We All Have to Be
Actors Now

BNI Summit meets every Wednesday at 7am at the Sudima Hotel in Queenstown. Around thirty local business owners sit in the same room every week, each with 60 seconds to say what they do and who they want to meet. Then one member gets the floor for a Feature Presentation. Last Wednesday it was my turn.

BNI runs on Givers Gain: give business to the people in the room and it comes back to you. I moved to Queenstown in December 2025, and nothing has helped me get to know the business community here faster. I am proud to be a member, and I wanted my presentation to give the room something useful, not just a pitch.

The line I kept coming back to came out in the questions at the end.

"We all have to be in front of the camera and perform and talk about our business. So we have to be actors."

Your customers want to see the person behind the business. A logo and a stock photo do not do that any more. Your face, your voice and how you talk about what you do are what people remember.

"It's not something that we're all used to. But it's a skill that we all need."

That is what I spend a lot of my time on with business owners in Content Training: getting comfortable in front of the camera, so you can pitch your business without freezing up.

Being the video guy, I filmed my own talk, with one camera on me and a timelapse running at the back of the room. Cutting 25 minutes down to 46 seconds showed me the same things I tell students.

• Talk to people, not to your slidesEvery time I turned to the screen behind me, that moment was no use for the reel. The usable bits were the ones where I was looking at the room.
• Start with something that makes people look upMy first line was "Smile, you're on camera." It got the room's attention, and it opens the reel.
• Say it once and stopThe best lines were short. Every "um" and every half-finished sentence came out in the edit.
• Use what you already haveA phone on a stand and a clip-on mic will get you most of the way. You do not need a crew to show up as yourself.

Content Training runs in Queenstown, Cromwell and Dunedin, and online. You learn to plan, film and edit content for your own business on the phone you already carry, and to get comfortable being in it.

And if you run a business in Queenstown, come and visit BNI Summit on a Wednesday morning. Send the chapter a message on Instagram at @bni_summit_queenstown.

Thank you to everyone at BNI Summit for having me, and for being good sports on camera. Class dismissed.