The end of June saw the annual CIMA Member in Practice Conference. You may not have any idea what that is but suffice to say it involves lots of accountants getting together for a two day shindig.

Your next thought may well be “Nightmare!”

But I am here to tell you we have the BEST fun and our speakers give us terrific feedback about how they find us as an audience!

For me it is a great opportunity to spend two days just thinking about my own business and not those of my clients. I come away with a shed load of new ideas and more new friends and contacts than I can shake a stick at.

In the past I have presented in break out rooms to a smaller subset of the total audience. This has meant a workshop style of presentation is possible – and fairly low stress if you prepare well.

This conference though I was down to do a main stage slot, for an hour, to pretty much everyone! I even had a couple of the key note speakers (proper professionals on the speaker circuit) sitting in. So no pressure!

Talking on the main stage is a completely different ball game than presenting a workshop and requires a different way of preparing.

For one thing it is less interactive meaning you are less guided by audience questions and have to be more prepared to take the gamble that you are covering all the information the audience may want or need.

You also need to put more effort into producing slides (I don’t usually do slides as death by powerpoint is the death of many presentations) which were engaging.

Thankfully everything went off well and I had some great feedback from MiPs afterwards – I even sold some copies of a book I had written on the theme of my talk.

It was a great experience and one I would be glad to do again – getting out of your comfort zone is generally a good thing. If you can, give it a try!

Fiona 🙂