Derrick called and spoke a mile a minute. His boss, the founder of a new hedge fund and the primary money runner had to speak at a capital intro in a week. Could I come and help?
I asked if the boss knew what he wanted to say, and Derrick said yes, but the talk was not developed yet and he (the boss) wouldn’t have time to devote to it until the weekend.
I asked about the boss. Derrick said he was really smart but not all that experienced speaking to large groups and hard to pin down because he was so busy keeping his eye on the markets.
We set up two meetings. The first to hammer out what the message would be; the second to practice saying it. I asked for a general summary of what would be said. Derrick replied, “He’s going to talk about distressed securities.”
“Is he going to say something unusual about them, or is he going to say something predictable but try to say it well?” I asked.
“By that question, I can tell that you are going to be helpful,” said Derrick, assuring me that I would not see any drafts until I arrived.
When I walked in the door, the receptionist seemed to be expecting me. She jumped up and escorted me into a meeting room off the lobby.
Derrick arrived like clock-work. He handed me his business card, made from the thickest card stock I’ve ever felt. I enthused over the feel of his card. He seemed to enjoy that. It broke the ice.
He briefed me on the status of the script and slides (a work in progress) and then in came his boss, backing into the room as he spoke to an assistant down the hall.
Peter was small and intense, with long hair and granny glasses. If Derrick was natty and professional, Peter was rumpled and professorial. Derrick excused himself immediately and closed the door as he left.
Peter had a handful of wrinkled papers in his hand. They were his notes. He did not know how to connect his computer to the projector, or how to use PowerPoint well enough to re-sequence the slides.
However, his knowledge of distressed securities was encyclopedic and his speech was supersonic. He had so many thoughts stampeding from his mind to his mouth that they got stuck on his tongue and toppled over each other.
Hummingbirds beat their wings 15 to 80 times per second, depending on the species. If a hummingbird could speak, that’s how fast Peter talked.
When I asked questions about his meaning to help him clarify what he wanted to say and in what order, he was wonderfully patient with my modest understanding of his discipline, and used analogies and metaphors to explain his point—a sign, I think, of a good communicator.
In addition to speaking like a hummingbird, he did not look me in the eye, and did not relate what he said to the bar charts on the screen. But he spoke with visceral passion and emphatic verve about the coming crisis in corporate debt—and that made up for his other sins as a speaker. He could lift up his whole body and jump into a key word with both feet–giving it real meaning and significance.
When our rehearsal led him to a new thought, he leaned over the conference table, pawing through his wrinkled pages, and jotted words on a spare corner of the paper.
He was trying to say that the imminent credit crunch would not be like past credit crunches, due to recent care-free lending practices. In fact, due to covenant-light loans, and CCC loans, he argued, we would not get early warning signs of trouble: we would be in the middle of the crisis all at once.
The challenge was to build the story so that the audience would think they were hearing a standard pitch about the potential attractive opportunities in distressed debt, and then yank the tablecloth out from under the meal spread before them to reveal something entirely new and terrifying.
After two meetings, we had cut the slides down to six and the timing down to less than ten minutes. He had no time to rehearse. He promised he would work on it in his hotel room when he arrived at the capital intro. I continued to e-mail suggestions to his Blackberry over the weekend.
I learned from Peter that he did not rehearse until he was on the plane, and then he stayed up most of the night in a panic working on it.
Two days after the event, he called to say it went well, and that my messages had helped. I called Derrick to get his assessment, who said it was a little short—much shorter than the presentations made by other speakers. I pointed out that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
As Mrs. Hubert Humphrey said to her husband after a particularly long stem-winder, “Hubert, for a speech to be immortal, it need not be interminable.”
The question will be whether Peter can:
1. Get attention at capital intros.
2. Keep attention
3. Make a clear point in a memorable way
4. Stand out in a crowded field
5. Move people to come talk with him.
That’s it. He doesn’t have to sell the fund, or close the deal. His job is to generate trust and curiosity.
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