About Shelley
For more than twenty years, Shelley Dolley ran the business behind Tom Peters' speaking career. She now advises speakers and authors building their own.
She started as his assistant in 2000 and finished as his Chief of Staff, handling contracts, partnerships, publishers, course creation, digital strategy, and the logistics of his global speaking calendar until he retired in 2023.
That seat taught her things that are difficult to learn any other way: how a fee gets set and by whom, what a bureau agent says about a speaker when the speaker isn't on the call, which parts of a book launch move a career and which are a waste of money.
Peters' colleagues began asking for the same counsel, so in 2004 she founded Leap7 to provide it. She has since advised Amy Cuddy, Tiffani Bova, Kate O'Neill, and Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez on positioning, publishing, fees, and the teams they build around themselves.
Shelley’s publishing work spans traditional houses, hybrids, and self-publishing, and she advises authors on the best route for a given book.
She produced the launch of Seth Godin's The Big Moo, and Tiffani Bova's first book reached the Wall Street Journal bestseller list in its opening week. She also advised Amy Cuddy on her speaking business in the run-up to her second book, Bullied (Harper Collins, February 2027).
She writes Speaking Success, a monthly newsletter on the business of speaking, and works from a Maine forest. Her mother still isn't entirely sure what she does.
As a first-time author, surrounding myself with an amazing team was important. Shelley was just that, amazing!
Her guidance and support were key to our success making it to the WSJ list of bestselling non-fiction business books in our first week of publication. I couldn’t have done it without her.
—Tiffani Bova
Author of The Experience Mindset: Changing the Way You Think About Growth