How to Introduce Yourself — Like a CEO.

Introducing yourself. The one question everyone hates getting asked is what? What's the question? What do you do? Are you gonna get asked it yes or no? Almost every single time. So let me give you a painful example. I was once going to a speaking engagement. I was in my Uber and I was sitting right next to the driver there. As I'm going there, we're stuck in traffic. So the driver just looks over at me and he wants to make conversation. So he says, so what do you do? And I look over at him and I said, oh, I'm a speaker. And immediately his face lights up. What, speaker? You mean like a motivational speaker? I said, no, not a, I guess you could say that. He says, wow. Motivate me. No, no, no. I speak about speaking and communication. And then he looks at me. You speak about speaking? I said, yeah, I teach people on presentations and boardroom conversations. And people give you money for this? Yeah, it's what I do for a living. If you were in the backseat, you would have seen him place both hands on the steering wheel, look up ahead and I'm sitting right next to him. He's like, wow, Canada, where they'll pay for just about anything. You're driving me to my speaking engagement. I need some confidence. If he stops driving Uber, I'm sure he can be a great demotivational speaker one day. But it was my fault. I told him I'm a speaker and he made all types of conclusions from that. I didn't do a good job of introducing myself. So maybe you go to a networking event and you make the mistake of asking someone what they do for a living. And they say, oh, I'm a cloud infrastructure engineer. What do I do with that? What does that even mean? So sometimes we introduce ourselves with titles that don't really mean anything. So I'm gonna show you a typical introduction that I have put together using AI. But tell me if you have heard an introduction like that, or if you're like me and you have given an introduction like this. Yeah, so I'm a tax consultant at XYZ Firm and we do a mix of things, honestly. We work with a range of clients, mostly successful businesses. And we help them with, you know, staying on top of their tax requirements and making sure things are accurate and submitted properly and all that. There's also some advisory elements, you know, depending on the engagement, like if they need planning support or they want to structure things in a more, let's say, efficient way. But yeah, we help with filings, compliance, and kind of being a point of contact for anything tax related and such. But, you know, every client's a bit different. So it really depends what they need. Yeah, that's kind of a little bit about us. How close did I hit it? Nailed it. This is what most of us sound like, hearing a lot of guilty laughs here because all of us do it. What did you make of the introduction? What was right about it? What was wrong about it? Okay, a great word to use. Why was it uncomfortable? Yeah. Yeah, just talking for the sake of talking. Go ahead. Yeah, you know, we do a little bit of this and we also do that. Yeah, very good word to use, generic. Okay, challenge. Who can repeat the introduction just now? You're facing it all. So typically, if you are meeting a client and this is their first interaction with you, they are not going to tell you they have no idea what you do because they nod their head. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You do the thing, the clients, whatever. They'll forget like that. And this is our first impression with every client. So if you just take the next few minutes to write out an introduction, this might help you for the rest of your career. One time structure. So here's a better way to do it, okay? First thing you do, and write this down. This will be really important because you'll use it in an exercise later. The first sentence was correct. That is just simply what you do. What is your job title? Most people say that and then they end there. I'm a tax consultant and that's it. What do you do? The second one is who do you help? So depending on who you're speaking to, you want to make sure you talk about them. The third one is how you help. I'll give you examples of all these, by the way. How you help, what is a process that you go through? And then lastly, why you or your company is different. Write this down real quick and then we'll expand on it. So what do you do, who you help, how you help, why it's different. That last part is extremely important when it comes to differentiation because you will have other firms that can do something similar. So we want to end with that. So here's an example. The first line, what do you do? I'm a tax consultant at XYZ Firm. So this could be your first line. The second, by the way, this is my rendition of what I would say. I want you to use this as an inspiration but come up with your own version of it, okay? So here it is. What do you do? Your job title, then who you help. We work with business owners and high net worth families like yours and we help you take more control over finances. Both your business and personal finances. That's who you help. Then you get into how you help. For example, if you're running multiple companies, managing real estate and thinking about succession, we work with you to review your entire structure, business, personal and estate. We then help you reduce your tax exposure, simplify ownership and build you a plan that supports your long-term goals both professionally and personally. By the way, I purposely made this long just so you have more ideas, all right? Why it's different. What makes XYZ Firm different is that we're the only firm that helps you with the intersection of business and family. We don't look at your company in isolation. We make sure every financial decision you make supports the bigger picture including the legacy you want to build. That's what high net worth individuals like you appreciate about partnering with us. Do we notice a structure there? Now the introduction, typically who is it supposed to be about? How many times did you read the word you in that introduction? 14 times. Now I'm not saying keep saying you in every single sentence, but even your introduction should be about how does this relate to me? What you do, how can you help me? If you tell me about your grandkids and my dad immigrated to this country 40, I don't care about any of that. How does this information have anything to do with me? If you're in a leadership role and you struggle to speak up in meetings and presentations and be perceived as a leader, this is for you. Now there's only so much you can learn watching a video, but if you are serious about transforming the way you speak, you should consider my online speaking classes. My team and I have coached more than 30,000 people at companies like JP Morgan, NASA, Google, Apple, you name it, and we help them speak with the confidence, clarity and credibility of a CEO. Now whether you struggle with rambling when you're speaking on the spot or you freeze in front of a room or you feel like you sound boring and people stop listening to you, these classes can transform the way you speak because knowing is not the same as doing. So if you are at all interested in changing the way you speak in a matter of days, click the link down below and check out my online classes.