‘When you read a book… it’s like when you watch a TV show or go to the theatre; you don’t think about all of the work that went in behind the scenes.’
I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t claim any of the following distinctions before I turned 26: flying a spaceship, losing a million dollars, being fired by Simon Cowell or dodging paparazzi.
Dominic Colenso, author of Cut-Through, ticked off all of these in the course of his acting career. Life is a little calmer now that he’s translated his acting skills into a unique framework for effective business communication, helping leaders and teams pitch and present with impact.
It turns out that rehearsing for a stage role has many parallels with preparing a business pitch, and even with writing a business book – not just delivering a message, but discovering the purpose, distilling the essence, drilling and debriefing repeatedly to get feedback on and refine the text.
And if you’ve been making excuses as to why now isn’t the right time to get started, prepare to have them blown away…
Cut-Through site: https://www.cut-throughbook.com/
Dominic’s site: https://www.dominiccolenso.com/
Dominic on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominiccolenso/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: www.proposalchallenge.com
Alison Jones: By the time he was 26, Dominic Colenso had flown a spaceship, lost a million dollars, and been fired by Simon Cowell. Now he empowers businesses, sales teams, and leaders around the world to increase the impact of their communication and perform at their best under pressure.
His YouTube videos on communication skills have racked up over two and a half million views, and he’s the author of Cut Through: The Pitch and Presentation Playbook. So first of all, welcome Dominic.
Dominic Colenso: Thank you for having me.
Alison Jones: It is quite the cv, isn’t it? You’re going to have to talk us through that before we go any further.
Dominic Colenso: Yes, so my career began as a jobing actor, or probably began before that in drama school, you know, learning my craft and trying to cut a way for myself in an industry that is incredibly competitive. You know, when I auditioned for the place at drama school, I think there were about two and a half thousand people auditioning for 30 spaces.
So the odds are pretty much sort of stacked against you. And then you get out into the industry and you walk into every audition and it’s full of people that look exactly like you. But I was very lucky early on in, within about three or four months of leaving drama school, I managed to land the part of Virgil Tracy in the Hollywood remake of Thunderbirds.
So I have flown a spaceship. And I’ve also been chased by paparazzi and had to sign autographs on the red carpet and and all of that madness. And
Alison Jones: Oh, so dull. Yes, no, I, I find that really tedious myself.
Dominic Colenso: Oh, Yes. I, being chased is, is a bit of…
Alison Jones: …oh, such a bummer.
Dominic Colenso: Trying to get out of hotel rooms when, you know, people… or through the front door of a hotel and you can’t, and you have to go out the kitchen, is a very weird experience, because you go from being no one to someone overnight, and then you go back to being no one again. Which is also the, the kind of experience I had. So we were, we were signed up for a three movie deal and the third movie was going to be a million dollar contract. It was all signed and delivered. And unfortunately, the box office numbers for the first film in the US just weren’t high enough. So about three months after the movie came out, we got final confirmation that the final check was not going to be in the post. And I had to say goodbye to, yes, what was… I hadn’t spent it, but mentally I’d, I’d imagined it, you…
Alison Jones: Yes, that is, that’s hard to take. And Simon Cowell?
Dominic Colenso: Simon Cowell was the creative consultant on a job that I did for ITV called Rock Rivals. And I was cast as the lead. It was a kind of fictional version of the X Factor being made by the people that made Footballers’ Wives, so, you know, very serious television. And Simon was watching the, the rushes about three or four weeks after we’d actually started filming and decided that I didn’t look right for the part. And as Simon Cowell is Simon Cowell, and I’m Dominic Colenso, he, he won in the battle with the producers and they paid me out my contract and and sent me home.
So I was living in Dublin, working in Dublin, at the time we were shooting out there, and I got this phone call saying, ‘I’m really sorry, but we’re, we’re going to put you on the next flight.’ And I just had to kind of close the curtains, cry to myself for a little bit, and then get out of the apartment and come home. So it’s a, a profession that is full of highs and lows. High highs, low lows, and I’ve tried to take…
it is brutal.
Yes. But I’ve tried to take some of that experience into what I do now in terms of helping people deal with high pressure situations, which are, you know, often pitches and presentations.
Alison Jones: Well, thank you for that beautiful segue. We’ll just make the point that Simon Cowell is properly off the Christmas card list and we’ll move on. Tell us, I mean, how do you sort of take all that experience and put it into something that, that those of us who don’t have to worry about leaving hotels at the front door, you know what did you see…
‘actually, I’ve got something here that’s going to be useful in the corporate world.’ Tell, talk us through that sort of transmutation of ideas.
Dominic Colenso: Yes. So the, the first thing that I did was I was asked by someone if I could help with storytelling, and I, was not only an actor, but I also was a director and I taught at several of the big drama schools in London. So I taught at RADA and Drama Centre and Guilford School of Acting. And what I noticed very quickly, you know, being plunged into a small meeting room with a team and not much of a plan, that actually the toolkit that actors use are really applicable for people in the business world.
The idea of presence, the idea of energy, the idea of structure and clarity and a beginning, a middle, and end. They sound really basic, but I, I’ve been working with businesses for 15 years now and it’s amazing how often you’ll sit in, in a meeting and go like, I have no idea where I am right now. I’m, I’m so lost in this narrative. So to be able to think like an actor, think like a director, think like a writer, and help you structure your message in that way became a really exciting thing for me to do. And I kind of got the bug because I love helping people and this was something that I could really tangibly do with a toolkit that I, you know, worked really hard with and studied really deeply in.
But to put it into a different context was a real thrill.
Alison Jones: And when you are trying to communicate that to executives, presumably the people who bring you in know that they need the help, but presumably you’re also working with people who didn’t make the decision to bring you in and think that they don’t really need that kind of help. When, as you work with them, what’s the kind of aha moment for people?
When do they go, oh, I see. I get how this is useful, typically?
Dominic Colenso: I think one fear that people have is like, oh God, they’re going to make me pretend to be a tree. Or, you know, there’s going to be some, like, some weird, you know, acting exercise and that’s absolutely not my approach. So the way that I think about translating the acting toolkit into the boardroom or into the, you know, the, the sales meeting is very practical, is very framework based.
And I think I also model what I’m writing about and what I’m talking about. So people see me stood at the front of the room and kind of go, ah, right, okay. He’s not over the top, but he is really energized. He’s not delivering a broadcast. This feels like a dialogue. And they, they start to see that with very simple tweaks, you know, sometimes just as simple as just taking up a little bit more space. And for those of you who are listening, I’ve just tried to sit up through my spine and you know, imagine that I’ve got a piece of string pulling me up from the crown on my head all of a sudden.
Alison Jones: Virgil Tracy moment.
Dominic Colenso: Yes, there we go. Puppet on a string. But it’s amazing what difference just some of those tiny tweaks make to the way that people come across.
Alison Jones: Well, you mentioned the framework. For people who haven’t yet read the book, do, it’s extremely good. Talk us through the framework.
Dominic Colenso: So when I started really thinking about how to not only deliver but craft and rehearse a pitch or a presentation that lands for the audience, it, it became apparent that there were a number of stages that people needed to go through.
The one that people probably miss out or jump is the first one, which is Discover, and that’s really about understanding the big picture. Too often people just open up PowerPoint and start dumping in slides you know, essentially writing their script into bullet points. And what we want to do is we want to stop and we want to understand the the why. Why are we giving this talk or pitch in the first place? Who are the audience? What’s the competition? All all of those 30,000 foot questions that allow us then to really start to focus more practically and more insightfully on actually answering the question that we’re being asked.
So once we’ve gone through Discover, we move to Distil, and that’s now saying, okay, there’s all of this that I possibly could say, but what must I say in this moment? What can leave itself on the cutting room floor, you know, be, be part of the sequel, but doesn’t need to be with us in, in that moment? Once we’ve distilled the messaging down, then we can start to Design, which is the third step in the process. And that’s not just about slides, that’s about designing the narrative, crafting the story, really putting everything together.
And in the book I share lots of different frameworks for different approaches, because not all pitches or presentations are created equal. Some will be a town hall to a familiar audience, others will be a pure sales pitch. It might be a product update or a demo. And all of these things require a slightly different approach. But the overall framework and the way of thinking about it stands.
Once you’ve designed it, then you’ve got to Drill it. If you don’t actually rehearse, if you don’t get it into your body, if you don’t understand what it feels like to speak the words aloud, unfortunately, when you do for the first time in front of a real audience, it will all come crashing down. So there are strategies that actors use and that I share in the book to really help smooth that rehearsal process so that it’s not taking, you know, a million years to, to get to a point where you feel confident and comfortable with it, but that it really is something that you feel very, you know, secure in when you come to speak.
Step five is Deliver. So now finally we’re saying the words aloud, and that’s where you really need to get to grips with some of the warmup techniques and the energy techniques and the eye contact and all of that kind of good stuff that actors are so good at.
And then the final step is Debrief, where we employ continuous improvement and learning and start to think, what can I take from that experience, however well it went, even if it was fantastic, what would I change next time? And if it was a disaster, what’s that going to teach me about how I approach the next one? So that’s the model.
Alison Jones: Brilliant. And what I find really, and since I sort of first met you and discovered this, this framework and so on, is that Deliver, I think is the one that we all just go, immediately go to, oh, I have to say something, and, and straight to, you know, point and. And it’s like watching an actor on stage and thinking that’s it, like there was no understanding of the character. There was no rehearsing. They just, and of course that doesn’t happen. It isn’t like that. So I think getting that really broad picture and that parallel to the process of, of delivering as an actor, and particularly that Debrief. I mean, how many leaders do we know that never even think of that? So important.
Dominic Colenso: Yes, I mean, as an, as an actor in a, you know, show in the West End, you’d get notes, you know, pretty much every night there’s, there’s this continuous debrief. It is never one and done. You can be six months, a year into the show and, and someone’s still coming in and tweaking the choreography and or, you know, changing the lighting cue because it doesn’t quite work or it would look better there.
And I think we really forget that in a business context, that there is a constant opportunity to, to be learning and refining what we do. But you have to jump on it in the moment, because we’re so busy that if you wait three weeks and try and remember how it went, it’s gone.
Alison Jones: Yes. Brilliant. You are very used to standing in front of a room full of people and talking… I was going to say, talking at them. That sounds really rude. You’re talking with them, talking to them, presenting, all that stuff. Did any of that help at all when you sat down to write a book? Just you and the page?
Dominic Colenso: There is a very different process to putting words on a page than speaking them aloud. But what did help was that I understood my tone of voice, so I knew how I wanted to communicate ideas and the vernacular and some of the stories that I might use to illustrate some of those points. So I really hope that when people read the book, it feels like they’re in conversation with me.
It shouldn’t feel like an academic text. It should feel like listening to this podcast and, you know, having your questions answered.
Alison Jones: What surprised you about the writing? Is this, this is your first book? No, it’s not…
Dominic Colenso: …no…
Alison Jones: …it’s not your first, it’s your second book. So what is it about, what is it about writing that appeals to you and, and is there anything that you don’t love so much?
Dominic Colenso: So what what surprised me about writing the second book was how much I’d forgotten about how painful writing the first book was.
Alison Jones: It’s a bit like childbirth.
Dominic Colenso: Yes, absolutely. So I’d kind of blocked some of that out. I found a real thrill in discovering the structure and, yes, I am a big picture person. So creating the framework and seeing how the ideas fit together and where the stand and deliver exercises might be and all of that sort of stuff was really thrilling.
Getting down to the dotting the i’s and, and crossing the T’s and doing those final revisions was where I had to bring all of the resilience that I’ve ever kind of had and worked on, and try and focus it and, and channel it into those moments.
Because I think for many people, you, when you read a book, you don’t think about… it’s like when you watch a TV show or, or go to the theater, you don’t think about all of the work that went in behind the scenes. You kind of imagine somehow misguidedly that those words just sprang onto the page, straight out of the author’s brain, fully formed.
So that revision process was challenging but vital, and I’m so glad I did, and I’m so glad I asked for feedback and I’m so glad that I, you know, spent time really interrogating and re interrogating the text to leave something that is, you know, a as good as it could be. I’m sure there would always be things that I’d want to change, but I’m really proud of where it is right now.
Alison Jones: And I do think that that is encouraging. If anybody’s listening and they’re sort of wrestling with their book at the moment, it’s very easy to compare your sort of scrappy manuscript with the polished books out there. But they didn’t, just, as you say, they didn’t form that way on the page. They went through the exact process you’re going through right now.
And then after, even after you deliver it, there’s the copy-editing and the proofreading and the typesetting, all the good stuff that goes on to make it look beautiful on the page. Yes. You are a proposal challenge winner, aren’t you? Do you want to just share with us, so you took part in the 10 day business book proposal challenge, and then in that last live in the group, I said the winner is Dominic Colenso.
How… tell us, talk us through that. What was that like? Was there a kind of Yay! Oh, no… moment?
Dominic Colenso: A bit of both. I, I signed up to the proposal challenge at like the absolute worst moment. So this is my encouragement to anyone that’s going, oh, I don’t have time for this. It was my daughter’s first week of school my wife was away on a silent retreat, I had about 400 things that I was needing to deliver in the business in that week.
And I just kind of went, I’m going to do this anyway. And I madly cooked dinner and got Nell to bed and then I’d sit down each night and do the, do the work. But what was fabulous about that experience was that it, just in a very short time allowed me to clarify my thinking. So I, I’d had disparate ideas, but because of the intensity of that experience I was able to, to really, to use my word, distil it down and be really kind of comfortable with the outline and the pitch for the book. And then of course it was a massive thrill to win it. And then the reality set in that I actually had to go away and write it.
Alison Jones: Damn it. Yes. And I’m very glad you did. So I always ask my guests this, but I’m, I think it’s really interesting, given what you’ve said about finding out you had to write the damn thing, you know, with so little time and, and, and so on, what would be your best tip for somebody who finds themself in that situation? They know they’ve got a book in them. They know they want to write it, but oh my goodness, there’s so much going on in life.
Dominic Colenso: I think that the approach has to be, you know, start at the end and, and work backwards, which might be really, you know, obvious. But, you’ve got to say, okay, well if I’m going to deliver it on this date, what needs to happen before? And it you, if it’s not your full-time job, which for the vast majority of people listening to this, it won’t be, you’ve got to work out where you can fit that stuff in.
But the other thing that I would absolutely say is, don’t forget to book your holidays. I was really, I was really kind of determined that I was also going to have moments of family life. There were lots of missed bedtime stories and late nights in the office, but I did manage to go away on our summer holiday and not pick up the manuscript and all of that sort of thing.
So I think that’s really important because it’d be remiss of me to pretend that you can do it with a degree of balance, or certainly I couldn’t, but you can carve out those important moments for yourself and that was vital for me.
Alison Jones: I think it’s important for you as a person, but it’s also really important for the book. It’s why we always say to people when you’ve given us the beta draft for the development editor to review, just go away. Put it down, don’t look at it, because then you come back with fresh eyes and that’s, that’s really important.
You can get to the point where you just can’t see it anymore because you’re too close. Your point about starting with the end in mind as well, I think there’s a double meaning to that because yes, you’ve got to sort of think, what are the stages and how do I, what does that mean for now? But like we start the proposal challenge, as, you know, thinking about the reader, and that’s thinking about what the experience is going to be for the reader of this book. That’s your North star throughout, isn’t it? That’s where you start.
Dominic Colenso: Yes. And also you’ve got to plot in, you know, what comes next because the published date is not the end of the journey by any stretch of the imagination. You know, if anything, it’s like day one. because now you want to get it out there into the world and you want it to have an additional life.
And I think there, the, the books that just, you know, start the first day of sales with a million copies are very, very few and far between and, and normally, you know, financed by very big publishing houses and celebrities. But for those of us that are writing business books, I, I think then it becomes about the strategy for how you are going to use it to share the message that you want to share with the world.
Alison Jones: And we were just talking off camera about the fact that you are deep in the throes of running your webinars and building your mailing list and all that really good promotional stuff that you have to do to create the market for the book. So, maybe you want to just, what have you found most useful in that?
Dominic Colenso: It’s huge. I mean, I, I’ve been, we’re we’re what, two working days away from launch now? So this is the final furlong of that chapter. But there’s a huge amount that’s been going on in the background in terms of, you know, building a list. In terms of engaging with clients and seeing if I can get them to allow me to run sessions for their, their teams open webinars, speaking engagements.
So I’ve had two big you know, stage speaking gigs in the last couple of weeks that were directly designed to help generate that interest and that awareness because you’re competing with so much noise. I mean, the irony of a book called Cut Through, it needs to cut through. People to actually see it, otherwise it will just end up, you know, collecting dust on the Waterstones bookshelves.
Alison Jones: And it was lovely actually. I remember you did a little sort of trip to Waterstones and, oh, there’s my book, at the end of the author day, which is really, as we’re speaking, it hasn’t officially been published, but it was out in the wild…
Dominic Colenso: it was, it was, that’s probably, you know, because you, you go on this emotional journey and there are those, the highs and lows and that was just one of the most exciting moments for me was kind of, you know, accidentally stumbling across it when it, when it shouldn’t have even been there, you know, unless you are, you know, a multimillion selling author, then they don’t embargo the books. But some, somehow this, these copies had made it onto the shelf and to see them there was just like, wow. It’s here. It’s arrived.
Alison Jones: And I love that you jumped on that moment and signed them. So now they can’t return them. So that’s brilliant. Well done. They’ve got ‘signed by the author’ stickers on and everything, which is terrific. Always do that.
Dominic Colenso: Absolutely Yes.
Alison Jones: Author tips.
Dominic Colenso: Yes.
Alison Jones: Brilliant. We’ve talked about your book of course, but I would also like you to recommend us another book. What have you read that you’ve found particularly useful or interesting or you’d like to recommend?
Dominic Colenso: So my go-to book for marketing and since we’re talking about launching and getting ideas out into the world, is Oversubscribed by Daniel Priestly. I’m a big fan of Dan. Dan was very kind to give an endorsement to my book. And I just love the way he thinks about how to engage an audience and create that tension between supply and demand.
Alison Jones: Yes, he’s a big fan of writing a book as well, so…
Dominic Colenso: …yes, he is…
Alison Jones: …can’t fault his thinking. Yes. Great recommendation. Thank you. And Dominic, if people want to find out more about you, more about Cut-Through, more about your YouTube stuff, where should they go?
Dominic Colenso: So two websites to visit. If you want more information about the book, then head on over to cut-throughbook.com and to see more about me and my speaking, training, and coaching, head over to dominiccolenso.com too. And I’m on LinkedIn as well, if you’d like to connect with me there.
Alison Jones: With a nicely distinctive name, which always makes me a little bit jealous, but… yes. Marvelous. Great. I’ll put those links up on the show notes at extraordinarybusinessbooks.com along with the transcript of this conversation, the link to the book and everything. But thank you so much for your time today, Dominic.
I did just want to spend the whole time talking to you about the spaceship and Simon Cowell, but we, we got some actual really useful stuff for the people there, so, you know, well, done us.
Dominic Colenso: Brilliant. Thanks for having me.
