Moment 47 - The Power of Good Communication: Nick Jenkins

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Steven Bartlett?

  In terms of skills as well as an entrepreneur, I heard you talk about public speaking being integral to, you did public speaking at university.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  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. 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 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 skills. 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 coherently.

• 0:48Steven Bartlett?

  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 I call, I refer to it as sales. 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, everyone you encounter, I think is a, to some degree, you're trying to sell something and it's usually yourself.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15Steven Bartlett?

  But those that are, you think about how that compounds over 70 years of your life, being good or bad at that one skill.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21Steven Bartlett?

  Will anything change the trajectory of your life more than being like a good salesperson? And that comes from, as you say, from being able to articulate yourself and speak and...

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, and just think coherently and put down a logical argument that people think, yes, okay, I get that, I understand it.

• 1:36Steven Bartlett?

  How does one get better at that?

• 1:38Speaker 01

  I think a lot of that's practice.

• 1:40Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  And I think people 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 they, if they're too nervous about saying something, they just don't say anything at all and then their ideas are never listened to.

• 2:07Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, and then they're devalued in that context.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  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, 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, "Look, this is the model that works and you can prove it in numbers," it is a very convincing thing, particularly for investors.

• 2:33Steven Bartlett?

  Irrefutable, yeah.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Right, if we do this, this is the evidence we've got, that's what will happen. That's very convincing. So there's also being numerate and being able to explain things in numbers, which is...

• 2:45Steven Bartlett?

  Persuasively.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47Steven Bartlett?

  It's so true, you can be orally persuasive, which is anecdotal persuasion, I guess, and then you can be persuasive with numbers, which is a...

• 2:54Speaker 01

  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 the stuff. Occasionally, they don't talk about the numbers, which is quite important. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful presentation and in a 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 realise that now, that just because I happen to see something one way doesn't

• 3:38Speaker 01

  mean to say that everybody else sees it in that way. And you have to understand how people, how people communicate.

• 3:43Steven Bartlett?

  On that point about 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 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, 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 do it on my own, was that I A, 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

• 4:28Steven Bartlett?

  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.