By Marc Fest

First thing every morning, I take my Belgian Shepherd dog Zeus out for a bike ride on the deserted dirt road that leads to our remote property here on the edge of the South Florida Everglades. The ride and the solitude of the place put me in the right frame of mind for meeting with my usually three or four clients per day. They come from all around the world and join me for 60-minute, one-on-one video calls in which I help them compress the stories behind their mission into a short speech that they can use in a variety of situations to get more support and attention for their work.

I have a formula for helping you get more attention and support for whatever you do. I call it the Elevator Speech Framework. It works for anybody in any situation. My clients use it to succeed on the frontlines of some of the biggest challenges of our time. Because of the step-by-step approach of the framework it is possible to achieve amazing improvements in just a single one-hour coaching session.

They are former National Security Council officials now working at D.C. think tanks, worrying about things like the impact of artificial intelligence on the command and control systems of nuclear weapons. They are CEOs of billion-dollar affordable housing investment funds, concerned about COVID-19 causing a “pandemic of evictions.” They are transgender migrants from Guatemala who now work as community organizers to help prepare undocumented immigrants for the terrifying moment when an ICE officer will knock at their door to arrest them. 75 CEOs and Executive Directors recently endorsed Elevator Speech Training.

The training sessions are paid for by some of the country’s best-known philanthropies: Knight Foundation, Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, JPB Foundation, The Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, and others. Other Elevator Speech Training clients include for-profit corporations like Axel Springer, an international media company headquartered in Berlin.

Different clients have different needs. Communications success for nonprofits usually means raising money from potential funders. For an analyst at a think tank, it can mean briefing members of Congress on the dangers of not renewing an arms control treaty with Russia. For a community organizer, it can mean enrolling undocumented immigrants as grassroots members in an organization that fights for immigration reform.

There is a lot of laughter during the sessions. My clients have called the experience “a breath of fresh air,” “really energizing,” and filled with “generosity and warm humor.”

Sometimes, Step Seven in the Elevator Speech Framework (“personalization”) will make a client cry. It’s where I encourage them to talk about why they care about their work and express an emotion. Their natural tendency is to talk about how accomplished or experienced they are, but I want them to reveal a vulnerability or a pain point that relates to their work. That makes their pitch stronger, but for some clients it is hard. But this step can be really powerful, especially right before your call to action. If you can lower your guard and share something vulnerable, then your audience will lower its guard and become much more responsive.

The strange juxtaposition of my interactions via Zoom with my reclusive Everglades existence is not lost on me. Sometimes I worry a little that it makes me a bit peculiar. For example, there’s this one yellow butterfly. She’s been coming by for months, making the same rounds every single day. Did you know that butterflies can live for up to a year? I call her Yellow. When I see her, I say ‘Hey, Yellow, how are you?’ I tried taking a photo of Yellow with my Canon. But it came out blurry (see below). I like it anyway. Sometimes I’m asking myself: What’s happened to you that you have a relationship with a butterfly?

German