28 BILL HOOGTERP SPRING 2018
FOR SCALEUP Summit speaker Bill Hoogterp, author of Your Perfect Presentation, the path to a great public speaking career came about when he was just in his twenties. He was working with several nonprofit groups, presenting repeatedly to college groups on the topics of community service, hunger, and homelessness. When he began to reflect on his abilities as a speaker, he tried to evaluate his presentation ability objectively, rating his skill at about a four out of 10. To his chagrin, with no source of feedback or coaching, he was only getting more comfortable in delivering his content— not necessarily getting better in any way.
Hoogterp looked deep within himself and made the emotional decision to train himself to be a better speaker. By focusing on the emotional aspect of his desire— and not just the intellectual— he was able to muster the patience and discipline he would need to analyze his weaknesses and do the work required to truly become better. While he never took a training class or read a manual in his effort to improve, he set out to“ invent, try and tweak new techniques” each time he set foot on a college campus to deliver a talk. A couple of hundred colleges later, he began to improve.
“ I don’ t think I have a great voice or even that much aptitude or charisma, but I made up for it in persistence,” he says. When Hoogterp earned his first speaking fee—$ 100— he was elated. The fees started climbing and he continued to improve, delivering his first commencement speech at Foothill College in California at the tender age of 23. He ultimately became hooked on teaching others after being asked to help present an intensive training session to a client of the well-known executive trainer, Jim Mustacchia.
In 1999, Hoogterp, the actor Andrew Shue and his childhood friend Michael
" HOOGTERP BELIEVES THAT EVERYONE HAS AN ABILITY TO CONNECT WITH HIS OR HER AUDIENCE,
LEADING TO A FLOW OF ENERGY OTHERWISE KNOWN AS ' CHARISMA.'"
Sanchez launched CMI Marketing, the parent company of the wildly popular website, CafeMom. Based on a blend of humor, advice, storytelling and news contributed by moms everywhere, the site became part of CafeMedia, launching a variety of niche community sites and amassing a whopping one hundred million page views per month. After exiting the company in 2006, Hoogterp turned his energy toward building his public speaking firm, Own the Room, together with his wife, Maria.
These days, Hoogterp is considered one of the best public speaking coaches in the industry—“ the best on the planet,” according to past student Matteo Scaravelli, a vice president at Siemens. Through his business Own The Room, Hoogterp and his team of more than 50 coaches connect with thousands of executives each year, training them to lose their butterflies— which he refers to as“ trapped energy”— and find a way to better connect with their audience. His clients have included representatives from technology superstars— such as Amazon, Facebook and Google— as well as companies in the financial services, healthcare, consumer products and media industries. While Hoogterp certainly does not claim that everyone he coaches will become the next Winston Churchill, he says he can help clients move from mediocre to good or from good to great.
Hoogterp and his team approach their public speaking training as a participative exercise, with what they consider their best coaches— video cameras, tablets and other technology— always in tow. They teach that one of the secrets to greatness is to“ get over yourself.” While this may sound blunt— as is Hoogterp’ s style— it gets at the essence of realizing that the audience doesn’ t care who the speaker is, and they certainly don’ t care about you, per se. You are merely the vehicle through which a message they want to hear is being delivered. Once speakers can succeed in not caring about their audience’ s perception of themselves, they can begin to lift the filter that exists between them and their audience and connect with them more authentically.
This is what he tells his participants:“ Do you know what happens when we put up our filters? Those in the audience mirror us and put up their filters too. Now we have doubleblocked ourselves from the audience. Not to be too Zen about it, but when we try to send our energy out toward the audience, it instead bounces back off our own filter, creating that paralyzing feeling [ of stage fright ].”
It takes work to remove those barriers to effective communication, and Hoogterp will be the first to tell you that, although there are many shortcuts to improvement, you still have to put the work in. However, the presence of strong emotions behind your words, whether it is anger, passion, sympathy or any other feeling, can block out nervousness and surprise you with its sheer ability to empower you. Some of the techniques he teaches participants include voice modulation, using strong versus weak