Event Sponsorship Brokering, Paid by the Buyer Only

We take no commission, rebate or rate-card override from an event organiser. Everything we are paid comes from you, and the clause saying so is in the engagement letter before you sign it. That matters here because the standard arrangement in sponsorship brokering pays the person advising you out of the deal they advise you into, which prices the advice at zero and explains why the recommendation is so reliably to buy. What we negotiate, in rough order of value: The booth is the least valuable line in most packages and the one the rate card is built around. What we push on instead: lead data ownership and export format, so badge scans come out of Cvent LeadCapture, Swapcard or Brella as mappable fields rather than a PDF; category exclusivity with a definition you wrote instead of the organiser's; an attendance warranty with a pro rata make-good if the audited count lands under the prospectus figure; logo and official-partner usage rights with an end date and archive permission; and the cancellation ladder, which is where money is actually lost. Timing: The rate card is an opening position. Inventory still unsold sixty days out is negotiable in a way the same inventory was not in January, and we plan around that: a first pass across the year's prospectuses during your planning cycle, then a deliberate wait on the packages where waiting carries no risk. Some things do genuinely sell out, and part of the work is telling you which ones for a given event rather than treating every deadline the organiser sets as real. Speaking: We separate the session from the spend in writing. If a slot comes with a sponsorship it is a sponsored session and belongs on the agenda labelled as one; if it came through the call for papers it is not ours to buy, and we will not ask an organiser to blur the line. In accredited legal education, where content independence is a condition of accreditation, this stops being a preference — sponsorship that reaches into session content puts the accreditation at risk, and we structure around it. Diligence before any negotiation: We ask for the previous edition's post-event report, the attendance methodology and whether it was audited, the registration mix between paid delegates and comped or free passes, and the sponsor renewal rate. Comped attendance is where prospectus numbers go soft. We also speak to two sponsors from the last edition who are not on the organiser's reference list. What we refuse: We will not accept payment from both sides of a deal. We will not broker a package we cannot defend to your own team, and part of what you are buying is the sentence do not sponsor this one, delivered with the numbers behind it. We will not buy a booth to close a logo-parity gap against a competitor. We will not arrange hospitality that a regulated client cannot lawfully offer or accept, and in legal and public-sector contexts we check that before it reaches a proposal. Who this is not for: Organisations that have already chosen their events and want a negotiator for the paperwork. First-year brand spending with no defined outcome, because there is no version of this where we can afterwards tell you whether it worked. Anyone who needs a deal closed this week: diligence on an event runs about three weeks, and signing without it is guessing with a budget. Deliverables: An event shortlist with the case for and against each, the diligence file behind it, a redline of the organiser's contract with clauses ranked by what we would trade away first, the negotiated agreement, and a post-event reconciliation against what was warranted — scans delivered, attendance versus prospectus, exclusivity honoured — with the make-good claimed where it is owed.