Welcome back to My First Stage! On the last day of the NSA Influence Conference I had the absolute pleasure of sitting down with the incredible Julie Holmes. If you’re looking to level up your speaking business, land paid gigs, or just muster the courage to watch your own “game tape,” this episode is packed with exactly what you need.

Julie Holmes is the founder of Stage Hopper, a lead finding and sharing platform built specifically for professional speakers aiming for paid gigs. But Julie is so much more than just a tech founder—she’s a Hall of Fame speaker, a PSA Fellow, a national champion in public speaking, and someone who’s spent decades helping companies (and speakers) master the art of communication. Safe to say, she knows what she’s talking about when it comes to getting—and crushing—your first stage.

During our conversation, Julie Holmes and I covered so much ground:

• Defining and Demonstrating Your Value: Why it takes more than being “funny and engaging” to get booked and paid in the speaking world.
• The Five Sales Triggers: Julie Holmes’ simple but powerful system—internal, external, before, after, and time—for identifying why an organization would need your voice.
• Doing the Research: Real tactics for uncovering what’s going on behind the scenes at companies and how to speak directly to their biggest challenges.
• Numbers That Matter: How to articulate ROI in ways that clients can’t ignore (and how to translate abstract value into hard numbers).
• Different Paths to Payment: From paid keynotes to back-of-room sales to workshops and more, Julie Holmes breaks down the many business models in speaking.
• Her Own “First Stage”: From degrees in public speaking to decades in corporate, Julie Holmes traces her unique journey and the value of early career “reps.”
• The Infinite Value of Watching Your Own Tape: Why recording yourself is non-negotiable, and how the discomfort of seeing yourself on camera is just part of getting better.
• Advice for New Speakers: What to do if you’re scared, how to reframe the nerves, and why mastery comes from honest self-reflection and relentless practice.

Ready to take your speaking career to the next stage? Here are your next steps:

• Rewatch Your “Game Tape” – No more hiding from the camera! Start recording your talks, watch yourself back, and see every single moment as a chance to improve.
• Connect with Julie Holmes – Learn more about her speaking, business, and strategies on LinkedIn.
• Share Your Story – How did you get your first stage? Head to myfirststagepodcast.com and share your journey—I’d love to hear from you!
• Subscribe & Review – Like what you’re hearing? Make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and help us bring even more real-world advice and inspiration to speakers everywhere.

Thanks for tuning in to My First Stage. Whether this was your first episode or your fiftieth, I hope Julie Holmes’s insights inspire you as much as they did me. See you next week for another behind-the-scenes story!

Timestamped Summaries

[00:00-01:07] – I welcome Julie Holmes to the podcast, and she shares her dual perspective as both a speaker and a founder. We dig right into what real ROI looks like for event organizers—not just entertainment value, but true organizational impact.

[01:12-02:32] – Julie Holmes introduces her five-point system for identifying a client’s needs—internal, external, before, after, and time—and why researching these is the secret to getting paid.

[02:52-03:37] – We walk through internal and external triggers, from company reorganizations to broader industry upheaval (hello, AI!). Julie Holmes lays out exactly how these events tie to the value you bring.

[03:51-04:46] – Julie Holmes explains the “before” and “after” of organizational change and how aligning your expertise to where the client’s headed is a mega sales tool.

[05:12-06:17] – We talk research tactics: digging into board memos, third-party surveys, and, yes, even using AI. Julie Holmes stresses the difference between making assumptions and backing up your pitch with hard data.

[06:39-07:39] – What does it mean to “find the number?” Julie Holmes shares how speaking on sales teams (with real growth targets) forced her to quantify value—not just “fun with AI,” but concrete outcomes and ROI.

[08:01-09:52] – We tackle the many ways to “get paid”—from keynotes to workshops to back-of-room book sales—and why each speaker must find their own lane (and their own joy) in this business.

[10:12-12:25] – Julie Holmes tells the story of her own first stages, from college competitions to corporate conferences, and why even those early, unpaid opportunities set the foundation for everything that followed.

[12:28-14:56] – We go deep on the importance (and pain!) of recording yourself. Julie Holmes gives tough-love advice for getting past the cringe of seeing yourself on camera, and how self-review is the not-so-secret key to getting better every time you take the stage.

[15:16-15:56] – To wrap up, Julie Holmes shares how listeners can check out Stage Hopper to find their next opportunity and grow their speaking business.

Hello and welcome back to the My First Stage podcast. We are here at the on the last day of the NSA Influence Conference. We've talked to so many amazing speakers, talked to some of the sponsors, and we have one of the sponsors here with us right now. This is Ms. Julie Holmes. And tell us a little bit about your company and what y' all do and what great advice you have for speakers.

Okay, so I am the founder of Stage Hopper, which is a lead finding and lead sharing platform for professional speakers focused on paid speaking gigs. But I'm also a professional speaker. So I'm a fellow in the UK and Ireland, PSA Professional Speaking association and a Hall of Fame speaker in the uk. And so I thought maybe what would be most useful for you all and for the audience is really to talk about how we define what ROI looks like. Like for the people that we're trying to present to. Because it's all well and good. I think if we, you know, we'd love to get up on stage, but that's our bonus for selling and for doing a good job. And so you have to find the leads and you should definitely check out Stage Hopper to do that.

But once you find the leads, you have to be able to communicate clearly your value to those leads and to be able to articulate why they need to bring you in. And it isn't just because you're entertaining and it isn't just because you're engaging and it isn't just because you're funny. Like, all of those things are lovely, but they aren't enough to make a corporation or an association sign a check with your name on it.

That's so true. And I feel like people kind of, sometimes I'll think like, well, I've been on stages so it should be easy to get that next stage. Or I've already spoken for this organization, so naturally this one's going to want me to be their speaker. But that's not really how it works. You have to like, it's a grind. You have to keep selling yourself, you have to keep proving yourself. And I think what we talked about just a few minutes ago is how you figure out what it is that you have to offer to people when you are starting to become a speaker.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And a lot of us have expertise, but we're not necessarily great at connecting that expertise to the problem that an association, an organization or an industry might be having. So I'd love to share. I kind of have a five point system that I Use for evaluating or identifying the value that I'm bringing into any given organization. And the more of these you can hit, the better off you are.

I feel like I should have a notepad to take notes or something. Good thing we're recording.

I know, right? Like, okay, if you don't have your notepad now, go, go, go get your notepad now. So it's. I call it internal, external, before, after time. Okay, so let's just walk through them.

Yes.

Okay. So internal and external. So internal is what is happening inside their organization or their business or their association or what's happening inside. That means that they need you. And so that could be they are in the process of revamping or reorganizing. So they need somebody to come in and talk about teamwork or leadership or strategy. It could be that they have a scandal that's happened and they need somebody to come in and talk about crisis management or crisis communication. So what's happening inside the company right now? And so that requires you to do some research and some digging about what's going on in that company right now, what's their big news? What's happening outside is what's happening outside of their company.

So that could be in the industry at large. It could be in the world at large. Like right now. That's artificial intelligence. That's what I speak on. So it could be artificial intelligence, it could be economics, it could be, you know, crisis communication, it could be political communication. It could be. All kinds of things are happening in the world right now.

Organizations are thinking and worried about that. So that's external. Then you've got before and after. So before is, what have they just experienced in their organization that means that they need you. Maybe they ousted their board, maybe they've got a new CEO. Maybe they've just expanded into Europe. Whatever it is that they have just done, that means that your expertise is particularly relevant and valuable right now. Have that research, know what's.

What has just happened in there. After, of course, is the opposite. Where are they trying to go that your expertise is going to help them get there? So that could be, you know, like they're trying to do an expansion into Europe. They're trying to, you know, they've got big sales targets next year. Like, what are all the pieces of the puzzle that go into play with that? And then the last one is dates, which is, oh, they've got a conference scheduled. So they've got a conference scheduled. That's another trigger for sales. So these are what I call the

five Sales triggers for jumping back to the internal. How do you really figure out what's going on? Like is, is it appropriate to ask some really like direct questions? Do you survey people? Like how do you really find out? Because they're not going to be like blogging about problems that they're having. You're not going to be able to read a lot of this on their website. How do you figure that out?

Well, there's actually a lot of ways to figure it out. So you know, most public companies will have board memos and board minutes of things that are happening, right? So if you're doing research online and it could be maybe it's not necessarily happening to them, it could be that it's happening to a lot of companies or there'll be like surveys. For example, we were doing, you know, doing some research on Apple, for example and it was like, okay, well their B2B sales, sales satisfaction numbers were XYZ compared to some other company sales satisfaction numbers through some survey that was done by a third party. So there is a lot of data. Now, you know, you're taking that information and you know, doing searches. We use AI to do that research, of course, and if you are, you know, if you subscribe to Stage Hopper, that kind of information is available inside the, inside the platform. But you know, whether you're using AI or whether manually doing it, it's probably part of it is just asking the question, you know, like being aware that there are things happening in a company and not making just an assumption that there's something like, oh, leaders all need to get better. Oh, we always need to improve our diversity.

That's all true. But why, like where's the number that actually justifies that? Where's the number that makes that truly a no brainer for them to pay an expensive expert to come in and share that expertise so that you can actually turn it around.

Can you explain a little bit more? But when you say what's the number? What do you mean by that?

So for example, it's, you know, if I go in and speak to a sales organization and I do a lot of work with, with sales teams and AI. So when I go in and speak to a sales organization, I need to be able to say like, all right, here's the challenges that you've got. Like you've got a 25% increase. You're trying to raise your sales figures by 25% next year. Well, how are you going to do that? Are you going to hire 25% more people? You're not going to do that. They're not going to expand their headcount for that. Okay, so if your goal Is to do 25% more sales, what does that mean we need to do? We need to get X number more prospects through the door. You need to be communicating with them more frequently on a regular basis.

Like, how are we going to justify bringing me in as an AI expert? It can't just be like, I'm going to come in, we're going to talk about AI and it's going to be super fun. It will, it will be all those things. But instead it's when you do this, you're going to save time, you're going to sell more, you're going to deliver a better customer service experience, you're going to deliver better sales experience. That's the kind of numbers they want to know. They want to know that there's a return on investment for bringing you in.

I love that with, with speaking. And you had said that your platformers were paid speaking gigs. And I feel like speaking pays in so many different ways and there's so many different forms that this takes. And can you speak a little bit to the value of those different forms? Whether it's like paid keynote versus getting paid to run a workshop versus maybe you're not actually paid to be on the stage, but they let you sell or something like that. Like what? Where is the value that you see the most in those different opportunities?

It all depends on the speaker, and I think it all depends on the organization and what the organization needs. And I think each speaker tends to find themselves, you know, kind of in a particular lane. Right. Their different speakers have different focuses and different kind of markets that they serve. And that market could be an industry, but it could also be a type of presentation. So I primarily do a lot of of keynoting. That's a big part of what I do. I love a big stage.

I'm very good on a big stage and so that's my kind of lane. But then I will do workshops or strategy events as a secondary off of that. So somebody will see me on a keynote stage and then book me to come in and do a workshop. So every speaker will find their own kind of path about where they want to play the most and where they can demonstrate the most value. Some people are big storytelling speakers, others are big like flip chart, we're going to get down to it. We're going to work in groups of five or ten. And where you find your energy and your joy in this work probably has to do with that as well. You can also, of course, you know, you can sell from stage.

So there are some people that don't get paid to speak on stage, so they don't get a, you know, like a speaker fee necessarily, but they'll sell books or they'll sell products in the back of the room. It's an entirely different business model. So I think it's. Everybody has to figure out what the right model is for them, for their content, for their energy, for how they want to build a business, and then can kind of figure out from that, like how they want to strategize their business and their leads according to that.

Gotcha. So you are an amazing speaker.

Thank you.

In your own right. For. So I have learned. I want to know how. I mean, it's. Our show is my first stage. And you have. You are such an accomplished speaker.

How did that start? How. How did you get your first stage?

Well, funny story. So, interestingly enough, and I don't know that there are that many people in our industry that can say this, my bachelor's degree is in public speaking.

Okay, so you knew you wanted to do this.

Yep. So I. I have a bachelor's degree in public speaking. I have a master's degree in communication. I competed in public speaking. So I was a national champion in public speaking in my university days. I did public speaking when I was in high school. So I always kind of loved this field.

I didn't know that I would be a professional speaker. I didn't know that was a thing until 20 years after that. Okay, so I took a job in corporate. I was in product strategy for a software company. I spent 25 years in enterprise tech. And because I had a lot of experience with speaking, I was just always being trotted out onto stages. Like, oh, we've got a trade show and, you know, we get a sponsored session as part of our event. So we are going to, you know, Julie's going to deliver that.

Great. Lovely. I mean, what I would say is a lot of people come into this business having done speaking for their companies. So my first stages. Well, if we go. My first paid stages. My first paid stages were as a corporate employee. And I think that's true of a lot of people.

So what I would say is be getting video the whole time, like capture video. Even those early speeches, you know, like, you never know when a picture of you on a stage or a snippet of you on a stage saying something important, even though you're maybe repping a product, like and be the person who is volunteering to get up there. It's. I think that there's a lot of people may not recognize the value of what we call kind of reps. And, you know, reps. Just like when you're in the gym and you do all those reps, it's not about doing one big barbell lift. You've got to do lots of reps over and over again at a lower weight. And in doing that, you kind of build your muscle more sustainably.

That's true. Speaking, too. So the more time that you can spend on a stage, the more you settle into that stage every time you walk on it, the more comfortable you get. And I think that that is, you know, like, if I could go back in time and wave my wand to those first stages, it would be like, capture video.

You. You said get video. And inside, I cringed because the, like, anytime I'm on a stage and I look out and see someone taking a video of me, I'm just like, please, for the love of God, don't tag me. Because I hate. I don't want to see myself on stage. I don't know what it is. I don't want to see it. I don't want to hear it.

I want to get off stage and forgot. Forget I was ever on it. And I feel like I'm not the only one who thinks that.

I think you might be the only one here. Yeah, I was gonna say you might be the only one who's not a pro. You know, who. You know, as a professional speaker.

Yes.

That should definitely not be something that is holding anybody back. Like, if you feel that way, then you need to keep doing it until you don't feel that way anymore.

Is it. Is there any. Any advice or anything for people that they.

They.

They are just starting to speak. They're just getting on stages, and they are still. Still intimidated, and they're still, like, scared to get the video and scared to put it out, scared to show more people. What would you say to those people to get them past that? And by those people, I mean myself.

So I guess I would ask the question of why, you know, why does it make you uncomfortable to see yourself on video and remember that it's a performance? Right. Every time we step on stage as a performance, even though we're doing content delivery, even though we're training or coaching or whatever. So does it make you uncomfortable to be on stage because you think, oh, I made a weird face, or, oh, I don't understand that gesture that I Did or why did I do that? Or I don't like the. The way my clothes look on the video. Like, whatever it is, those are all within your control. Yeah. You know, this is about mastering your craft.

Sure.

You know, if you think about every actor or actress we've ever seen on film, right. They are going back and rewatching their videos. I not only record my talks, I record them all on audio. I analyz every word I say. You know, like, this is a craft. And so if you are a speaker and a professional speaker at that, then this is part of being a professional speaker is really, you know, getting comfortable with evaluating yourself and then seeing those opportunities not just to improve, but also to look at them and go, do you know what? That was really good. I really liked how I did that. That was a great.

So you've got to be able to. To look at yourself in a 360 degree way, compliment yourself, find opportunities for improvement as well. But to bring it all together so that you are constantly delivering better every time you go on stage.

Oh, it means I got to keep doing it, huh?

You got to keep doing it. Break out that camera.

That's the exact opposite of the answer I was hoping for. I'll be honest. That's not what I wanted to hear.

No, but it's. The truth. Doesn't always feel good.

Oh, it doesn't? The truth hurts. Thank you so much for coming on. Tell us a little bit about how we can. It's called Stage Hopper.

Yep, Stage Hopper.

How people can try it out, where they can find it and how they can use it.

Okay, so Stage Hopper lead finding, lead sharing platform for professional speakers. It's like a glass door for speakers. So you can check it out@stage hopper.com. it's a great place to go and, you know, choose specific leads that you want to purchase that have, you know, verified speaking fees attached to them. And so, yeah, that's. That's what it is.

Perfect. Well, thank you so much for joining us. This is fantastic. Thank you guys for listening and hanging out and come back next week for more stories about everybody's first stage and hit that subscribe button so we can keep bringing you more. We'll talk to you next week.