Effective communication, the most powerful force of businesses, can be the ticket to success when used constructively. Compelling business ideas with the potential to drive innovation, must be strategically narrated to influence decisions and drive business forward.
While pursuing her MBA, Janine Kurnoff identified that her classmates struggled to communicate their ideas using presentation tools like PowerPoint. Standing out from her peers, Kurnoff’s presentations were clear, visually engaging, and always told a compelling story. She realized that raw creativity alone wasn’t enough to bridge the communication gap with customers and be heard in a competitive market.
From this observation, Kurnoff established The Presentation Company (TPC) in 2001. Janine’s sister, Lee Lazarus, joined her at TPC a year later after being convinced that together, they could change the way business presentations are created.
As an award-winning training company, TPC is dedicated to helping talented businesspeople, at all organizational levels, bring clarity and meaning to their ideas via hands-on, experiential workshops delivered in-person, virtually, or through online self-paced platforms. Simply put, they believe that storytelling is more than just words.
“Our mission is to empower talented professionals at any level to communicate with clarity and confidence by transforming them into great storytellers,” says Kurnoff, co-founder and chief innovation officer at TPC.
In the fast-paced business world that demands higher productivity, making quicker and more impactful decisions is paramount to staying ahead of the competition.
TPC is a response to this inherent requirement to accomplish more with fewer resources. Instilling confidence in individuals and helping them articulate ideas have transformed how leaders in organizations collaborate and share concepts, building a united approach toward success.
TPC’s learning journey is grounded in a new mindset: story first, visuals second, which applies to all facets of the company’s workshops. The workshops equip teams with practical tools and a common language and framework for crafting cohesive narratives.
TPC’s curriculum is designed to flow from one workshop to the next, offering skills, tools, and coaching that build on each other and travel with learners throughout the journey. The journey begins with Crafting Strategic Visual Stories, a workshop centered around story strategy – a way to organize ideas and data into meaningful narratives.
The next workshop, Influencing with Visuals, focuses on visual strategy and brings learner’s stories to life with maximum visual impact. The final workshop in the journey, Presenting Data Visually, teaches data strategy and how to turn facts and figures into easy-to-scan data visualizations.
Fueling the award-winning curriculum, TPC instructors come from diverse business backgrounds and have a wide range of expertise, offering real-world experience while encouraging behavior change.
For example, TPC’s client Colgate-Palmolive, a multinational consumer products company renowned for its diverse range of oral care, personal care, home care, and pet nutrition products, quickly realized that they needed to rethink the way they were using data to drive growth, profitability, and efficiency. They partnered with TPC to equip thousands of employees with storytelling, visual messaging and data visualization skills so anyone could have these skills in their toolkits to communicate effectively to both their business and their customers.
Teams at Colgate-Palmolive were able to apply TPC’s story strategy and data strategy to tell a more unified story, get to decision-making faster, open new strategic partnerships, and empower their employees to not only interpret data, but tell the ‘so what’ behind the data story. In recognition of its excellence, TPC received the prestigious Brandon Hall Gold Medal award in partnership with Colgate-Palmolive.
To maximize the reach of TPC’s storytelling approach, Kurnoff and Lazarus co-authored the best-selling book Everyday Business Storytelling in 2021. The book distills the essence of their workshops into a practical companion guide, making storytelling accessible for anyone, no matter their role or function. It features case studies, before-and-after scenarios, and content that improves presentation skills and effective data storytelling.
Being authentic is at the heart of TPC’s operations. By embracing the concept that ‘every story and individual matters,’ the company champions inclusivity and ensures clients’ distinct narratives receive the attention they deserve.
“Everyone deserves to be seen and heard. We are geared to bring voice to their narratives,” says Lee Lazarus, co-founder and chief strategy officer at TPC.
Reprinted with permission from Manage HR Magazine