weisman

The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition

April 21, 1998

Jerry Weisman Specializes In Helping CEOs Sell Themselves

By QUENTIN HARDY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. -- Jerry Weisman is one of the top acting coaches of our time. But instead of box-office grosses or Oscars, he measures success in stock prices.

"Think about your audience," he tells Frederick Foley, chief financial officer of EIS International Inc., a telemarketing automation company in Herndon, Va. "Analysts. Institutional investors. Your job is to allay their fears and stoke their greed." Mr. Foley, lips pursed, nods as he works on building his character.

Show on the Road

A dapper 63-year-old former television executive, Mr. Weisman teaches executives how to sell themselves to the investment community. His specialty is the "roadshow," the grueling round of gatherings with investment professionals that precedes an initial public offering. These marathons often involve scores of meetings in dozens of towns over a few short weeks and can be daunting for untutored executives.

"So many MBAs talk like Valley Girls -- they'll say, 'this is like a totally hot IPO,' " Mr. Weisman says. "I don't tell them 'you're terrible.' I talk about opportunity."

Since 1989, Mr. Weisman's one-man company, Power Presentations Ltd. of Santa Clara, Calif., has worked with the heads of more than 250 companies, including Yahoo!, Cisco Systems Inc. and Peoplesoft Inc., on telling their companies' stories.

"I teach them Aristotelian concepts of dramatic structure -- the call to action -- plus a few tricks," Mr. Weisman says. Of course, he adds, "I don't tell them it's Aristotle. Instead of quoting Shakespeare, I quote Henry Ford."

Insider Trading

Four days of basic training costs Mr. Weisman's pupils about $20,000 each. He also frequently insists on the right to buy as many as 1,000 shares of the new offering at the insider price. He says he isn't rich -- "I only bought 250 shares of Yahoo!" he moans. But he does have a taste for hand-tailored suits from Saville Row, silk neckties and Paris vacations.

Fledgling IPOs are happy to ante up. In the last six years the number of publicly traded companies has nearly doubled, to about 11,500, and newcomers struggle for the attention.

Jerry Weisman has helped more than 250 executives hone their sales pitch.

"You learn how to connect in a human way," says Scott Cook, chief executive officer of Intuit Inc., who had sessions with Mr. Weisman before taking his company public in 1993. "A lot of his techniques are to help you overcome your own internal defensiveness when you get asked questions about your baby."

Gary Harmon, chief financial officer of Rambus Inc., a Mountain View, Calif., developer of semiconductor technologies that went public last May, says it can be hard to fire up a group of bored or tired investors and analysts. "Every meeting starts with a guy [in the audience] telling you how many billions he manages," Mr. Harmon says. "They want to see the company's managers, and fire them a few tough questions. It can be real tough."

Mr. Weisman tutored Mr. Harmon to get the clutter out of his presentation and stick to a few key points. "Jerry wanted big gestures, reaching out to the audience," Mr. Harmon recalls. "It feels weird, but it looks good." Another hint: focus on "the three most influential words in the English language -- 'you,' 'money,' and 'save.' "

Be Clear

A key to connecting with an audience, Mr. Weisman says, is simple clarity. "Tell them what you're going to tell them. Tell them. Then tell them what you've told them," he says. "If the story is clear, it shows you can manage your data."

Not everyone is an easy pupil, however. When Mr. Weisman tutored Bill Gates prior to the launch of Windows 3.0 in 1990, Microsoft Inc.'s chairman "challenged everything I said," he recalls. Mr. Weisman also spent two hours coaching Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's excitable executive vice president of sales and support. The session ended, he says, when Mr. Ballmer's knees "started tapping up and down." Microsoft declined to comment.

Mr. Weisman's career has been marked by restlessness too. After graduating from Stanford University, he spent 10 years at CBS, where he produced and directed political and public-affairs programs. Then he wrote a novel in Hollywood and tried producing English-language soap operas in Mexico. In 1988, after three more years of work on an unpublished second novel, he was broke.

That is when Ben Rosen, chairman of Compaq Computer Corp. and an old friend, steered him to a new career. "He kept hearing CEOs of tech companies who either bored him or frightened him, because they were so nervous." Mr. Weisman says. "He saw a golden opportunity, so he backed me, and introduced me to people in Silicon Valley."

The growing demand for speaking skills has now drawn consulting giants such as Coopers & Lybrand and Deloite & Touche LLP into the coaching business. Microsoft's outside public relations firm, Waggener Edstrom, recently started an "articulation boot camp" for executives. Microsoft itself runs a self-help group (known internally as "Shows Are Us") for executives in need of smoothing their presentations.

Help Me, Coach

High-tech companies, whose in-house conversations can sound like computer code to outsiders, are especially in need of help, says Ann Winblad, of Hummer Winbald Venture Partners, a venture capital firm in San Francisco. And these days they are hiring so frantically that not everyone is ready for prime time. "We have zero unemployment, and a lot of executives who are 20 or 25 years old," Ms. Winblad says. "Some of our less socially adept people" can use a coach, she says.

The training session with EIS is fairly typical. Mr. Weisman shows up at a conference center near the San Francisco airport early. (Rule one: Know the room, and make sure the slide projector works.) The EIS executives, who have flown in from around the East Coast, are scheduled to deliver a dozen presentations during a day-and-a-half mock investors' conference.

The problem: EIS must explain a series of bad acquisitions that drove the company's stock to $4.00 a share last year, from $31.63 a share a year earlier. Mr. Weisman counsels "story building" around a "turnaround" theme. Searching for a simple message, the executives fill a whiteboard at the front of the room with headings like "trends," "balance sheet," and "customer support."

Mr. Weisman covers a white board with scrawls, loops and arrows, then he halts.

"Something's missing, guys," he says. After a pained silence he writes "growth strategy" on the board. "If this is a turnaround, you've got to tell me where you're going."

Eventually, the EIS executives agree on a common theme: EIS was fortunate it got beat up when it did, and the experience has helped it adapt to industry changes.

The story roughed out, Mr. Weisman moves on to effective slide show management: eyeball movement, good grammar, icon use. "Less is more," he says, quoting the architect Mies Van der Rohe. In other words: more pictures, fewer balance sheets. And stand on the left side of the stage, with the slides on the right. People read from left to right, so there's a natural flow from the presenter to the slide.

As the session ends, Mr. Weisman says he isn't worried that he will be out of work when the current IPO boom tails off. "I recently went to a Montgomery Securities conference, and spent three days watching guys talk about their companies," he says, shaking his head in wonder. "I'll have work forever."