I recently began introducing myself at parties as an "exporter of humans." That never goes over too well. People imagine me loading excessive numbers of Syrians into an inflatable raft and then pushing it towards Greece. What I actually mean is much more boring. Of...
Meaning: to think about the past Examples: It is important to look ahead at the future, and to not spend too much time looking back. When I look back at my childhood, I realize it was a very good childhood.
I know a lot of you are working from home this week. It probably involves a lot of videoconferencing, which might feel a little strange, since it's probably a bit unfamiliar. I do a lot of videoconferencing, so here are three tips that might help. 1. Humans like...
---------- Forwarded message --------- From: matt@krauseenglish.com Date: XYZ Subject: CXO Letter sample To: xyz@xyz.com A favorite word that I've run across an unusual number of times in my readings this week is "slog." This word can be a noun or a verb, and using it...
Click here to download the presentation checklist (one-page PDF).
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Baldwin and Matt interviewed Memet Yazıcı, Managing Partner of TRPE Capital. Memet speaks here about preparing for pitch meetings, a portfolio company’s management team’s role in telling the company’s story, and the importance of relationships with LPs.
Baldwin and Matt interviewed Roland Meerdter, co-founder of Door Ventures. Roland speaks here about streamlining the DDQ process, the origins of Door, how standardized DDQs evolve over time, and how digitalization is affecting the due diligence process.
Baldwin and Matt interviewed Kyle Dunn, CEO of Meyler Capital. Kyle speaks here about marketing in the fund world, and what opportunities fund managers are missing, and that performance is vital, but it’s table stakes, it’s like BMW saying, “Our cars run good.”
Baldwin and Matt enjoyed the first interview with JB so much, they invited him back for an encore.
Baldwin Berges and Matt interview JB Beckett, author of #New Fund Order.
A listener asks Ole Rollag, a guest on our podcast, his thoughts on their newsletter.
Baldwin Berges and Matt interview Ole Rollag of Murano.
Baldwin and Matt talk about one of the mistakes they see fund managers making: Mismatching their product design and their target investors.
Baldwin and Matt talk about one of the mistakes they see fund managers making: Not qualifying their prospects.
Baldwin and Matt talk about one of the mistakes they see fund managers making: Always sending in the highest-ranking person.
Baldwin and Matt talk about one of the mistakes they see fund managers making: Trying to go all the way on the first date.
Baldwin and Matt talk about one of the mistakes they see fund managers making: Rushing their investor.
Baldwin and Matt talk about one of the mistakes they see fund managers making: Not equipping their investors to argue their cases to other people.
Tsufit started out as a lawyer, singer, and actress, and for over 15 years now she has been coaching others to step into the spotlight. In fact, she wrote a book titled exactly that: “Step Into The Spotlight!”
Baldwin Berges spent years in the investment world, helped companies raise money, and is now helping them clarify their messages, making complex ideas simple to understand. In this interview he talks a bit about speaking at conferences, and gives some tips to other speakers.
Erik Vos has worked and presented in 91 countries and counting. In this interview he talks a bit about speaking at conferences, and gives some tips to other speakers.
Zeynep Stefan has been in the insurance and risk management business for over 10 years. In this interview she talks a bit about moderating a panel.
What if you want to keep some reminder notes around, but don’t want to hold pieces of paper in your hands?
Aydın Bırık sees many, many startups pitch their companies to potential investors. Here he talks about what he does (and does not) like to see, and what suggestions he would give to the entrepreneurs…
UPDATE: As of March 2017, Matt’s public office hours have been replaced by “members only” office hours. For the location of the members-only office hours, please see: https://dopplercomm.com/members-only/office-hours/ Matt holds weekly office hours on Thursdays at 3pm (Istanbul time) at Muizz, the restaurant on the ground floor of the Gonen Otel in Taksim (click here […]
One of the most commented-on items in our Tips & Tricks series is a Kevin Spacey speech…
There’s more behind that “practice 25 times” advice than just an unthinking “more practice is good, so get a lot of it.”
Here’s what’s behind it…
It’s BizDev on steroids, and we’re your personal trainer.
Welcome to the Freelancer’s Show podcast listeners! Here are a couple things to reinforce what we discussed on the show. Just sign up with your email address, and we’ll send them along to you. They are: a brief guide covering the three mindset changes (otherwise known as “attitude adjustments”) we recommend to our clients before […]
A great cartoon showing one of the main differences between executive and associate email styles…
Why the Tips and Tricks is a weekly email series, not a once-and-done ebook.
Jesse Scinto, our head speechwriter and presentation trainer, is a faculty member at the Strategic Communications department at New York’s Columbia University. So, understandably, we are proud of him and happy to have him on our team. In these interview highlights, Jesse discusses techniques for connecting with your audience, for persuading them over to your […]
Why we don’t do many one- or two-day trainings We get a lot of requests for one- or two-day trainings, but we don’t do very many of them. Why? It is almost impossible to make a deep change in someone’s life, or in a company’s performance, in one or two days, and we are not […]
Equipment: Please use headphones. They don’t have to be fancy; the ones you use with your iPhone are fine. Please use Chrome or Firefox. Sometimes Internet Explorer works for this, but most of the time it doesn’t. Preparation before the call: Please look at the typical questions below and think about them a bit. Your […]
With today’s technology, we don’t have to be face-to-face.
Speaking before an industry conference next month? Call on us to design your slides and coach you through the presentation.
Meeting with investors in London? Let us guide you through refining your message and designing your collateral materials.
Want to come across more professionally in those quarterly earnings conference calls? Perfect, we can help you with that.
Eric Takaha at Franklin-Templeton is a master of using what we call “softening words,” which can come in very handy when you are describing overall trends in a public forum…
Equip your people to break through the barriers of resistance, to influence client decisions more effectively, and to use tested and proven techniques of visual design, communications framing, and neuromarketing.
We help your people focus on your client and transform confusing, cluttered messages into clearer, more impressive, and easier to understand sales tools.
You depend on your people to grow your business. Send them out into the field with the right tools for the job.
Markets are most unkind to things they don’t understand. We help you clear up those misunderstandings and represent your company and its ecosystem more clearly.
There’s almost almost always something about your company, or the market in which it exists, that you wish your investors understood more clearly.
Expanding your markets. Representing your company on panels. Getting board approval for a major initiative. These all require the right presence, the right wordings and turns of phrase.
We edit/improve your speeches, practice your speaking skills, and design a whitepaper you can use in followup inquiries. But if you just want to talk astrophysics or House of Cards, we can do that too.
You’ve invested a lot in yourself, and made sacrifices for years, to get where you are. Don’t stop now.
Even the most complicated message can usually be distilled into a few words. It just takes a lot of work. A LOT.
One of the most common questions we hear when people go onto the stage is, “What do I do with my hands?”
Michael Bierut describes not only the method we use, but why we use it, so well I read it and thought, “Yeah, that’s me!”…
I love this article, especially the third tip…
Used a certain media in a previous Keynote presentation but you no longer can locate it on your computer? You can reach out to that file in 5 easy steps.
A lot of people think presentations are about informing, but here’s the problem with that view…
Listen to Jesse and Matt talk particularly about the importance of audience members making their commitments physical and public, and how we can do that in a presentation.
Matt and Jesse discuss a chapter from Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, specifically the human desire to seem logical and consistent, and how we can use this natural human desire to persuade our audiences…
Listen to this talk to find out about how “When our audience can see that we have flaws, it really helps them identify with us.”
Jesse tells us what “progressive complications” are, where they come from, and how to use them in our presentations.
Often, our clients feel like if they talk about conflict or problems in their presentations, their audiences won’t respect them. It feels kind of risky. We asked Jesse about this. If a speaker takes the risk, what is the speaker going to get in return?
Jesse demonstrates how to tell a story about a corporate restructuring.
One of our clients asked us how to tell stories in a business context. Jesse gives a great answer about that…
Jesse describes a more interesting way to structure your information, one that will keep your audience’s attention better.
It’s a good question: Should I do my training in Turkish or in English?
The best way to answer that question is probably to ask yourself, “What do I ultimately want to be able to do?”
Here’s one thing I recommend: Listen to the same thing, over and over. You want to listen to a 20-minute speech? That’s great. Pick three minutes of it, and listen to that same 3 minutes 5 times. Each time, write down one new thing you heard.
Ever wondered what to do with your hands when you are delivering a speech while sitting down?
Watch this short video for some tips.
Here’s another neat tip for seeing your speech from another perspective: Put it into a tag cloud.
Getting up in front of people and speaking may not always be as easy as strolling in a park on a warm Sunday afternoon. Sometimes, it may feel more like a bigger challenge you find yourself immersed in. Our experience with our clients show that, people are usually afraid of making one, two or all […]
When you connect your computer to the projector before starting a presentation, what does your audience see first? Do they see a neat and tidy computer desktop with a regular wallpaper? Do they see a cluttered desktop with a lot of icons on top of your two year old niece’s selife? It is commonly accepted […]
In the Fundamentals we mentioned the Curse of Knowledge, and six ways to overcome it. My personal favorite, though, isn’t on that list. It is: #7: Ask questions. Specifically, ask your audience to describe back to you what you just said. Ask them to describe your world back to you, and see how close they […]
“How does this person think?” Maybe your audience members don’t know who you are. They might not even care about your subject. But they probably want to know how you think. It’s a natural human impulse: We want to know how other people solve problems, because maybe they can solve problems we can’t. If you […]
Yesterday I saw this ad in the subway station… At first I thought, “Oh, that’s such a pretty picture there on the screen… fish, water, blue, nature, sun, how nice!” But then I saw something completely different: A herd, moving in unthinking unison, swimming, spiraling, like brainless automatons towards a bright light, towards a god […]
Sometimes our clients ask us to sit in on their “real life” presentations. We love opportunities like that. Seeing our clients operate live, “in the wild,” helps us do our jobs so much better. When a client lets us watch them give a real-life presentation we can help them so much more than when we […]
The other day someone asked me for advice. He had wanted to give a speech that would last about 4-6 minutes, but instead the speech went for almost eight minutes. “What should I do?” he asked. “Slow down,” I said. Wait a second, shouldn’t I have told him to talk faster? Why did I tell […]
When you start preparing a presentation, don’t you dare start by opening PowerPoint. Mull over these three questions first: Who are you talking to? What do you want them to do? Why should they care? Ask these questions because a good presentation doesn’t happen in the head of the speaker, it happens in the heads […]
A couple years ago there was a woman who walked from Spain south to Morocco, and then east across Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, then north into Jordan, and then into Jerusalem. She walked alone, and she didn’t spend any money. When I talk about my walk across Turkey, someone invariably pipes up and says, “Yeah, […]
“The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea.” What is the idea? The idea is that “[i]deas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.” In addition to describing how the spread of ideas is like the spread of viruses, Gladwell describes three kinds of people who are necessary for the […]
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I threw this book across the room. Couldn’t read more than a third of it. Why? I’m no statistician, but, if I understand correctly, analyzing large amounts of data (which is the technique the authors used) is a great way to find a population’s average. However, it is not a great way to understand a […]
The upshot: If you want to get to the high points, you’re going to have to push through the low points. Most people don’t push through the low points, so the playing field will be nice and clear when you get to the good times. I recommend Seth Godin all the time. I love his […]
The upshot: Sometimes big, disruptive things happen, and they can’t be planned for, because you don’t know what they’ll be. They will end life as you know it (or as your business knows it), and that’s just the way it is.
Do not look for a summary of this book. In my opinion, this is one of those books you should either submit to, allowing it to change the way you think, or don’t even bother picking it up. Go big or go home. In other words, I loved it. The thing I liked most about […]
The upshot: Marketing is a conversation. It is a two-way exchange between people, not an opportunity for you to shout at your customers.
The upshot: Blah blah blah, a bunch of stuff. When you are preparing a presentation, segment your audience. Blah blah blah, a bunch more stuff. That one part, the reminder to segment your audience, alone makes the book worth it. All too often, presentation books tell us to know our audiences, but they don’t tell […]
Transcript: I recommend, for the first 10 speeches, no visual aids at all, no slides, nothing. We’re there in Toastmasters to learn how to connect with the audience. We’re there to learn how to make eye contact, and how to relax, and how to use body language, and how to get inside of the audience’s […]
New Service: Test My Presentation. You send us your presentation, we suggest how you can improve it. Click here for more info. Pro Tip: Use this service once a month, and watch your presentation skills rise up to the next level. It’ll be like your own personal communications seminar! Transcript: People ask me, “How many […]
One of my favorite scenes from Mad Men comes at the end of season 1, when Don pitches Eastman Kodak using a slide show from his own life… There are many things I like about this scene. One of them is that Don knows his audience has a question (“What does this story about Teddy […]
These are the first questions I ask my clients when we are preparing a presentation. They are obvious questions. It is so easy to answer them quickly, forget the answers, and continue on, unthinking, unchanged, uninspired. The other day I was meeting with a client. Some months before, he had gone to an international training […]
The other day, I was helping a client with a presentation. He was an engineer for a solar power company, and he was going to introduce his company to some potential investors. Other engineers would have loved his presentation. They would have picked him up, put him on their shoulders, and carried him down the […]
People ask me for advice on how to speak better. When I tell them they have to practice 25 times, their eyes glaze over. They don’t want to hear it. What they want to hear is, “Yes, you can be lazy AND awesome at the same time”. But it’s not true, man, sorry. You can […]
Text of the speech: Raising the Bar on Yourself Raising the bar on yourself. What does that mean? Well, “to raise the bar” simply means, “to set a higher standard”. Raising the bar on yourself just means setting a higher standard for yourself. At first, it sounds intimidating, but it doesn’t need to be. You […]
Should you put an objective on your CV, or not? Probably not. Here’s a typical objective: "A challenging managerial position in marketing at a growing FMCG company." What’s wrong with this statement? First, it’s about you, and what you want to do. It’s YOUR objective. Remember that the hiring managers who look at your CV […]
These words are on almost every CV. They are popular, and everyone thinks they should use them. But they are empty, and they say nothing about you. Kill them, and replace them with something else: responsible for experienced excellent written communication skills team player detail-oriented successful Why are they empty, and what should you say […]
When someone else talks, what’s a good way to make sure you understood? Remember this phrase: "Let me repeat what you said, to make sure I understood you correctly…" I’m a native English speaker. I still use this phrase 10 times a day. Want to improve your language and communications ability? Use that phrase. Your […]
A short 33 second video on public speaking. One of my favorite lines: "Public speaking is abnormal. No one is born a great public speaker, so practice, practice, practice, and then practice some more." This video was brought to us by the good people at ethos3.com.
Long term goals require short term actions, too. It’s Wednesday, 5:47 pm. Your boss brings you an urgent project. You can either: do the urgent project, and delay that important professional networking meeting go to the important professional networking meeting, and delay the urgent project With one, you will feel pain tomorrow. With the other, […]
There will always be something: a request will come from your boss the phone will ring a friend from out of town will visit your bedroom curtains will need to be cleaned your cat will need a bath There will always be an excuse to postpone the things you really need to do. There will […]