Three Reasons Not to Book Me as Your Speaker

Q: When should you not book this speaker?

When your audience lacks the authority to act on frameworks, when your event needs entertainment rather than a working session, or when your brief requires sector-specific expertise rather than cross-industry method.

Q: What is the speaking track record?

Early-stage, with one paid engagement to date. The operating career behind the content is long and the platform experience is not, so a committee needing delivery certainty should weigh that carefully.

Stagnation Slaughters. Strategy Saves. Speed Scales.

Most speaker pages are written to get you to enquire. This one is written to stop you enquiring if the fit is wrong, because a programme committee that books the wrong speaker loses a session slot and I lose a reference, and neither of us gets that back. Three specific reasons not to book me, then the track record without varnish, then what I am actually right for. If you reach the end still interested, the fit is probably real.

Three reasons not to book me

Your audience cannot act on frameworks, your event wants entertainment, or your brief requires sector expertise I deliberately do not offer. Any one of the three makes this a bad booking, and all three are things a programme committee can establish before a conversation rather than after.

One: your audience cannot act. What I promise a room is two or three frameworks that could move their business inside six months. That promise is empty for an audience that cannot reprice, cannot reallocate resources, cannot stop a project, and cannot override a functional head. Middle managers and individual contributors will find the content interesting and will not be able to use it, which produces good feedback forms and no outcome. If your delegates need permission from somebody not in the room to act on anything they hear, book somebody whose content works at their level of authority.

Two: your event wants entertainment. This is a working session, not a performance. The format runs roughly eighty per cent talk and twenty per cent workshop, which means people are expected to apply something to their own numbers before they leave. That is the wrong shape for a gala, an awards dinner, or a closing session designed to send an audience home energised. Those slots need a professional speaker with a professional speaker’s craft, and I am not one.

Three: you want sector expertise. I will not discuss my current employer, its competitors, or its industry, and those exclusions are permanent rather than negotiable. Beyond that, the content is deliberately cross-sector: the frameworks come from five turnarounds in five different industries using the same approach, and the argument is that the approach transfers. If your brief is somebody who knows your sector intimately and can speak to its specific dynamics, that is a legitimate brief and I am the wrong answer to it.

What is the track record?

Early-stage, and I would much rather you heard that from me than discovered it yourself halfway through a committee meeting. One paid engagement to date, with a multimillion-dollar private company implementing concentration analysis across its portfolio. The operating career is long. The speaking practice is not.

That distinction matters for a programme committee and it is the thing a speaker page is structurally designed to obscure.

What is substantial: a career in corporate turnarounds across several large industrial companies, three billion dollars of aggregate shareholder value, two published books, a blog published in fifteen languages, and the frameworks themselves, which have been applied in real operations rather than assembled for a stage.

What is thin: the stagecraft, the reference list, and the volume of rooms. A committee that needs a speaker who has done two hundred events and can be relied upon to hold a difficult room at four in the afternoon is describing an experience level I do not have.

Weigh those against each other honestly. If the priority is content somebody has actually executed, the balance favours me. If the priority is platform reliability in front of a large audience, it does not, and an experienced professional speaker is the lower-risk booking.

The operating career is long. The speaking practice is not. A committee that needs somebody who has done two hundred events and can hold a difficult room at four in the afternoon is describing an experience level I do not have.

What actually happens in the room?

Three named frameworks, delivered as roughly eighty per cent talk and twenty per cent applied work, with the audience running something against their own business before they leave. The promise is two or three tools that could move their numbers within six months, not inspiration.

The Karelin Method is about concentrated capacity rather than longer hours. It separates the three things that actually multiply an operator’s output and shows why working eighty per cent of your time on the top twenty per cent of activities produces a different order of result from working more hours on everything.

80/20 Squared is recursive concentration analysis. Standard Pareto stops at the first level, and the structural picture lives at the second and third: the top four per cent of customer-product combinations frequently produce most of the profit, and the bottom third frequently destroys value nobody has measured. I learned the first level at Illinois Tool Works and extended it from there.

The Aggression Gap is the distance between the conventional playbook and what genuine transformation requires, and the three barriers that keep operators inside the conventional zone: career risk, organisational antibodies, and never having seen the aggressive alternative work.

The workshop portion is where the value is and it is also the reason the format does not suit every event. Twenty per cent of a session spent with delegates running numbers is twenty per cent that looks, to an organiser watching from the back, like the speaker has stopped speaking.

What does it cost?

Five thousand dollars for a virtual keynote, or two hundred and fifty book purchases instead of the fee. In-person adds travel and lodging on top of that, and I will travel anywhere in the United States for an event that fits. Workshop extensions are quoted separately on enquiry.

The book alternative is not a gimmick. For an organisation whose budget can absorb inventory more easily than a speaker line, two hundred and fifty copies distributed to delegates costs roughly the same and leaves the room with something after the session. Several committees find that easier to approve than a fee, and I have no preference between the two.

I prefer virtual, which is unusual and worth explaining. A virtual session removes two travel days from my calendar, which is the constraint that actually limits how many engagements I can take, and it lets the fee stay where it is. In-person works and costs the event more, because the travel is real.

I have written separately about how that fee was set and what sits behind it, so I will not re-argue it here. The short version is that it is priced where the practice currently is rather than where the content might justify.

What should you ask me before booking?

Four questions, and I would rather be asked them than not. What will delegates be able to do on Monday, what happens if the room is the wrong seniority, what have you spoken on before, and what would make you turn this down. A speaker who cannot answer the fourth is selling availability.

These are the questions I would ask a speaker, which is why I have written them out rather than waiting to be asked. A committee running them against every candidate will sort the field faster than a showreel does.

What will delegates be able to do on Monday? An honest answer names a specific action, not a feeling. Mine: run a concentration analysis on their own customer and product data and identify which combinations are destroying value. If a speaker answers this with inspiration, energy or perspective, they are describing a mood rather than an outcome.

What happens if the room is the wrong seniority? Ask it directly and see whether the answer is a reassurance or a plan. Mine is that the content will not transfer and you should book somebody else, which is the whole first half of this page. Any speaker who says the material works for every audience has told you it was built for none.

What have you actually spoken on, and to whom? Ask for the count, not the highlights. I have given you mine above. A speaker who answers a question about volume with a list of impressive logos has answered a different question, and the substitution is usually deliberate.

What would make you turn this down? The most useful of the four and the one nobody asks. A speaker who cannot describe an event they would decline has no fit criteria, which means they will accept yours regardless of whether it suits, and the risk of that lands on your programme rather than on their calendar.

When am I the right call?

When your delegates run businesses or business units, when you want them to leave with something applied rather than something felt, and when the content mattering more than the platform polish is a trade your committee is willing to make.

Two audiences fit this well and both are specific.

Corporate events at manufacturers, where the room is general managers, plant leadership and functional heads with real decision rights. The frameworks were built in operations like theirs and the examples land without translation.

Industry association and trade show programmes, where the audience is owners and operators of mid-market businesses. This is the group with the most authority per head and the least access to this kind of content, because the firms that produce it are priced for somebody else.

One more condition worth stating, because it determines whether the session produces anything. The workshop portion requires delegates to have some grasp of their own numbers. A room that cannot approximate its own margins will do the exercise abstractly, which is pleasant and produces nothing. If you can tell delegates in advance to bring a rough sense of their revenue, gross margin and where their profit concentrates, the twenty per cent does real work.

Who should this article send away?

Any committee whose primary criterion is a name the audience already recognises. I am not that, the speaking practice is early, and a marquee draw is a legitimate thing to need for an event that has to sell tickets or justify a sponsorship.

That rules out a real category of event and it should. A conference building its programme around headline recognition is solving a marketing problem, and the right speaker for a marketing problem is one whose name does marketing work. Mine does not yet.

A second group: committees that need certainty about delivery. An experienced professional speaker has done the room you are worried about many times and will handle it. I have a long operating career and a short speaking one, and the honest read is that my downside variance is higher than theirs.

Where to go instead, and these are genuinely better for specific briefs. If you need an operations keynote with two decades of platform experience, the established speaker bureaus maintain rosters built exactly for that and will match a brief faster than I can. If you need lean or continuous improvement specifically, the Association for Manufacturing Excellence and similar bodies have practitioner speakers with deeper domain credentials than mine. And if your brief is a named author with a large following, the major business publishers’ speaking arms represent people whose reach will fill a room that mine will not.

Where does this break down?

This is a sales page arguing against itself, which is a persuasion technique as well as an honest one. A reader who finds the disqualifiers reassuring should notice that reassurance is exactly what a page structured this way produces, whether or not the content is accurate.

The content is accurate, and you should verify it rather than take that on trust. The fee is published, the frameworks are in books you can read before booking, the operating career is checkable, and the thin speaking record is stated above rather than left for you to discover.

Two further limits. The three disqualifiers are the ones I can see from inside my own practice, and a committee that has booked two hundred speakers will know failure modes I have not encountered yet, which is itself a reason to trust their judgment over my self-assessment. And the promise of two or three frameworks that could move a business in six months is a claim about content, not a guarantee about outcomes; whether anything moves depends on the room, the authority in it, and what happens in the eleven weeks after I leave.

One thing I will not soften. If your audience cannot act, this booking will produce a pleasant hour and no result, and I would rather tell you that now than collect the fee and read the feedback forms.

This is a sales page arguing against itself, which is a persuasion technique as well as an honest one. A reader who finds the disqualifiers reassuring should notice that reassurance is what a page structured this way produces.

What I sell, and what I don’t

I don’t sell consulting. My employment contract doesn’t allow it, so there is no engagement waiting at the end of this article and no proposal coming. Two things here are commercial: I speak for a fee, and I sell books. Everything else, including the audit, is free, and it stays free because it has to be. This page is one of the two commercial ones, which is exactly why it leads with the reasons not to book. If the fit looks right, enquire through my speaking page.

About the Stagnation Assassin

Todd Hagopian is a transformation executive who has generated $3B in shareholder value across a career in corporate turnarounds, including Berkshire Hathaway, Illinois Tool Works, and Whirlpool. Known as The Stagnation Assassin, he is the author of two published books, The Unfair Advantage: Weaponizing the Hypomanic Toolbox and Stagnation Assassin: The Anti-Consultant Manifesto. His blog is published in 15+ languages and read by operators worldwide. Bring him to your stage via his speaking page or connect with him on LinkedIn.

I hold a global vice president role at a Fortune 1000 company, which is stated rather than hidden: the frameworks predate that job and are unrelated to it, and the day job is the reason the audits stay free.

Not what you needed? Find Your Solution →