How we get founders to stop sounding like a press release

Put a camera in front of a founder and something strange happens. A person who just told you a great story over coffee starts reciting their homepage. Every sentence gets longer. Words like leverage and synergy appear from nowhere. It is not a talent problem. It is a prep problem.

The instinct is to write a script. Scripts make it worse. Now the founder is doing two jobs at once, remembering lines and trying to seem natural, and failing at both. What works is the opposite: no script, better questions.

What we do differently

Before the shoot we have a real conversation, off camera, about the thing they know best. Somewhere in that conversation they say the line. They always do. Our job on shoot day is to ask the question that gets them back to it, then stay out of the way.

On set, we keep the room small. Every extra person watching adds ten percent more stiffness. We roll early, before they think we have started, because the warm-up take is often the best one. And we ask the same important question twice, spaced apart, because the second answer is shorter and sharper every time.

The result is an executive who sounds like a smart person talking, which is the entire point. People trust people. Nobody has ever trusted a press release read aloud.