We have a hard limit on self-promotion to at most 3 slides in your entire deck. We believe that’s enough for people to understand what you do presently, the bulk of the talk should be helping people understand why your approach is unique, via telling real world examples in your career that cause you to see the world this way.

LinkedIn exists, Wikipedia exists, ChatGPT exists, we believe those are the best places to share curriculum or X 101 style lessons of the basics of your field. If there’s an objectively correct answer to the problem, sharing is probably best done in a mass medium. We’re interested in the messy problems with many or no one right answer, how you solved them and, more importantly, *why* you chose that path of tradeoffs vs the many that could be chosen. The reason we want you on stage is to deliver content only you can deliver. 

You’re not competing with other Fractionals, you’re competing with apathy and “why can’t I just do it myself”. So lean into it and teach people how to do it themselves! We believe the best way to convince someone to hire you is to teach them to the best of your ability, how they can do your job without you. It’s only after doing it themselves that they understand why it’s worth paying money for someone to take it off their hands and the person who taught them is a natural person for them to reach out to. Thus, we want you to focus on what the scrappy version of your job can look like and how people can DIY.

Your approach is not everyone’s approach, that’s what makes you, you. Give people a clear sense of your particular view of the world that is distinctive. Some blog posts we feel embody this type of approach:

• How I ship projects at big tech companies

• Staring into the abyss as a core life skill

  Notice these two posts could have only come from these two authors because they draw on specific life experience and present a view not everyone would agree on.

We get the natural instinct to want to cram too much into one talk, think about this talk as the first in a series of 3 and, if you’re popular, we will be looking to help you develop the 2nd and 3rd talk in the series to keep your content fresh.

We believe a tight 40 minutes is the right length for a great talk before people’s attention starts flagging. We highly encourage you to rehearse your talk with a stopwatch before you submit it and we will push back to trim the talk if we believe it can’t be delivered 

A talk that is the same every time you give it could have been a Youtube video. We want you to take advantage of the talent in the room to make sure each talk only could have been delivered to the people in that room. Think about ways to build in interactivity into the talk, use simple “raise your hand if” questions to help get the people warmed up but use it as an opportunity 

To pick which topic to talk about, you ultimately want to answer the question: “Amongst all people who do what I do, what’s at least one memorable way I approach things differently”. If the answer is not obvious to you right now, we suggest speakers write down 9 - 12 career experiences that they felt they learnt some interesting lesson from or was a pivot point in their career. From this, see if you can see a throughline of a theme across 3 - 4 of them. If you see multiple throughlines, pick the one that feels most fun to talk about and leave the others for future talks.

We will work with you so that each talk has a “hook” and a “trigger”. The “hook” is the information gap in the title that makes people want to attend to hear the answer. Pick one of the 5 Ws/1H (Who, What, When, Where, Why, How) and tease it. Some great examples of past talk topics have been:

• “How Not to Burn Your Company Down With Your First 10 Hires” (How do I do it?)

• “Three Reasons Being Smart can Hurt you as a Founder” (What are they & why?)

• “Building a business? First, get over your ego” (Why should I get over my ego?)

The trigger is a simple word or idea that indelibly gets linked in the audience mind to you. We say, “your goal is not to create customers in the room, it’s to create salespeople”. When this person is listening to a founder friend of them gripe, what keyword is going to activate the natural response of “Oh, you should talk to X about this!”?