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 sit in the conference room alone and try to imagine our client in real life.
Usually, in these situations, we end up sitting in the back of the room, in a chair like this…
Invariably, there comes a moment in the meeting when someone in the audience points to us and asks, “Who is that?” The answer is usually something along the lines of, “Oh, that’s Matt,” or “Oh, that’s Alper,” and then, “He’s coaching me on my speaking skills, and he wanted to see me speaking in real life.”
This reminds of us of a scene in the movie “Meet Joe Black,” where Joe Black (Brad Pitt) is sitting at the back of the room. Someone asks Anthony Hopkins, “Who is that,” and Anthony Hopkins says, “That, oh, that’s Joe,” as if that was enough of an explanation. And so Alper and I call that chair The Joe Black Chair.
Yes, Joe Black was the devil, come to get Anthony Hopkins at the end of his life. Yes, sometimes we have a dark sense of humor. 😉