We, The Pitcher team, are very happy and excited to share with you one very special interview with the charming and extremely talented Amy Tez!

Amy Tez is a highly-trained London-based actress with 20 years of professional theater experience. She has worked with Kenneth Branagh on the film Love’s Labour’s Lost and set up two theater companies: Shotgun Theatre with actor Tom Hardy in 2006 and Killer Theatre in 2009, culminating in a West End play at The Trafalgar Studios, London.

Amy is also an entrepreneur, business strategist, and performance coach. Her mission is to get the entrepreneurial world speaking with the same brilliance as our world-class actors and to pitch with the passion of a natural-born performer.

Amy, you are an entrepreneur, actress, business strategist, and performance coach. What motivates you to wear so many career hats?

I love the flexibility and the ability to fluidly move from one role to another. It’s really just an application of different skill-sets which I have developed over the years through force of circumstance. So it’s less about motivation for me and more about how my skills have organically evolved to meet my needs.

I went into acting simply because I got bored of studying Economics. I never could get the IS-LM curve into my head!  My parents weren’t very happy with my new choice of career but it’s what I wanted at the time, and as always, I stubbornly followed my guts. At Drama School in London, I learned about stage presence, communication skills, and spontaneous expression – the hard way. In fact, I had to “fail” successively and experience first-hand what it’s like to fall flat on my face in public before I could truly understand the power of effective communication. I believe the art of acting is the perfect way to hone your expressive powers. It’s a highly-skilled craft that fundamentally gets you out of the over-thinking mind-state and into a more physically powerful expression so that you become engaging and inspiring when you talk or perform.

After 20 years of acting and producing, it seemed a natural progression to move into performance coaching. I had just completed a West End play in 2012 and had grown tired of not having control over my career. The acting profession is notoriously fickle and your career is often in the hands of casting directors and agents. I decided to take back that control but I wasn’t sure how. Having a sister who is successful on the tech scene in San Francisco inspired me to find out more about the tech world. So I took a job at Wayra, an accelerator for startups in London, and that’s where I started to notice the huge lack of communication skills amongst all beings tech. I thought who better to teach them how to communicate with passion than a spirited actress with a love for live performance. I set up a Performance Coaching company last year and finally took control over my career whilst still doing what I love – expressively communicating and teaching others to do the same.

Making that transition forced me to become an entrepreneur as I had to do everything myself, from designing my own website, marketing myself online to figuring out what it takes to run a successful business – bootstrapping myself all the way. It’s been hard graft and takes masses of commitment as it’s all on my own shoulders. But there is great power in that. I truly understand what it takes to be a passionate entrepreneur.

So in answer to your question, I can wear all the different hats because I have had direct experience of every role. And nothing beats experience when you coach. Without it, you can not understand the struggles of your clients or how to move them past their particular limits.

Since 2016, along with private coaching, you have led a series of Masterclasses. Can you tell us a bit more about the Radical Collective?

The Radical Collective is a series of intensive masterclasses designed to get ambitious business leaders, entrepreneurs and executives communicating with the same brilliance as our world-class actors. I designed a highly practical and interactive workshop called The Radical Entrepreneur that has been massively successful over here in London. The focus has been to radically shift the way entrepreneurs communicate, pitch and present so that their impact rockets. It’s all about developing a person’s spontaneity, charisma, and presence to ensure their potential collaborators and clients take them seriously. With presence and charisma, an entrepreneur can inspire others so much more powerfully.

But the goal is always the same: to get the entrepreneur to become more alive,  present and charismatic when they speak.

Although every masterclass comprises of a group of people, I still work with each person in a very individual way. I recognise that we are all different with our own unique set of limits. So I make absolutely sure I laser in on each individual with the best insights that will work for them and them only. It’s a highly bespoke and radically different way of working, and I trust my instincts because they are firmly rooted in over 20 years of stage experience and personal development. Most workshop facilitators dish out a one-technique-fits-all approach, but I find that lazy and ineffectual. I work with each person in a unique way and apply only the right tools that work for them. It’s harder for me that way, but ultimately much more rewarding as I prefer to genuinely help each person and challenge them to make the personal shifts that will propel them forward.

You have worked with a multitude of entrepreneurial leaders in London, San Francisco and Istanbul, including TED speakers and CEO’s, helping them to embrace their communication brilliance and scale their success. Why is good public speaking so important in the business world?

You cannot underestimate the power of communication. It’s the fuel that rockets your ideas from obscurity to ultimate visibility. It’s the engine that drives your business to the highest domain. And it’s the bedrock of all successful business stories. Communication is the key to massive success.

However, most entrepreneurs and business leaders tend to focus only on their content and words as opposed to how they actually communicate. But countless scientific studies have proven that human beings pay much more attention (over 90%) to another’s body language and physiology than they do to their actual words. We subconsciously listen to a person’s tone of voice, volume, and pace. We take in someone’s quality of eye contact, posture, and gestures. We can even notice something as subtle as their breathing, or lack thereof.  Thus, how you say what you say is EVERYTHING.

I have found that the business world is notoriously flat in its communication delivery. How many times have you listened to a talk or a presentation and wished you were somewhere else? The same endless monotone spiel is rehashed again and again, and ultimately the words loose their impact. Sadly some fantastic entrepreneurs are missing out on some crucial opportunities for business growth because of lousy communication skills.  That is not what I want for the people I work with. My Radical Entrepreneur Masterclass has ultimately one aim: to lift people out of their habitual modes of communicating and into a much more alive and charismatic presence so that others start to take note!

With this in mind, when working with each person I ask myself: Do they sound convincing or flimsy when they speak? Do they come across as confident or do they lack assertiveness in voice and body? Do they rush their words leaving the listener confused, or are they clear, focused and in control of their voice? Do they emotionally connect to their audience or do they disconnect and alienate their listeners?

I ask many more questions than that as there are multitude of ways into each person’s process and a further multitude of tools to tackle each person’s communication issue as it arises.

But the goal is always the same: to get the entrepreneur to become more alive,  present and charismatic when they speak.

What does it take to pitch like a Winner?

I would say the best pitchers are those who are comfortable in their own skin. They walk on stage with ease and a sense of openness. They are grounded, they stand tall and they make eye contact. Their tone of voice is relaxed and their breathing calm. In fact, their breath is supported by their diaphragm and not their chest, the latter often being the case with an anxious speaker.  They can take their time and are confident the audience will listen. They hold the power. And they steer their own ship. They can even pause when they choose in order to give the listeners time to reflect on what’s being said.

When a speaker does all this, the audience feels safe in their capable hands. Investors will more likely buy into the speaker’s credibility and trust what they have to say. Never underestimate the power of your body language. Confident body language can attract so much more success.

The best pitchers also own their “mistakes” knowing that there are in fact no mistakes – only perceived ones. They don’t waste time fretting over how they are doing moment to moment. They simply enter into the flow of their communication, embracing the spontaneity of it all. When the speaker let’s go of this notion of “getting it right” and allows himself to screw up, he ironically finds he never does. Instead, he can enjoy the moment without constantly and anxiously self-monitoring. It is only at the moment that a speaker comes truly alive and powerful.

No amount of clever words and technical speak can make up for a lack of self-confidence on stage. Investors want to be able to buy into YOU and that is hard when you project anything but empowerment. Fortunately, empowered communication is a skill that can be learned. I started off quite shy and unable to utter a single word on stage without going bright red or shaking. Now I can stand on a West End stage and confidently carry myself in front of 100s of people without worrying about the outcome. I trust myself and I trust the moment.

So above all, I would say the biggest single skill you can develop is self-trust moment to moment to ever-evolving moment.

What advice would you give to the entrepreneurs, who will pitch on the stage at The Pitcher 2018?

First off, make absolutely sure you know your content. Ask yourself why you set your business up, what problem you are solving and why it’s so important that you solve this problem now. Ask yourself what is the purpose of your pitch? How much money are you looking for and what exactly will you do with it? Be specific. Investors like clear answers that show you know exactly what you are doing. You want to come across as a viable bet.

Being focused in the moment is when you really shine.

Secondly, ask yourself personally why you are doing all this? Why does it even matter to you? What drives you to get up each morning and commit to this business day in day out, through blood, sweat and tears, and in spite of major odds? When you know yourself, your motivations and what’s driving you, you can connect to your passion. You don’t necessarily need to reveal your deeper objectives before any panel of VC’s, but knowing your personal mission will give you the motivation to speak with so much more commitment and verve than you normally do. Connecting to your personal why will allow you to show your determination and resilience, both crucial qualities to being a successful entrepreneur. An entrepreneur has to be a fighter and you are fighting to win.

I would also advise entrepreneurs to warm up and practice their pitch regularly. Think of the masters of tennis. Just like these champion tennis players have to warm up and practice religiously, so do you if you want to win at pitching. As a tennis player, you can’t expect to go out onto the court and bash out a few winning serves without ever having picked up a racket beforehand. You have to do the hard graft of rehearsing your shots over and over and over. The same with pitching. You need to warm up your breathing and voice so that your human instrument never fails you on stage. You need to learn how to engage your full body if you want to speak with power and sound assertive. And just as champion tennis players need to truly focus before every match, you also need to get into the present moment by focusing your mind before you pitch. The self-doubt may still kick in because you are human. The trick is not to buy into its story of how you suck. And the less you listen to self-doubt’s constant drone, the less you will analyse and monitor the moment. When you do that, you enter your flow and the more dazzling you become.

Being focused in the moment is when you really shine.

Do you have any exciting projects coming up?

I am running a Radical Entrepreneur Masterclass at Launch22 in London this July. Launch22 is an incredible charity start-up incubator, and the mentorship they provide for disadvantaged groups is of a really high standard.

I am also running a further masterclass on pitching for Capital Enterprise here in London which will have me working intensively with a large group of start-up founders on their individual pitches to raise seed investment. There is also a future visit to Istanbul coming up to work with the guys at Stage-Co to help their founders pitch like winners, and of course, I have my private clients, many of whom have big talks and presentations to craft. Hopefully one day I can take my Masterclass events on a global tour. I love travelling and working with new people from all different backgrounds. I just hope I can do this forever.

Thank you, Amy, for the fantastic interview! Keep doing the great job that you do!