Business coach Samad Shoeb explained about the art of public speaking
Most founders can remember the exact moment their voice shook in front of investors, or the meeting where they lost the room halfway through a slide deck. It happens to almost everyone, and it doesn’t mean much about your ability to lead. The art of public speaking isn’t some gift a lucky few are born with, it’s a skill, and like most business skills, it responds to practice. Samad Shoeb, a business coach who has spent years working with entrepreneurs, executives, and young professionals, puts it plainly: the leaders who grow the fastest are usually the ones who got serious about learning to speak clearly and confidently, on purpose, not by accident. This piece walks through what that actually looks like in practice, why it matters more for business leaders than most people realize, and where to start.
What Is the Art of Public Speaking and How Do I Learn It?
Strip away the jargon and the art of public speaking really comes down to this: can you organize your thoughts and hand them to an audience in a way that actually lands? Doesn’t matter if that audience is one investor across a coffee table or a thousand employees at a town hall. It’s not about volume or a naturally commanding voice — plenty of quiet people are excellent speakers. It comes down to structure, clarity, and whether you’re actually connecting with the people in front of you.
Samad Shoeb breaks it into three pieces he keeps coming back to with clients:
- Content — do you actually have something worth saying, in an order that makes sense?
- Delivery — your voice, your pace, how you hold yourself, whether you make eye contact
- Connection — reading the room and adjusting as you go, instead of just running through a script
So how do you learn it? Same way you’d learn any other business skill repetition, feedback, and being willing to look a bit awkward while you improve. Nobody nails their first keynote. Even the CEOs who look completely at ease on stage today have a long trail of clunky, forgettable early talks behind them. That part just doesn’t make it into the highlight reel.
Why Public Speaking Is a Business Skill, Not a Soft Skill
A lot of founders quietly file public speaking under “nice to have” somewhere below product, fundraising, and hiring on the priority list. Samad Shoeb pushes back on that almost every time it comes up in a coaching session. Think about it for a second: a pitch, a board update, a sales call, an all-hands, a press interview; these are all speeches, whether we call them that or not. The founder who can lay out a vision clearly tends to raise more money, hire better people, and close more deals than the one who can’t, even when the two businesses are equally strong on paper.
That’s really why the art of public speaking sits right at the intersection of leadership and communication. How well a CEO speaks shapes investor confidence, team morale, how customers perceive the brand, and even how journalists write about the company. It’s not a soft skill sitting off to the side, it’s closer to a revenue lever.
How to Master the Art of Public Speaking: Samad Shoeb's Framework
When Samad Shoeb works through this with entrepreneurs, he tends to use a simple four-step framework, nothing that requires hours a week, just enough structure to build the habit.
1. Know Your One Idea
Every talk, pitch, or meeting should be built around a single core message, not five. Before you touch a slide, ask yourself: “If people remember only one sentence from this, what should it be?” Leaders who try to cram in everything usually end up communicating nothing at all.
2. Structure Before You Style
Don’t polish your delivery before the structure is actually solid. That’s putting effort in the wrong place. A basic three-part shape the problem, the insight, the action works for almost anything, whether it’s a two-minute elevator pitch or a forty-minute keynote.
3. Rehearse Out Loud, Not in Your Head
Reading your notes silently feels like preparation, but it really isn’t; it rarely carries over into confident delivery. Say it out loud, ideally to a colleague or even just your phone camera, at least a couple of times before anything important.
4. Review and Refine
After every talk, good or bad, take five minutes and jot down what worked and what didn’t. It sounds small, but this one habit, kept up consistently, is often what separates a decent speaker from a genuinely great one after a year or two.
Practical Tips for Improving Public Speaking Skills
Beyond the framework, here are a few practical tips for improving public speaking skills that actually fit into a founder’s or executive’s already-packed schedule:
- Volunteer to speak first in meetings : It’s low stakes, and it builds the same muscle you’ll need in high-stakes moments later.
- Record yourself : Watching even a short clip of your own pitch back will show you filler words, rushed pacing, or posture habits you’d never notice while actually speaking.
- Slow down on purpose : Nervous speakers rush. A one-second pause after a key point makes you sound more in control, not less even though it feels uncomfortable at first.
- Lean on stories, not just numbers : Data convinces the analytical side of the brain, but it’s the stories people actually remember and repeat afterward.
- Prep for the Q&A like it’s the main event : For CEOs and founders especially, deals are often won or lost in the questions, not the slides.
Best Techniques to Become a Better Public Speaker
If you want to go one level deeper, here are some of the best techniques to become a better public speaker that Samad Shoeb comes back to again and again with senior clients.
The Rule of Three : Group your points into threes wherever you can. Audiences hold onto triads far better than long lists “people, process, product” sticks in a way a five-point breakdown never will.
Vocal Variety : Shifting your pace, pitch, and volume at the right moments is what keeps a room engaged. A flat, monotone delivery will lose people fast, no matter how good the actual content is.
Strategic Pausing : Silence isn’t dead air, it’s a tool. A pause dropped right before or after an important point gives it weight and gives your audience a beat to actually absorb it.
Grounded Body Language : Standing with purpose, rather than pacing or fidgeting, reads as composure. Boards and investors, fairly or not, often use that as a stand-in for how you’ll handle pressure elsewhere.
Audience-First Framing : Swap “what do I want to say” for “what does this room actually need to hear right now.” That one shift changes how you open, structure, and close almost every talk you give.
Why This Matters
If you’re a business coach, a good chunk of your own credibility rests on how well you communicate the frameworks you teach. A coach who can’t speak persuasively is going to struggle to build trust, no matter how solid the methodology behind it is.
If you’re an entrepreneur, your speaking ability has a direct line to your ability to raise capital, recruit good people, and land early customers often well before your product has fully proven itself.
If you’re a CEO, the way you speak sets the tone for company culture, investor relations, and public perception. Every all-hands and press appearance is, whether you like it or not, a bit of a referendum on your leadership.
Across all three, the art of public speaking isn’t a nice-to-have bolted onto your skill set. It’s one of the higher-leverage things you can actually invest time in.
Conclusion
Getting good at the art of public speaking has less to do with eliminating nerves and more to do with channeling them into something structured and audience-focused. As Samad Shoeb tells his clients often, the goal was never to become a “perfect” speaker, it’s to become a consistently effective one. Start small. Speak up first in your next internal meeting, record your next pitch rehearsal, or just build your next talk around one clear idea instead of five. None of it feels dramatic at the moment, but these small habits, kept up over time, add up to the kind of speaking presence that actually moves rooms, closes deals, and builds real leadership credibility.
FAQs
It’s the skill of organizing your thoughts and delivering them in a way that informs, persuades, or moves an audience. You learn it the way you’d learn most skills building a clear message, rehearsing it out loud, and reviewing your delivery honestly after each talk.
Start with low-stakes practice, speak first in internal meetings, and record yourself so you can actually hear the filler words or rushed pacing you can’t catch in the moment. Small, consistent reps beat the occasional high-stakes attempt.
A few that hold up well: the Rule of Three for structuring points, strategic pauses, varying your vocal tone and pace, and framing the talk around what the audience needs rather than what you feel like saying.
Because it directly touches fundraising, sales, hiring, and team morale it behaves more like a revenue-driving skill for founders and executives than a communication nicety.
Mainly this: confidence comes from preparation rather than personality, clarity beats eloquence almost every time, and genuinely believing your message matters more than a polished delivery ever will.