Founded by President Candace G. Carson in 2018, The Intelligentsia Agency, Inc. was created as a rebranding of her original speakers agency: Lily of the Valley Speakers. Headquartered in the business district of Tysons Corner, Virginia, Ms. Carson originally entered the speaking industry due to being fascinated by not only the various inspirational and motivational messages that she heard over the years from various professional speakers, but moreso fascinated with them in the sense that they were a representation of various microcosms of human potentiality that had been activated and actualized.
Once Ms. Carson learned the way the booking business worked, she realized that there was a blaring need for innovation within this small but tenured industry. The need was for a more circumspect vetting of both professional speakers, consultants, and especially their content, resulting in a higher and deeper level of cumulative emotional and intellectual intelligence being delivered to clients.
The Intelligentsia Agency, Inc. is the brain child of Ms. Carson and was created due to the need she witnessed in the speaking industry for a tightening up and increase of quality of content that gets delivered to organizations around the world. Her reasoning is as follows:
“The relationship between agencies/ bureaus and professional speakers/consultants needs to go a bit deeper than surface level interaction, because at the end of the day professional speakers and consultants are having a direct impact on the people and industries around the world, and industry is what makes global economies. It’s not enough and it’s not fair to the client, to simply assign a speaker that speaks on the topic needed by a client. An agency should also take on the higher responsibility of ensuring that any intelligence that is delivered to a client is inclusive of any recent developments or discoveries in a particular field, when applicable. This notion especially applies to those who are consultants. There is definitely an under-served need in organizations that has been verified by some of my comrades, for more excellent and competent consultancy. These organizations don’t necessarily need a keynote speaker persay, but rather they need a professional consultant who is an expert in a particular subject matter to come in and work with and teach their teams in a core area of competency like: digital marketing for example.
Organizations and businesses are only as competitive as the intelligence/information that they have, and the world is constantly in flux. Industry, therefore is constantly in flux. It’s simply the right thing to do, to make sure that any speaker or consultant that represents our agency, presents content that is both relevant, thorough, and up to date with recent substantive and established developments.”
In addition to making sure that content is circumspect, there is also the duty of making sure that speakers and consultants are indeed professional. Many speakers and consultants claim to be professional yet aren’t. The event or meeting of a corporation is too big of a deal for their staff members to take the risk of booking someone who is amateur at best.
Before a speaker or consultant ever comes into contact with any of our clients, we first make sure that we are all on the same page in terms of what our clients actually receive, whether we are talking about their professional interaction and conduct or their content.