This weekend, I had the pleasure of taking Marki Costello’s hosting boot camp and want to share a couple of insights with you. This class was a little different than the others because it was taking place on the same weekend that her new reality TV show The Drama Queen #DramaQueen was premiering.
Marki, is the grand daughter of Lou Costello of Abbot and Costello fame, and she has built a name as being the “go to” person if you want to be a TV host. Although I have no desire to be a host of E! like most of her clients and students, I did learn a lot that will help me grow my business and my clients grow theirs.
The reviews of The Drama Queen, Marki’s reality TV premier on E! are mixed. One critic complained that they used to many reality TV tricks, and complained that one overused trick was Marki “screaming a lot”. I can tell you from her class this isn’t screaming, this is how Marki Costello tells you what she wants, thinks or needs. That is how Marki is. If you have ever taken one of my courses, you will quickly figure out that Marki is very much the opposite of me when it comes to verbal communications.
After being a military and commercial pilot for 20 years, one of the skills that is engrained into my psyche is the ability to present a calm voice and presence under pressure. In high stakes negotiations and real estate investing, this skill has transcended nicely and served me well. Nobody wants to hear fear in a pilots voice, and no one selling a home wants to see the buyer jumping for joy over the price.
As a stage speaker and trainer however that skill gets me notes from students like “boring”, “not interested in topic” and my favorite, “He sounds like he is reading from a script”. I know that in order to grow my business, I need to start building video presentations for my online audience, and I don’t want to be boring, uninterested or read from a script.
My life is pretty much work or play. Since I am very active, there isn’t much time to sit and watch TV hosts to learn the tricks of the trade. Instead of investing 400 hours watching entertainment news, and infomercial kings, I decided to cut right to the core and get a little school from the best.
I first took the free one day introduction class, which was basically the first four hours of the weekend bootcamp. While you might feel a bit ripped off seeing the same material twice, I was glad to have the repeat so I could work better with my clients. Of course Marki’s biggest critique for me was that my voice was too flat and didn’t carry. Oddly my wife is always telling me that I am too loud.
Listening to myself during our on camera reads, I understood exactly what Marki was talking about. More importantly, I got to see what other students looked like on camera and how much better they were. I came away from the class with a lot of work to do. The hardest part for me will be learning to turn on and off the two different voices. As long as I fly and race cars, I need that calm steady voice to communicate over the radio and public address. As long as I want to grow my business and help you grow yours, I need to really work on my inflection and intonation otherwise you might fall asleep.
As video becomes more important to marketing a small business, the tools I walked away with will help me and my team build better presentations to connect with you, and help you build better presentations to connect with your customers.
While Marki Costello will say she has no drama in her life, I don’t really buy it. To begin with, she lives in Hollywood and her life does create drama for everyone around her. You can see it in her class and you can see it on the show. I don’t think E! needed any “reality TV tricks” for this show. What you see is Marki Costello at work, perfecting the very voice that got her where she is today. Every business owner out there could learn a little something from her.
