The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 47 - The Power of Good Communication: Nick Jenkins

Episode Date: March 4, 2022

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. Nick Jenkins is the founder and former CEO of Moonpig.com, a company which revolutionised gift cards and is now worth over one and a half billion pounds. In this moment, Nick shares his wisdom with us on the importance of having good communication skills from public speaking to stand-out graphics and polished writing. Your ability to articulate yourself, think coherently and coerce a logical argument is vital to all walks of life whether that is business related or not. People often think that to be a good communicator you have to nail those public speaking events, but what Nick notes is that actually we practice articulating ourselves everyday. Making eye contact, engaging in conversations and listening to people are all things we can do. The more we output, whether that be speaking, writing or drawing the better we naturally become at communicating with people. We compare this to sales because at the baseline, we are always selling ourselves to people we meet, persuading others that we are the best. Nick is an incredible guy who leans on the power of composing yourself well in front of others in order to succeed. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/ogWmjYsc6nb Watch the Episodes On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the united states and i'd be recording a lot more over in the states they put a massive billboard in time square um for the show so thank you so much amazon music um thank you to our team and thank you to all of you that listen to this show let's continue in terms of skills as well as an entrepreneur you i heard you talk about public speaking being integral to you did public speaking at university i did i did a lot of public speaking at university and a lot of debating and the skill i think that's important is the ability to be able to persuade people of your ideas yeah not necessarily public speaking but in every meeting that you go to you

need to be able to look people in the eye and convince them that your idea is right and and that could be in a sales role, it could be sitting around a table with a bunch of developers, and one of them saying, I think this is the right way forward. If you can't articulate yourself properly, then you're never going to be listened to. And that's a skill I think is, it's being recognised in schools. I do a lot in education now. So I see now more and more, they recognise that that's a skill that is really important, that people should be able to look someone in the eye and be able to explain yourself very, very coherently. I tend to actually believe, I'd go one step further and think, I can't think of a more

important skill in life and business than we, I call, I refer to it as sales because, and we think of sales, we think of trying to get cash out of someone else's pocket by giving them something. But I think of it as like, meet a girl in a nightclub you know try and communicate your idea to your team investors employees um everyone you encounter i think is a to some degree you're trying to sell something and it's usually yourself yeah but and those that are you think about how that compounds over the over 70 years of your life being good or bad at that one skill yeah yeah will anything change the trajectory of your life more than being a like a good salesperson and and that comes from as you say from being able to articulate yourself and speak and yeah and just think coherently and put down a logical argument that people think yes

okay i get that i understand it how does one get better at that i think a lot of that's practice um um and i i think you know people make make this sort of binary thing between public speaking, standing on a stage and speaking to a crowd of people versus not doing anything at all. And actually in between, there's a whole load of stuff, which is working within a team and being able to... And that's where most people come up against it

is that they'll be sitting in a meeting with four or five other people and they've got something they want to say. And if they're too nervous about saying something, they just don't say anything at all. And then their ideas are never listened to. Yeah. And then they're devalued in that context.

And similarly, it may not necessarily be spoken word. You've also got to be able to write well and convincingly. Then there's another side of it, which is the numeracy side. And I find that the most convincing is when I... I love a good spreadsheet. But when you can express ideas in numbers, and you say, this is the model that works and you can prove it in in numbers it is it's a very convincing thing particularly irrefutable investor yeah i think right if we do this this is the evidence we've got that's what will happen yeah that's very

convincing um so there's there's there's also being numerate and being able to explain things in numbers which which is... Persuasively. Yeah, yeah. It's so true, yeah. You can be like orally persuasive, which is, you know, anecdotal persuasion, I guess. And then you can be persuasive with numbers, which is... Or graphics.

And that's the other thing. I do see the quality of decks in the last 15 years has dramatically improved. And in that they're much, much more engaging. And there's some real creative genius behind some of this stuff. I mean, occasionally they don't talk about the numbers, which is quite important. Yeah, and you have to email.

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful presentation. And, you know, big sort of, you know, you go through this doc send and all fantastic looks, lovely, beautiful graphics. And then you think you have kind of missed out the point about how you're going to make any money. But so there's a lot more. So again, but that comes down to how you persuade people

and how you present ideas. Not all of us, not all of us understand things by listening. Some people understand by seeing, I see patterns in numbers, but not everyone does. And I, I realize that now that, that just because I happen to see something one way, it doesn't mean to say that everybody else sees it in that way. And you have to understand how people, how people communicate. One of the, on that point about, you know, persuasion and communication. One of the most amazing things that happened to me inadvertently was, well, one of them's right here. I started doing a podcast and I, from, I never, the unintended consequence of me being forced to speak on stage because I was running around the world talking about marketing and being forced to write out on, I do quotes on Instagram, write these quotes every single day at 7pm on Instagram. And then write, I used to write this podcast. I used to just build my own, was that I was able to develop my ideas

better. So if you ask me any question on marketing, well, I've already written it out. I've written an essay on it because I had to do a blog because I had to run my personal brand. Or if you ask me something else about my life, I've already spent, you know, a thousand hours talking on this podcast about it, was I became much, I'd say 10x better at communicating. And the impact that had on my life was just profound. So my conclusive point here is I really think for young people that there are ways to force yourself to accelerate that learning.