NORTH STAR INTERVIEW: Marcus Henry John Brown, Creator + CEO of Speakery

I first met Marcus John Henry Brown in Bournemouth at Silicon Beach, where he wowed the audience with his performance of the original work he created called ‘The Passing’. I don’t think i’ll ever forget the phrase Marcus ended the performance with; “Optimism is good for getting you through the day, pessimism gets you nowhere, but dystopia arms you for the future.”

Fast forward to today, and his work has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people; he’s been featured in international publications and called all sorts of glowing things. Last year he put out ‘The Hustle Royale’, what he calls ‘the best work of his life so far’, but things are changing for Marcus; things that are very good for everyone and anyone who has ever watched a bad presentation. Here’s the download on Marcus’s next focus, Speakery, the business - and methodology - aimed at executives who need to drive change and motivate people.

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How do you describe Speakery to people? 

Speakery is the mindset, the process and a methodology for finding answers troubling corporate people, particularly senior management, spokespeople and sales. Why do I get so nervous in front of an audience? Why can't I sleep the night before a big presentation? Why am I not winning pitches or raising money? Why are my presentations trash? Why don't audiences engage with what I'm saying? 

Why did you create Speakery? It's different to a lot of the other coaching and speaker courses out there, and connected to your previous life/work as a performance artist? Talk about how that all combines for a bit…

It wasn't a eureka moment. One of my clients had seen The Passing, my 2017 performance and asked if I would consider training their speakers and spokespeople. The brief was, "can you teach them 1% of what you do on stage". I did. I enjoyed it. So did they, and we saw that what I was doing really impacted how and what they were presenting, and Speakery was born. 

Presenting ideas, pitching business and standing in front of audiences are some of the most essential skills business people need to have. Still, they're skills they generally have no schooling in. There are a number of services out there that offer speaker training, which is great as I think it's important to have a variety of styles and approaches available to people looking to improve their presentation skills.

What makes my approach unique is the fact that I not only use PowerPoint and presentation techniques as performance art forms on business conference stages, and that I use performance acting techniques in my work, but that I also have nearly thirty years of corporate and agency experience. I’ve walked the walk. This means I can empathise with my mentees from a presentation and business perspective. 

You've been public about battling various issues during the pandemic; how did these impact the design - or direction - of Speakery? Am I right in saying it's not 'a result of', but more 'through the process' kind of invention/innovation? Is trauma the secret source? 

2020 was set to be my biggest year as a performance artist, with international bookings throughout the entire year. Then the virus came. I fell into a deep hole. Then people started to present online from their work-from-home hellholes and the tiny boxes of ZOOM and MS Teams. They were terrible at it. And I wanted to help, so I used the technical skills I had developed to create my performances and began producing short videos to help people improve. Then people started booking me to help them. And I was happy to help in exchange for money. Slowly but surely, Speakery gained momentum, and I began creating, writing and show-running what can only be described as Hollywood Grade Corporate Streams and coaching, directing and guiding the executives who were presenting on camera. 

It wasn't necessarily trauma, but the decision to pivot away from the performances and go all-in on Speakery was made because I realised that what had once been a pandemic-driven necessity had become my purpose. Performance art is my passion. My ego very much liked the attention, but stepping out of the spotlight, handing over the clicker and helping other people rock the stage is my purpose. 

It's not meant to be a mass product yet, but who benefits from what Speakery provides? 

Over the last three years, I've trained professors from Stanford, Harvard and Barcelona business schools, Lord Mayors, agencies, CEOs, leadership teams, book authors, artists, politicians, startups looking to raise money, television personalities, senior partners from global consultancies, football clubs, as well of people from some of the largest global tech companies. 

All of them were looking for answers to the kind of questions I mentioned above. What they got was 90 minutes with me and the answers. Niche, unique, personal, intimate and discrete.

A presentation isn't just slides and bullet points - it's a format, a product and a moment of storytelling. My approach has more in common with Martin Scorsese or Butch Vig than a certified business coach, and the business professionals who book me seem to appreciate that.

You described it to me, or you said others describe it as, 'therapy', what do you think this tells us about the state of executive communication? 

I don't see myself as a teacher, and I'm certainly not a therapist, but Speakery sessions are intimate and frequently intense. I’ve had customers cry. I spend more time watching my customers than looking at what they're presenting. I'm interested in the person, what they're saying, how they're saying. More importantly, I'm trying to understand why they're not doing what they so dearly want to do: perform. There's always someone in our past, always something that happened, whether it was an aunt or a neighbour who told us not to be so loud or to stop showing off, that dented our self-confidence, and it is the memory of those moments that tends to hold us back.

I find that moment: peel back the onion skins of years of corporate bullshit, excuses and faux syndromes to find out what's really holding them back. And then, I help them find their voice and the stage version of who they really are. Once we’ve done that we can start work on the presentation and the performance. 

I generally work with senior people who carry the heavy burden of leadership. They're busy. Very busy. They rarely have time, if at all, to think about themselves, but they can when they come to work with me, and magical things can happen to their communication and presentation skills when they do. Most people just want to survive in front of an audience. I want them to thrive. The process of getting from one stage to the next is intense, emotional and liberating because my customers can finally reveal themselves - and I think that’s why some of my customers have described the Speakery experience as therapy.

But it isn’t really. It's direction. I’m like the Tarantino of corporate talent. 

How does poor communication affect leadership? What does the data tell us? 

I've no idea what the data says, but I've sat through so many poorly written speeches and badly performed presentations to know that audiences want to be led, and it pisses them off when they’re not. 

Audiences don't want much: they want two questions answered - what's the point of this?, and what's in it for me? Everything the presenter does and says duration of their time on stage must answer those two questions. Answering those questions is leadership. If you can't answer them in your speech, presentation, townhall, pitch, or strategic kick-off, well, you've failed. You've failed your audience, and you've failed as a leader. I am the champion of the audience - I want to save them from dreadful presentations, and helping leaders fulfil their potential helps achieve that goal. 

It's not just (whatever we land on above) there's money to think of too. You've helped people win multi-million-dollar accounts, right? What's the secret there? 

Pitch production not only requires a razor-sharp focus on the what's the purpose? and what's in it for me? questions: you have to focus on the vision.

As a creative director, I would tell my teams to "sell them the vision of the thing" and not the thing. Get to the point as quickly as possible. Don’t try and prove how clever you are. Stop wasting time with credentials. Avoid unnecessary detail. Sell them the vision. Explain the purpose. Explain why they should care. Win the pitch. I still use this technique.

I regard pitching very much in the same way as creating a piece of theatre or an album. I'm the producer guiding, teasing, coaching, and directing a group a highly talented people. Rick Rubin helped Jay-Z, the Beastie Boys, System of a Down and Rage Against The Machine win Grammys, Plantimum Records and millions in sales. I help people win multi-million dollar funding, or advertising accounts and the possibility of winning a Lion at Cannes.

I was recently at Chatham House's Future of Work summit listening to the MD of World Economic Forum who said that technology and megatrends are colliding, which makes for greater uncertainty at work and a nervous workforce. How do leaders respond without freaking everyone out? What's the best way to start new norms in small and large businesses that don't make it feel like the world is ending if the boss calls and all hands? 

To be honest, I think it’s the current management class, particularly in small to medium-sized businesses, that should be freaking out about technology and trends colliding. Their workforce is levelling up. Gaining new skills in which presentation technique plays a major role. They have access to and are using new technology to improve their work, and I’m seeing a mindset developing that could potentially challenge the status quo of work. For many years managers and business owners had been asking for more entrepreneurial hunger from their staff. It’s coming, and it’s being driven by content, tools and the ability to communicate and present. I’m not sure the corporate ruling class are ready for the workforce that they’ve wished for. 

What's the biggest sin most senior execs commit when going on training courses like Speakery? 

Let’s flip this because it’s usually the corporate comms who write the presentations for the CEO or the leadership team. So in that sense, the biggest sin is not knowing the point of the presentation, why anybody should listen to them and what problem the presentation is trying to solve. The comms team need to make sure the exec understands why it’s all being done and why it’s important they deliver the content and not just get it over with, and the executive needs to spend time with the presentation. The other sin is that people play the role of keynote speaker instead of themselves. There's more, of course. This doesn't solely have anything to do with arrogance, per se, but comes about because of a lack of process, focus and methodology. 

What surprised you most about creating Speakery? 

That watching a Speakery customer get a standing ovation would fill me with more joy than getting a standing ovation myself. I didn’t expect that.

We are communicative beasts; we speak from the age of one, but when it comes to work, we aren't championed to speak up, and most are never given formal training. Why do you think this is when it's so important? 

Because most organisations don’t think that it's important. It’s a by-product of doing business, like meeting rooms, whiteboards, expenses and coffee machines. Senior executives assume that the workforce can do it - it’s just talking and clicking, right? Everybody thinks they’re great at presenting until you put a clicker in their hand and ask them to win 15 Million dollars in series A funding. Everybody thinks they’re a TED Global speaker until you put them on a TEDx stage.  Being a good speaker feels like an art form, and most universities, corporations and orga-structures regard creativity and art with suspicion. It’s not necessary. It’s not important. It’s not real work until, of course, it is. It’s treated like corporate standup. 

Like art, acting, music or sports, we think that talent is the key. Talent is the secret sauce of people like Meryl Streep, DaVinci or Serena Williams. People like them seem to have a god-sent genius gene. Was Steve Jobs a genius? Maybe. What all of these people have in common is the grind. They worked incredibly hard at what they did to become the best at what they did. They worked harder at it than They took the time to become the best. No world champion ever said that they never had time to practise, and yet, when you talk to senior executives, they'll point to a full calendar. So the success of a presentation becomes hit-or-miss. It becomes luck. People who are naturally good at it make it look like magic. You've either got it, or you haven't. 

But that’s not true. Anyone can learn to do it.  Anyone can get better at it you just have to put the work in. Presentation skills are deemed soft skills when in fact it's the hardest skill of them all. 

How should people sell you into their businesses or execs? How do people lead horses to water and make them drink? 

I'm introduced to potential customers or mentees at a specific moment of need: a product launch, an internal all-hands, a strategic kick-off or big presentation in front of the four-thousand people at a big conference, so there is normally a reason to drink. The very idea of standing in front of a couple of thousand people is making them thirsty. Panic, ego, and the pressure to win can make a CEOs throat go dry. Speakery is the well. I am the water. 

For more information and to engage Marcus, head over to Speakery.de.