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The Bigger Stage w/ Matt Stone is a conversation series about leadership, relationships, and the stories that expand influence.
Matt Stone sits down with CEOs, founders, leaders, and creatives to explore the human moments behind growth—how trust is built, how visibility changes responsibility, and how storytelling becomes a leadership skill as stakes rise.
This show is for entrepreneurs and leaders stepping into bigger roles, bigger audiences, and bigger impact—who want to lead with clarity, credibility, and connection, not performance.
BBR Pre-Launch Convo - Mike Verret
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Matt Stone: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Building Business Relationship Show. I'm Matt Stone, and before we officially launch, we are exploring what matters most when it comes to relationships in business. These early episodes are about testing ideas, learning from great guests like we have today, and hearing what you think belong in the conversation.
Matt Stone: So please listen in, watch, share your thoughts and help us shape what this show becomes. And joining me today is Mike Verret, the Chief Presentation Officer at Verret and Associates, and he's got a knack for helping people talk about themselves the right way. We'll have to figure out what that means. Most of us try to say, or write, what we think our audience wants to hear, but we don't actually think about what they need to get out of it.
Matt Stone: Mike flips that around. He shows you how your message actually lands with your audience and helps you sharpen it so people get it and remember it and remember you. His whole philosophy? To be memorable, you have to be first, best or different. First and best. They're pretty hard to come by, [00:01:00] but different.
Matt Stone: That's what makes you memorable and I hope this conversation is memorable. Mike, thank you so much for joining me.
Mike Verret: No, no, no, no. Thank you for having me.
Matt Stone: No, no, no. Thank you. Okay. We're not getting good.
Mike Verret: to talk to a camera for 20 minutes. This is gonna be a blast.
Matt Stone: I've been called worse. I've been called worse. Alright, sounds fantastic. Well, as you know with this show, we jump right into it. So looking back, what's a business relationship that's had a major impact on your life and maybe your career?
Mike Verret: That's a great question. I think from a business perspective, the biggest impact in business that I felt on my life in on, in my life, uh, was actually some time I worked at Hasbro Toys and Games for seven years. And for four of the years I didn't know what I was doing. They hired me from their ad agency and I was in a swimming pool full of master's degrees who would eat their young [00:02:00] to climb the corporate ladder.
Mike Verret: And I came in this other door. I had no idea what was going on. So the first four years was a practical and brutal education on product management. What they figured out after that fourth year is, I'm terrible at making this stuff. I'm really good at talking about it. And they turned my role into running our global sales meeting for just the games division, which represented about a quarter of the Hasbro business, just the games division.
Mike Verret: I would coordinate our global sales meeting, and then they'd send me to all the industry events, all the trade events called toy fairs around the world. And so I'd go to Hong Kong, I'd go to Germany, I'd go to New York, LA all for two weeks at a time. And my job was to get the buyers to feel and understand what we're doing with Hasbro games.
Mike Verret: And what I realized was, insight wise, we have 400 games, the buyer has six minutes. Furthermore, they know how much every game [00:03:00] costs, what's in it, and how many they could fit on the shelf at Walmart. So they really are there to see and feel what we're gonna do about it. Everybody else is using demo them how the transformers transform, or how My Little Pony's, uh, you know, castle works.
Mike Verret: But what I know is if I put the right idea in their head, substantiate that idea and show 'em the benefits of that idea, sales will go up. I know this 'cause it happens every time I did it. The buyer would come up with the salesperson, And I would put an idea of say, the joy of connection, in their head. For the next five and a half minutes, I'm substantiating that idea, joy of connection through our different segments of games.
Mike Verret: Preschool, uh, adult games, family games, kids games, and the last 30 seconds are spent explaining the benefits of what we're doing about creating those connections and sales would go up by 10%.
Matt Stone: Mm-hmm.
Mike Verret: It was simply based on one thing, [00:04:00] understanding how to communicate to another human being. And in the business world, we're all playing a role.
Mike Verret: We don't act like this at home. We don't use words like synergize and ideate. We
Mike Verret: say, work together and think so. Understanding that we play a role, how do you speak to the real person, gets lost in business. So I turned my job into understanding and acting as an audience for my clients. It's providing an audience perspective to show 'em what their audience really sees compared to what they see.
Mike Verret: And usually it's pretty eye-opening.
Matt Stone: Now I will say I use synergize at the Dinner table all the time. Like, you know, honey, you know, we need to, we need to synergize uh, the salad with the, with the, let me go see what I can do and, um, uh, we'll touch base.
Mike Verret: That dinner was delicious. I gotta what are your KPIs this weekend?
Matt Stone: Exactly. It's really a romantic dinner table. I, I gotta tell you. Um, no, no, you're absolutely right.
Matt Stone: That's not the language that we use in our regular life. And [00:05:00] honestly, we'd be better off not using it in business either. But it is hard. It's hard. 'cause we all, you know, in that context, we all mirror each other.
Matt Stone: And so you, you just sort of fall into it. But I'm curious, um, there's a lot of different threads, but for the sake of this particular show, you talked about, they, when I asked you about the relationships in Hasbro. Were there any particular people that you felt like really got you, that really saw you more than others?
Matt Stone: That, helped you? You said they kind of put me in this role that was perfect for me. 'cause they, somebody saw you, somebody saw the magic, the genius that you brought to the table and had the wherewithal or did you impose that on them? I, I, I'm, I'd like to just pull that thread.
Matt Stone: Listen to me. You're not getting It, you know.
Mike Verret: It came together because I was moved to the franchise marketing group within games. Okay. So not product management, product marketing.
Matt Stone: Yeah.
Mike Verret: And so part of my job was global sales meeting. And the [00:06:00] first one that they had me coordinating, I was gonna be host and make it into a talk show, but no interviews and just stupid human tricks. It went over huge, to the point where they gave us a much bigger room, and it was usually in front of an audience of 300 people, that I would sort of lead this show. And we left impressions like you would not believe. It was so different than what was going on in the other rooms. And my simple strategy was every single person in this room has been a kid before.
Mike Verret: They still have the tendencies to act like a kid, and we're gonna give 'em permission to during this fun, engaging hands on GSM.
Matt Stone: Hmm.
Mike Verret: So for three and a half hours. I was host or the emcee practically, and we would have the crowds leaving happy. We were memorable. We left a huge impression on them, and when that happens, sales go up.
Mike Verret: So we constantly, were seeing a better understanding of what we were doing, which [00:07:00] understanding is not cerebral in this case. It's Oh, I get it. I feel it. That's the impression we were trying to make.
Mike Verret: When I say they, it actually started with the VP of the gaming group.
Matt Stone: Oh, okay.
Mike Verret: He's the one who put me in that position. But the support I would garner from the rest of the gaming team to bring that event to life was fantastic. At the trade shows, it was just me with an audience of buyers,
Matt Stone: Right.
Mike Verret: Whether they were from Asia. Europe, South America, didn't matter.
Mike Verret: I had to understand the personality of the person I was speaking to there, understand that speaking to someone from Russia is very different than speaking to someone from Italy, those types of things. But the support I got once I was put in that position by the VP, the support I got from the team is what made it.
Mike Verret: Feel real to me as a, oh, now I feel like I have a career. Now I feel like I have
Matt Stone: Ah,
Mike Verret: of being at [00:08:00] Hasbro and the four years prior to that,
Matt Stone: you didn't. So essentially it was the relationships that you had with those people that helped that, were the mirror you needed. To know, okay, yeah, I'm in the right place now. I'm, I'm situated right, and now I can soar. You know, it kind of gives you the validation and then the confidence to, to go forward and do the amazing work that you did.
Mike Verret: Yeah, it, um, it. It was a one off opportunity, and the fact is I wasn't one to shine at that
Matt Stone: Mm-hmm.
Mike Verret: I was in the same position for your same level for years, and I just knew I wasn't cut out for it, but I went to work every day. Then when this happened, all of a sudden I felt like, oh my goodness. I figured out a way to actually contribute to the marketing team of the games group.
Mike Verret: I figured out a way to contribute to the product managers, developers, designers, [00:09:00] all of those things. I'm the loudspeaker for the work they've put into it. And that's where I got the support from everybody on the games group. It wasn't, oh, this is gonna be a slog. It was, Mike's found his spot, he's found his energy.
Matt Stone: And how cool is that when you come across someone whom you know genuinely is happy for you, that you've done that and they're excited about it and it's, it's.
Matt Stone: There's nothing I was, you stole the words. There's nothing better
Matt Stone: than that. Um,
Mike Verret: Simply because you are going happy. It's a personal accomplishment.
Matt Stone: Yeah.
Mike Verret: But it's validation.
Matt Stone: Right,
Mike Verret: Social proof coming from the outside.
Matt Stone: Right, right. And the fact that someone's actually happy for you, like
Matt Stone: about you, that's, there's, that is like magic.
Matt Stone: When people believe that you're happy for them, there's nothing more trust building than that, uh, in my experience.
Mike Verret: I think it's an absolute permission.
Matt Stone: Yeah. that's it. That's it. Okay. Now let's take all of that learning and, and that experience now with what you're doing now and helping clients , rethink the way they message so it lands the way [00:10:00] they intend and kind of get outta your own perspective as you, as you help people do.
Matt Stone: For a long time when you said the word relationships, the default belief was that you were talking about what you might call a personal relationship, your, your wife, your husband, your children or whatever. But, but I think now more and more, I'm hearing more people think of it the way I've always thought of it, which is that relationships, they might have a different context, but the basic human dynamics of human relationships are still operating everywhere you go.
Matt Stone: So I wonder how that plays into the work that you do with clients.
Mike Verret: I think the best way to explain it is this. Every one of us when it comes to talking about us or what we do for our business, or, you know, as a business or our resumes. it's coming from us, it's impossible to do. It's impossible to say the right things, see the right things, so you know you're communicating the right things because you're in this vacuum where a hundred percent is important to you.[00:11:00]
Mike Verret: But the reality is only 5% of that matters to your audience. And finding the 5% is what people run into. If they know everything, how do they find the 5% that matters? An example of this would be an author who writes a book. Stephen King writes a new book. Every word in that book is important to him.
Mike Verret: So when it comes time to write the blurb, how is he going to write three paragraphs that sell the book if everything's important? Well, they need to know this, and I have to tell him this, and I mean, he's thinking 90 paragraphs, not three.
Matt Stone: Right.
Mike Verret: Fascinating thing happens when there's a shift from your perspective to your audience's perspective.
Mike Verret: In that instance, Stephen King gives the book to someone else to read. They read it, finish it. And it takes them 10 minutes to write the blurb because they see what he can't. His mind is cluttered with everything. So how can [00:12:00] you get a better perspective of your audience to actually cater your message to them, not based on what you think, not based on, oh, my services or my unique approach, or my team.
Mike Verret: They don't care about that. What they care about is. Can you grab my attention, lead me through your story in a way I understand, and have me understand with no ambiguity, what is the benefit? That's what they're there for. No matter what it is. I don't care if it's a public speaking opportunity to 10,000 people, or it's pitching your business to two.
Mike Verret: The truth is the second, like right now. You are an audience, which means you're thinking like a human being. Every single person when you're talking to him becomes an audience. So how you perform in front of that audience is based on what they see and not what you think. So my job is to play the audience [00:13:00] for my clients, show them what the audience sees, and show them the order that they see it or think about it and align the business's story
Mike Verret: as a story for the audience.
Matt Stone: And that's the basis of the intro to your relationship with that person and how short-lived it might be, right? Whether they want to come back for more and whether it you intrigue them to learn more.
Mike Verret: I would say it's in part and selfishly the relationship that they build with me, more over the practice of what we go through enforces the importance and shows them how to build that relationship with their audience.
Matt Stone: Oh, yeah.
Matt Stone: That's what I'm talking about. The relationship with the audience, the prospects, partners, et cetera.
Mike Verret: I'll give you a very simple example that's relevant to this: Ted Talks. I'm sure you've seen or at least heard of them. Everyone who does a TED talk starts it with either a raise your hand if [00:14:00] question type of thing, or a think about this type of statement. The whole reason they're doing that is to start a connection with the audience and shift from a presentation to a conversation because now the audience is engaged.
Mike Verret: It's not me versus them, it's us. That's how our brains recognize and, reconcile those hands going up. It's actually psychologically puts the speaker at ease, when they see the hands go up. And those types of things are an imperative, time you meet someone to create a relationship, right? If you own a PR firm, and I say, what do you do?
Mike Verret: Say I own a PR firm. Well, I know what a PR firm is. I know what they do. Maybe I'll ask you about your clients, but I'm not really gonna go as deep as you want. But, if you that question, what do you do? I make news when it matters. That completely changes the dynamic. First, they need to know more.
Mike Verret: Tell me more. That's what you [00:15:00] wanna get 'em to say, the first thing outta your mouth.
Matt Stone: Mm-hmm.
Mike Verret: But more importantly it focuses on the motivation for why they would need a PR firm. Their news has to matter, they're more apt to relate to that message and connect with that company based on the relationship that the company's building with them right from the jump.
Matt Stone: Yeah. That's, that's really, really well put. Okay, I've got two more questions. The first one is, what are we not talking about on social media and in other venues like conferences and just in the atmosphere in general, um, what are we not talking about in terms of relationships enough or at all that we should be talking about?
Mike Verret: I'll give you a quick response to that. 12 years ago, working at an ad agency, for instance, we were making TV commercials. We just started making web pages, web ads, that kind of stuff. Okay? Now fast forward. 10 years, 12 years, and most agencies are just moving data back and forth, that's coming from platforms that didn't exist 10 years ago.
Mike Verret: [00:16:00] SEO, SEM, paid search, all of that is a different way of looking at the world. Very few companies are making TV commercials now, right? And seeing that evolution, now we're jumping into AI, which is a completely different animal on its own. Don't get me started on the Terminator stuff. But, the AI stuff adds to the problem, because now what all these things can do quickly all these penny by penny campaigns can do instead of a Super Bowl ad, is things that people don't understand yet.
Mike Verret: don't. They say, oh, AI we'll use that. Well, what does that mean? And how they're communicating with them is a relationship stopper, and that's the problem. We've lost the ability to create actual connection, and we look at it in ones and zeros. We look at it as statistics. We look at it as Google Analytics. That [00:17:00] stops relationships from forming.
Mike Verret: They're lucky if they establish a relationship in the sales meeting and that's it.
Matt Stone: Wow. Okay. That is a topic that, and this is the reason I ask. That's great answer. When a topic like that. Gets me even more interested and pulls me in and makes you want to explore that more deeply. That is the gold. And so let's put a pin on that and put that in the show, and I'm gonna invite you back to talk more about that and we'll, let's, let's get some other experts from different fields, put 'em at a table and dive into what human relationships look like in this age and, and how we need to be reinventing our whole idea about how we're approaching this right now.
Mike Verret: I mean everything from social media for a 13-year-old, all the way to all those Google Analytics that a big company's using to market themselves,
Matt Stone: Yeah.
Mike Verret: All the same problem.
Matt Stone: All the same problem. Yeah.
Mike Verret: There's no relationship building opportunity because it's not an authentic connection.
Matt Stone: This is a topic of endless interest to me, and one of the reasons [00:18:00] why I'm actually creating the show in the first place is this.
Matt Stone: What do relationships mean now? And for those of us who still think they have incredible value, not only for profit, but for world peace, uh, I think it's, it's something I'd love to explore more with you if you're okay with that.
Mike Verret: I'll leave that question with this. Partnership is used a lot more than relationship in the business world; and partnership is very ones and zero sort of objective sounding. Relationship is human.
Matt Stone: Yeah.
Mike Verret: And that's what's missing,
Matt Stone: Yeah. Oh,
Mike Verret: Not just, not just 'cause of AI. I mean, the way we think in business and the role we play,
Matt Stone: yep.
Matt Stone: Yep.
Mike Verret: destroys our ability to make those relationships work.
Matt Stone: Let's change how people are thinking. And I guess I'm kind of teeing up the last question. This is gonna sound like I'm just self-serving this, um, but I really mean it sincerely. You know, a little bit about the show. Talked to you offline about the show. What interests and or excites you the most about when we launch this show next year? [00:19:00]
Mike Verret: I think at launch what's gonna be most exciting is getting people off the letter I and onto the letter E, uh, IQ and EQ. And you guys focus on relationship building, emotional intelligence, the EQ does measure that, and that's the type of thing that you can actually evaluate your workforce in a whole new way.
Mike Verret: You know, there's operations, there's marketing, there's sales, but human resources, that's the tough nut to crack if you don't understand who works for you.
Matt Stone: Yeah.
Mike Verret: And it's more than numbers, it's more than IQ. It's human being to human being. So I think that'll be the most fascinating aspect of it, because that's something that every business lacks.
Matt Stone: Thank you, Mike. This has been absolutely fantastic and a great sample and preview of what's to come. We're gonna have such great human beings and we're gonna have fun doing it. And, and I'm glad you're part of the part of the BBR universe now.
Mike Verret: [00:20:00] Well, you put the blame on yourself with the human beings part.
Matt Stone: Okay.
Mike Verret: So then you can talk about emotional quotient.
Matt Stone: Ha. All right. And with that, thanks for listening to the Building Business Relationship Show. This pre-launch phase is all about discovery. So if something sparked your interest, I'd love to hear from you. Please share your thoughts, ideas, or guest suggestions, and help us shape the conversations to come.
Matt Stone: And of course, subscribe, especially on YouTube. Go to YouTube, find Building Business Relationships Show. Subscribe there and join the community, so you'll be the first to know when we officially launch, and in the meantime, when another great conversation and more content drops.
Matt Stone: Thanks again. We'll catch you next time. Bye-bye.