Marty Wilson, a Certified Speaking Professional and former Australian Comedian of the Year, and Michael Arnot, founder of Encore Speakers with decades of experience booking thousands of keynotes, are the founders of the Mainstage Academy.
Together, they assist experts, authors, and industry leaders in building commercially sustainable professional speaking businesses.
Following their attendance at the National Speakers Association (NSA) Influence conference in Austin, Texas - an event gathering nearly 900 international speakers - Marty and Michael reviewed the state of the global speaking market on the That’s Audacious podcast with Lauren Clemett, who is one of the Mainstage on-faculty coaches. Their observations highlighted a profound disconnect between how speakers view the industry and how the corporate speaker booking market actually operates.
The initial situation across the speaking landscape reveals widespread confusion. Many speakers mistake their peer groups - associations, speaker networks, and annual conventions - for the actual industry. In reality, the true industry consists entirely of the paying clients: corporate event planners, executive committees, and business operators who invest in event talent.
This misunderstanding breeds several critical deficiencies across both emerging and established talent:
The Mainstage Academy was established to address these precise deficiencies, guiding experts away from passive expectations and towards a structured, commercially viable and reliable speaking enterprise.
The Mainstage Method is a systematic framework that transforms how keynote speakers develop an on-stage product that is then packaged, and sold. It addresses the core operational flaws observed at industry events and enables speakers to transition from sporadic breakout workshops to high-fee mainstage keynotes.
A central outcome of this approach is shifting the speaker's focus from selling personal ego or celebrity to delivering an ownable ‘product’. Michael & Marty dispelled the myth that to be a well-known speaker you just need to build a profile, clarifying that, unless an individual is a household name, clients don’t book them based on their personal biography. The upside is that speakers don't need a compelling, life-changing story or an Olympic medal to build a successful business around speaking.
The Mainstage Academy trains speakers to package their expertise into a clear conceptual product - complete with a compelling title, an overarching thesis, and structured thematic modules - much like a published book that is attractive to their specific target audience - the very people looking for a speaker to book for their next conference or event. This product-centric model removes overwhelm, allowing speakers to confidently market the tangible solution their presentation delivers rather than selling themselves, and to focus their marketing efforts where they get the best conversion.
The Mainstage Model has nine distinct steps, covering every element of a successful speaking business, and can be implemented in just a few months, with many speakers securing bookings as they learn the process. Speakers discover how to create their onstage product, craft the collateral and materials needed to sell their speaking services, and increase their fees to create sustainable income as speakers.
The Mainstage Method provides a business plan that also clarifies the strategic purpose of a mainstage keynote. Counterintuitively, high-earning keynotes command premium fees not by delivering granular, 17-step instructional dumps, but by operating at a high conceptual level that moves audiences emotionally and sets the tone for an entire organisation. Simple, unforgettable frameworks - such as Tim Gard’s stress-management cadences or Ben Hunt Davis’s Olympic rowing premise, "Will it make the boat go faster?" - create lasting cultural shifts within client organisations long after dense technical data is forgotten.
By replacing passive waiting with structured business development, pre-briefing alignment, and clear market positioning, Mainstage equips speakers to build repeatable booking pipelines, secure higher fees, and achieve long-term commercial control.
The Mainstage Method delivers structured frameworks and operational shifts that redefine a speaker's commercial trajectory, including:
Michael offers a direct perspective on the reality of the corporate booking market, which many have bemoaned as slowing down or becoming too competitive, emphasising that speakers must align with client expectations rather than internal industry noise:
"There is actually nothing wrong with the speaking industry. The problem is that the vast majority of speakers do not understand the speaking industry correctly. It is the people that are paying the money that really run the industry. We do not care what you are passionate about; we care what you are going to do in the room that is going to make the people in the room passionate about our mission as a client."
Michael also highlights why conceptual clarity drives commercial value on the main stage:
"The more superficial your keynote is, the more you are going to get paid. You are not going to be unforgettable by machine-gunning people with information. What you can do is blow them away with a story we can all relate to, leaving a memorable impression they'll never forget. That is where the value in a keynote is."
Marty reinforces the necessity of active business operations over passive expectations:
"There is no speaker circuit. The work doesn’t just find you. You have to go out and find the gigs, position yourself in a way that the people who book speakers find you attractive, and do the work to sell yourself to those people."
Addressing the path forward for speakers seeking sustainable growth, Marty adds:
"The gap between where you are now and the speaking business you want will not be a lack of knowledge. It will just be how hard and fast you can implement the steps that we tell you to do."
To learn more about Mainstage Academy, explore the process, or access the Mainstage Method framework and their expert on-faculty coaching, connect through the following channels:
Website: mainstage.academy
