Podcast Transcript
Bart: (00:00)
Kenny, thanks for joining us today.
Kenny: (00:02)
Thanks man. Kenny: (00:03)I appreciate you inviting me Bart.
Bart: (00:05)
absolutely built this day is all about building businesses with longevity. You’re going on nine years since you started your own business, big fish presentations, and it’s now a service line within your agency. Three 68 so at three 68 you help team. Your team helps other brands build for longterm success as well. You’re, everything you’re doing is helping you know either your own company or others with longterm success. I’m wondering though, as a builder yourself, looking back, did you always think you would build your own businesses?
Kenny: (00:39)
You know, I always felt like I had something to do with business. My Dad’s an entrepreneur. He’s a real estate developer. Former FBI agent owned a nail salon that like did really well at times and I always thought to myself, he looks like he’s having a lot of fun, but he feels like he has a lot of purpose in life. And so it always like dawn on me that one day I’m going to create something or a bunch of fuel cap. A lot of fun while helping people along the way.
Bart: (01:06)
That’s awesome that he was having funny, he wasn’t like coming home and complaining about all the challenges and problems of running his own business.
Kenny: (01:14)
Maybe he was, we’d never came and took it home. You came home, was it dad? I hear a lot more of the complaints now being older business and just learning about it, but back then it really just sparked something in me was, you know, entrepreneurship. It’s always been something that intrigued me because it allows you to like live like others can, you know? It’s so interesting.
Bart: (01:38)
Yeah. Very cool. So take us back, you know you started big fish presentations about nine years ago. What was the start of that? Where were you coming from? How did it happen?
Kenny: (01:50)
So I just came back from a fresh trip to Vietnam where I wanted to go find myself. I made some really stupid decisions in high school and I realize in high school I really need the like at the end of high school I need to get my life together and so I thought to myself, I need to go to college. That’s how low the bar was. What’s it college and decide that if I’m going to get myself out of a Rut, I’m going to start joining student organizations and my first organization was the student Real Estate Association and while doing that I became the treasurer and while doing that I was somehow appointed to be the person responsible for making sure all the speakers that we invite into the organization, they do a great job. They go on stage and they kill it. Well, I did that for every speaker until there was one speaker I’d had no control over and this is a speaker from a fortune 500 company and the president at the time said, you don’t have to worry about anything. It’s a 400 fortune 500 guy. Just don’t worry about it. It’s going to be great. I guarantee it.
Kenny: (02:54)
What happened. Bart was the guy shows up and I’ll never forget. I was thinking to man, even if it goes bad, it’s still going to be my fault even though I had no control over it. It’s showing up. When the guy goes up on stage, he hands me his USB drive. I plug it in, I see 300 slides. Oh my goodness. Worst man. I looked at him, I said, do you know you have 15 minutes? Any responded back? I got this. Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. And I was like, okay, well I’m just going to go sit down and if you don’t got this, people are just going to blame me. Guy Goes up, takes two and a half hours. Super. Yeah. He starts asking some questions, telling you though, like at answering some questions, telling jokes, laughing his own jokes, reading off every single slide and I’m sitting here and I’m just thinking to myself, I feel everyone’s eyes at the back of my head.
Kenny: (03:59)
They get, how the hell can I let this happen? Now they can, no, it’s not my fault, but I can prevent this. In the future because if I can create a company that can help people become better presenters, this would never happen again. If these big ideas that we’re talking about, you know, these stories can be told. And that’s when I realized that we needed to do something because we don’t read the world of boring presentations. No one’s going to listen. And so that’s where the idea of big fish presentations came around. It’s important for the story is that during the Sidebuy form to cup or a student organization called IME, which is I am entrepreneur, we had no entrepreneurial organizations on campus and I realized how about we start one. And so I started getting more into public speaking and training my crap. And this is where I figured I can use where I learned speaking in my own ward to help people as well.
Kenny: (04:50)
I see in a final way I can make a meaningful difference out of it. And that’s when that opportunity popped up. So what year were you in school at this point? Know I think I was like a freshman math early in school. Did you write then say, I need to start a company like right now or were you like, Hey, I’m going to start this company in the future? I said right now man, because like, you know, why do it tomorrow? You know, to me it was like you can train anyone to be a better presenter. Like right now you can help people make better presentations right now. And this is during the time when Prezi started becoming really hot and people were like wondering what is Prezi? And so we started, uh, you know, showing people prescient, no clue what it was. And my first client was a raising canes, which is a huge like chicken, one of the fastest growing chicken finger franchises and in the country. And they believed in me and I realized if I can have a cane, I can probably go after some other clients that would believe in this. And then my second client was blue cross Blue Shield Louisiana, which the largest privately owned company in Louisiana. And that’s when I realize, did you probably create a business off of this bad presentations? That stuff don’t end right after school. The rest of our lives unless we do something about it. And so big fishes came from that need of, we would have read the road of boring presentations.
Bart: (06:16)
So for the sake of people who may not know Prezi, can you explain what that is and how you used it?
Kenny: (06:23)
Yeah, they give it as a presentation on a canvas where you can move from different sides but in a more interactive way. You see things that more of a high level and presently visually, uh, I recommended you want to use Prezi if you want to use it more for like a brainstorming session. Uh, it’s been one of those tools that really helped us differentiate in the beginning because in the beginning, you know, we could have been like every other like advertising agency and said, we can help you with your presentations. But we said, you know, we’re going to focus only on presentations and here’s this new tool that you can use.
Bart: (06:56)
Yeah. Did you just use Prezi or did you do PowerPoint as well?
Kenny: (07:00)
Uh, we started using only Prezi but then we realized that it’s really like you have to make sure the presentation medium works for the audience. And so we started using PowerPoint and keynote. Then we started doing films and incorporating film elements of the presentations doing film. So it kept growing in terms of like what we can offer and what this is one we realized like the ultimate thing is people will always remember the presenter more than the presentation. So our real work and our real difference maker isn’t just the sides, it’s who’s on stage. We want to make them influential.
Bart: (07:33)
How did you have the confidence to just go, you know like engage with some of these early customers like blue cross blue shield, these big companies?
Kenny: (07:45)
Dude, my first head and I even had oracle as a student to work.
Bart: (07:51)
You have blue cross blue shield, you had oracle, you had major customers.
Kenny: (07:55)
Yeah. You know [inaudible] like I feel like I was always that guy in our group trying to convince our friends what to do cause like presentations aren’t meant just to be slideshows. It’s good communications, good communication, good communication is making sure you’re clear, make sure you have accountability and making sure that people know what to do next. And so like presentations can be like in many different formats. So I figured in my mind, and I was pretty naive, is that I can just help people that are just too much in the weeds of focus on their soft skills. Like I, I can help these guys out. And I was pretty young and naive, but fortunately it worked out.
Bart: (08:34)
And w w you, uh, you started this with a cofounder, so you had Gus with you. Did you guys provide each other that confidence where you like supporting each other or were you kind of dividing and conquering or how, how did, how was that, uh, working over those dynamics?
Kenny: (08:52)
So Gus has been one of my childhood best friends. Uh, we always do, we were going to do something together. We were the type of two that always like loved kind of breaking rules and doing something fun. And he was actually at that presentation with me and we were talking going like, man, what was that like? I had one little idea and then it started evolving and so like once we launched the idea of dusk came a little bit later it he actually start, he’s our COO now and he’s really good on projects and like making sure we say clear and like things are moving or like what happened was Gus was first as a designer and that being customer doing it together and I realized, hey man, maybe we should play to our strong suits where I can focus on the sales and then you could focus on the management of these projects. We should probably go get a designer. That’s what like we started focusing more on her zone of genius.
Kenny: (09:49)
Yeah. At that time we realized that ego set aside, I’m a really crappy designer. We need to do something different if this company’s going to grow. So this is, remember this is all in college, like we were sophomores. We’re not in this company or Gus was a freshman. I was a sophomore and this is all while we’re in college. Did people question your age at that point and experience? Yeah, I mean I kind of told a joke where it’s like I’m Asian, I look young. It was funny at first I realized maybe I should just own it is that we’re young, we have low attention spans so we’d know what gets our attention. I can spit. Oh that’s pretty good. Yeah.
Kenny: (10:34)
So what were some of the challenges this first couple of years as you were trying to like build this as a legit business? I mean dude, just going from like that startup mentality of like never owning a company before. Um, not staying focused, trying to do too many things. Only like getting a reference check for one thing. Such as like someone recommended me get this Internet. I didn’t ask around. I just assumed they knew and I was like the worst like financial decision cause you have to buy out that contract at a young age and the company, a lot of the problems came down to not having prior experience before and not asking but also not really prioritizing like openly like this is what we need to accomplish next. So it was very much like whatever it takes, sacred sweat squirrel kind of like, you know, like you just like don’t know where you’re going next. But now like we have a clear milestone pet path where we need to go, where’s our big goal? So like we had to grow a lot like over over the years in the tipping point of that was when we had full time employees that were like buying houses, having kids that did we really need to take this seriously? Like
Bart: (11:55)
before you had full time employees, were you doing, like you were named one of the top 50 student led startups by ink magazine and Kairos Society. Like were you presenting on this as a, um, student startup idea at startup competitions or what did that look like in those first years?
Kenny: (12:15)
I mean, in the beginning, man, we got involved in entrepreneurs organization, EO. I mean he was a great networking and like peer-to-peer sharing about the entrepreneur’s life very deep. There was this competition I helped host called the global student entrepreneur awards. Uh, Kevin lately was the chairman of EO, which is a global organization. We live in our little town of Baton Rouge and he told me about it and I got into a, the GCA made it to the semifinals of as well as a top suit or a startups with the country. And I just had that niche of more like the itch of, let me go see how far I can take this because at every presentation competition I was doing a presentation. Yeah, sounds better. But I was like understanding like how to like deal with that pressure. And so eventually I started signing up for in coolest college startups. Then I signed up for a Caio society. If people just love the angle of, you know, you’re just gonna make the world a lot less boring.
Bart: (13:18)
That’s good. Yeah. I like that too. That’s a good value you’re bringing to the world.
Kenny: (13:23)
[inaudible]
Bart: (13:24)
tell us about the evolution from big fish itself to what you currently do with three 68.
Kenny: (13:31)
Dude, I am having so much fun with what I do now. Three 68 is the parent company, um, big fishes a service line. This happened in 2015 around 2013 and 2014 we ran into two guys, Jeremy Baten and nick, definitely we needed a new website and we hired this group called Yolo design. Dude, don’t judge me. They probably will hate when they hear this, but you’ll design. They eventually chases the hatchet. Um, which is a way better idea. Uh, and so what happened was we just kept like bringing each other in on projects. We were referring work to each other. And then one day we just said, this would be so much fun and we’d be better together. And we started talking about it. Seriously. This is where we realized big fish helped individuals within brands become more influential because when you take the stage that you present, you want to build influence because the best KPI in any presentation is momentum.
Kenny: (14:30)
You want people to take action. At the time though focused on making sure that brands became more influential and we realized that we can merge with these philosophies of how about we make the people in the brand themselves more influential. We can raise the world’s creative confidence with some of the cool of the coolest and most brands in the world. And so we merged together in 2015 to create an integrated marketing agency whose mission is to challenge our clients to embrace their creative confidence. And if you embrace your creative competence, you become more influential. And we’d be more influenced in this world positively. And we know it comes from not only the brands but the people within the brands themselves.
Bart: (15:11)
So embracing your creative confidence as sounds interesting, like a lot of creative agencies. I mean they’re, they’re around because they say we have the creativity and we’ll bring that to you and help your business. But are you saying that you actually empower these brands to embrace their own creativity?
Kenny: (15:29)
Yeah. Think about it man. Like I hate when agencies say to themselves like we have all the creativity. I think that’s bs me because do anyone can be creative and the thing is we all go to the same thing when we were kids where our parents and like just our lives like we start being molded into you can’t do this, you can’t do that. I mean just looking at it from an outside perspective runc we’re just going to awaken the creativity that you’ve always had. We’re going to help you like with your gut feelings and like your big ideas and we can present some amazing ideas to you as well. But really what it is here is that everyone is creative. That’s why you look at our first org structure. There is no one with the term creative in it because everyone is creative. It’s understood and with our clients we want to make sure that they understand that as well as like you guys are creative as well. There’s like, I hate when like people in finance banking like healthcare that you know, we don’t have any creativity in us. It’s like, that’s not true then you wouldn’t be this successful. Our job is to help you reach over that plateau or that challenge rate and see the really build you over and we’re just going to wake up the creativity that you always knew you had. Let’s bring back that child like ambition that you had.
Bart: (16:40)
Yeah, I love that. In one of our previous episodes we were talking about design and I mentioned that I had spoken to someone about how a designer, how I felt like I had an eye for design and she was like, yeah, everyone thinks that. And I think she was kind of like, yeah, I don’t know if everyone has it, but uh, you know, Christian from a, a design agency that I was speaking to, I think this is episode seven. He said, I think everyone should and does have a certain, uh, you know, eye for design and you know, we all do to some extent. The question is, can you actually create the design? That’s, that’s a different question. But I love this idea that we’re all creative to some extent and, and it’s really about tapping into that and, and, and building confidence in that and, and also having a team that can, you know, do it together well. So is that part of what three 68 brings is you kind of assemble the right team and to work with your clients and together you kind of come up with some pretty cool creative stuff?
Kenny: (17:41)
Yeah, we run off of studio agency model, which is we have core people here who are incredible and I love working with them every day. Uh, we’re very blessed to be together. We’re better together. Uh, but the thing is, as studio agency model, we know that with some clients we bring in outside perspectives quite frequently. Uh, people that are like usually freelancer, I’ve done it before or have like really unique perspectives. Uh, we value a lot on differentiating perspectives because when you have multiple perspectives, you tend to reframe problems really well. Uh, we, we very much value having like a really fast agile company that can rope in a really interesting people to solve really interesting problems.
Bart: (18:23)
Yeah. I mean everyone wants that. Right? Um, so yeah. That’s awesome. So when it comes to that, let’s kind of move to like application, like we’ve talked about presentations and we’ve talked about creativity. Um, help us as, as we all think about our builders, you know, everyone who’s listening to this, whether they’re starting a new business or they’re, they, they’re already in flight, how do they, how should they think about presentations and is it just when you’re, you know, you have a slide deck and you’re presenting officially, or can you think about presenting, you know, in a broader scope than that?
Kenny: (19:06)
I made presentations that given every day because presentations, presentations are essentially arguments. And if you think about an argument as something that you’re passionate and you’re pitching for, you’re not a negative necessarily, like necessarily like negatively arguing. You’re just presenting a point. And with presentations you can do this at home, such as where do you need for dinner? Or like, what are you going to do for, you know, replacing your door, you know, what these different options and you’re pitching it to your spouse. You know, presentations can be anything. But what I find that all presentations are, are not only are they great arguments or the almost enacts some kind of action. So like in any part of your life when you communicate with someone and you’re trying to get them to take action, that itself right there as a presentation, it’s a presentation of an idea of a theory of an argument, something that you want to get across to someone.
Kenny: (19:56)
And so there are things that you can do to become a better presenter. Like one of my favorite ones is that I tell people, I learned this from a mentor named Eric Eisner. He used to be the speech writer for Al Gore and Jeff L, uh, from GE. I asked them, what’s like the one takeaway you can help all presenters with? And he said, you need to start thinking of presentations, uh, in a sense of like, there’s no takeaways but only two dues. And I was like, what does that mean? He goes, think about this. There’s about 30,000 decisions humans have to make each day. If you go and teach someone like take action on this and you walk it through with them, they’re going to think of yourself as much more influential on people want to be around influential people. And like when he told me this, I was like word that was good and I started like focusing this more with my clients and I found that you don’t really have any kind of like conversation today.
Kenny: (20:52)
You know, it needs to have some kind of momentum. It’s going to be an engaging and thought provoking conversation. You know, you have those conversations such as like how are you, which is, you know, Eh, if you want to get into a really deep presentation conversation while you’re presenting ideas like lead, think about the kind of questions that you’re asking. I find the why, what if and how questions can provoke great thought provoking presentation of ideas. Like, you know, why are you doing this? What if there was no budget or whatever. We won’t get in trouble with the solution. What would you propose? And then finally, how are you going to do this? But I’m asking people like whenever they do present ideas in whatever fashion, if you could break down the idea that you ask them to do and say like tell you what, if you can do this and the next 72 hours you’re make, you’re taking action and that’s when you put it in a bite sized chunk and make it easy for them to think, okay cool. That’s one decision out 30,000 I don’t have to make now and I can take action and when I do it on whatever you,
Bart: (21:48)
I love that because it’s, you know, it’s moving beyond the inspiration and moving to like, like change agent, you’re helping people actually make changes. Do things move beyond where they are currently? Um, yeah. So what are, what are some of the most common like mistakes that people make when presenting, whether it’s a formal, you know, slide based presentation or just like, you know, meeting with a customer or a partner or someone else. Do you have in mind, you know, top three mistakes that people make?
Kenny: (22:22)
Yeah. One is making sure they don’t know their audience and want to say like, you don’t know your audience. You need to walk. Make sure you walk in the room with a couple of things in mind, such as who’s your audience, when and where are you presenting. Um, when it comes to when and where you’re presenting, it’s really important to know if you’re in a board room, chances are you’re going to be at one end of the board room. Make sure you walk around to engage people. Just knowing where you are will bring that self awareness. Uh, what are the, the audience wants to hear the most? What biases does the audience have against you? I’m going to put a major fat star next to that because if you go on a presentation room and people don’t know you well, they already have an opinion.
Kenny: (23:03)
If you go in a room and say, Hey, I know you’re probably thinking this, this and this, and it’s empathetic enough. And they realize like, oh, he does get our point of view. They’re going to open their hearts and listen. And that’s why it’s really important to walk into a room and know the biases. And then next it’s asking like what’s at stake here? And there’s nothing at stake here. What are we doing here? Right? Like [inaudible] you know what’s at stake, you know, we’re just talking to them. They get talking, you know, Time’s not a renewable resource. I would they do that. So like you have to know who your audience is and that’s number one and those questions can help guide you there. Number two is what we mentioned earlier is like no takeaways only to dues. If you put takeaways as the final side of your presentation that doesn’t enact action, it might just be a update.
Kenny: (23:46)
Well you have to do such as and so two hours review this what I just presented to you all over again and then give me feedback on this. You become more of a change agent and you can move things along with, like you said earlier bar. But the third is really important is that you have to have your own big idea when you present. And so this is like when it comes to like really big presentations, if you don’t have a big idea, which is essentially a central argument around your presentation, the whole purpose of why you’re there. If you don’t work on this first, you’re wasting your time with designing and writing content. You have to know where you’re going before you start and presentations. So it’s very important to lock down ahead of time on what does winning look like to me and what happens if we don’t win. That’s essentially what the big idea is.
Bart: (24:33)
So is that connected to what’s at stake here?
Speaker 3: (24:36)
Yeah,
Kenny: (24:37)
exactly. Yes. Once you figure out who, once you go through your audience, it’s real easy to pull out the whole entire big idea. So what does your audience want to hear the most? You know, what would you like them to do? Like those kinds of things can you tie to what’s at stake? That’s your big idea right there. So I gave a keynote or presentations all the time and my big idea, I know my audience is always people that want to hear great presentations and like want to learn on how to deliver great presentations. What’s at stake here is that they don’t listen to me. Their presentations will be consistent and will be great. However though if they do listen to me, you can make great presentations consistently. So the big idea is very clear. If you listen to my theories about presentation process, you make a great consistent presentation experience.
Bart: (25:23)
Hmm. I love that. Let’s move onto the creativity piece as well. Like you talked about assembling the right team to, you know, solve problems and be creative about it. Like what are some of the things that makes that possible? If people have big problems, they, they need creative solutions, what should they think about our builders who are listening when they come together, you know, one, two, three, four or five people together in a room. What are some of the things that they can do to, to be successful?
Speaker 3: (25:54)
[inaudible].
Kenny: (25:54)
Yeah, I mean when it comes to this, it’s kind of like some design thinking principles. It’s like making sure that the people in the room or obviously like people in the room with like numerous perspectives on things obviously have a good facilitator. But if everyone sees like the same column, say we’re all looking at this gray and then I say like this is Earl gray or pearl gray or something like that. Like you’re probably gonna listen to me cause I was way more specific. Right? Yeah. And you’re giving, this guy obviously knows what he’s talking about, but making sure just having like a diverse, a mindset actually is really valuable. But also making sure that there’s not too many people in the room just basis says, you know, two pizza rule. You know, having too many people in the room, it becomes more of a, you know, a facilitated like more of just like a talk rather than an actual like let’s get to the like root of the problem.
Kenny: (26:44)
I find that like good teams are diverse. They’re not large. They all say they’re agile, but also like when they do meet, there’s certain verbs that are used around a lot of, one of them that’s really common is aligned in the side. I find that if you have a meeting where it’s just a disgust, there’s no action and most likely you probably didn’t do anything beforehand. But if you say ahead of time, like in the meeting in general, we’re going to discuss, we’re gonna or we’re going to align and we’re going to make sure we decide on something. That means people have to do their homework prior and like great teams that align in the side B that they’re like making sure like in between the cracks, they’re looking at everything. But what I really value the most on all this man is that what I go work with teams.
Kenny: (27:29)
Uh, I don’t like teams that tend to jump to solutions. By the way, I like teams that ask really good questions. We call it question stormy. There’s a book even on it. Uh, we find that like teams that ask like really good questions, they figure out like, you know what a problem is. They ask really good questions. I find a why, what if and how questions really work. And then from those answers that we find we have a hypothesis and we test the hypothesis against the problem and then we continuously reiterate and we move as a team to like really find out like what the issue is so that it only comes from asking really great questions or at the end the hypothesis. Maybe we should reframe the problem itself. I read an example the other day where someone was doing a survey about elevators and in this condo and something in the Condo, they said, I want faster elevators.
Kenny: (28:23)
But when you reframe the problem, people realize like people just hated waiting. Are you going to replace a really expensive elevator with a new motor? No, I think the easier answer is, you know, if you put mirrors in front of an elevator, people tend to look at themselves a lot to make them realize the waiting times, not that long because they’re looking at themselves. But then when you get in the initial elevator, this is actually appeal while we have elevator music. It decreases the weight. It makes people feel like, Huh, it’s not that bad. And so it was like, what’s your reframer problem? Imagine what you can do, right? Like you can look at it like completely in a different light and that’s why like, you know, questioning is so important for good teams, but making sure the right teams are in their desks,
Bart: (29:07)
ask the right questions to get down to the real problems rather than just jumping to conclusions.
Kenny: (29:14)
Correct. I mean, is your problem a symptom of a bigger problem? Because let’s go to the bigger problem. I love that. Cool. Kenny,
Bart: (29:23)
so much appreciate you taking the time today. I have one last question for you. What is next for you? What’s next for you? Three 68 like what’s the future look like?
Speaker 4: (29:32)
Yeah.
Kenny: (29:34)
Out three 68 is having a blast. We’re really focused on the helping people actually improve their physical and digital customer experiences. We’re doing a lot of experiential work right now and we’re, we’re just finding new ways for people to reach their customers. I think we live in an economy where attention, uh, is a luxury is like if you could have someone’s attention for quite awhile, like you’re doing it really well and with presentations and learning how to get people’s attention, we can take these principles of human connection and apply on a much bigger scale. So for us, you’re going to see us a lot more consulting companies on the customer experiences that they deliver. Yeah, absolutely. Very cool. I think the best advice I can give for anyone that thinks they’re a really good public speaker is to shove the ego at the door and go try standup comedy.
Kenny: (30:23)
I’ll tell you this. Um, I did inbound last year, inbound hubspot’s conference and I gave a talk on uh, event marketing and when I went on stage I thought it was okay, but then everyone said that was the best presentation at least in my face. And they see us on inbound, they loved it. This is your, one of the best presenters I’ve ever seen. And I realized, you know, as a presenter, if you keep phoning in, in what’s gonna happen is you’re going to stop caring and presenters that stop caring or people that are not influential. And I realized that if I felt like I’ve mastered this, I need to get out of my comfort zone again. And so what I did was I had started doing stand up comedy and that’s where we learn everything. Like the old rule presentation says you have 40 minutes present, present 30 minutes of material and because it game day you’re going to go over well on stand up.
Kenny: (31:12)
You don’t do that. You know you, if you have 10 minutes you present like 20 you like rehearse 20 minutes material because you to adjust to the crowd. So for me, whenever I go to present information now I know that like in the crowd wants to hear something else, I’ll have something up my sleeve right away and stand up taught me that is that I need to like, it’s like mastery mastery is learning the basics then relearning it in a completely different perspective. That’s what Sam’s doing for me. I just with Crowdwork is like helping me get me out a lot. Whenever I go on stage now and actually interact with people, have like fun conversations with them, I’m able to be a better host even in a room of like a hundred couple hundred people now. Like that’s, that’s why I tell anyone that wants to be a better presenter is that you think you’re really good. Go off, try stand up, you’ll relearn it. What does that require? A lot of preparation.
Kenny: (32:08)
It does, but like you have to just go on stage and work it out. Like, you can’t get great at stand up if you don’t just go and work out like open mics, like great places to work out. Um, and it’s gotten me better. And like people love people that are funny and humorous, especially if you’re funny humorous. And then you can educate them as well because you’re gonna remember a theory when like you laugh at it and it’s easy to tell that to someone else if that’s what great comedians do is they’re able to take like really complex, complex things that make it funny and make it simple for you to understand. So everyone, the room’s on the same page, are you usually pay like really expensive, like consultants that do that. It’s like go talk about this to the state of comedian. No, probably be able to tell it to you in a much more memorable way.
Bart: (32:53)
So instead of takeaways, what are the two to do’s that we have from this episode?
Kenny: (33:00)
Yeah, I liked it. I liked it man. Um, so this is all I can do for people. If they want to email me, anyone that listens to this, I’m happy to send them our mind map on how to write in like formulate a great presentation. Uh, we, we actually wrote this out, uh, because people kept asking us like, how do you orchestrate a great presentation? How do you outline it? How do you figure out who your audience is? Just email [email protected] and I’ll send it to you. And the other thing is like if you reduced the next 72 hours, it’s actually sign up for a standup comedy class. If you think you have really encountered the top line of your presentation ability.
Bart: (33:41)
I love that. I kind of want to go do that even though I’m actually kind of scared of it. So thanks for taking the time. This is awesome information, Kenny. Um, builders, if you want to learn even more about how you can present your ideas better, read the big fish experience. That’s a, the book that Kenny came out with, uh, several years ago has some of his, his key, um, ideas for that. And next time your in baton rouge also check out, is it Soji? Is that your favorite restaurant?
Kenny: (34:12)
Oh yeah. Yeah. A restaurant. They’re delicious. Uh, it’s called Soji. It’s a modern Asian restaurant. The team over there is killing it. I’m lucky just to be able to break people over there and tell the story.
Bart: (34:26)
Yeah. So check out Soji restaurant, that’s one of Kenny’s side hustles and links to all of these as well as our show notes. We’ll be on built to stay.com.
