About Jeff Simmermon

My first day as Director of Digital Communications at Time Warner was also my first day onstage trying to entertain a live audience. I left my office at Columbus Circle, took the train deep into Brooklyn, and got onstage at a biker bar where the path to the stage passed between the dartboard and the dart players.

I don't even remember if I did well or not, but I was hooked. I spent the next five years developing executive messaging, corporate narratives, crisis communications, and digital strategy for a Fortune 150 company by day while getting up on any stage that would have me at night, five to ten times a week.

When I left that corporate job, I thought I was being pulled in two different directions and I wanted to focus on my comedy and storytelling career.

Now I realize that one hand was washing the other the whole time. While I was fighting for laughs in a dive bar in my work clothes, I was learning how to be present, how to be real, and how to make sure I never, ever took an audience's attention for granted.

If you pay attention, any audience - whether it's corporate blog readers, executives, investors, people on dates, bachelorette parties or a roomful of drunk tourists who just need to get out of the rain - will tell you when your ideas are unclear, whether or not they trust you with their time, and what stays with them on the way home.

The difference between someone who gets paid good money to hear you talk and someone who just paid good money to hear you talk is colossal, and very few people understand it.

I'm one of them.

Today, I bring those two bodies of experience together. I develop executive communications and business storytelling, coach speakers, and lead workshops for leaders, expert teams, nonprofit and policy organizations, and performers. My clients have included CGI, the Inter-American Development Bank, InVision Communications, PagerDuty, Burning Man Project, and PBS’s Stories From the Stage.

My own work has appeared Off-Broadway at SoHo Playhouse, on The Moth Radio Hour and This American Life, and in The Paris Review Daily. I’ve also released comedy albums through Comedy Dynamics and 800 Pound Gorilla Records.

I’m based in Brooklyn and available for consulting engagements, speaker coaching, workshops, and full-time communications roles.