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Cynthia Barnes

Cynthia Barnes

Apogee speakers

Cynthia Barnes

Founder, Black Women's Wealth Lab® | Creator, The Extraction Recovery System™

Expertise:

Business StrategyComplianceGovernment PolicyInclusion and BelongingLeadershipLeadership TransformationRisk Management
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Details

Fee Range - $20,000-$25,000
Region - North America

Speaker One Sheet

Cynthia Barnes

Biography

Cynthia Barnes doesn’t help women find their voice. She teaches them how to invoice.

As founder of Black Women’s Wealth Lab® and creator of The Extraction Recovery System™, Cynthia helps high-achieving corporate women, particularly Black women with decades of specialized expertise, stop subsidizing organizations with uncompensated intellectual property and start building enterprises of their own.

Her methodology is forensic, not motivational. Through proprietary frameworks including The Law of Worth™, the Corporate Extraction Dictionary™, and the Framework Value Formula™, Cynthia helps professionals document what they’ve built, calculate what it’s worth, and price it without flinching. Across 17 forensic Value Audits™ she has documented more than $124 million in economic value, and authored The Extraction Report, the first published forensic study of value capture at the principal tier. She audited herself first: her own documented Invoice Number™ runs from $17.5 to $52.5 million against $60,000 in income.

The record backs it up. Three decades in sales, where she reached the top 1% nationally. Founder of the National Association of Women Sales Professionals, which she grew to 15,000 members and partnerships with Fortune 500 companies. The first Black woman to keynote OUTBOUND, the largest sales conference in the United States. A Salesforce Top Sales Influencer and multi-year honoree, a LinkedIn Top Voice, and a TEDx speaker.

Her signature talk, rooted in her TEDx work and the Thank You; It’s True™ methodology, challenges audiences to stop deflecting their own brilliance and start treating their expertise as the asset it is. She doesn’t deliver inspiration. She delivers infrastructure.

For organizations ready to address the economics of undervaluation, not just the optics, Cynthia Barnes is the forensic accountant your leadership team didn’t know they needed.

SIGNATURE TOPICS

For Corporate Audiences:

1. The Economics of Extraction: What Unprotected Intellectual Property Is Actually Costing Your Organization

2. Thank You; It’s True™: Why Your Top Performers Are Building Frameworks They’ll Never Own — and Walking Out the Door

3. From Framework Builder to Enterprise Owner: The IP-to-Revenue Infrastructure Your Best Talent Is Missing

4. The Corporate Translation: Why Your Most Valuable People Can’t Document What They Do — and What That Means for Your Bottom Line

For Associations & Member Organizations:

5. Document It, Trademark It, Invoice It: The IP Strategy Your Members Were Never Taught

6. The Framework Is the Asset: Why Your Most Accomplished Members Are Giving Away Million-Dollar Intellectual Property for Free

7. From Expertise to Enterprise: How High-Achieving Women Turn Unprotected Ideas Into Trademarked, Revenue-Generating Businesses

Cynthia Barnes

Featured Media

Cynthia Barnes

Reviews from the field.

Your captivating presence and words have made an enduring impact on our members and allies, evident in the positive feedback we have received.

FREQUENTLY ASKED

The questions planners ask first.

How does the booking process actually work?

You send us a brief. Inside one business day, an advisor comes back with a curated shortlist of three to five speakers we’d back, with reels, fee bands, and a candid note on fit. You pick a direction. We hold the date while you finalize internal approvals, then issue a contract. From there, our team handles travel, AV, and prep calls. Most engagements close in seven to fourteen days.

Standard fees cover the keynote or session itself, one pre-event prep call, and reasonable customization for your audience. Travel, accommodation, and ground transport are separate and itemized before you sign. Your advisor will spell out exactly what’s included for the speaker you’re considering, so there are no surprises later.

 

No. Our commission comes from the speaker’s standard fee, not your budget. The fee you pay through Apogee is the same fee you’d pay booking the speaker directly, with the bureau’s vetting, advisory, and event management built in.

Yes, and often. The fastest way to lose a client is to put a speaker in front of an audience they don’t fit. If we read your brief and think the right answer is a speaker we don’t represent, we’ll say so. Sometimes that means we lose the booking. Most of the time it means we earn a longer relationship.

Carefully, and slower than most bureaus. Every speaker we represent has been chosen because we’d stake our reputation on putting them in front of a room. We review reels, talk to past clients, sit in on live engagements when we can, and look hard at how a speaker handles the harder parts of the work, like Q&A, off-script moments, and difficult audiences. We add more slowly than we get asked to.