If you follow this blog you know that Speaker Sponsor specializes in small business sponsorship for niche events. While all the other sponsorship agencies target big corporate sponsors, we have found our niche in the over 125 million small to medium sized businesses in the world, instead of the under 50,000 large corporations. That’s only a rough estimate based on D&B data and other resources. But you get the point. There is much more opportunity in small business sponsorship, especially for speakers and artists.

With the explosion of niche markets of all kinds, small business sponsorship is a goldmine for speakers. I’ve noticed that a lot of speakers tend to gravitate towards general topics, like leadership and customer service. That’s great if you’re only looking to be hired by corporations and organizations who give you a paycheck for speaking on that topic.

But if you want to try something new as a speaker and create your own speaking career without having to wait around for a meeting planner to call you, consider creating your own niche events and finding small business sponsors to fund it. Here are two examples of performers who forged their own path and created their own successful niche events.

If you watch Shark Tank perhaps you’ve heard of Ten Thirty One Productions. This is their simple logline: “We are an entertainment company that creates, owns and produces live attractions in the horror genre”. Period. They don’t put on job fairs, weddings, birthday parties, or conferences. They don’t do comedy, westerns or action. Just horror. Not everyone is a horror fan. But you can bet that those people who are are die hard fans. No pun intended. (more…)