Every booking begins in one of two ways. The first is an enquiry — a date, a city, a theme line and a question about who might be free. The second is a brief. The distinction sounds bureaucratic and is anything but: an enquiry starts a conversation, while a brief starts a shortlist. Our recommendation can only ever be as precise as the brief that produced it, and many organisations send the minimum expecting us to extract the rest. That extraction takes weeks. The brief takes an hour.

So here is the template our consultants work from — one page, eight sections, no attachments required. It stays on one page deliberately, for urgent bookings and leisurely ones alike, because a clear one-pager does far more than a long chain of half-answers ever will. Length is not rigour. A single page forces you to decide what actually matters, and deciding what matters is the whole exercise.

  • Event context — and the keynote's function in the program
  • Audience profile — seniority, industries, and what people are carrying
  • The shift — two or three outcomes, with Monday-morning behaviours named
  • Topics — to include, and to avoid
  • Format and hard stops
  • Budget tier
  • Logistics
  • One contact, one decision-maker

The room, not the theme

The first section is event context — not the theme line from the website, but the keynote's job within the program. Is this the opening session that has to set the terms for two days, the closer that has to send people out the door with something to do, or the after-dinner slot competing with dessert? The same speaker would build three different talks for those three jobs, and we build three different shortlists.

Context also means the business behind the event. The real commercial situation beats the event theme every time — what is changing, what is stuck, what the audience is quietly avoiding. And sharper still: the most useful briefs tell the speaker what the organisation needs said that it cannot credibly say itself. One honest sentence about the tension you are navigating is worth more than any number of theme lines.

Then the audience — the section we find most under-invested, and the one we would keep if we could keep only one. Seniority, industries and role titles are the start, not the finish. Two hundred junior marketers and two hundred CTOs are both "200 delegates", and they demand fundamentally different talks — a contrast we see confirmed weekly. What we really want is what people are carrying into the room: a restructure, a flat year, a merger half-digested. Psychographics over demographics. And tell us which speakers this audience has already seen, because nothing deflates a program like a familiar keynote.

The shift, the no-go zones, and the money

Outcomes come next, and the discipline is to name two or three — measurable, and expressed as Monday-morning behaviour. Not "lift the team" but "sales leaders leave willing to run the new pricing conversation, and know what it sounds like". If you cannot name the behaviour, the speaker cannot aim at it, and afterwards nobody can say whether it landed.

Topics cut both ways. Tell us what to cover — but tell us, with equal candour, what to avoid. Every organisation has no-go zones: the litigation nobody mentions, the restructure still raw, the internal slogan so tired that hearing it from a stranger would draw audible groans. Speakers cannot step around landmines they have not been shown. This is the section people are shy about and should not be. It is also the one speakers thank us for most.

Format and hard stops are quick to write and expensive to omit: exact duration, Q&A or not, panel or solo, and the immovable finish time — because "45 minutes" and "45 minutes, then the buses leave" are different assignments. Then budget, as a tier rather than a blank. You need not disclose a figure to the dollar, but a range shapes the shortlist more than any other single field. A brief without a budget produces a shortlist you will spend a week trimming for the wrong reason.

The unglamorous half-inch at the bottom

Logistics take three lines — date, venue, run-through times, whether travel is involved. The final section takes one: a single point of contact who either is the decision-maker or sits one desk away from them. Shortlists die in committees. When feedback arrives as six opinions across four emails, everything stalls; when it arrives as one voice, we can re-cut the list the same day.

Two last notes. Send the brief four to eight weeks out where you can — the market's working window, and a sensible one. And when a speaker or a consultant pushes back on part of it, treat that as a healthy sign rather than a problem; a brief is a working document, not a cage. The template exists so the pushback happens in week one, on paper — not in the green room, ten minutes before doors.