A CFO with three days' notice before their first television interview
The client — The CFO of a listed fintech, booked for a live broadcast interview on results day with three days’ notice and no prior television experience.
The problem — Two problems, in fact. The obvious one was camera technique — eye line, stillness, what to do with the hands. The real one was that the results contained a soft quarter in one division, and the CFO’s instinct was to explain it thoroughly. A thorough explanation on live television becomes forty seconds of a finance chief sounding defensive about a number nobody had asked about yet.
What we found — In the first mock interview the CFO volunteered the weak division unprompted, twice, before the interviewer had raised it. The answers were accurate and far too long: the average was ninety seconds against a format that uses fifteen to twenty.
What we did — Three sessions across two days. Session one: message design — three points, phrased to be quotable rather than defensible, plus one prepared answer on the soft division for if it came up. Sessions two and three: recorded mock interviews, increasingly hostile, watched back line by line. Roughly eleven mock interviews in total.
The result — All three messages landed on air. The soft quarter was raised, once, and answered in nineteen seconds without defensiveness. The CFO now does the results interview each quarter and treats it as routine.
“The mock interviews were brutal and completely worth it. By the time I sat down with the actual journalist, nothing they asked was new. I had already been asked worse.”
