Please note : This transcript is automatically generated and provided for your convenience.

[00:00:00]

Boris Hristov: You work one year for one day.

I was like, what? Sure. But let's imagine that it is possible. Well, what are you going to do? Because this is out is outside of my control.

Rob D. Willis: to Superpowered, the unique stories of modern leaders. Each week, I talk to people who've mastered their skills in the most demanding situations. They share what's worked for them, so you don't have to learn everything the hard way. My name is Rob D. Willis, and this week I'm talking to Boris Hristov about how to run events.

Boris is the creator of Present2Succeed, the world's largest conference on presentation skills. Boris has some amazing stories about the kinds of things that can happen when you're putting all those pieces together to make sure that everything is all right.

You don't have to be running events, though, to benefit from what Boris is talking about. Even if you're just running a weekly meeting, you are an event [00:01:00] organiser. And following the principles and methods that Boris talks about is going to help you get better results from your interactions.

If you haven't done so already, please make sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and get ready for this interview with Boris Hristov.

Hi, Boris, welcome to the show.

Boris Hristov: Hey, thanks for having me.

Rob D. Willis: I've known you a while

through your work with 3 5 6 Labs, and also you are the creator of Present to Succeed, which is the world's largest presentation skills conference. But for listeners who don't know you, could you just tell us a little bit about yourself

and what you do?

Boris Hristov: Sure. Absolutely. I started my career as an IT guy. Which is very different than presentations, as you can imagine. However, during my years in the IT, I loved presenting. I just loved it. And because I found it very, very cool and very interesting in a way, I started presenting all over the place, meaning all over Europe, including in the U S.

And every single time when I was [00:02:00] presenting, I was searching for. Ways, how can I make it better? How can I improve every single aspect from the storytelling aspect to the design, to the delivery? Have in mind, have in mind, I'm not a designer, right? That's also very important. That's as we nowadays call passion brought me to the idea that, wait a minute.

I care about presentation so much. Why don't I try and start a business? That's, you know, that involves presentations and focuses on presentations. And that's how three, five, six laps was born nine years later, after we have been working for many of the top brands out there, building presentations for them, training many of their teams.

We now also have this thing that you called present to succeed conference, which is the largest presentation, ask us event out there. And I'm not going to announce anything in this podcast, unfortunately, but Currently, the event is located [00:03:00] and is hosted in Sofia, Bulgaria, where we are based, but I think that you have to, I promise that we, there will be some surprises for 2026.

Rob D. Willis: Oh, exciting stuff. Exciting. Now I, you've run a few of these events present to succeed, and they're big. We're talking like 900 people. And that's far larger than many people will ever have to organise anything. But I'm just wondering, because this is all about learning skills in the most extreme situations. What are maybe some of the three big lessons you've had to learn in that journey,

growing present to succeed?

Boris Hristov: Yeah, I would just first say that the first two events were just for your audience to get a clear understanding of what this project is all about. So the first two events were online only, and these two events were not 900 people. Both of them were a little bit above 3000 people. So the first, that, that, [00:04:00] yes, that surprised us as well.

The fact that we are able to sell more than 3000. Tickets for an online conference on presentation skills that blew us away. However, that was also the thing that made us realize that, wait a minute, there is something here. You know, there is something here. Let's try to reinvest everything that we got.

And make it better and better and better and better in 2023. We switched to a hybrid model. Now we have almost a thousand people with us in person. And that's just purely the limitation of the venue that we are operating with in Sofia, Bulgaria. But we also have a few hundreds every single time online as well.

So it is a little bit larger than 900 people. It's always above a thousand. It really depends on the year. Now, in terms of what we learned, there are so many things that we learned when it comes to event [00:05:00] planning, events, et cetera, uh, if I have to, you know, pick and choose some of those things, I would say that, for example, one of the things that every person who is involved with sales probably knows, or at least.

Maybe they have heard is never, never dedicate or never outsource a hundred percent of yourselves to someone else. Don't do that. Because this is not their project. This is not their thing. There's so many, bad things that will happen. And then you have to catch up and try to sell everything by yourself, but then you will be limited on time because you are waiting for someone else to sell it for you.

So that is one thing that we learned. Another thing that we learned was. Even though, even though some of the biggest brands in the world are telling you, Hey, we're, we want to sponsor the event. We want to sponsor it. Not just this one, but the next one as well. [00:06:00] companies, again, very big brands are telling you, we want to purchase 300 tickets.

Here is the contract. Even though all of these things are happening, there is out that nothing is guaranteed. You know, turns out that nothing is guaranteed. One of the scariest things that we went through. In 2023, I don't know if you remember, but there were, there was a moment when a bank in the US went bankrupt.

Then there were,

Rob D. Willis: Silicon

Boris Hristov: yeah, the Silicon Valley bank. Then there was one bank or two banks in Switzerland that went off back then in 2023. We had so many sponsors that wanted to join and so many people who wanted to purchase tickets, meaning companies that wanted to purchase bulk amount of tickets for their for their teams that.

At some point we were investing so heavily in the event because we saw a lot of opportunity to invest a lot of money and make it as great as it can be. However, there was [00:07:00] this week that I will never, I'll never forget. Probably it is, it was in March, 2023, where for one week we lost a 110, 000 euros. So when you are a company like ours, meaning a small, a small agency, when you lose so much money for one week, because of circumstances that you can, that you don't control, it is painful. You know, it is painful. It hurts.

A lot, and it can bring a lot of problems for you as the, in this case, the event planner. So if you are an event organizer, especially in these years that we are currently living in, just, just be mindful, just be careful as we like to say, until the money is not in your bank account, don't think that they are coming because a lot of things can change like that and when that happens.

It could be scary, you know, it could be absolutely scary. So that is [00:08:00] probably number, number two, number three, I would say is when you work with people who are very high level executives and they outsource their participation in your event as a speaker to their assistants, be extremely careful how you communicate with these people and how active they are on their side.

Meaning. Are they responsive? Are they replying often? Are they replying at all? Because we experienced a nightmare last year with, I'm not going to name names, but this happened, like the VP of a company outsourced this to their senior assistant, and then we just didn't hear from this person and we didn't hear from them up until May.

Okay. Our event was in June and we didn't hear from them up until May yet. We're, [00:09:00] we have a photo of this person on our website. There is a session name in the agenda. People are buying tickets maybe because of that session alone. And so this, the, the game with the assistants, my, my two cents, they're very cool people, most of them, but just be careful monitor for, are they, once you send their first, once you sent your first email to these people, are they replying?

Are they replying fast enough? Because if you are seeing someone not replying for, let's say, more than two weeks, I will immediately raise a red flag. Immediately. Immediately. Because that's not a good sign. Or at least it's not a good sign to me anymore.

Rob D. Willis: Absolutely, man. That sounds like you had your heart in your mouth, I think is the phrase. But they it

turned out

okay in the end they

turned

Boris Hristov: Yes, they turned up, but it was a little bit stressful. Let's put it this way, but that's the game that you're playing. [00:10:00] When you're in events, planning event organized in this business of planning events, organizing events, running events, there is always, you, all of us have heard or have probably have some friends who are in this world.

of, uh, you know, stressful situations up until the last moment, you know, everything can happen. Anything can happen. And so you have to be very much aware and be very mindful of also, for example, I, I personally, I'm very careful of how I manage my own personal resources. Do I have enough sleep?

Do I do my training, et cetera, because I need the full capacity of my everything, you know, to react and be able to react in the best way possible when something like this happens. If it is to happen, I need to make sure that on my side, I'm working with my bed, with all of my, all of the resources that I have.

Rob D. Willis: It goes part and parcel with. Everything needing to go well at one [00:11:00] particular time and place. And the old phrase, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. But the flip side of that is you can also be pleasantly surprised. So you mentioned at the beginning, you had no idea that you were going to have so much interest.

Can you tell me about the moment when you first realized this is way bigger than you thought it was going to be? What were your expectations? When did you it kind of click for you? And what were your

thoughts? And

how did you approach it from that

point?

Boris Hristov: Our main goal for the first event was to sell a thousand tickets. If we sold a thousand tickets for online only event, that was going to be a huge success to us. That was our internal key performance indicator, KPI.

However, once we sold a thousand tickets, In the same day, okay. In one day we update, I'll never forget it. We updated the website that [00:12:00] where we said that, Hey, here's how many people are joining. And then once we did that in that same day, there was three companies in total. One of them purchased 500 tickets.

One company purchased 500 tickets. Another one purchased 350. Okay. And another one purchased 250. Okay. So we have, you have more than a thousand more tickets in one day. And that absolutely blew us away. That changed this event forever. And the way we think about this event, I believe forever, because when you see that potential, when you see that businesses and companies understand the importance of presentations and of effective communication, it's just a, it's just a great moment.

You are in this space, you know, how our industry is not that developed compared to other industries, I mean, [00:13:00] so compared to marketing, to the marketing industry or to the tech industry or to any other almost industry, the presentation industry, some people, we like to say that there is an industry right together with you and our colleagues, it's a very small industry.

It's a very small industry and there are very few people that are operating in that space. And so when you see that people in side of the biggest brands out there recognize the importance of presentation skills, of communication skills, that's, that's a good day. And it's a good day for everybody because maybe this event was the first.

Touch point or the first moment when someone or hundreds of people saw something about presentations and maybe that was the unlock for them. The moment when they said, wait a minute,

wait a minute, this is. Maybe I can really try this. Maybe I, this really makes sense. Let me try to find more resources on that subject.

And from there, they go to the HR [00:14:00] search for, let's say, a consultant search for a trainer for something in a way they want to go deeper into something. So I think that the, the, the conference itself, it's a great project, brings up a lot of great people together to network, to meet, but I also believe that it also.

Expands and grows the whole industry, which is. A by product, but to me, at least it's a person who is in that industry. It's a very important by product.

Rob D. Willis: Yeah, I know. I'm in full agreement because many people, if you talk about the presentation industry that

Think like what's that

because it's not held to be an industry in itself and putting down this marker conference like this, which is big, has good speakers is done to a very high quality that can only benefit everyone, including, of course, the attendees, most of all, but I'm just I'm wondering because There's got to be two sides to this, because on [00:15:00] one hand, it's like brilliant, we've sold all these tickets, love it. It's

also got to be a little bit scary, in some ways, because it takes on another magnitude to what you had planned beforehand. And also requires a different level of planning. This is not like hosting a meeting for 40 people on zoom. So how did you make sure that everything about your structures? was robust enough to handle that increased

demand.

Boris Hristov: I would just say that we are very good at, or at least we try to be as good as we can be in managing and managing the resources that we have internally inside of our team. So in a way we are very good in project management. What's more, every single time. And immediately after every single event, we also do the so called retrospective meetings with every major stakeholder involved.

We first do it internally, and then we do it [00:16:00] with some of the people that we hire externally, especially when there is a use case for that. We had a very, very important situation that happened, for example, in 2023. For the first hybrid, when in the first five minutes, unfortunately, the internet, the wifi connection in the overall in the, at the venue stopped.

And so this was my only fear. You know, this was the only thing that I, I was, I was fearful of back then in 2020, we actually, so the second event that we did was in April 10th, 2022. And it was online only. I personally went and booked the venue for the third event in January, 2022. So we booked and we knew that we were going to be doing a hybrid next year before we actually had the second event.

And we booked the venue. And the only question that I asked. [00:17:00] The venue and the people who are running the venue was what happens if the network connection stops? What happens then? How are you going to react? The answer was that that's impossible. Bobby, that's impossible. That never happened. We have multiple internet providers bringing us the most expensive internet connection possible, et cetera, et cetera.

I was like, what? Sure. But let's imagine that it is possible. Well, what are you going to do? Because this is out is outside of my control. I cannot, I'm not running the network, the network there. I'm not administering, administering this network. I'm not an IT guy anymore. I'm just a client. I'm just a customer.

So they convinced me that it is absolutely impossible for this to happen. And then on the day of the event, turns out it was possible. [00:18:00] And so this is, for example, one of the external providers that we had to sit down. And do a retrospective meeting with them and their team to just see what happened, what did we do well, right?

Both of us, what did we do well in collaboration, but also what can we improve and back to your question on how do we manage all of these things and how do we build Resource allocation or project management or whatever you may want to call it. Every single time when we see something that surprises us that we didn't plan for, et cetera, we immediately add it to our template of tasks.

This is a template full of tasks. Each one of them full, very complete in terms of his description, which is the starting point for every single event. Okay. So think of it this way. Now that we're running 2025 coming up on June 6th, before we started working on it. And the starting point of our work and our team's work [00:19:00] is this template, but this template was improved and constantly being updated in the last four years.

Every single time when we saw something that we missed, every single time that we learned something new, we went in and updated it. And so now the fifth. Year that we are doing this, this is our starting point. So the chances of us being surprised by something, I'm not saying they're slim to none. I'm just saying we are trying to push them to minimum to the minimum.

And that's our approach. That's the way. We have been, we, we managed to be very, very, I would say successful in this. We don't do overtime. No one of our team is doing overtime during, in the last one month before the event, which is when you tell it to someone that runs events, they, they lose their minds.

No, we don't do overtime. There is no need. So yeah, it, it works. It works and it works very, [00:20:00] very well, but we're very, we try to be very disciplined In regards to, Hey, let's make sure that we are constantly up to date here. Let's make sure that we do our homework because it will pay off sometime in the future.

Rob D. Willis: And what I love about that approach is you're never at zero in terms of risk, but you're

getting

better every single time.

And it's totally within your control. There must be though, because I'm just thinking back to your your original point, which is never outsource sales 100%.

Boris Hristov: Yeah.

Rob D. Willis: Tell me about things that you've taken off that list, that to do list, things that you've discovered, you thought, we thought we'd learned a lesson here, but actually maybe we either misjudged it or we were wrong or we need a new approach.

Boris Hristov: There are so many little things that happen. You know, we, we always try to make this [00:21:00] event better and better. The problem that we are facing every single year is that. If we have to be very honest, we are very ambitious in regards to what do we want to achieve with this event? However, at the same time, the reality is that we don't operate with unlimited resources.

So there is a big difference between, for example, me working in a company, let's say like Microsoft and I'm their event, event planner or marketing person. And Microsoft tells me, Hey, here are 5 million euros. We need to do some incredible events. It's your task, blow us away, right? In our case, we are not operating with those budgets.

First and foremost, we are, we operate with way, way less money than a company like that. What's more, we don't operate with someone else's money. We operate with our own money. And that is very hard because we need to first make this money. And then decide [00:22:00] how to invest it in the best possible way so that hopefully it creates the experience that we want and even better if it brings some, a profit for us at the end, because in the event space, you may have heard this.

There is the saying that. You work one year for one day. If you think about it, if your event is a one day event, you're working on it for a year and then everything comes up and happens in that one day. And you hope that it's going to be great in the way that you planned it, if not even better. So if I have to go back and say, okay, what did we do?

Said, okay, we checked that box. We said that we are successful here, but then went back and said, no, uh, this is not enough, or if I understood your question correctly, I would say that we have done so many things, especially on the creative side, meaning how [00:23:00] do we build our website? What are the promotional videos that we run?

How do we market the whole event? So many things that we thought we nailed it. You know, we nailed it. And then you see the results and you're like, wait a minute. This is not what I expected. And it's not what I expected by far. It is. The discrepancy is so huge. You're like, wait a minute. What's going on here?

We were planning for something completely different. We had a case, for example, with. With a marketing agency in 20, 22, I think we're 20, 23, we had a five people on our team who are doing just marketing. Okay. So copywriter, social media, video creator, et cetera. We actually decided to hire an external agency as well.

Okay. So on top of that, let's hire an external agency as well. We [00:24:00] told them, Hey, you have 15, 000 euros for the paid advertising part. Okay. This is outside of the, and by the way, I truly understand that 15, 000 euros for paid advertising on Facebook and Instagram is not that big of a number. I know, trust me.

I know, however, it's also not a small number as well. Okay. So we are not talking about a hundred or 200 euros or something like this. And so we heard, and by the way, this number was also their advice. It wasn't just me saying, Hey, why don't we give you exactly that number? It was their advice. These people who are otherwise experts in this field.

So we gave them that. Money was, we were paying the maid, their agency fee. And a few months later, we're sinking and joining a call to sink and see what's happening. And they're showing us their data. We were seeing our data. They showed us their data, which confirmed our data. So this budget was utilized and completely.

And then the end result was [00:25:00] 17 tickets were sold. Okay. So now

Rob D. Willis: I'm guessing tickets are not a

thousand euros.

Boris Hristov: you are absolutely correct. There are not a thousand euros. So again, we are not Microsoft. We cannot afford to make such big investments slash mistakes. So just when you thought that you figured it out, that these are the people that are now going to help you grow so much because they're the experts in this field.

You're back to, you know, you're back at the starting point. You're back. You, it's what happened. How is this even possible? And then you start analyzing everything and we came up to our conclusions and that's why we changed our marketing approach completely. Did we have to go through this to learn that and to extract all of those insights?

Maybe, maybe yes, maybe yes. [00:26:00] I don't regret it, but in the first few moments, it's a. It's just a shocking, it's a shocking thing. It's just a shocking thing. And so, especially to me, that is not running events that hasn't been in that space for dozens of years, et cetera, those things are surprising me and not in a pleasant way, as you can imagine.

Rob D. Willis: So just to round off this part of the conversation, have you developed any principles then, or questions, or something that you'll frame your decisions around investing

for your

Boris Hristov: Yeah. So what we have done, especially on the marketing side is that if it's not, if it's not helping us, Get in front people in the world of business, meaning we say, let me put it this way. 90 plus percent of our sales is B2B, than 10 percent is B2C. Back then, what we were trying to do with all of those campaigns, all of those experts, agencies, et cetera, [00:27:00] is B2C.

And it didn't work and it didn't work because people, the end person, the person who is the marketing, let's say, or the PR or the tech guy, whatever, they rarely know that presentation skills are important for them. They rarely know it. And when you're trying to sell a premium product to these people, And that product is something that they cannot care less about.

You have, you're selling 17 tickets. That's what happens, right? You need 900 though. And that's a different, it's a different ballgame. However, the people that know that the presentation skills are important are people who are, let's say, team leads. Managers, HR managers, learning and development managers.

These are the people that understand that these skills are crucial for the success of the whole organization. If you're trying to sell to [00:28:00] them, it becomes way easier, just way easier. Thus, anything that we're doing in terms of marketing is to create interest. In the potential B2B sale, we are not interested in the B2C.

I'm not saying we close the door. You will see us do a lot of things in regards to B2C in the upcoming, let's say, six to 12 months, but mainly our focus and our investments is, is that going to help us get in front of the HR or the learning and development manager of the, of that company? Yes or no. If it's a yes, let's try it.

If it's a no, let's keep it. Let's not do it.

Rob D. Willis: Yeah, it's definitely that sort of 80 20 principle, isn't it? 80 percent of the results come from 20

percent of the actions and work out what they are and just invest into that as much as possible. You've, you've got a very systematic mind. And I know you have this background in tech and databasing and backend. [00:29:00] Is there something maybe from that period, which you feel equips you particularly well for what you are doing now. Any principle that you

had to learn back

then?

Boris Hristov: Yeah. I think that, I think that being very organized is of extreme help. I think that to me, for example, those little things, those little things back then, when I was an IT guy, I was very organized. So when you see all of my files. Everything is perfectly named. Everything is in the right folders.

Everything is just pixel perfect. You know, these little things are a lot. I would say, uh, also back back then in the it world, I learned a lot about processes and procedures and what can I say when you work in a big corporation, there are so many things that you can do. You can extract in terms of insights.

Obviously, there are also a lot of things that you might end up hate because there is just so much [00:30:00] bureaucracy. However, I had the pleasure to work as a, in a corporate environment and then jump in another organization that was back then 500 peoples. The 500 people only. And when you jump from a company like HP, because I worked for HP, had some projects with Microsoft as well, but didn't work for Microsoft as an employee.

When you jump from an organization like that to a people, to an organization with 500 people, you see, wait a minute, how is this organization working and what makes it successful? And what makes the corporate organization successful? And then you see in an organization of 500, that there are no processes.

There are no procedures and you're like, how do you guys Operate, like, how are you even doing anything? And you can see that there is, it's a, it's a chaos. You know, it's just, it's chaos. And then you start your own thing with two or three people. And you're like, let's see now, what should I take from [00:31:00] those two experiences and try to implement in this new reality where you have just two or three or five or 10 people inside of your team.

I would say processes and procedures. And just being very organized is never going to be something that, yeah, these things to me are, they should always be there. They should always be there because they help you be so much more productive. And they again, limit the chances of you making, let's go this way.

Rob D. Willis: The same mistake twice.

Have you got any particular processes that you applied of absolute micro scale? So for yourself,

Rob D. Willis: for instance.

Boris Hristov: I would say, yeah, I mean, for the micro scale to me is, for example, how do you name your files? I hate it. I personally hate it when I see, let's say someone sends you a proposal and the proposal is called doc one.

Rob D. Willis: [00:32:00] final

draft B.

Boris Hristov: That, that to me, I hate, I always, for example, if I'm sending a proposal to a customer, I will always probably do the following.

I'll put our name on the front. Do okay. Three 56 labs dash, the name of the customer dash, let's say training dash proposal. And then gen 20, gen 25, you know, to me, this is, these are super little things. You can say micro things, but to me, at least they show how you approach everything that you do, the little things matter and they make a huge impression on people who are trained to seek for those little things.

And in our case, the people who. We're talking to are exactly those people who are trained to monitor for the little things. And that's why it's very important for us to be very precise in otherwise. You can say, [00:33:00] wait a minute, that's kind of basics. These are, is just an attachment. Why do you care? No, there is a reason why we care and I can explain why we care.

Hopefully you can understand why we care though, because not everyone has the eyes to understand that. No, not every person, even when you explain it to them, they're still not convinced, I, nothing wrong here. It's just not us. It's not our, these are not our people.

Rob D. Willis: Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting. You've got two sides to your character, because on one hand, you've got this very precise tech guy who loves process, who's refining and so on. On the other hand, you're the tech guy who loves to present. And when we think of the big presenters, we think of quite chaotic people or people who are not this precise. Can you think back, maybe earlier, before your corporate work, Where does this mixture of precision [00:34:00] and presentation come from? Do you think?

Boris Hristov: I'm, that is a very good question. I'm not sure to be honest with you. I'm not sure probably is a mix of many things that happened to me when I was in IT, and even I can probably go back in my university years because I saw, for example, I was one of the worst presenters that you can imagine. I was not able to maintain eye contact, which was And when I say I was not able to maintain eye contact, I mean, complete, I was not able to allow, I was running events, uh, small seminars.

I was organizing small seminars for our colleagues and my job was to introduce the speaker for 30 seconds on the, in the seminars and then open the floor for them to, to join and continue the seminar in those 30 seconds for multiple in multiple events, I was there just for 30 seconds. No one was listening to me.

Have [00:35:00] in mind that these are different audiences every single time. And so at some point I was like, there is something wrong with me. It is just not possible for them to be wrong. You know, there is no way for you to see and be in front of different people every single month. And none of them want to listen.

There should be, you have to look inwards. There is, there is something going on. So that's made me work a lot harder. Just focus a lot on how can I improve this part of my skill set. And then when I went to the it world, I just, I was just immersed in this corporate environment where you see this precision, this processes that need to be followed every single click, every single checkbox, everything needs to be described, needs to be executed exactly as it's written.

And then I had this case where I did a very big mistake back then, for example, with one of our customers, I deleted one of their production [00:36:00] databases. Wow. I was actually doing, my intent was to be proactive and surprise them with something cool, but I didn't see the name of the server that I was working with, and there was one letter that was different and insert, if you're in the IT, you probably know that there is a big difference between the, the letter P and the letter T one stands for production, which is.

The server that serves end customers most of the times, and the T is coming from a test server, which is, yeah, you can do whatever you want to do on that server. And so I deleted the database from the P server while I was trying to do something really, really cool for them. And that was not even documented in the database.

It wasn't anywhere, which is against any rule.

Rob D. Willis: Well, it's definitely

surprise.

Boris Hristov: yeah, yeah, it was a bank and they got, they was, they were very, very surprised 30 minutes later, after I did that delete command, my manager and have in mind, this was during one of [00:37:00] our night shifts, we were giving night shifts, so 30 minutes later, after I did that, my manager called me on my personal phone, which was around.

I would say 11 PM or something. And that surprised me when I saw that he was calling me. I was like, why is Nicky calling me? That's strange. was already caught by some other people and I quickly understood what happened

Rob D. Willis: Oh, man. What a situation. Tell me, Boris, if you were to take that whole journey from being the person at university couldn't look 30 seconds to someone who's running the biggest presentation skills conference in the world. If you were to write a book about that journey, what would you call it?

Boris Hristov: just before the conversation started. We were, we were discussing this, that this is going to come up. And you know, I immediately came up with a word and I immediately came up with a word for so many reasons. But I would [00:38:00] probably call that book context.

I think that nowadays And especially in our work with presentations, for example, but not only with presentations, I would, I would argue that with communication in general, in order for you to be successful, Sure. There are some rules, there are some best practices that you can follow, but at the end of the day, it's all about context, you know, you can change and you can.

Decide not to follow a specific guideline or a best practice, just because, you know, a little context, something that you have heard, maybe just before you entered the meeting or, you know, Maybe because now you're presenting in front of a different culture and the context changes. And so all of the rules that you followed when you were talking with people from the Western part of the world are now not applicable because you're talking with people who are from the Middle East, let's [00:39:00] say.

And so to me, context. Is that magical word that I have in my head almost constantly, because everything that we're doing and in order for you to be a successful communicator, you have to be able to understand the context that you are communicating in. And once you understand that context, then you can pick and choose, okay, which are the best practices, which are the.

Things that I know, or that I would, I was taught that now I can implement and run and try and see if they would work, but without you understanding the context of the room, the context of the people, what happened with their life today, you know, an hour before they joined this meeting, you might fail, you know, you might fail, you might not communicate as effectively as you can.

And so that word context, I would say is if I have to write a book around who. The last 10 years, I would probably do, I would probably name it [00:40:00] context.

Rob D. Willis: I heard someone, I can't remember where, say that there are essentially three positions to communication. First, second, and third. First is recognizing your own biases and preferences. Second is understanding your audience empathetically, and then third is understanding the situation, the context. And you need to understand all three fluently in order

to be effective as a communicator.

Boris Hristov: agree. Well, well, well said, well put. The problem with, you see how it is for us as trainers, it's very easy to say, but it's very, even for us, I would say, and I hope that you would agree, even for us, sometimes it is hard to do

Rob D. Willis: It is, I try and ask clients, essentially, is there anything I should know

before going into work with a team? And sometimes you will be surprised at the kinds of really valuable bits of information they're going to give you. The things that [00:41:00] may not have come up at all anyway,

but you're really glad you knew them. Because they, you can shape how you talk about things, you can avoid

certain topics, etc.

Boris Hristov: I agree.

Rob D. Willis: Let's think about just building on that. A short, I'm aware of time, so I'll take this slightly, slightly quicker, but let's say we're talking to An executive or a leader, and they're trying to plan now a high stakes board meeting or an investor event.

It's something which basically has to go well. What is your approach for that kind of thing? That kind of scale of

people?

Boris Hristov: If you're presenting in front of a super high level exec crowd, I would say that you need to, the things that you mentioned are very much applicable. So I'm not going to, I'm not going to repeat what you said. However, if I need to go into a little bit more detail, some of the things that I will do, because We don't have the time to go through everything that [00:42:00] goes into the planning of such a presentation.

I would say that one of the things that I would start with is, first of all, do I know who those people are? Meaning, do I have their names? Because if I have their names, I want to spend a little bit more time in just searching information about them, what they look like. Posted somewhere, what they are saying, any podcasts, any interviews, any video interviews, just anything that's coming out of their mouth.

I would be very curious and I will be very interested to learn as much as I can about these people. Now, obviously every single presentation, and we know this very well as people who are in this space, every single presentation chases a specific goal. We want to achieve a specific goal with it. Now, again, having that in mind, I would always ask myself, okay, I have 10 people from the board.

My goal is this one. Do I need to convince all of those 10 people in order for me to achieve that [00:43:00] goal, or do I need to convince just the, just two of them? Because if it's just two of them, I would focus my, a lot of my 80, 20, remember 80 times, 80 percent of my time in understanding those two people that.

That are going to give me this approval, maybe, and the others, I'm going to learn about them, but I'm not going to be focused on them once that is clear. Once I have the goal and I understand who I need to affect in a way, who I need to get my approval from, I'll try to find as much information about them as possible.

I always give this example with one of our customers. We worked with Deloitte in a similar situation and the surprising. Place where we found the most important data on one of the people that we were presenting to, who was about to get our customer, our client, they were, he was presenting for a promotion and this was the person in the jury who was going to more or less say, Are you getting that promotion or not?

And keep in mind here, we're talking about a country director to a [00:44:00] global leader's position, which is high stakes presentation. We actually found the most interesting piece of information about this person in the intranet of Deloitte, not online, not with the help of chat GPT. Back then there was no chat GPT, which is by the way, hopefully now that people are listening to this one are like, wait a minute, am I using chat GPT to understand my audience?

And if I'm not, why am I not using it? Especially if the people that are in front of you are a little bit more public personas. So this is, this is step number one. I will go there for sure. The goal, then understanding who those people are as the more time I have, the more information I will try to collect.

Obviously, again, you don't have unlimited time, so you have to stop at some point, but then I would probably, depending on the topic, depending on the cover, depending on what I want to communicate with them, I'll probably approach it as a conversation, not exactly as a. Linear [00:45:00] presentation, because these people are short on time.

They are very, most of them are interrupting a lot because they want to get to the point very, very quickly. So I would probably advise people to at least consider, at least consider. Again, it will depend on the context, at least consider approaching their presentation as a conversation, meaning. Utilizing a technology like maybe Prezi or PowerPoint and PowerPoint and it's Zoom, the so called Zoom feature, because that one allows you to do this so called in our industry conversational presentations.

Once I do that, I'll keep it obviously very short, very, I'm not going to go into the details at all. These people don't care about details. Again, easy to see. Not that easy to do, hard to do sometimes because many people say, yeah, everything is important and everything is important. It's not actually. [00:46:00] And.

I'll try to keep it very high level, then I will just spend a lot of time rehearsing, a lot of time rehearsing and every now and then I'll prompt charge GPT and say to charge GPT. Hey, I'm presenting, here is my presentation. This is my goal. These are the people that are going to be in front of me.

Here is what I'm going to cover, which are the top 10 questions that I can expect an audience like that to ask me. Can you please format it in a table format with the question on the left and the answer on the right? Thanks. Right. So I will probably do something like that so that I can see, okay, what are the potential questions that might be.

Might be asked, I'll rehearse the answers of those as well so that I boost my confidence in the material that I'm going to be covering and presenting. So if we have to, if I have to give a short type of explanation or approach, how would I, how would I [00:47:00] approach something like this with one of our customers without knowing anything else?

I'll probably go that path.

Rob D. Willis: Sounds about right. Get the goal, understand them, begin to refine that as much as possible, map it out in a

kind of conversation, because that's what works for these people, and try and preempt what might come up using

tools like chart GPT. But I actually think, to be honest, in my experience, we kind of know what the objections are going to be. We just need to be honest enough to

say they will have questions about that. And

this is how I'm going to

tackle

Boris Hristov: Yeah. I love that. I love that idea where, when we were brainstorming presentations with some of our customers, which are very high stakes and presentations that are chasing an approval, we always like to ask, Hey, give me the top three reasons why they're going to say no. And that brings a whole new thing in the conversation.

Sometimes we even decide to structure the presentation based on those objections. [00:48:00] So we, this, we just ditch every, everything that we have created and structured the presentation starting from the biggest objection, right? And just presented it's more or less, Hey, maybe most of you here in this room are thinking that a solution like that is not going to work because this and that, and this and that.

Well, let's tell you a little bit more about it, right? So we present the first objection, present the counter and counter argument about it. And then once we present that part, we're like, but maybe that's not enough. And you're thinking to yourself now, yeah, they might figure this out, but what about. And then go again with the counter argument.

So you are absolutely right. I love that idea around. We always, we always have at least a bear. We always have at least an idea of what the objections would be. However,

I'm not sure that most business people who are being asked to present do [00:49:00] their homework to prepare well.

Rob D. Willis: I would say that's exactly

right. And why we exist in the forms that

we do.

Boris Hristov: I think so as well.

Rob D. Willis: Now we're going to come to the listener challenge. And in this part of the pod, we give listeners a short exercise or ritual that they can try out for a week to give them a little bit of your superpower. Boris, what have you got for

us?

Boris Hristov: Starting in the last, in December, 2024, I started when I wake up, I decided that I'm not going to consume anything from my phone. And the first thing that I'm going to do is grab a cup of coffee, do my breakfast, go to the gym. Okay. So I would say if someone is not doing something similar, or let's just simplify it when you wake up, try to not consume anything from your phone for the first 30 minutes.

Dedicate those 30 minutes to yourself. Don't touch that phone. It will be with you [00:50:00] throughout the whole day. Just dedicate them to yourself and to your self improvement in any shape or form, be that your physical conditioning or your learning about presentations or about anything else. Don't touch that phone for 30 minutes.

Okay. See how it feels. I think you will love it

Rob D. Willis: What do you feel was the inspiration for that

particular exercise?

Boris Hristov: till

you will find it strange. You'll find it very strange. If I tell you that, uh, I'm not going to do any, I don't want to advertise anything in regards to, okay, what, what, what made me do it? The, the reality is, and I'm very honest, it would probably sound naive or anything or something, but. Uh, I actually decided that it is now goddamn time for me to step up in regards to my health and fitness.

I have been doing sports for a long, a long, long time, but if I have to be honest, [00:51:00] the food component was not there for me. I was also drinking every week, maybe a glass of wine, maybe two. You know, not that much, but still alcohol as well. And that, when you want to get in shape and feel the best you can feel is not going to help you.

And so I decided, I read a lot about this device that is called Whoop. I don't know if you know

Rob D. Willis: Mm hmm.

Boris Hristov: So I, I decided to purchase one and see, I went on with the trial with the 30 day trial and yeah, it's, it showed me a lot of things that. When you see it, when you see that once you have a glass of wine on the next day, your body is in the red zone in terms of recovery, you're like, do I really have to do that?

Like, do I really have to drink that glass of wine? Or do I really need to drink alcohol at all? To be very honest, the amount of alcohol that I had for the last two or three months is [00:52:00] Almost none, almost none. And I feel great. And the reason why I did it is because this small device and the application that they have every single time, when you just get a drop of alcohol, it detects it somehow.

I don't know what they're doing, what their algorithms are, but it really understands that that happened. And so the whoop thing is probably one of the biggest reasons why I changed my. Approach to what I do in the morning. How much sports do I do? Do I eat? Well, do I drink alcohol or not? And to be very honest, I'm very, very happy with it.

Very happy with the results as well.

Rob D. Willis: Sounds awesome, man. And now I

really want to get one myself.

Boris Hristov: try it,

Rob D. Willis: where can, yeah, I will do.

Boris Hristov: try it.

Rob D. Willis: Boris, where can people go to

find out more about you?

Boris Hristov: Easiest way I would say is LinkedIn. You can just find Boris Christophe it's me on the picture. So it's not going to be that hard. [00:53:00] And then I'll be, it will be great. If someone wants to join and decides to join the event, you can find the event that presents succeed. com. At least you can join online. If you're not coming to Sophia.

And if you want to see more about the agency and what we're doing there, it's three, five, six laps. com, not three 65, but three, five, six. We're working on a little bit of redesign on the website currently coming up maybe in a week. But yeah, if you want to see what we're doing for our customers in terms of presentations, you can see it there.

Rob D. Willis: Awesome

stuff, Boris. Thank you so much for joining

Boris Hristov: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Rob D. Willis: that was Boris Hristov.

What struck me most about that conversation was, despite running a large event, which By its nature is going to be riddled with uncertainty. Boris seems pretty calm and he's been able to put together something amazing with relatively few things going wrong. And he's done it by focusing on process and getting the details right.

Something which we can [00:54:00] all do. We can all refine and get better at. Over time, if you found today's conversation valuable, please just take a minute to review us wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you know someone who is hosting an event, facilitating a meeting, or even just organizing their kid's birthday party, send them this episode.

I reckon that Boris's perspective might be just what they need. I'm Rob D. Willis and you've been listening to Superpowered, the unique stories of modern leaders.

Rob D. Willis: Thank you for listening and goodbye.