A polite notice to course and conference organisers

Presenting courses and speaking at conferences is work and also fun for me. I enjoy it and I'm happy to be invited to practitioner and academic events, being public or private (in-house trainings).

My careers includes experiences at senior level as quantitative analyst, trader, risk manager, and academic lecturer, but does not include sandwich man or marketing board.

When presenting courses or seminars, I provide a service to the audience, sharing (part of) my knowledge and personal in depth research. For a one hour seminar, the preparation time is one day, for a one day course, the preparation time is one week. As a (fiercely) independent advisor, that time is not sponsored by any state or outside company.

I speak only at events where a high quality service is provided and the audience is the client (not: the speakers are the clients and the audience is the product); consequently the speakers are selected for their in-depth content, not for their marketing budget.

If you contact me to speak at an event, expect the discussion to be based on the above preliminaries. I'm happy to discuss the subjects that I can present, the location, the length of the presentation and many other variables, but in all cases there will be some constants: I keep a full control of the content (no censor), the content is mine (no presentation in a sponsor's name, no IP transfer) and I'm a service provider (fair retribution).

In particular if in your approach there is something like "you can insert some company pitch in the material" or "this is a senior audience and you can expect return from it", or "we don't have a large budget for this event and expect speakers to be paid by their company marketing budget or to find a grant", please don't call me.

If your are an honest practitioner or academic event organizer that recognizes himself in the above text, don't hesitate to contact me.

Note This notice also applies to marketing and business development intermediaries. Speaking/presenting the results/research/code/tools that I have developed to a paying audience you have selected is also a service I provide to you and requires a fair compensation for my work.

Note 2: Fair retribution includes: a speaker fee to compensate (a very small part of) the research, development and preparation time and full conference related expenses (travel, hotel, meals, etc.).

Related blogs:

Presenting at conferences - 2021-08-26

A(nother) polite notice to course and conference organisers - 2022-08-31

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