The Entrepreneur Ethos

Ryan Warriner

Jarie Bolander -

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Summary

Hey everyone. Stay tuned to the end of the interview where I’ll give you some actionable insights that I learned from my guest. These insights are also in the show notes. As always, thanks for listening.

Now on to my guest for today, Ryan Warriner, a communications professor, founder of Professional Presentation Services and author of the forthcoming book The Effective Presenter: The Winning Formula for Business Presentations.

Ryan’s pitch to me was so good I used it as an example in a webinar on pitching, so I knew he was someone I needed to have on the show. I share that pitch in the show.

Ryan’s interest in understanding how to better communicate is rooted with his own feelings of frustration when he was a kid with not being understood. He went on to study and try to understand the principles of effective communication, earning a PhD and becoming a professor. While visiting friends who had founded a startup, he helped them prepare their presentation for potential investors. From there the ball got rolling as he realized he had valuable insight to offer. He now offers his services helping entrepreneurs and professionals prepare better presentations. His research and findings are put together in a forthcoming book, The Effective Presenter.

Ryan walks us through the keys to preparing and delivering presentations. Listen to find out how you can prepare a more effective presentation, be it for a potential investor or for colleagues at the office.

Now, let’s get better together.

Actionable Insights

  • One of the most important things to do when preparing a presentation is to think about your audience. What are their values and interests? What are they interested in knowing more about? Do your research and also try to put yourself in their shoes.
  • Figure out what you want your outcome to be. Do you want investors to ask for that second meeting? Do you want people in your company to better understand a concept? This will help guide your organization of ideas.
  • Use devices like introductions, providing roadmaps, and talking through transitions to diminish how much effort listeners have to put into it. Listeners have limited capacity to absorb information, so you want to make it as easy as possible. Be sure to check in and assure people that some of the content may be harder to grasp so they get the message that they might need to pay closer attention.
  • Don’t rely on your presentation slides; use them as aids. Limit how much text you put in each one.
  • Practice, practice, practice. Warriner also recommends mentally rehearsing your talk, and going back over it to see if there are words that can be cut out.

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