Licensed professionals
Professionals who use continuing education, conferences, and other speaking opportunities to build relationships and generate referral business.
Speaker Representation
Helping speakers enter the rooms most aligned with their work.
Cheryl Janis Agency provides full-service speaker representation built around proactive outbound.
We work selectively with professionals, independent thought leaders, and paid speakers whose work has substance, relevance, and a clear audience.
Unlike a traditional speakers bureau, we are not waiting for event organizers to browse a roster or come looking for someone like you. We actively identify the right organizations, associations, conferences, firms, professional groups, and hosts; find the people responsible; develop thoughtful outreach; build relationships; follow up; and help move the right opportunities toward booking.
The goal is not simply more speaking. It is to build a sustainable speaking practice around the audiences and outcomes that matter.
Who We Work Well With
Different paths, one commitment to building over time.
Independent thought leaders
People who use speaking to create visibility, credibility, and demand for the work or ideas they are building.
Paid speakers
Speakers who want an energetic outbound effort to develop speaking into a meaningful revenue stream.
A Small Team, Closely Involved
Strategy and representation stay connected.
Cheryl leads opportunity research, outreach, relationship development, follow-up, and booking development. Philip leads onboarding, strategic interviews, speaker development, and coaching.
Together, we learn the speaker’s work deeply, determine which audiences and opportunities make sense, review what we are hearing from the market, and refine the campaign over time.
What Representation Includes
A connected campaign, not a list of isolated services.
01
Strategy & positioning
Clarify audiences, organizations, event types, topics, positioning, and opportunities worth pursuing.
02
Market & opportunity development
Build and continually refine a targeted universe of associations, conferences, firms, professional groups, companies, and potential hosts. Identify specific opportunities and the people responsible for programming, education, events, membership, partnerships, and other relevant functions.
03
Outreach & relationship building
Conduct thoughtful personalized outbound outreach designed to start real conversations rather than submit speakers indiscriminately. Follow up over time and develop relationships that may produce multiple opportunities.
04
Booking & campaign management
Shape speaker biographies, topic descriptions, positioning, and outreach language as needed. Manage interested-host communication, booking coordination, appropriate fee negotiation, scheduling and confirmations, and ongoing reporting and strategy.
Beyond One Booking
Beyond one booking.
A sustainable speaking practice is built through accumulated trust.
We build an interconnected ecosystem of audiences, organizers, institutions, referrals, repeat invitations, and adjacent opportunities rather than treating every engagement as an isolated transaction.
Over time, one meaningful engagement can lead to another organization, a media inquiry, a referral, a repeat invitation, a new audience, or a stronger fee position. Our role is to recognize and cultivate those connections.
Cheryl is building more than a CLE pipeline for me — she’s creating a long-term speaking strategy with the right attorney audiences, repeat opportunities, invitation-based events, and the messaging and materials to support it. She handles the moving pieces so I can focus on showing up and giving a strong presentation.
How New Representation Begins
A clear four-month starting engagement.
New representation relationships begin with a four-month engagement at $3,000 per month — $12,000 total.
This is a working engagement rather than a package of fixed deliverables. The four months give us the time to sharpen positioning, identify the right markets and buyers, begin thoughtful outreach, follow up consistently, build organizer relationships, and learn from the response.
During this initial engagement, we take no commission on speaking engagements we help generate. Our compensation during the four months is the monthly retainer only.
At the end of the engagement, we look together at what we have built and what the market is telling us. If there is strong mutual fit, the speaker’s positioning and materials are ready, and there is meaningful market traction, we may discuss transitioning to a commission-based relationship.
Commission-only representation is not our starting model for new clients, and we do not offer a reduced-scope version of the representation engagement.
A Common Question
Why don’t we work on a commission-only basis?
Commission-only representation is real, and it works — for speakers who are already selling. Traditional speakers bureaus earn their 25–30% by matching proven speakers with the event planners who are actually their clients. They can afford to say yes to almost anyone because the economics are lopsided: at one major bureau, 45 speakers out of a 4,500-person roster generated the bookings that kept the lights on. The stars subsidize everyone else, so adding one more name to the roster costs them nothing.
We deliberately run a smaller model, and we consider that an advantage for our clients. We forego the scale that lets a bureau say yes to everyone — and what we gain is focus. Here, every client has to earn their keep, which means nobody languishes on a roster while reps chase the big-fee names. When we take you on, your business gets genuine effort, because our business depends on yours succeeding.
We’re a speaker management company, not a bureau: our client is you, the speaker, and our work is building your platform from the ground up — positioning, materials, identifying the right buyers, outbound prospecting. All of that labor happens before a single booking exists, so it can't be funded on commission. If you're already booking consistently at high fees, a bureau may be a great fit for you, and we're happy to point you toward a few.
A Free Guide for Speakers
Find the idea only you can bring to the room.
The Point of View Guide for Speakers is a practical guide to cultivating and articulating a point of view that serves your audience and makes your speaking more distinct.
Written by Philip Morgan, the guide includes POVSpace mapping, audience exercises, and writing prompts to help you move from broad expertise toward a clear idea worth sharing.
Free to read and download. Beta edition, 2026.
Do you have meaningful work that belongs in more rooms?
Learn how we work, what we ask of the people we represent, and whether this kind of relationship fits what you are ready to build.