Storytelling is the difference.

Growth.

What I learned at Amazon about leadership is staggering. My keynotes and workshop offer a powerful, incisive and inspiring view of leadership and the future of customers, companies, and industries.

Finding the right speaker can be one of the most exciting, yet one of the most challenging decisions you will make. Content, energy, and profile are all primary considerations, but often what determines whether a speaker hits a home run with your audience is something more important — empathy and humility.

Empathy is how well your keynote speaker understands what the audience is presently experiencing. Humility is when a great speaker doesn’t just tell (or sell) their story, they take the time to understand the audiences.

“It’s tough to pick one speaker that I most enjoyed hearing from when the lineup consisted of top execs from companies like Pinterest, Waze, Havas, and IBM, but one particularly memorable presentation was delivered by Anthony Reeves.”

Lainie Smith, WHOOP.

That's what makes me very very different. Every single in-person or virtual keynote, discussion, or panel talk is customized to meet your audience's specific needs - whatever their size.

Before delivering an exciting keynote, I undertake a four-step preparation program, including asking the conference organizer for feedback. This preparation guarantees I will have everything I need to deliver a non-canned, high-energy, thought-provoking keynote that not only provides relevant solutions for your audience, but includes relevant take-aways and can-do’s. And most importantly, it’ll help deliver a presentation that people will be talking about for months and years to follow.

There are two common themes. 1) Leadership for Growth, or 2) The Future Customer. Whether it's a 45-minute live keynote, a 40-minute webcast for your managers and hands-on team, or a day-long strategy session for executives, you'll get an exciting blend of original insights, engaging storytelling, immediately usable growth and sales strategies, and maybe even a laugh or two.

“Anthony is a true leader, who understands how to create great teams and work. His passion for strategic communications that produce results is unparalleled. “

Mark Capps. VP, Client Partner, Merkle (Dentsu)

1: LEADERSHIP FOR GROWTH:

What made you successful in business in the first place, isn't what will keep you successful. In fact, the life expectancy of an F500 company is now just 12 years? Every day decisions are the building blocks of adaptation and innovation - and keep business alive and kicking. During times of disruptive change and challenges, the quicker you need to reposition your team's focus. And the faster and more effectively you adapt to change and implement creative solutions, the faster your business will grow. 

Leadership for Growth will cover the ‘8 Steps to Building a Growth Business'. This is my flagship program, built on what I learned at Amazon. It has been experienced via small C-Suite round tables to full-scale auditoriums. It is perfect for sales and marketing conferences, industry events, and client engagement sessions. 

The clear takeaways are the lessons and mechanisms from Amazon that you can put into immediate use:

1. A Culture for Growth: Innovation, growth and change won’t happen unless the right culture is in place. Culture has the power to kill any initiative. Culture has more power than leadership. (And ping pong tables and open bars aren’t culture.) At Amazon, through the values, principles, and mechanisms, the culture helps 1,000,000 team members make fast, effective decisions.

2. Here Be Dragons: It's not change people fear; it's the uncertainty that change brings. A leader's role is to ease the tension of change and align the teams. (Get the players on the bus.).

3. Start Me Up: It's hard to believe Amazon acts like a scrappy start-up, and they're always in a state of Day One. No matter how big you get, you can inspire and champion creative solutions through organizational structure and missions. 

4. The Death of SWOT: Obsess over customers. If you spend more time focussing on your competitors, you'll be playing constant catch-up. Focussing on customers means you'll always remain ahead. 

5. Report on Today. Focus on Tomorrow: Setting input goals rather than output goals allows you to measure what matters. 

6. Gain Tailwinds: By focusing on the Customer and where they are heading, you'll build experiences that matter to them and gain a tailwind into tomorrow.

7. Fail Fast: Remember the Fire phone from Amazon? Business innovation should be about two-way doors. Learning to fail, and fail fast will make you stronger. At Amazon, you fail up.

8. Black and White: Why inside of Amazon, finding a color printer is a job in itself. Learn why.

2: Experience: The new Brand.

I almost got fired after my first presentation at Amazon. In hindsight, I know exactly why.

Amazon is a retailer and a tech company . . . above all, they are an Experience company. Their Customer Obsession delivers an amazing experience. A new international survey of consumers finds that an overwhelming majority - 76 percent - would rather spend their money on experiences instead of products. The most commonly repeated descriptions of what consumers said they want from brands were "inspiration" and "meaning." That 76% is a lift of over 200 percent more than the survey done three years earlier.

This consumer behavior shift should send shivers down the spine of every CEO, marketer, and product owner. Importantly, how should you react?

The Experiences over Things keynote is a hallmark of 20+ years in the marketing and advertising industry, and takes in the deep and steep lessons from developing branded eCommerce solutions for the world’s leading brands - Diageo, P&G, Unilever, Rapha, Nike, Hyundai, and more. To be clear, this keynote not about the death of TV advertising (I cut my teeth building 30sec spots). This is about rethinking every GTM plan, and the experiences you build, with hands-on, business-driving examples that'll change your thinking and change your approach.

In the keynote you’ll takeaway how and why brands need to deliver Experiences over Things:

1. How Experiences result in greater happiness: According to research, experiences result in longer-lasting happiness than material possessions. For brands (unless you're selling coffins), should always be related to happiness.

2. Why brand Experiences provide better memories: Have no doubt, as humans, the best memories we have, are experiences. And the job of branding is to build memories so that when people go shopping, they remember your product or service, and build a true sense of belonging.

3. Delivering Experiences result in less clutter: The clutter customers feel is phenomenal, and most of the time, the chaos results from brands competing internally for the same customer's attention. 

4. Good brand Experiences provide greater opportunities to connect: TV, print radio, and direct are all about the interruption. When you deliver a true brand experience, you involve the customer. And this is a customer-brand connection.

5. Brand Experiences result in greater mindfulness: In 2010, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert published an important study in Science magazine. Their research concluded that "a wandering mind is an unhappy mind." And the greater a person's ability to "stay present" in a given moment, the greater happiness they experience during and after. Brand experiences provide a greater opportunity in this regard.