Today I am chatting with Beth Noymer Levine. Coaching people to use their brains before their mouths is the sole focus of Beth’s work at SmartMouth Communications. After more than a decade in PR, IR, and Corporate Communications in New York and Atlanta, Beth established SmartMouth in Salt Lake City in 2005 to offer Speaker Coaching, Presentation Skills Training, Media Readiness™ Training, and related services.
This podcast series is hosted by Patricia Kathleen and Wilde Agency Media. This series is a platform for women, female-identified, & non-binary individuals to share their professional stories and personal narrative as it relates to their story. This podcast is designed to hold a space for all individuals to learn from their counterparts regardless of age, status, or industry.
TRANSCRIPTION
*Please note, this is an automated transcription please excuse any typos or errors
[00:00:06] Hi, my name is Patricia Kathleen, and this podcast series contains interviews I conduct with women. Female identified and non binary individuals regarding their professional stories and personal narrative. This podcast is designed to hold a space for all individuals to learn from their counterparts regardless of age status for industry. We aim to contribute to the evolving global dialog surrounding underrepresented figures in all industries across the USA and abroad. If you're enjoying this podcast, be sure to check out our subsequent series that dove deep into specific areas such as Vegan life, fasting and roundtable topics. They can be found via our Web site. Patricia Kathleen .COM, where you can also join our newsletter. You can also subscribe to all of our series on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Pod Bean and YouTube. Thanks for listening. Now let's start the conversation. Hi, everyone, and welcome back. I am your host, Patricia.
[00:01:07] And today I am sitting down with best Beth Noymer Levine. She is the founder and principal at Smart Mouth Communications. You can find out more online at w w w dot smart mouth communications dot com. Welcome Beth.
[00:01:22] Thank you, Patricia. It's good to be there.
[00:01:24] Yes, absolutely. I'm excited to kind of climb through what you've done. I just discovered that both of us have had a tenure in Salt Lake City, Utah. So I'm excited to get into that for everyone listening. I will read a bio on Beth. But before doing that, a quick trajectory of today's podcast, the roadmap, if you will. It's going to follow the same as all of us in this series. Namely, we will look at unpacking Beth's academic background and early professional life before turning our efforts towards and packing smart mouth communications and other current endeavors that Beth has going on. She's got an IOS and Android app I'd like to look at, as well as a suite of communications and presentation skill courses offered. And then we'll turn our efforts towards looking at goals that best may have for the next one to three years regarding her companies and work endeavors. And we'll wrap everything up with advice that Beth has for those of you who are either looking to get involved in what she's doing or perhaps emulate some of her career success. A quick bio on Beth before I start peppering her with questions. Coaching people to use their brains before their mouth is the sole focus of Beth Levine's work as smart mouth communications. After more than a decade in P.I. and PR I. R and corporate communications in New York and Atlanta. Beth established Smart Mouth in Salt Lake City in 2005 to offer speaker coaching, presentation, skills training, media readiness training and related services. Beth is the author of the award winning book Jock Talk Five Communication Principles for Leaders, as exemplified by Legends of the Sports World. She is also the creator of the IOS app, as well as the now Android app Smart Mouth Community, Smart Mouth, public speaking tool kit and a suite of communication and presentation skills courses offered online through open sesame, dot com and g o one dot com. Beth has lectured and taught at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and the University of Utah and New York University in 2015. Beth was one of Utah Business magazine's 30 women to watch. She has been featured in Forbes Harvard Business Review, the BBC, The Wall Street Journal and is a regular contributor to Forbes.com. So, Beth, that's fantastic. I know you join a huge legendary list of people we've actually spoken to that contributes regularly to Forbes.com. And I love that. I love everything that you're doing right now, too. But before we get into unpacking some of that, I'm wondering if you can draw us just a quick platform of what your academic life and early professional life that brought you to smart mouth communications was like.
[00:04:03] OK, thanks for Tricia. Yeah. So I actually have a degree in economics with a minor in German, and I got that at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania and went to work in New York right after college. And a little known story is that my very first colleague in New York was a guy named Barack Obama. And we shared an office and went over Wang Computer Terminal and the telephone, the Wang computer terminal actually dates us. Wait a minute. Because they they owned the market and then just faded out quickly. And at the time, I thought I wanted to be a writer and editor. And that's what Barack and I were doing. We were working for a company called Business International, but was a research publishing and consulting firm for multinational corporations. You know, it's a sort of something I don't share often, but it's sort of a fun little tidbit. And it allowed me to have a real life lesson for my kids when I was raising them to say, you really need to be nice to everyone because you never know who's gonna be the leader of the free world. Right. So and then I eventually worked my way in New York to different communications roles on Wall Street. So I did public relations for financial institutions and I did investor relations also for financial institutions and other publicly traded companies. And it was during those years when I was very young and. Pairing investment bankers, their corporate clients and people who are very smart and successful for interviews with the media, presentations in front of investors. And I remember feeling like it was second nature to me. But it seemed to be so appreciated by them and they couldn't figure out find their way through a paper bag to a clear and concise message. And I remember making a note to self that this by itself could be a business someday. So that's sort of the. Germ of where the idea for Smart Mouth came from was those guys on Wall Street, which were very exciting days because it was the 80s and there were deals galore and initial public offerings and hostile takeovers and all kinds of mergers and acquisitions and things going on. It was quite, quite a time.
[00:07:04] Yeah, very changing time. Lot of lawsuits coming up. Lot of interesting things happening, particularly on Wall Street.
[00:07:12] I'm interested in this idea of like refining one's message, because I do think that that started to take off, particularly as people started to re understand the idea of branding, which is a term I don't feel like was really heavily discussed outside of the, you know, Madison Avenue moment in the mainstream until about the early 90s and then not even heavily until the early aughts. It sounds like you were there as this concept of branding and, you know, refining one's message and kind of really honing in on the clarity and that reaching into branding was right when you were there. Do you feel like you were on the beginning of understanding what is now perceived as branding, even as personal branding or things like that, as you were doing these kinds of techniques and systems of helping people train their media professionals?
[00:08:05] That's such an interesting question and why we could go into a very deep dove. One of the interesting things that I want to share is that when I first started Smart Mouth. Fifteen years ago, I and I would train either professional athletes or Olympians. It was always a media training and it was geared toward training them to speak to the traditional media report. Television reporters, newspaper reporters in the last. I'm going to say it's been at least six years or more since I've done that with athletes. I worked with a lot of Olympic athletes. I have a ton of corporate clients also. But with the athletes in particular who are, you know, young and ambitious, I've turned that traditional media training session into a personal branding session because they are responsible for most of their own media coverage through social media. And so, you know, I've I've I've sort of come to the two thousand tens plus to answer your question that. Yes, very much so. It is a branding thing. If I were to look back at the messaging we did in the 80s and the early 90s, I would say that, you know, it's funny. Branding was a term on Madison Avenue at the time. And the the political arena version of that was spin. And I can't remember the guy's name, but he was a press secretary for Bill Clinton. And he called spin a self-interested selection of facts. And so to that extent, we were engaging in spin on Wall Street for sure. And then, yes, I think all of that morphed into branding. And for a very long time, I've been telling clients these messages that we're creating for you. These are your verbal. This is your verbal branding. So the simple answer to your question is yes, but it's been a morphing and an evolution over time and to the point where I don't bother with media training anymore. I just work on personal branding with one on one clients.
[00:10:42] Yeah. Well, and that's I mean, that's was trained into the industry. I'm not sure the industry had had a say in that.
[00:10:49] You know, the advent of social media exaggerates, trumped every part of it. Doesn't matter what, you know, damage control campaign you were putting out there. So I think something we all engaged in and I'm wondering. So you launched in 2005. You kind of mentioned the beginning of smart mouth communications. I'm wondering if you can walk us through some of the nuts and bolts of the beginning times. Were you the sole founder? Did you take investment? Did you bootstrap? How was the first year of growth? I know that the the platforms that you changed on, as you just described, took on this think life and change. But in the beginning times, what were the logistics like?
[00:11:28] So the beginning of Smart Mouth was what I thought was just my latest harebrained idea in a long string of hair brained ideas. I was it was 2005. I had moved from the East Coast where I had established myself personally and career wise for my entire life. I had moved from Atlanta to Salt Lake City in nineteen ninety eight. So 2005 was seven ish years later. And I had been at at home with my children for about. I'm going to say 10 years, give or take a year or so, so smart mouth was actually my career reentry strategy from motherhood.
[00:12:23] And it worked.
[00:12:25] And I was doing it in a city where I had no network, no relationships professionally, no relationships from school or college or anything. I knew some parents through Little League brat preschool classes and things like that. So in that regard, it was incredibly challenging. And I you know, I have never forgotten that there were a couple of dads that I knew through Little League and basketball for my son, who is my oldest, who heard that I had started this business and gave me a shot. And one of them was the president of the Utah Jazz, the NBA team at the time.
[00:13:22] And I you know, we've often talked.
[00:13:26] I've often said to him, I don't know why or how you gave me a chance. I was just a mom in the stands with little kids running around. And. And another guy was in advertising and had a lot of clients. And they were two of my earliest clients. So this pardon me, a big fish for our first client. Yes. Well, my actually my very first big client was the U.S. ski team. And right when I started the smart mouth, I saw that they had put out an RFP for somebody to do media training for the athletes. And but I don't think these other guys knew that I had done that. But I was competing. I was invited to make a presentation to the executive committee and the board to get this bid. And I was competing with a worldwide public relations firm and a woman in North Carolina who had decades of media training experience with athletes alone. And I knew that I couldn't bring in PowerPoint that showed anything because I had nothing. So what I did instead to pitch the business and myself to the executive committee and board was I decided to go in there and give them the training that I would give to the athletes. So I sold myself by offering them the experience that they would be buying. And I got the business. So they were actually my first big client.
[00:15:18] That's excellent. It's a clever take on it as well. You know, kind of shaking things up like that. I remember in my youth, prior to photography and film, working for a billion dollar architectural firm in San Francisco. And going into pitches that, you know, for basic city scaping, essentially these Australian dollar projects. And. And my boss would say flip off or flip on the lights because everyone was running these power points. Right. Exactly. And he would say, turn on the lights. And I would turn on the lights. And it was just this this kind of you know, you had this kind of look at me moment and it shocked everyone else. But I, I tell you, it worked so many times. It's ridiculous to get tunes of billions of dollars. And so I like this kind of leg, you know. Quick attention getting devices that kind of flip people into thinking like that's clever in the consideration that it does, it takes a lot of uniqueness.
[00:16:16] Well, at the time, it was sort of more out of desperation, but it turned out to be a stroke of genius. And I continued to do it after that because it they were just floored, right. That the lights were on and they were being asked to do things. Yeah. And so I have used it since. And it. Yeah. So it turned out to be you know, one of those necessity is the mother of invention type of moments.
[00:16:43] Absolutely. That in bravery. I'm wondering when you so you started out you've had this growth with how you advise your clients as trends to shift mainly into this personal branding, which takes place largely in social media as it does the world over, I think, for a lot of that majority of clients anyway. People in different industries and wondering the ethos of the company, did that change the philosophy behind it? I'm always interested in people in communications companies because the advent of the social media platform and things like that did not really no one really saw it coming, certainly not the utility and the impact that it would happen so quickly within the five years from the aughts to 2005 to 2010. But I'm wondering if your company and the ethos behind it changed or did you have a really you fine tune? That's what you do for your clients, right? You funnel out and siphon out these very tinctures, moments of brand and things like that. You yourself for smart mouth communications. Did you have a very crystallized brand and did that have to change with the change of your platform?
[00:17:48] So I would say if this is an interesting question, because I've reflected on it especially lately, when I think I for my business and most people for their businesses are considering pivoting. Right. Because we've got such a an unusual set of circumstances in front of us. I would say that for the first five years of smart mouth. I was probably 70 doing 70 percent media training, and then that morphed into personal branding and 30 percent presentation skills training or public speaking coaching, and the coaching is usually done one on one. And the presentation skills training is usually done in groups and. After the first five years, and I think this does coincide with exactly what you were saying about the onset of social media and how it literally swooped in and took over, there were far fewer requests for media training. Far fewer at all. Or personal branding and way more requests for. Please help our people be concise. Please help them stay on point. Please help them know what a mess, how to use it. And so the evolution became that the presentation skills training I was doing became about 70 percent of the business and media training became more 30 percent, with adding still sandwiched in the middle. When branding is always part of it, because even when a client, an individual client and I coach on the C suite level and then presentation skills training for the groups is done at a usually a medium to high level within the company. But they'll come to me with what they think are their messaging platforms or or a series of messages. And I do challenge that. You know that as a as just an anecdote to digress for a second, when I have worked with a nonprofit executive who says one of their messages is we make a difference. I literally go berserk on them. If you have a nonprofit and that's the best you can say and the best you can do, which is the most trite commonly and I would say overused statement if they don't have something better to describe their work and the difference their work makes than, you know, we've got all we've really got to dig in and do better. But so I do I poke and prod a lot. I don't let people get away with trite Kofman or really used phrases and message points.
[00:21:05] Yeah, well, and hence their clarity of message, hopefully yielding in something to their bottom line.
[00:21:12] I'm wondering, with the IRS and Android app, Smart Mouth public speaking tool kit, can you kind of unpack that or enumerate the utility of it or what it is for everyone listening? And also, when did it come to be in existence with your company?
[00:21:27] OK. I would love to unpack it because I think it's probably for a and I do still charge for it. It's a dollar ninety nine in the Google Play store. And also I saw the app is a combination of lessons, kind of like how there's a how to section but and various tips and strategies and ideas, everything from how you want to organize your thoughts on your content to how to manage your nerves. But it's the functionality of the app that really is a standout. And believe it or not, it was built about seven or eight years ago. I mean, this is actually an old app. But a couple of highlights of the functionality are that you can go in to what's called the speech builder section and. Using the prompts and dropdown buttons, you fill in the blanks to answer this series of questions, and it produces the outline for a presentation. And the outline is based on some proprietary methodology that we've developed at Smart Mouth Communications. And it's how to organize your thoughts and your material in a way that work for people's attention spans and their ability to retain and which is, I think, something that is all too often forgotten by speakers, presenters. They you know, they're told what the topic is. They're invited into the room. They're the subject matter expert. And yay! They just go about sharing their expertize without really thinking about the audience. It could be the 10 millionth time the speaker has gone over this material, but it's usually the first time the audience is hearing it. And so this idea of really knowing how to shape and present your material in a way that works for the audience is absolutely key. And that's the smart mouth methodology. And so this speech builder inside the app, like literally prompts the user to create an outline that they can then email to themselves. They can duplicate it. And so that they can adapt it for a different audience. There are all kinds of functions within that. And the outline just sets them on their way to a great speech or great presentation.
[00:24:22] Yeah, it's amazing. I think that there are a lot of this doesn't get discussed in us. Everyone talks about in communications and at building in particular, how it's burned and dead and gone in two years. However, like good code or good theory and evergreen content sticks around. And it sounds like that's what this is. Because even though the platforms have advanced and things have come out and the new darlings of the platforms, those change daily. Don't get me started on the new trends. Instagram's out. Pinterest is in like everybody's got. These continue to do. And within that kind of hyper frenetic community. You still have these evergreen content truth, which is you still need concise, accurate, eloquent speech building and things like that. And so things like this would make sense to stay around. It sounds fascinating to I can't wait to get on and buy it.
[00:25:11] Blowing is something that I know it actually sort of is. You know, it's funny because I so I built it about I'm going to say it was seven or eight years ago it came out and I was thinking it would be great. I used it with client groups. I had them loaded on their phones. And and then eventually I had to build the Google wanted to my developers at the time when we first started, said to me, oh, gosh, no one's going to no one uses an ad for it. Well, that's not entirely true. So we build out the Google version. But the interesting thing was I sort of just let it do its thing. You know, I would occasionally recommend it to a client group to buy if they wanted to do there. We do a lot of interactive exercises if they want us to do it. Me up. And then one day, about a year, year and a half ago, I realized, oh, my gosh, I get money deposited into the Smart Money account monthly from Apple and Google. This is this thing has legs. This has been years. This has legs.
[00:26:28] So there have been a variety of kind of startups that I've.
[00:26:36] Sort of explored whether or not they could use the intellectual property and build it out further, and that's an that's an exploration.
[00:26:45] I'm still in no way will everyone. You heard it here. Beth is exploring acquisition of some sort.
[00:26:50] So, um, you know, allow me to be the matchmaker that facilitates that contact. Smart mouth communications, if you're looking for that tech, which everybody should be. That's such a beautiful addition to anyone in that space, in branding and in personal branding development or even higher level, you know, corporate branding development. It could be modified towards so many different sectors.
[00:27:15] I'm not one of the ideas. What started it for me was I thought, you know, in something like Slack or teams, they should have a presentation collaboration tool and this would be the intellectual property for that. So I went to a good client of mine. That's a very large West Coast venture capital firm. And I said, what do you think? And he said to me. I think you're not even a rounding error and you're better off looking for something that's newer starting out that really could use the, you know, the head start on your intellectual property. So gentle attached to it. I. I know. I love honesty, though. So it was OK.
[00:28:06] I do too. Yeah, I do too. Well, honesty can be laced with fire or bunnies, as my grandmother always said. You know, it depends on how you want to package it. I'm wondering the suite of communications and presentation skills and the courses that you offer. I'm assuming those are online. And then I wonder if they were kind of born out of the app because it sounds like it's kind of an extension of that. It's kind of getting into these, like, courses that drag you through this process, just like it kind of extracts the speech out of you with the app. You know, and you have described the course is a little bit more and the things that come of it.
[00:28:43] Yeah, some of those I developed in 2016, which now seems like a really long time ago. And the idea behind those was to expand on the app and merge in the. What I tend to deliver in a training when I'm in the room with a group of people. And it was an idea to scale my ability to reach people and give them the presentation, skills training and the tools they needed without people having to put seats and butt butts in seats. Excuse me.
[00:29:22] And so I used to host the courses on my own on my Web site.
[00:29:30] But to be honest, we found with my small staff, we found that we were providing an awful lot of tech support. So we put it on open sesame go one dot com, which is a fast growing platform for professional development and personal development courses. And we had a few months before the pandemic were loading them onto you, Timmy's business site. And they are on there. They're really behind right now in their review and approval process. So we're waiting to get onto you to me as well.
[00:30:11] Well, they exploded, you know as well. I thought I was like fringe when I was, like, having my 10 year old son learn how to program his first program on you to me. And all of the sudden, I think I heard it like cast upon like it at a coffee shop right before the pandemic. It was like, let's I'm no longer leading that wave. But, yeah, it's those platforms. I mean, and Facebook started to compete with that. You know, they're really trying to get everyone to host their courses and things through there, which is a monopoly unto itself. But there's a lot of opportunity out there and different platforms that kind of cater to, I think, different industries and utility of depending on the populations you're trying to serve with what you're doing. So that's interesting. And yeah, you too. Me, I can't wait to find out what you think about that after you if you do the over. I'm wondering it sounds like we're kind of already dodging or slipping into the goals, which is my very next question. What are your goals for Smart Mouth Communications and its apps and all of its services for the next one, two, three years in taking into consideration the Cauvin 19 pandemic that swept over the world? Have you shifted things for the entire company or just some of the immediate goals?
[00:31:24] So I would answer that by saying that I am going to gauge that based on what my client's goals are. So I have a lot of clients in tech. And there's a huge tech and very active, successful, robust tech quarter in Utah that not a lot of people know about, but have a lot of clients there and a lot of other corporate clients. I have clients on the East Coast as well. And to be honest, Patricia, I feel like it would be arrogant for me, too, or presumptuous for me to set goals before I finish sort of surveying them. And I've been talking to. Last week I had conversations with two of them. This week, I'm going to have another two conversations. And these are with the larger clients who consistently, you know, we renew over and over. What I'm hearing from a few people is that there will be an indefinite moratorium on gathering in conference rooms. Which is interesting. So my own thought process is that I'm going to need to go virtual. I love being in a room with people. I love feeding off the energy of the groups and the individuals I meet and talk with. But I think that I'm going to need to shift it to more of a virtual delivery, which is easy to do with one on one clients. Obviously, Zoom's is an incredible platform for that. And I you know, it's funny, I've been using Zoom's for probably two or three years and used to be clients would say to me, well, I have Skype, can't we Skype? And I would say, well, Zoom's better if you just don't mind getting on zoom. Zoom is a household word and a verb and all of that that I. I am looking at different options and different platforms for delivering trainings, virtually live trainings virtually. So we'll see. It's challenging, but I'm waiting to hear more from my clients before I decide exactly what the pivot will look like if there is a pivot.
[00:33:52] Absolutely. Is there any works in the apps? Are you are you can just keep that evergreen content as it. Have you ever thought of developing another app?
[00:34:00] No, I'm going to keep that as is for now. I hope that's how it works. The methodology really works for people. And I you know, I sometimes run in to former clients five years later and they'll say, oh, my gosh, you have totally changed the way I communicate in business. And, you know, I'm still using map Avrum, still using your approach to, you know. So that's very rewarding and gratifying.
[00:34:29] Absolutely. It sounds like I'd like an outline concept that, you know, stays with one's brain even when they're not using it anymore. I'm wondering I'm going to wrap everything up today with asking about advice. And I like this piece most because it should always be changing. And given the current climate and everything that's going on for everyone, I think it changes a great deal daily. But I'm curious if you did this podcast was developed for female female identified non binary individuals, pretty much everyone other than white men. And not because I don't adore everyone on this Earth, but because we've done a lot of effort towards that area. So I'm wondering if an individual of a female form identified or non binary origin came up to you tomorrow and said, listen, Beth, I've had this career that took place on the East Coast, Wall Street communications and things of that nature. I went off. I had a family. It took some time, took a breather, getting ready to launch my company and get my feet wet. And I'm just gonna see how it goes. It's a reentry moment for me. What are the top three pieces of advice you would give that individual?
[00:35:35] Knowing what you know now, that's a good one. I would say that, you know, an idea I haven't very often talked about the fact that Smart Mouth was my career reentry strategy after taking time off for motherhood. But I think it's something I should talk about more, because I think a lot of women write themselves off after they've had a long break. And what I did at the time was I just read a lot. I went back to school. I went to the Tuck School at Dartmouth for a host MBA certification, which means that it's a mini MBA program based for people who either had an MBA and hadn't used it in a while or had MBA level experience. And that's where I qualified. So then that refreshed my vocabulary and perspective and gave me new ideas and new ways of thinking to help sort of dust off the cobwebs. So I would tell women if they've taken a break or a break has been foisted upon them for family reasons, that you're never out of the game. You can always get back in the game. That's one thing, I think, for people who are starting their own business. I had a great piece of advice X that accidentally came to me when I was talking to an acquaintance when I first started Smart Mouth and I was telling him what I was doing and I said, and I really, really need to get out there and market it. I know I need to do that. And he said, you know, at the beginning. Why don't you just let it happen organically and until you're really comfortable with what you've got and what you're offering. Let it market itself organically. And that's probably the single best piece of advice I got because the business did morph and evolve and it did grow organically. And he was 100 percent right. I don't think that I would want to market. I would not have wanted to market what it was in the very beginning, because now it's so much more and it became so much more pretty quickly. So I think that rut, that rush to market yourself or market what you've got can actually be limiting. So the organic growth was great and. Then finally, I would say remain open. We'll learn to be vulnerable, you know, put yourself out there, fall down, learn from it. Get back up. Try something different. Nobody ever grows, expands, moves forward or succeeds without, like, multiple failures and embarrassments and cringing moments. And, my goodness, I have had my share.
[00:39:00] As have we all. And they become more fun. The older you get. You know, I sit around with my female colleagues and ruminate over our failures far more than our success. Because they're funnier. Yeah, absolutely. And they humanize us. Yes. Yes. So I have just to recapture number one. You're never out of the game and always get back in number two. Let it happen organically in the beginning until you've got a solid identity developed. Let the building and the unraveling of it. Number three remain open. Learn expansion requires failures.
[00:39:39] Absolutely. I love those. Yeah, I do too. Those are fantastic.
[00:39:43] That's that's got to go in your your immediate memoirs. That's the first three chapters. I love it. From me to you. That's what we're out of time today, Beth. But I wanted to say thank you so much for giving us all of your time. Everyone is immediately and at once busy and available right now. It's a very odd turn of events. And I really appreciate you giving us your time.
[00:40:08] Thanks for having me, Patricia. It's fun.
[00:40:10] Absolutely and for everyone listening. We've been speaking with Beth Noymer Levine. She's the founder and principal at Smart Mouth Communications. You can find out more again on w w w dot smart mouth communications dot com. Thank you for giving me your time today. And until we speak again next time, please stay safe. And remember to always bet on yourself. Slainte.
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