How Far Ahead You Need to Book a Speaker in Ireland, and What to Do If You Are Stuck for Next Month

An email arrived on a Wednesday last January. Two hundred people, a hotel in Dublin, the following Tuesday. Their speaker had pulled out with a chest infection and the woman writing to me was extremely calm in a way that told me she was not calm at all. I was free, as it happened, and it went fine. But I have had that email a dozen times and I have mostly had to say no.

Most Irish companies book a keynote speaker eight to twelve weeks before the event, and that is the range to plan around. For January kickoffs and for wellbeing weeks in May, three to five months is more realistic, because the whole country wants the same narrow set of dates. Shorter notice is often possible and it is always worth asking.

The eight to twelve week figure is not a rule imposed by speakers, it is just when budgets clear and agendas firm up. In practice a booking goes through three stages. Somebody decides they want an external speaker, which can be six months out. Somebody gets the money released, which is the slow part. Then somebody contacts the speaker, by which time the date is fixed and unmovable. If you can make contact at stage one rather than stage three you get a considerably better choice, and you can often hold a date provisionally while the approval works its way through.

Enda O’Doherty is a keynote speaker based in Waterford who takes fewer dates now than he used to, so the diary closes earlier than the fee band would suggest. That applies to a lot of the more experienced speakers in Ireland. The busiest names are not always the hardest to book. Sometimes the semi-retired ones are.

January fills first and fills hardest, because new year kickoffs, sales conferences and start of year town halls all land in the same three weeks. September and October come next, driven by Q4 conference season. May is tight because of wellbeing weeks and mental health awareness activity. December and August are the quietest months by a distance.

If you are planning a January event, the realistic window to be talking to speakers is October and November. By the second week of January, when most people start ringing, the first three names on your list are gone and you are choosing from whoever is left, which is a worse way to make the decision.

The flip side is genuinely useful. If your event can move, February and late March are far easier, June is easier again, and you will get better attention and often a better rate, because nobody is competing with you for the date. I have given clients a better price simply because they were willing to take a Thursday in February rather than the third week of January.

• January, the hardest month to book, plan from October
• September and October, Q4 conference season
• May, wellbeing weeks and mental health awareness activity
• February, late March and June, the easiest months to get a good speaker
• December and August, the quietest by a distance

Yes, more often than people expect, but the shortlist shrinks fast. Inside four weeks you are working with whoever happens to be free rather than whoever is ideal, and inside two weeks you are essentially asking who can be in that room on that morning. Ring rather than email, and ask the speaker directly rather than going through a bureau.

The phone is the whole trick with short notice. A speaker checking email on Friday evening will see your request on Monday, by which time you have lost three days you did not have. If a website gives a phone number, use it.

Ask two things when you are up against it. Whether the speaker can do the date at all, and whether they can do it without the usual preparation, because an honest speaker will tell you that a talk delivered after a twenty minute briefing call is not the talk they would have given with three weeks. Sometimes that is a perfectly good trade. It is better to make it knowingly.

The other short notice option people forget is virtual. If the constraint is travel rather than time, an online session opens up speakers who could never have made the room, and for a town hall or an internal wellbeing session it works perfectly well.

Ask this before you book rather than after. Enda O’Doherty holds public liability and professional indemnity cover, and if he cannot attend you receive a full refund and he will do everything possible to find a replacement speaker in time. Any professional speaker in Ireland should be able to state their position on this in one paragraph.

The reason it matters is that your exposure is not the speaker fee, it is the room. A hotel, catering and two hundred people’s morning is a much larger number than anything you are paying me. What you want is a speaker who understands that and has a plan, rather than one who has never thought about it.

I would also ask about illness substitution specifically. A refund is the minimum. A speaker with a real network who will pick up the phone and find you somebody good on a Thursday night is worth a great deal more than the refund.

An hour to an hour and a half is standard for a corporate keynote in Ireland, and most conference agendas are built around it. Forty five minutes works where the agenda is tight. Travel is the single biggest factor in whether a particular date works, because a morning in Dublin is a different proposition to a plant in the north west with an overnight.

I adjust to fit the conference rather than the other way round, and I would rather be told the real constraint early. A speaker who insists on ninety minutes in a seventy minute slot will overrun, and the person who pays for that is you, standing at the back watching the coffee go cold.

A geographically awkward date can be harder to get than a busy one, which is why telling me the location in the first email rather than the third saves us both time. Send the date now rather than when the budget clears, say where it is and roughly how many people, and I will tell you straight away whether it is free and hold it while you get the approval sorted.