Diane GardnerFounder, Adept Business Solutions · Profit First Professional

Mike's Secret to Never Boring an Audience

5 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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In this excerpt, the speaker (Mike) explains how delivering the same presentations—Profit First, The Pumpkin Plan, and Get Different—hundreds of times has allowed him to step back and observe his own performance. By internalizing the pacing, beats, and pauses, he can effectively remove himself from the presentation, freeing mental space to experiment with new material. He adds 1–2% new content each time, exemplified by a joke about his hometown, Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, which he uses to engage the audience with self‑deprecating humor about the town’s name. This approach keeps repetitive talks fresh and maintains audience interest.

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I've delivered Profit First and Pumpkin Plan in parallel so many times, and also Get Different, those three, so many times that I can remove myself effectively from the presentation and almost be observing myself presenting, 'cause I know what the line is, I know the beat to hit, I know where to put the pause, and then I also allow myself to try new stuff. So I presented Profit First, say the 400th time, and every time I present, I'll be adding 1 or 2% new content just to freshen up and see if I can introduce something new. It was around the 400th time, 'cause I'm from a town in Jersey called Mountain Lakes, I asked the audience, I said, who here is familiar with mountain lakes? And of course no hands go up. So I said, of course. I said, no one's familiar with mountain lakes, but you are familiar with New Jersey. We don't have mountains and we don't have lakes. I live in mountain lakes. The greatest irony, if we were factually true, it should be called hilly puddles. I live in hilly puddles. And so people get a kick out of it. And that worked well enough that I started inserting it.