Meet Lisa Elia of Expert Media Training in Brentwood

Today we’d like to introduce you to Lisa Elia.

Lisa, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I believe most of us have a few inciting incidents that lead us to pursue the careers we pursue. My first one was when I was four years old and my family and I had just moved to Geneva, Switzerland. My parents had heard that “language immersion” nursery schools (that’s what they called them back then) were the best way for kids to learn French. Armed with not even a few French phrases and no preparation, I entered the school where only French was spoken. The teacher looked at me like I was an alien when I spoke to her in English. I hated it. After a few days of crying, my parents moved me to an international school where English was the first language and we learned French as a second language.

One of the best things about living in Europe as a child was that my kindergarten class looked like a mini U.N., with kids from all parts of the world. Seeing and interacting with people from a wide variety of countries and cultures, I began paying attention to the way people expressed themselves, verbally and nonverbally.

After taking a communication class my freshman year in college, I decided to double major in communication with a public relations (PR) focus and English with a journalism focus. I was fortunate to have professors who were also actively working in their fields and who taught me well. Much of what I learned in college is still useful in my current work. I graduated my communication/PR degree and not the journalism degree because I was didn’t want to take the three extra classes that would delay me from graduating in four years, which somehow seemed important back then and truly isn’t.

After a few years of working at small agencies after college, I began my first marketing-communication firm when I was 27. Soon after, I was asked speak publicly when a friend called to ask me if I could fill in for her to create and deliver a presentation on creating a marketing plan for your small business at the University of Delaware Small Business Development Center. At that point in my life, I did not like public speaking at all. I saw myself as a behind-the-scenes person. I reluctantly said yes and whipped together an hour-long presentation to deliver two days later.

My first professional public presentation was not great. I was so nervous that when I picked up a paper it shook a bit. Immediately afterwards, I decided I wanted to improve my public speaking skills. I began reading everything I could and took an acting class. A few weeks later, I was asked to deliver my presentation again at the University of Delaware. I spent some time mastering my content, used everything I had learned to that point and made the decision to have fun with it all. My presentation went very well and led several people to approach me that night to ask me to work with them. Then, I was hooked. I began seeking out and securing speaking opportunities and I continued working with acting, movement and voice teachers in Philadelphia and New York.

In 1996, after a year-and-a-half stint in New York, I moved to Los Angeles. The day I landed here I felt like I’d come home, even though I’d never been here. The warm weather and open-minded people still make me happy to come home after traveling.

When I first moved to L.A., I wasn’t sure I was going to remain in PR, but within a couple of years the press coverage I secured for a celebrity fitness trainer I was working with brought me a lot of attention and clients. My PR practice built itself and grew very organically.

I hired assistants and then other publicists to enable my firm to serve more clients. During my years as a publicist, I booked and prepared clients for interviews with media outlets such as GMA, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Today, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and hundreds of others.

Around 20 years ago, I began media training my PR clients because I wanted to ensure that they received very thorough, strategic training that prepared them for just about anything. Soon after, clients came to me asking if I could coach them for speeches, presentations and investor pitches. My experience as a business owner and working closely with C-level executives to position their companies for expansion, IPOs and other opportunities was extremely valuable when it came to training.

When the financial crisis hit in 2008, I had a small staff that I wanted to make sure we could continue to support. I didn’t want to rely solely on referrals in that economic climate, so I got involved in several business groups, met the founders and was asked to speak at numerous events. I also became more involved in social media, which led to invitations for more speaking engagements and to share my expertise with media outlets like Entertainment Tonight, E! Entertainment, Inc. Magazine and many others.

As requests for my training from people who were not my clients increased, I was realizing how much I enjoyed the training part of my business. I loved that I could help clients make profound and quick transformations when I trained them, which I found, and still find, deeply gratifying. Over the next few years, my team and I finished out our PR contracts and closed the PR side of the business to transition to focusing solely on media training, presentation training and investor pitch coaching.

Today, my firm, Expert Media Training, serves clients that include executives, sales teams, startup founders, actors, musicians, athletes and other public figures.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Overall, my journey has been fairly smooth, but there were definitely struggles and obstacles along the way. My training business gives me a much more serene life and a schedule that I can control then when I had my PR firm and felt pressure to always be thinking about what else we could do to get our clients publicity. Managing several publicists who were pitching clients and overseeing their work to preserve quality was sometimes challenging. The shift to providing only training services was a great gift to myself.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
Expert Media Training provides media training, presentation training and investor pitch coaching. We prepare people to confidently deliver effective and powerful media interviews, presentations and investor pitches so they can grow their businesses, share about their projects and spread their messages.

I’m proud that we provide a high quality of service and that our clients get great results from the training. Nothing is better than when clients call or text to say they’ve had media interviews go so well they were asked back immediately or that their investor pitches secured the funding they were seeking. Some very meaningful transformations occur with clients who seem shy or retiring and, through the training process, find another side of themselves and learn to exude greater confidence in all areas of their lives.

Another source of pride for me is that my firm has always been involved in giving back in meaningful ways. Over the last year, I’ve worked with DEFY Ventures as a mentor to prison inmates through their entrepreneur-in-training program, I’ve mentored a woman who won her investor pitch competition for Women Founders Network, and I’ve presented to inner city high school children through Youth Business Alliance to expose them to a career they might not know of otherwise.

My approach to working with clients or the people I work with in my volunteer work mirrors what I tell clients to focus on. Consider about what you want people to think, feel and/or do during and after you meet with them and let that guide your communication.

What were you like growing up?
As a young child, I loved doing gymnastics, ice skating, swimming, dancing around the kitchen table (free-form, not good), and playing games that my siblings and I made up, like when my older brother would roll a box of golf balls down the upstairs hall and I had to scramble to not let them bounce down the hardwood stairs. (Sorry, Mom and Dad’s old house.)

I was a cheerleader in junior high and a majorette (baton twirler) in high school. I was very social and somewhat talkative. I guess I’m still rather talkative: my husband thinks it’s great that I get to talk to people all day, probably so I use up some of my words before I get home at night.

In school, I did well in English, psychology, child development and the classes I cared most about, which happen to be the classes that pertain most directly to what I do for a living. My friend and I skipped gym class for a month in junior high because it was winter and we didn’t want to go outside in the cold. My mother was not happy that she had to come to school to sign something, but my oldest sister got a good laugh out of it.

I’ve always been intellectually curious. The travel through Europe that my family and I did when we lived in Switzerland, when I was ages four through seven, exposed me to some great art, many cultures, and a wide variety of foods. My father always made a point to let us know the significance of what we were seeing in our travels and he always made sure we had lots of books around, many of which I read.

I’m grateful for all of this for many reasons, one of which is that in my work a wide breadth of knowledge is very useful and having a genuine interest in all different types of people is essential.

Contact Info:

• Address: 11620 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 900
• Website: https://expertmediatraining.com
• Phone: 310-479-0217
• Email: [email protected]
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ExpertMediaTraining
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/MediaTrainingUS
• Other: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisaelia1

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