[FADE IN]
EXTERIOR--A bright-blue, cloudless sky on a spring morning in Austin. An office park, populated with identical brown buildings interspersed with grassy areas and trees.
INTERIOR--A small conference room. At one end stands a whiteboard with a screen pulled down in front of it. Seated near the head of the table is DAVE YEWMAN, co-owner of Elevator Speech, a consulting firm based in Austin and Portland, Oregon, that specializes in media and presentation training--specifically in helping clients craft pithy 30-second descriptions of their companies. According to Yewman, executives who can't, in half a minute, clearly explain what they do and why anyone should care miss out--on sales, funding, partnerships, and more opportunities. His firm uses video to dramatically show clients how bad they often are at explaining their businesses.
Across the table, looking at a silver Mac laptop and fiddling with portable speakers, is Yewman's business partner, ANDY CRAIG, head clean-shaven, wearing a pressed lavender shirt. A week earlier, Craig spent a day with a video camera trained on eight executives of uControl, an Austin-based home security start-up, asking each of them a simple question: "What does your company do?" He and Yewman then spent several days watching the tapes and taking notes. They're about to deliver the results to JIM JOHNSON, uControl's CEO, who sits at the other end of the conference table. He looks a little nervous. His company, which is 18 months old and has 18 employees, is competing for contracts with the nation's largest cable and phone companies, and Johnson needs any edge he can get. Seated next to him is JASON DOMANGUE, uControl's director of marketing. His pen is poised and he is ready to take notes.
ANDY [Stands up behind his chair to lead things off] Have any of you ever read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell?