Speaker applications for the 2027 Badass Business Summit are open. The form is at badassbusinesssummit.com/speak.

Before you fill it out, read the next four lines. They are the whole deal, and most people who email me asking to speak find out one of them is a problem.

We do not pay speakers. No fee, no honorarium, no stipend.

We do not cover travel or hotel. You get yourself to Dallas and you pay for your own room.

Speaking does not come with a ticket. If you want the rest of the summit, you buy a seat like everyone else.

There is no selling from the stage. No offer at the end, no QR code on the last slide, no “come see me at my table and I’ll give you the thing.” If you sell from the stage, we cut the mic. That is not a figure of speech.

Still here? Good. Those four lines are not us being cheap. They are the reason the room works.

Why it is built this way

I have sat in the back of enough conferences to know what happens when a speaker gets paid and nobody checks what they are going to say. You get 45 minutes of a story you can find on their podcast, and then a close. The audience knows. You can watch 300 people pick up their phones at the same moment.

The minute a speaker is there to sell, the session stops being about the room and starts being about the funnel. Everybody in the audience can feel the turn. And once one speaker does it, every speaker after them gets listened to with one eye closed.

So we took the money out of it on both sides. We do not pay you, and you do not sell. What is left is the only reason worth being on that stage: you have something you actually know how to do, and you want to teach it to a room of business owners who will go use it.

That trade is better than it sounds. You get 300 small business owners in one room watching you teach. Not watching you pitch. Watching you be good at the thing you do. In my experience that generates more real business than any stage close ever has, it just does not show up in a spreadsheet the same week.

What the application actually asks for

It is not a form you fill out in two minutes, on purpose.

Your bio and your headshot. The real one, not the one from 2019.

What your session is. Title, which of the three pillars it fits, the format you want, what the room walks out able to do. That last one is the question most applications fall down on. “They will be inspired” is not a takeaway. “They will have a one page scorecard for their own numbers” is.

Two links to you speaking. Not a highlight reel cut to music. An actual session, or a long clip of one, where we can hear you teach and watch the room. If all you have is a sizzle reel, send it and tell us what it is cut from.

Two references. Name, the event they ran or booked you for, and how to reach them. We call them. We ask whether you showed up on time, whether you taught what you said you would teach, and whether you sold from the stage.

That last part is why we ask for references instead of just a reel. A reel shows us your best 90 seconds. A reference tells us what you are like to work with on a day when the AV is broken and your slot moved.

Who tends to get picked

People who have done the thing they are teaching, recently, in their own business. BABS is not a motivation conference. Every session maps to one of the three pillars, and the sessions that land are the ones where somebody hands the room a system and then shows their own numbers from running it.

The other thing: speakers who have sat in the room pitch better sessions. If you have never been to BABS, come to one first. You will understand in about an hour why selling from the stage would not work here, and your application next year will be twice as strong.

Dates and the honest timeline

The summit is September 15 to 17, 2027, in Dallas-Fort Worth. We build the lineup over the winter. We read every application properly, which takes a while, and we come back to everybody either way, including the people we cannot fit.

If you would rather just come and watch, tickets are on sale now and prices go up January 1st. Grab a seat.

And if you want on that stage, the form is right here. Four terms. No surprises.