Presentation Training & Public Speaking Skills

The programme most clients start with, and the one we’ve run most often for twenty years – for graduate cohorts, sales teams, technical specialists and leadership teams alike. Your people learn to plan a presentation around what the audience needs to decide or know, build a message that holds up under questions, and deliver it as themselves rather than as someone reading a script. Everyone presents several times over the programme; one of those is captured on camera and analysed with them, so they see what the room sees.

What we work on:

• Get their ideas heard and acted on. Walk into a room knowing what they’re asking for, and leave with a decision instead of a discussion.

• Take complex, technical or data-heavy work and make it clear to people outside their own team.

• Use story to make an idea land emotionally as well as logically, without it feeling like a performance.

• Hold their own in front of senior people, and handle questions without coming apart when the slides stop.

• Present, rather than read a deck. Build slides that reinforce the message instead of repeating it.

• Speak with courage and conviction – because confidence is what the audience decides they have in you, and this is how you earn it.

• Use AI to sharpen their thinking, never to do it for them: for research, for distilling a mass of material down to what needs saying, for sharpening slides. Not the thinking, and not the deck from a blank page.

They take away: a copy of Step into the Spotlight and a workbook · their own video analysis, charted against the Archetypes · the preparation tools and structuring templates we use in the room · and a shared vocabulary for presenting that the whole team can use afterwards.

Participants have rated The Spotlight at a Net Promoter Score of +90 since 2021. For context, +50 is considered excellent in professional services.

For people who already present competently and now have to do it where it matters most: to a board, an executive team, a regulator, an investor. Same three practices as The Spotlight, harder scenarios – shorter time, tougher questions, more at stake. Participants work on their real papers and pitches.

What we work on:

• Deliver concise, decision-focused briefings that lead with the recommendation and layer the detail underneath.

• Turn operational, technical or strategic complexity into language a board or executive team can act on, without losing the meaning.

• Take dense strategy and turn it into a narrative that people understand, remember and care about – so it lives in the organisation rather than in the slide deck.

• Frame an argument so it survives scrutiny – and use AI to stress-test the paper before the board does.

• Handle challenge, interruption and difficult questions with composure, without becoming defensive or drowning in detail.

• Hold a senior room with presence: authority and authenticity as things you do, not things you have.

They take away: the book and workbook · video analysis of a real high-stakes piece · advanced audience-analysis and preparation tools · and a clear picture of their own presenting pattern and what to work on next.

For a leadership team that wants to change how it communicates, not just how it presents. Four half-day workshops build a shared method and vocabulary across the team, drawing on the most relevant parts of our presenting, storytelling and influence programmes; four one-to-one sessions with Russell work on each person’s own material and habits. Spread over six to eight weeks so the team can apply each stage to live work before the next one. This is the most thorough thing we do.

What we work on:

• Communicate recommendations, options, trade-offs and risks in ways that support executive and board decision-making.

• Distil complexity into a clear, compelling and memorable narrative – and use structure, story and the Story Map to build real buy-in.

• Influence outcomes through communication rather than authority.

• Navigate scrutiny and challenge with credibility.

• Raise the standard across the whole leadership group, because they now share a language for what good looks like.

They take away: everything in The Boardroom, plus a personal development plan built one-to-one with Russell, and four sessions of individual coaching on their own real presentations.

When there’s one presentation that matters – a funding pitch, a board recommendation, a conference keynote, a tender, an interview – and it has to go well. We begin with an analysis of where you are and where the audience is. Then we work through the three practices in order: Planning – the audience, the objective, the structure; Messaging – the argument, the story, the slides; and Delivery – where we rehearse the presentation itself, all of it, out loud and on camera, more than once, with the questions you’re dreading thrown in. We’ll use AI where it helps, for the research, for sharpening the slides and for testing the argument before the room does, and keep the thinking yours.

What we work on:

• Exactly what you’re asking the room for, until you can say it in three sentences. Or eight seconds.

• Content built for that audience, that holds together under pressure and sounds like you.

• The presentation itself, rehearsed until it’s yours, with the hard questions and interruptions along with it.

• A preparation method you can use on the next one without us.

You take away: the book, the Planning Canvas and tools · video of your rehearsals with analysis · and a clear read on your own presenting pattern.

Looking for the book of the same name? It’s here.

Presenting to a screen is its own skill: less feedback, shorter attention, and an audience you can’t read the way you’d read a room. A half-day for up to four people, with individual coaching on camera. Good as a standalone for a remote or hybrid team, or as a follow-up to The Spotlight.

What we work on:

• Hold attention online from the first thirty seconds, and keep it.

• Set up the camera, light, sound and their own presence so the medium works for them rather than against them.

• Build a deck for a shared screen that reinforces what they’re saying instead of reading it out for them.

• Use the platform’s tools – polls, breakouts, chat – to find out whether anything landed.

They take away: their own video analysis, and a checklist for setting up and rehearsing any virtual presentation.

For a conference, an offsite, a leadership forum or a whole-of-company day: Russell speaks and runs a working session – on the Archetypes, on the Three Practices, on business storytelling, or on presenting in the age of AI. Practical rather than motivational; people leave with a tool they can use the next morning. Often the first thing an organisation books before a programme.

Your people take away: a diagnosis of their own presenting pattern and one method they can start using immediately.