Strong storytelling helps speakers deliver ‘medicine’ without the aftertaste

Karim Ellis is the keynote speaker at the AICPA Governmental and Not-for-Profit Conference in October in Las Vegas. The early-bird registration deadline for the event is Friday.

For Ellis, the qualities of a strong speaker are similar to the ones needed in a strong leader: empathy, preparedness, adaptability, and excellent storytelling skills.

In this conversation, Ellis shares how he prepares for speaking, some of the rookie mistakes he made decades ago, and why the experience of taking some foul-tasting cough syrup has stuck with him.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• The meaning for Ellis of the phrase “iron sharpens iron; rust sharpens rust.”
• Why a speaker’s preparation is like baking a cake.
• How Ellis adapts if he senses his message is failing to resonate with an audience.
• An example from his childhood that illustrates the power of good storytelling.
• His advice for conference attendees’ choice of seats for his session.

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

Neil Amato: An October conference keynote speaker is the guest on this episode on the Journal of Accountancy podcast, and that speaker’s words about the power of storytelling and more are coming up after this brief word from our sponsor.

[Sponsor message]

The keynote speaker at the October Governmental and Not-for-Profit Conference is our guest today on the Journal of Accountancy podcast. I’m Neil Amato with the JofA. Welcome back to another episode. I’m happy to welcome Karim Ellis to the show. Karim, thank you for being on and talking some about your keynote session.

Karim Ellis: Absolutely. Well, as I say, every time I do one of these, it’s an honor, it’s a privilege, but most importantly, it is a pleasure to be here not only with you, but the group of listeners that, I’m hoping, you have already made the selection to come to one of the greatest conferences you’re going to see this year. It’s a pleasure and privilege and an honor to be here today.

Amato: That’s great. Thank you for that enthusiastic intro and preview to the conference. This is, as far as I know, your first AICPA event. What are you looking forward to about it?

Ellis: Yeah, the beautiful thing about being in this industry, the speaking industry, and I’ve been doing this for a little over 20 years because I love the fact that I get to meet so many people. I think right now we’re at a stage in human development across the world where empathy is needed more than ever before.

I love to be able to go out on the field and go out there in the streets, go out there in the cities and be able to connect and meet so many different people from so many different walks of life. They call me the No. 1 breakthrough strategist because my first desire is to make sure wherever I go to, whether I talk for two minutes, 20 minutes, two hours, is to help those individuals have what I call a powerful breakthrough moment. That’s what we’re looking at, and that’s what I love to do.

Amato: One part of your speaking background, specifically, is that you nearly won, you finished second, in the Great American Speak Off. That’s an event that had 30,000 competitors, got narrowed down to a small group of finalists. Tell me something about that event and why it’s special to you.

Ellis: Yeah. It was a one-year-long contest, 30,000 applicants. It got whittled down to the top seven competitors, a blowout finale at the MGM Grand in Vegas in front of a crowd of close to 9,000 people with 150,000 people watching online.

The mission, the assignment was to give the best two-minute talk. That might sound simplistic. The goal of the speaker is to be able to give you a one-hour message and condense it into two minutes. So it was way much more difficult than what it looks like. We did place second in that contest, which is an honor.

When people ask me why in the world would I do something like that. There is a philosophy I learned from a mentor in elementary school a long time ago. That mentor taught me that “iron sharpens iron, but rust promotes rust.” I’m going to say that again: “Iron sharpens iron, but rust promotes rust.” If you have a gift, a talent, or expertise, your job is to make sure you keep that thing as sharp as you possibly can, and the way you keep it sharp is the utilization of it or putting yourself into environments that challenge you to better your best.

Amato: Clearly, you’ve given speeches to groups large and small. You’ve already given speeches in Vegas, as you just mentioned. What are two or three ways that you ensure that you’re prepared to give the best possible presentation?

Ellis: What I will say is this because I think there’s a lot of ways to prepare. I look at success almost like baking a cake. If I’m going to bake a cake, there’s a multitude of different ingredients I’m going to put inside that cake. Here’s the caveat. If I’m making a cake, but I end up leaving one of those ingredients out, you can taste it.

I think there’s a bunch of ingredients that go into it, but if I had to pick my top two or three, the first one would be information. The reason why I say that is my personal mentor in this season is a gentleman by the name of Les Brown. Some of you guys are familiar with him. He’s known for giving this great motivational speech, called “You Gotta Be Hungry.”

I’ve been with Les for several years. What Les taught me is never let what you want to say get in the way of what the audience needs to hear. I’m going to run that back. Never let what you want to say get in the way of what the audience needs to hear. To make sure you’re given the right content, you have to have the right information.

That’s why I’m talking to event planners and also getting there possibly a day early and connecting with the attendees and asking them powerful questions about the conference and what things they think they need to be super successful. That’s all about gathering information. That’s No. 1.

No. 2 is relatability. People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Relatability means to me when I come out and talk to an audience, I don’t care the background or what they do for a living. Can you still find a way to relate and be empathetic to the needs of what these individuals are requesting in this session?

Then last but not least, it’s connectability, because you can’t relate to someone and then not connect with them. Connectability is my ability to see you at a different level than where you possibly may be in life.

Amato: Do you get nervous before you go up on stage to speak?

Ellis: Yeah, so this is the thing. I don’t now. Ironically, the very first time I got nervous was at a speaking contest, nowhere as grand as the Great American Speak Off. But there was an organization I belonged to many, many years ago, back in 2012 I think, called Toastmasters is when I joined. They had what’s called the International Speech Contest. Room was full of about 50 to 60 people, but I got in front of the room, and I forgot my message the moment I opened my mouth. I walked off the stage in embarrassment.

Part of the problem was I was nervous because I did not know what I was going to talk about. This is why I tell new speakers to know your message intimately, not that you need to read it from note cards or have it written down, but know it up here. Because once you know your message up here, you can multitask, you can walk the room, you can talk. There’s so many different things you can do, but the more knowledgeable you are about your expertise and your topic, you’ll find that the nervous energy typically dissipates.

Amato: I think all of us have had those moments where even if it’s just for a split second or five seconds, we’ve forgotten what we’re going to say, so very relatable for sure, back in your old Toastmasters days. Maybe this isn’t an issue for you, but I am curious. Have you ever had a moment where you sensed that the audience just does not seem all that interested in what you’re saying?

Ellis: Yeah. These are rookie mistakes I made way back 20 years ago when I first started out. This goes back to what I talked about earlier, where Les had taught me, don’t let what you want to say get in the way of what the audience needs to hear. On certain occasions, there have been event planners that have booked me to bring me out, and they had the event theme. They tell me what they think the attendees need to hear, and when I get out here, that is not the message they needed to hear.

They are going through something totally different. The message I have planned is nonrelatable. The last time I had that happen was probably over a decade ago, where I got out there to speak about a certain topic, and 10 minutes into the talk, I noticed people pulling out cellphones. When people pull out cellphones in your talk, that’s a bad sign.

That means whatever you’re talking about is not important, and something else has already gathered their attention. What I had to do was something that I put inside a chapter of my bestselling book called GPS My Success. I had to recalculate. What that means is if you’re driving down the road, you put an address in your GPS and either the road is out because of construction, maybe there’s an accident, or maybe you were distracted and you missed the turn not paying attention.

The GPS does not give up on the assignment, it begins to reroute and recalculate, showing you there’s more than one way to get to the finish line. The assignment was to give this audience a breakthrough moment. I just had to recalculate and re-pivot what was the best message that was going to pull that audience back in. Of course, we landed the plane with rave reviews. You’ve always got to be willing to recalculate.

Amato: Yeah. I’d say recalculate is one piece of advice you might give to other speakers who are in that situation, whether they’re talking to 12 people in a corporate boardroom or several thousand in a conference center ballroom. Are there other methods that maybe if they felt like they were losing someone, they could reel them back in?

Ellis: Yeah, I think one of the best ways you can reel someone back in is knowing how to be good at the art of storytelling. Let me put it this way. As a kid growing up, back in the ’80s, I’m a product of the ’80s, the one cough syrup I absolutely could not stand was cherry cough syrup. I could do grape, I could even do bubblegum.

Cherry just had this nasty aftertaste. When it went down, it just was pungent. I remember that we were out of school because we got this crazy snow day in Cincinnati, Ohio. I think it came down like 8 or 9 inches. School was closed. My mother heard me in the other room watching cartoons because what else do you do when you get an off day from school?

I’m starting to cough and hack because I’m catching this cold. The problem is the streets haven’t been cleaned up. The only cough syrup we got is cherry Robitussin. She has to come up with this plan to get me to take this medicine. She calls me into the kitchen. She sits me at the table. She pours the syrup on the spoon, and I’m looking at her with my arms folded, there’s no way in the world I’m taking this cough syrup.

All of a sudden out of nowhere she transforms this spoon into an airplane. She even makes the noise of the airplane taking off the runway, it’s in the air, and I’m looking at this spoon. That’s clearly a spoon while she’s trying to convince me that it’s an airplane. After a while, she’s like, “The airplane’s getting ready to run out of gas, it’s about to crash. Open your mouth so it can land.” Before I know it, my mouth is open wide. The spoon is halfway down my throat. The cough syrup’s already down. I’m thinking to myself, “I have been bamboozled.” But I’m going to give you a perfect 10 because the delivery was awesome. You may not trick me a second time, but you lined this thing up perfectly.

Why am I saying this? Because the art of storytelling is so valuable in the world of speaking. As speakers, our job is to come and give a prescription to the audience that the audience may not want to take because it tastes bad. I may come out there and tell you something that you may not want to hear, but if you take that medication, in five to seven days, you’re going to start feeling a whole lot better.

The problem with most people is they don’t want to take the medication, so a speaker has to be gifted and talented and creative enough to wrap that medicine around a very entertaining story like that airplane. That way the message is delivered. You may not like it when it goes down, but guess what? You took the medicine, so you should start to feel better.

Amato: Oh, my gosh, do I love that. I still won’t like cherry Robitussin. I am definitely a grape Dimetapp guy. Grape Dimetapp all the way as a kid, but definitely memorable, and that’s the power of storytelling.

Ellis: Yes.

Amato: You remember because of how that was told. The conference, as I mentioned, specifically, it’s Oct. 27–29 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. We will include a link to the registration page in the show notes for this episode. Karim, what’s a sneak peak of some of the points you’re hoping to make with the attendees at the event?

Ellis: My job is to make sure that this group gets one of the most powerful dynamic breakthrough moments of 2025. We’re going to do game time. It’s all about understanding the rules of success that you need to know before you roll the dice. I’m letting you know right now this message will be entertaining, it will be engaging.

It will be highly interactive. I will be giving out prizes. We’ll be participating with certain types of games. But most important of all, I want you to walk away 100% better for being at this event, not just because I’m speaking, but because of all the knowledge and wisdom you’re going to get. Above all, I want the attendees to have fun.

I want you to come out. I want you to enjoy yourself. I want you to engage and let the little child inside of you come back out and have a blast for this event. You can put your thought hat back on when it’s all said and done, but for this event, I want your imagination to step up in the first place, and I want you to do everything you can to maximize the rate of return of just being at this event. I’m looking forward to it.

Amato: This has been great. It’s been memorable, entertaining. Anything to add as a closing thought?

Ellis: For anyone that’s going to be at this event when I come out, the only advice I’m going to give you is sit close to the front of the room. It’s the only advice I’m going to give you. I’m not going to tell you why. I’m just going to say that when opportunity presents itself, your job is to be in proximity of the opportunity so you can move and take advantage of it.

That is the only thing I’m going to give. The reason why I say this, Neil, because most of us are grown adults, we revert back to how we were as kids. You remember we used to go to school auditoriums and they’d have big events for the whole school. All the kids will try to sit away from the front of the room. That way you can get away with doing stuff you ain’t got no business doing. This is the reverse. I know how we think. People will get rewarded for being closer to the front of the room than farther away. I’m going to leave that there and let them do with that as they will.

Amato: Karim Ellis, thank you very much.

Ellis: Absolutely. It’s definitely a pleasure. I’m looking forward to October.