Our first goal is simple: to find out what your talk is all about. We’ll focus on two questions: What’s the one big idea the audience should take away? And how will your main points support it? If you’d like, you can go ahead and start sketching these ideas ahead of our vision call!

After our vision work, your speech writer will assemble it all into the structure of a compelling talk. We’ll then send you a detailed outline to review, revise, and fill in as needed. This step is crucial: it’s our chance to ensure the talk has everything it should. We’ll be leaning on you to supply the necessary details and stories (since you’re the only one who’s got them!). You can provide those however you’d like: bullet points, stream-of-consciousness Word docs, haiku, audio notes, a phone call.. whatever is easiest and stress-free for you!

Remember, there’s no need for you to say anything well at this point. Eloquence is optional here (since that’s what you’re paying us for!)... our first aim is to make sure we’re saying everything that needs to be said.

And because we’ll use the outline to write the speech itself, now’s the time to get it right: we can always restructure the talk later, but once we’ve agreed on the outline and we’ve produced a couple of drafts, it gets expensive to overhaul the core of the talk. In sum, the outline is our moment to capture your vision. Everything afterward will be about capturing your voice.

Just like a painter makes sketches before the final work, our next step is to sketch out the speech, script, or story line-by-line.

Think of the first draft as halfway between the outline and the final script. It’s less “say these words here” and more “say something like this here.”

How much time copy editing will you spend on this draft? It’s up to you! Some clients like to work and rework the language back and forth; most are happy enough to run with just a few changes.

At last, the final speech: expertly formatted and ready for you to memorize or (if it’s absolutely necessary) read from the stage.

Now’s the time to celebrate how your time and attention have paid off. Congrats, you made your dreams come to life!