Being invited to speak can feel like an opportunity in itself. There is a stage, an audience and a chance to share your expertise. But Ashley Alleyne, founder of OTOVA Agency, encouraged the women of Bloom Connections to evaluate speaking opportunities differently. Before deciding whether a room is worth entering, she wants business owners to understand who is actually sitting in it and what they want the opportunity to accomplish.
Ashley works with established entrepreneurs to secure speaking opportunities and build systems that can turn those audiences into paying clients. During her Bloom Connections Educational Moment, How to Find Rooms Where Your Buyers Are Already Sitting, she focused on the research that happens before someone says yes to an event, podcast, conference or community invitation.
Her lesson challenged a common way of evaluating speaking opportunities. The size of the audience, prestige of the event and presence of a speaker fee can all matter, but none of those details automatically tell you whether the opportunity supports your business. Ashley’s approach starts with a more fundamental question: Are the people in this room connected to what you are actually trying to accomplish?
A Speaking Opportunity Is Only Valuable in Relation to Your Goal
Ashley began by acknowledging a situation many entrepreneurs recognize. They receive an invitation to speak at an event, appear on a podcast or teach inside someone else’s community, but they are not entirely sure whether saying yes will be worth the time required to prepare and show up.
She explained that evaluating the opportunity becomes easier once the business owner has established her own criteria. Ashley gave attendees three questions to consider before accepting a speaking engagement: Are the decision-makers who can pay or connect me in this room? What is my goal for speaking here? Can I capture the audience and follow up with them afterward?
The second question is particularly important because not every speaking engagement needs to produce the same result. A business owner might be looking for clients, greater exposure, strategic partnerships or opportunities to provide workshops and training inside organizations. The right audience changes depending on which of those outcomes matters. A room filled with peers might be useful when the goal is building industry relationships, while a business owner looking for clients may need a room filled with prospective buyers or people who can directly connect her to them.
Once the goal is clear, the opportunity can be evaluated against it. Ashley explained that this is what allows an entrepreneur to develop criteria she can use repeatedly rather than reconsidering every invitation from the beginning. Over time, that criteria can make it possible to determine much more quickly whether an opportunity deserves a yes
A Large Audience Does Not Automatically Mean the Right Audience
To show why audience alignment matters, Ashley compared two speaking situations. One involved a software engineer specializing in AI and security who had spoken at Grace Hopper, a major technology conference with an audience of tens of thousands. Her goal for the engagement was to gain new clients for a business that served everyday business owners interested in understanding how AI could help them grow.
The problem became clearer when Ashley asked who was actually in the room. The conference audience included technology leaders, owners and operators, while the speaker’s desired clients were everyday business owners. The event was substantial and highly visible, but the audience did not closely match the people she wanted to hire her.
Ashley summarized the distinction with a line that became central to her lesson: “Speaking to your peers is networking, and speaking to your prospects is how you actually sell and grow your business.”
That does not make speaking to peers a poor use of time. It means the value of the room depends on the intended outcome. If networking, professional relationships or industry visibility are the goal, peers may be exactly who the speaker wants to reach. If the goal is generating client opportunities, however, the audience needs to include prospective buyers, decision-makers or people positioned to make relevant introductions.
This is also why audience size alone is an incomplete measure of a speaking opportunity. Thousands of attendees can create significant visibility, but visibility becomes more useful when the people receiving it have some relationship to the speaker’s business objective.
The Best Opportunity May Not Be the One With the Speaker Fee
Ashley deliberately left another familiar question off her initial criteria: Is this a paid speaking opportunity? She acknowledged that wanting to be compensated for time and expertise is valid. Her point was not that speaker fees are unimportant, but that payment for the appearance is only one way a speaking opportunity can create business value.
She illustrated that distinction with a second example involving one of her clients, a nonprofit executive director who leads a child advocacy organization. The client accepted an opportunity to speak at a large industry conference even though she had to pay her registration, travel and hotel expenses. Viewed only through the immediate financial cost, the opportunity could have appeared unattractive.
Her goal, however, was not to earn a speaker fee. She wanted to develop strategic partnerships and reach leaders of organizations that employ the helping professionals her organization could train. That meant the decision-makers in the audience were directly connected to the work she wanted to expand.
After the engagement, an industry leader reached out to book a conversation with her. That conversation developed into a partnership discussion with the potential to create future workshops and training opportunities inside additional companies and organizations. For Ashley, the example demonstrated why a speaking opportunity needs to be evaluated according to the result the speaker is pursuing rather than one universal definition of a “good” stage.
Ashley was also careful not to turn the example into a blanket endorsement of pay-to-play speaking opportunities. She explained that these opportunities will often not be worth the investment. The point is to have enough clarity about the audience, goal and opportunity to make that determination intentionally rather than accepting or rejecting an invitation based on a single factor.
Build Your Own Criteria for What Is Worth Your Yes
Ashley’s three questions provide a starting point, but she encouraged attendees to develop criteria that reflect their own businesses and boundaries. That became particularly clear during the discussion following her Educational Moment when an attendee asked about events that require speakers to help sell tickets.
Ashley explained that this type of requirement belongs in the evaluation process too. A speaker may want to know how many tickets she is expected to sell, whether her ability to take the stage depends on those sales and what other responsibilities accompany the invitation. Someone with a large and engaged audience may be comfortable with those expectations, while another business owner may decide that the added responsibility makes the opportunity a poor fit.
The important part is knowing the conditions before agreeing to them. Ashley’s original three questions might become five or seven as a business owner gains experience and learns which factors matter to her. The result is a personalized framework for assessing opportunities instead of relying on prestige, audience size or someone else’s definition of what makes a speaking engagement valuable.
That framework can also make the search for speaking opportunities more focused. Once a business owner knows what she wants from speaking and who needs to be in the audience, she has a clearer picture of the rooms she needs to pursue. As Ashley explained during the discussion, the process starts by determining where the speaker wants to be, then using that information to decide which rooms are worth going after.
Speaking Can Be the Beginning of the Client Journey
One of the strongest realizations from the session came during the conversation after Ashley’s presentation. An attendee who had been speaking for five years said Ashley helped her understand that speaking was not necessarily at the bottom of her funnel. It could sit at the top.
Ashley expanded on that idea by encouraging business owners to think about speaking as a way of getting in front of ideal buyers. If an entrepreneur speaks several times each month in rooms containing people who can hire her, refer her, partner with her or connect her to other opportunities, the value of those appearances can extend beyond what she is paid for the time spent on stage.
That perspective also makes Ashley’s third question, whether the speaker can capture the audience and follow up afterward, more significant. If speaking introduces the business to prospective clients and partners, the stage is not necessarily the end result. It can be the point where someone first encounters the speaker’s expertise and begins considering what a deeper relationship with her business might look like.
For business owners using speaking as part of their visibility or client acquisition strategy, that changes the measure of success. The question becomes less about whether they were simply seen on a stage and more about whether they were seen by people connected to where the business wants to go next.
About Ashley Alleyne and OTOVA Agency
Ashley Alleyne is the founder of OTOVA Agency, a done-for-you brand visibility agency that helps established entrepreneurs get booked to speak and builds systems designed to turn speaking audiences into paying clients. During her Bloom Connections Educational Moment, Ashley shared the research stage of what she calls her Profit Pipeline, the process her team uses to determine which speaking opportunities are worth pursuing for its clients.
Ashley also shared access to her Speaker’s Vault during the session. She described the resource as containing more than 100 speaking opportunities across different industries that her team has already researched, including information about the events, attendees and application links so speakers can evaluate opportunities against their own criteria.
Learn Something. Share Something. Grow Together.
Ashley’s Educational Moment gave the women of Bloom a different way to think about speaking opportunities. The lesson was not simply to pursue bigger stages or turn down rooms that do not offer a speaker fee. It was to become more intentional about what a speaking engagement is expected to do for the business and to understand enough about the audience to know whether that result is possible.
If Ashley’s framework changes how you evaluate your next speaking invitation, put it to use. Develop your own criteria, research who will actually be in the room and get clear about the outcome you want before giving away your time and expertise. If the lesson helps you make a better decision, tell Ashley. Leave a thoughtful review, share her work with another business owner who could benefit from it, or carry her name into a room where her expertise belongs. That is how an Educational Moment continues beyond the 10 minutes we spend learning together.
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