relationship-based opportunity
Building connections with care rather than relying on pressure, volume, or impersonal outreach.
The right work should not have to shout.
We believe meaningful ideas can be presented with clarity, beauty, and confidence without becoming loud, simplified, or performative.
We are interested in speakers whose work asks something of us—attention, memory, courage, curiosity, responsibility, or a willingness to see another person more fully.
Could we be a good fit?
The strongest partnerships begin with clarity. Learn how we work, what you can expect from us, and what we need from the people we represent and support.
The Agency
Cheryl Janis Agency
Boutique Speaker Representation
Thoughtful voices. Meaningful opportunities.